Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yelena was not a morning person.

Before the Thunderbolts, she was always up late. Sometimes it was because she was on a mission that was best done under the cover of night. Sometimes it was because she couldn’t sleep, too busy thinking about all the horrible things that she’d done, so she drank until she passed out. Between the two, her sleep schedule was badly damaged. Even when she forced herself to get up in the morning, it took her a while to fully wake up, to adjust to the light and the rhythm of the day.

So, when she dragged herself out of bed to get a cup of coffee, that was all she wanted—a cup of coffee. Yelena did not want anyone to talk to her or at her or around her at any volume higher than was absolutely necessary. Most of the time, everyone understood that about her. However, there were days when it seemed like Bob forgot half the boundaries they’d all set in place. Days when Bob was intense, when he spoke fast and loud and semi-incoherently and he didn’t want people to listen so much as he just wanted to talk.

She knew it was going to be one of those days when she found him in the common area, pacing with a tablet in his hand. His laptop was open on the table in front of the couch, his phone screen on beside it. They were all covered in words, too many and too small to read from a distance. It wasn’t the first time Yelena had seen him like that—pacing and twitching and trying to read ten things at once. That was just how he was on his “good days” and even if it was a lot for her, Yelena let him do his thing because at least he seemed happy.

(Usually. He’d only had two other notable periods he labeled “good days” since they met, but both featured multiple incidents that Yelena would definitely not describe as “good.” For example, refusing to sleep and working in the training room until he literally collapsed of exhaustion; having a panic attack on the balcony because he was scared of heights and convinced the Thunderbolts would kick him out if he couldn’t get over it; and buying and taking a shitload of pills before Yelena made him throw up and flushed the rest down the toilet.)

Yelena walked over to the coffee station they’d created near the window and barely grabbed a mug from the rack before Bob was at her side. He paced behind her, his gaze still fixed on the tablet in his hands. Bob started speaking immediately but he was only mumbling, talking to himself. He did that a lot too, but it was hardly limited to his so-called “good days.” Yelena started the coffee machine and did her best to listen when Bob raised his voice, spoke faster than she could process.

“So, you know how I didn’t go to high school?” Bob did not stop pacing to talk, his fingers tapping the back of his tablet. “I mean, I did go to high school, but I didn’t even last two months, and I was on so much morphine I don’t remember any of it, you know? Anyway, I couldn’t sleep again last night—”

“Again?” Yelena interrupted. The machine poured her coffee into her mug as she glanced back at Bob. His hair was even more tangled than hers. “You’ve barely slept all week.”

“I know, I know. It’s fine, I’ll sleep tonight or whatever. Anyway, me and Walker got in that argument last night and it got me thinking, right? Because I would never tell him but he kind of had a point. There’s so much like basic knowledge shit that I don’t know. Like, I don’t even really know how to do algebra. I don’t even know what kind of math is considered algebra. So, I was looking up ways to learn that stuff and you know what I came across? GEDs.”

Yelena rubbed her eyes and took a sip of her coffee as she processed what Bob said. His mouth moved too fast to follow as he said it. “What the hell is a GEDs?”

“It stands for General Education Development. It’s a high school equivalency diploma. So, people like me who didn’t graduate high school for whatever reason can get this instead.” Yelena rubbed her temples as Bob tapped around on his tablet. She really shouldn’t have asked. Not when he was in the mindset to over-explain everything. “You have to take four tests: Mathematical Reasoning, Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. If you pass them all, you get your GED, and then it’s proof you have the same basic knowledge other people learned in high school.”

It was hard to tell what Bob’s driving motivation was. If it was something he wanted to do for himself, Yelena would support him unconditionally. If it was something he wanted to do just to spite John, it might have been better for her to try and talk him down. Not necessarily to talk him out of it, but to remind him that it was okay that he dropped out of high school, that none of them—even John, probably—judged him for any gaps in his knowledge. It wasn’t like all of them had been to high school either.

“So, I was thinking I should get my GED,” Bob continued, when Yelena nodded for him to go on. She needed more coffee in her before she tried to add to the conversation. “I spend half my time sitting around reading anyway, why not read study materials? I already found a ton. I don’t understand half of it yet but I’m really fucking smart so it can’t be that hard to learn. I mean, shit, fifteen-year-olds do it, right? And I’m way smarter than a bunch of kids. Even when I was a kid. I probably would’ve graduated early if I wasn’t so high I didn’t know where I was.”

“What do you do with this GED?” asked Yelena. She needed more information to be sure that it was for him, that he didn’t want to do all the work just to say I told you so. “What’s the point of taking the tests instead of just researching what you want to know?”

“Well, mostly, people use it to apply for jobs and college, you know?” Exactly. Bob did not need to get a job or go to college. “But I guess I just thought I would get it to get it. People told me to do it a few times before, but it was always a bad time. Nobody said it when I seemed okay. They’d tell me to get off the drugs and get my GED while I was high or in jail or in the hospital or basically just not in any state to be capable of doing that. Now I’m clean and happy and I think it’s a good time to prove to myself that I can do it.”

To prove to himself that he could do it. That was what Yelena wanted to hear. She nodded, drank a bit more of her coffee as she considered the idea. Yelena had never gone to high school either. She hadn’t gone to any school since those three years in Ohio. Sure, the Red Room had given her an education, but it wasn’t exactly well-rounded. It was littered with propaganda, tailored to their mission and their plans. Yelena picked up a lot since building her own life, studied things she was interested in, but she’d never thought about learning all the basic knowledge a normal young adult knew.

“Okay.” Yelena nodded, spoke without thinking because her brain was still only half awake. “I’ll do it with you.”

“Wait, really?” Bob’s eyes widened with excitement, a tiny shimmer of gold around their rims as he smiled. Yelena nodded. She needed something to occupy herself between missions too. Better to spend her time studying than doomscrolling. “Oh, shit, this is going to be so fun! I spent all night finding the best study materials. I’ll start printing things so we can get to work. You’re not doing anything today, right? No missions? We can get started as soon as I—”

Yelena pinched the back of his sweatshirt before he could walk away. He stopped and turned around to face her again. He was practically bouncing on his heels, his fingers fidgeting in front of his waist. “Have you eaten anything today? Drank anything?”

“Yeah, I— no, I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s still really early.”

“You’ve been up all night.” And he hadn’t eaten dinner the night before, nor was she sure if he’d had lunch. Another thing about Bob’s ‘good days’ was that he seemed to forget to tend to his basic needs like eating, sleeping, and showering. “Come on, let’s go get breakfast before you go down the rabbit hole again.”

“I’m not really hungry,” said Bob, and for once, he didn’t elaborate.

“At least a glass of water, please, Bob?”

She knew that Bob only agreed for her benefit, and she didn’t care. Yelena managed to get him into the kitchen, but he only sat at the counter for three minutes before he stood up and resumed his pacing. He drank a glass of water and only half a piece of toast before he wandered off, leaving Yelena to drink her second cup of coffee alone as she wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

Bob really didn’t know why they kept pestering him.

If he wasn’t hungry, he didn’t need to eat. If he wasn’t tired, he didn’t need to sleep. It was common sense. He thought mercenaries, of all people, would understand that. Surely, they’d been through times when they were just as food insecure as he used to live, when they were in too much danger to sleep even when they wanted to. It really didn’t make sense why they pushed him to be “healthy” when they were a group of people with little to no concept of how to be healthy themselves.

So, after literally all of them told him to sit down and eat dinner with them, Bob’s frustration got the better of him and he holed himself up in his room. All he really wanted to do was read about the GEDs and he couldn’t do that while everyone was harassing him. He locked the door, whipped out his tablet, phone, and laptop, and got back to work. That was seven hours earlier. Yelena had come to check on him once, but she ultimately admitted defeat and left him to continue scrolling while she went to bed.

Given that he knew she went to bed, Bob probably shouldn’t have texted her two hundred-and-something times, but he’d already done it, so he figured why stop. Bob scrolled through page after page of information on how to get a GED in New York, read study document after study document to get a grasp on what exactly he would need to learn. He sent half the links to Yelena and closed the other half because he deemed them inadequate. He sent her everything from short thoughts to long rambles to voice messages. Then, halfway through typing a text about how fucking awesome they were, Bob had a revelation: him and Yelena weren’t the only two Thunderbolts who hadn’t finished school.

He added Ava to the chat without a second thought, without considering whether she was interested or if she was awake or if her phone was muted. Bob’s thoughts moved too fast to properly process, his thumbs typing as much as he could keep up with. For a further hour, Bob kept scrolling and texting, too excited by the idea of getting started to sleep. Then someone knocked on the door.

Bob ignored it the first time. He glanced at the clock to see it was just past three in the morning and decided no one would knock on his door at that hour. Then it came again, and he froze but still hesitated because he’d been hearing footsteps for hours. He was pretty sure the footsteps weren’t real—they sounded just a little too much like his father’s—and it was possible the knocks weren’t either. Until a voice accompanied the third round of knocking and he jumped to his feet because that definitely was real.

“Ava?” Bob blinked when he opened the door, shoved a hand through his hair only for his fingers to immediately get wound in the tangles. “What are you doing up?”

“Funny,” started Ava, holding up her phone in her right hand, “I came here to ask you the same thing.”

She unlocked her screen to reveal more text notifications from Bob than she could reasonably scroll through. Bob stared at it, not sure how to feel. He didn’t necessarily feel good about blowing up her phone in the middle of the night, but he didn’t feel particularly bad about it either. If he felt a pang of guilt over anything, it was how tired Ava looked—her low ponytail messy and her suit mostly covered by fuzzy black pajamas.

“Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and I was thinking about what John said about how I was missing a lot of basic knowledge.” Ava blinked a few times, like she was adjusting to the light, adjusting to Bob. “I started looking stuff up and I came across the GEDs, and I thought I should finally get my GED, so I told Yelena, and she didn’t know what it was at first but— wait, you know what GEDs are, right?”

“Yes, I’ve looked into it before,” said Ava behind a yawn, “I just didn’t see the point.”

“For me, I think the point is that people kept telling me to get clean and get my GED but I never felt like it was possible and now it feels possible so I think I should do it before it stops feeling possible. Plus, I don’t have much to do around here, and I like learning, and this gives me something specific to learn about. Yelena liked the idea of having something to do too, that’s why she’s going to do it with me. And I thought you might want to join us so that’s why I added you to the—”

“Okay, all right, I get it. Thank you, Bob.” She didn’t sound irritated so much as tired. Ava crossed her arms, her brow knit in concern. “You said you didn’t sleep last night? And you’re up now at three-thirty in the morning? When was the last time you slept?”

“I’m not tired,” said Bob, dodging the actual question. He wasn’t tired so it didn’t matter when he last slept. It annoyed him when they checked in on him anyway. Sure, it was nice they cared but realistically, he was a god among humans. All their power combined was just a fraction of his. “Do you want to do the GEDs with us? I sent you all the info if you want to think about it. It’s in there somewhere. I don’t know how many times I texted. I was just—”

“Hey, can you listen to me for a second?” He hesitated before he nodded. He slid the top of his thumb into his mouth, chewed on his skin to keep himself from talking. “I’m asking you this as a friend and I promise not to be mad or judge you regardless of your answer, all right?” Bob nodded, confused. “Are you high?”

Bob hated it when people didn’t believe he was clean. Of course, he’d spent around fifteen years’ worth of those arguments lying, but he wasn’t anymore. He wasn’t high, he was happy. The Thunderbolts were just so used to Bob being depressed, to his connection to the Void, that they didn’t understand what he was like when he was happy. Bob bit down harder on his thumb as he shook his head.

“I’m clean,” he insisted, scratching at the spot on the inside of his elbow where he used to inject drugs from strangers. “You know I’m clean. Why would you—? I’m clean.”

“Okay.” Ava looked him up and down, her expression hard to read. “If you say you’re clean, I believe you. It’s just that you’re not sleeping, you wouldn’t eat dinner, and you’re talking a lot more than you usually do. Plus, you’re practically twitching you’re fidgeting so much. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m just excited. I’m excited to get my GED.”

To be entirely honest, Bob didn’t always realize how much he fidgeted until someone pointed it out. He just had an intense need to release some energy, a feeling in his veins like he was fucking buzzing. That was why he kept pacing and blinking and yanking on his fingers—he felt like he was vibrating, and he didn’t know how else to neutralize it.

“Right.” Ava sounded unconvinced. She crossed her arms, stared at him for a moment before she spoke again. “Well, I’m not saying I won’t join you but let me think about it, all right? We can talk about it in the morning.” She turned to leave then stopped, glanced over her shoulder. “Please try to get some sleep. Just a nap, even.”

Bob nodded and forced a smile that dropped off his face the second Ava closed the door behind her. He grabbed his tablet in one hand and his phone in the other, then opened his phone to his notes app. Best not to wake Ava again, not least because he didn’t want her to know that he had no intentions of trying to sleep.

He flipped between the screens, reading and taking notes until the sun came up. Until he lost track of time again and somehow it was almost noon, and he thought Ava would probably be up. Bob nearly left his room to find her but hesitated. He quickly switched his shirt to make it seem like he’d slept and changed. He looked down at his hands, at his tremors, and tried to force himself to stop shaking. It hurt more than it worked, so he gave up, but then he thought it was better to be hurt than to look like he was high.

So, he dug his nails into his palms until he could no longer see himself vibrate. It hurt and it made him a little nauseous, but it stopped him from looking like he was tweaking and that was what mattered most.

Ava wasn’t sure about it at first.

She told Bob the truth the night before; she had looked into getting her GED, multiple times, but she never went through with it. Ava was intrigued by the idea of educating herself where S.H.I.E.L.D. failed her, of taking the time to do something solely for herself. But it was never more than a fantasy because she always came back to the fact that she would never use her GED. She would never get a conventional job or attend university. So, what was the point?

According to Bob, the point of him getting it was to make himself feel good. To give him a sense of confidence that he always lacked, to fill holes in his knowledge that bothered him more than anyone else. And that was what really stuck in Ava’s head because that was why she’d thought about it too. It wasn’t that she wanted to get a job or go to university, she just wanted to learn for her own benefit. To learn about math and science and global history beyond the surface of Google.

So, when they finished training for the night and Bob asked her and Yelena to stay behind, she agreed. Ava wasn’t committed yet, but she wanted to hear what Bob had to say. Except he talked really fast and a little disjointed and it made it hard to follow along. Both her and Yelena had to stop him multiple times to ask questions, to have him clarify simple thoughts disguised as long rambles.

“…and I broke it down into each section, so we study all three topics for each test one at a time and then take the test,” Bob went on. Yelena and Ava sat on the floor of the training room as he paced around them. Ava asked him to stop once because it was starting to make her dizzy, but he was still for only a few minutes before he seemingly forgot her request. “Well, technically there are four for math, but the first one is just basic math and it’s really easy stuff, so I don’t think we’ll really have to study that.”

Ava was honestly worried that she wouldn’t know all the basic math, but she didn’t want to say that. She was relieved when Yelena spoke first and asked, “What exactly is the ‘basic math?’”

“Fractions, decimals, multiplication, basic graphs, basic units, blah, blah, blah. You can go over it if you want but it’s way too easy for me. I’ll send you the link to the study guide for that part.” Ava nodded, didn’t say a word. She wanted Bob to send her the link, just to make sure she knew everything, but she’d rather not admit it—especially since he thought it was all so easy. Bob pulled the tie out of his hair for what must’ve been the fourth time and paced across the floor as he looped it back into a tangled bun. “Anyway, I have it all written out so we can just go right down the list through each of the subjects.”

“And you want us to do them one at a time?” asked Yelena. “So, study then test, study then test, study then test, study then test.”

“Yeah. I think that makes the most sense, doesn’t it? Then we don’t have to worry about remembering stuff for as long.”

Ava nearly pointed out that the aim was to learn and remember as much as they could, but Bob was the one in the room with a history of memory loss, so she kept her mouth shut. Her and Yelena remained mostly silent as Bob rambled on about his plans and ideas and tangentially related thoughts. It was hard to keep up with him, honestly, but Ava did her best with well-timed questions and the occasional interjection from Yelena.

Ultimately, they decided to go through the four subjects one at a time: Mathematical Reasoning, Reasoning Through Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. Not counting basic math, each subject had three topics to study. They would take as long as they needed to study each of them, aware that life and missions would inevitably get in the way. Once they felt fully prepared, they would take the test and move on to the next subject assuming they all passed.

“Okay, so, we have a plan? We’re doing this?” Bob smiled wide after half an hour of rambling interspersed with conversation. Ava and Yelena agreed and, before Ava time to process what was happening, Bob knelt down and pulled them both into a hug. She awkwardly returned it as she gave Ava a look. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m so fucking excited. This is going to be so fun. I’m going to go get things ready. I love you guys. I love you.”

And then he was gone, and Ava and Yelena were by themselves. Ava stared at the training mat beneath them while Yelena made a face. Her gaze turned to the door Bob left through, settled there for a moment before she shifted her eyes to Ava. The look on her face was serious, her nose scrunched just slightly.

“Does he seem okay to you?” she asked.

“Bob?” Yelena nodded and Ava turned over her shoulder to look at the door, as if Bob would suddenly reappear through it. “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem not okay. I think he’s just very excited to do this with us. I mean, with that much energy, he must have finally gotten some sleep after I spoke to him last night.”

“You talked last night?”

“Yeah, after he started blowing up my phone at three in the morning. He said he couldn’t sleep. I actually asked him if he was high because he was fidgeting so much but he said he wasn’t. I believe him.”

There was a long pause as Yelena looked down at her hands, her dried, sweaty hair still clinging to her forehead from sparring. Ava did think Bob was acting weird, honestly, though she did truly believe that he was clean. The Thunderbolts hadn’t seen a lot of Bob when he was happy, when he felt mostly free of the Void; maybe that was just how he expressed that emotion.

“Let me know if he tells you anything else,” said Yelena distantly. She tugged her hair behind her ear and tapped her hand against her knee. “I feel like he’s been getting weirder all week.”

“Maybe he’s just had a good week?” Ava suggested, more to try and calm Yelena’s anxiety than because she believed it.

“Yeah, maybe.” Yelena took a deep breath before she turned to Ava with a smile. “So, you want to do this GEDs thing, then?”

“I guess. I’ve thought about it before, actually, I just couldn’t see the point. But if we’re all doing it together, it kind of makes me feel like there’s more to it than just knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I did always want to go to school. Bill helped me a little, but it just was never the priority, you know?”

“Me too. My education was limited and filled with propaganda. The things they taught us in the Red Room were the things they wanted us to know. I have done so much research to help myself unlearn what I was told. It sounds sort of nice to have an education I can control. Better late than never, right?”

That was the idea Ava clung to the most—it was never too late. It was never too late for her to improve her condition, to make her first real friends, to give herself a better education. For the first time in her life, she was in a position where she was able to do things just for herself. Not for survival, not to manage her pain, just for her.

Bob’s approach to the idea was a little overwhelming, but Yelena was a grounding counter to it. The way she was so honest about her upbringing, how openly she listened when Ava spoke about hers. Ava had looked into getting her GED a few times over the years, but it always felt impossible. It always felt like a waste of time for someone like her.

But if it wasn’t a waste of time for Bob, and it wasn’t a waste of time for Yelena, then maybe it wasn’t a waste of time for her either.

“Which one of you dumbasses got a kid?”

Yelena looked up when Valentina stormed out of the elevator, her voice loud and accusatory. She walked up the short flight of stairs and crossed her arms as she set her gaze on John.

“Was it you?” Val demanded, and Yelena couldn’t stop herself from chuckling at the utterly baffled expression on his face. “Did your ex let you have the kid?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said John, sidestepping the subject he never wanted to discuss. He popped his last pretzel in his mouth and brushed his hands on his jeans. “Why would you think we got a kid? We’d all be fucking terrible parents.”

“Ah, not me!” argued Alexei, and Yelena had to resist the urge to point out that, although she loved him dearly, he was very far from perfect. It was more important to let Val talk, to hear what she had to say.

“Well,” started Val, “I can’t think of any other reason why any of you would spend six thousand dollars on school supplies.”

It took a minute for it to click, admittedly. Yelena listened, baffled, as Val argued with John and Alexei over the money. Then, out of nowhere, it hit her—Bob. Bob, who wanted them to get their GEDs. Bob, who last disappeared after saying he would get things ready. Yelena sighed as she pulled out her phone and texted Bob to come upstairs.

Within a few minutes, Bob walked out of the elevator. His hair was still half tied back, still horrifically tangled. He wore the same t-shirt and sweatpants he had on while they sparred the day before, wrinkled and lightly stained with sweat. Bob did not wait for a pause in the ongoing argument before he walked up to Val and gestured for John to stop talking.

“It was me,” said Bob, a few steps behind Val. “I bought all that stuff.”

“What?” Val laughed incredulously, shook her head as she turned to face him. Yelena moved to the edge of her seat, ready to intervene if needed. “You bought six thousand dollars’ worth of school supplies? Why?”

Bob blinked a few times, almost like he was surprised by the number, but he quickly shook it off. “We’re getting our GEDs. Me, Yelena, and Ava.”

“Again, why? Are you not happy being world famous superheroes? You’d rather go get desk jobs?”

“Oh, I would not,” said Alexei. He shrugged when both John and Yelena shot him a look.

Something flipped in Bob’s eyes when Val spoke to him in that condescending manner. His face twitched just slightly as he opened and closed his fists, his head barely tilted to the side. He took a step forward, two, until he was inches away from Val and towering over her frame. Yelena set one hand on the couch cushion, ready to push herself up in a second. Because somehow, it didn’t look like Bob challenging Val, it looked like the Sentry.

“It’s none of your business what we do in our spare time,” Bob told her, his voice low and extra gravelly. He leaned forward and Val took a step back. “You gave us access to your money and told us to buy whatever we needed. After everything you’ve done, do you really believe you have the authority to decide what we buy with it?”

“Bob—”

“No, Yelena, don’t.” He reached one arm in her direction without looking her way, his palm pointed up to tell her to stop. His eyes never left Val’s face, dark and narrowed. “You might own this building, but we own you. We didn’t say you could be here, so why don’t you just get the fuck out?”

Val scoffed and shook her head. “You think you can tell me what to do?”

“I think I already did.”

They stared at each other for a long, tense moment before Yelena decided enough was enough. She stood up, looped her arm around Bob’s, and tugged him back. John quickly caught on and placed his own hand behind Val’s back in a less-than-friendly manner as he escorted her to the elevator.

When the elevator closed, Yelena released her grip on Bob. She looked up at his face, at his clenched jaw, and tried to determine her next steps. Given how intense his expression was and how he’d threatened Val moments before, Yelena was fully prepared to be shouted at if she chose the wrong words to say.

Which was why she was so surprised when, before she said a word, Bob smiled like nothing happened. Like Val was never there. He twisted his hands in front of him as he rocked back and forth on his heels.

“I’m still waiting on some things,” Bob started, his tone suddenly flooded with the excitement he’d traded for animosity, “but I’m almost ready. We should be able to get started studying tomorrow. Can you tell Ava? I think she blocked me because she stopped responding to my texts.”

Probably because he’d sent something like four hundred of them. Still, Yelena thought it was more likely Ava had muted him rather than blocked. “Okay, yeah.”

“Hey, Bob.” John walked back up the stairs, his hands held out in a gesture of bewilderment. “The hell was that about?”

“Nothing,” said Bob with a lighthearted shrug. “Just thought someone should remind her who’s really in control here.”

He walked away before any of them could think of a response. Yelena sat back down on the couch and dropped her hands on her knees. She turned to John and Alexei and asked the same question she’d posed to Ava the day before.

“Does he seem okay to you?”

Both men shrugged noncommittally, leaving Yelena right back where she started. She took a deep breath and willed herself to stop overthinking. It would all be fine, she told herself. They would all get their GEDs and they would all be fine.

Chapter Text

“That’s not geometry, you know.”

Bob ceased his pacing for just a second when Ava spoke, his fingers frozen on his Rubik’s cube. He hadn’t stopped moving once since the start of their first study session; always either walking in circles, playing with his Rubik’s cube, or both. Ava tried to be patient with him, to let him move however made him comfortable, but it was annoying. It was distracting and dizzying and pulled her eye from her worksheet.

“It’s a shape, isn’t it?” Bob clicked the pieces of the cube back into place and tossed it between his hands. His tone was hard to read, his expression blank as he looked over Ava’s shoulder rather than at her eyes. His gaze followed something (Maybe a bug?), before he looked back to his toy.

When she read through the study guide for basic math, Ava was pleasantly surprised by how much she knew. She tried a few practice problems that she didn’t immediately recognize but for the most part, Bob was actually right—they were good on basic math. So, their first study session had them skip right to geometry. They started out together on the floor as Bob presented the materials that he’d gathered and explained what he had in mind. But once he ran out of things to say, then came the endless pacing.

“Geometry is more than just shapes,” said Ava teasingly.

‘Teasingly’ was the key word there because she didn’t think that anything was wrong. Ava assumed that Bob was joking. The last thing she expected was for him to narrow his gaze as he snapped, “How am I supposed to know about it? I haven’t done geometry since I was thirteen and I was high the whole time. I don’t even know if I— shit, I must’ve passed because they let me into high school somehow.”

Maybe that was why he kept pacing and fidgeting so much. Bob knew less than he claimed, and he was anxious and overwhelmed. Ava understood that his situation was different from her and Yelena’s—Bob had gone to high school and because of his addiction, he had to drop out. Out of the three, he was the only one who had the chance to get that education and, from his perspective, pissed it away.

(Those were the words he used, not Ava—he’d said it once before, when he wasn’t so happy, when he was venting about how he felt like he pissed away every opportunity he was ever given. Whether that was going to high school, going to rehab, or accepting an extended hospital stay; Bob “pissed away” every one of them for some reason or another until people gave up and stopped giving him more chances.)

“Bob, are you okay?” asked Yelena. Bob nodded aggressively as he resumed his pacing. Ava closed her eyes and took a deep breath, willed herself not to tell him off. Yelena looked down at the study guide Bob had printed for her and flipped to the next page. “I think we are good at two-dimensional objects. Should we move on to the next thing?”

“I told you we should start there in the first place,” said Bob, as if Ava and Yelena had learned nothing from the last thirty minutes. Sure, it was easy once they knew how to do it, but it wasn’t something they immediately remembered off the top of their heads. “The next thing should be finding the area, circumference, whatever of a circle. What are the formulas for that?”

“Let’s start with one at a time.”

Ava flipped her own study guide to the same page as Yelena and read through it aloud, having realized that Bob had no intention of sitting down to read his own. Yelena read along and listened in silence as Ava explained the formula (pi times the radius squared) and directed them to the practice problems that Bob had lined up for them. Bob, on the other hand, mumbled to himself the entire time Ava read, though he was quiet enough that even when she paused, she couldn’t tell what he was saying.

When prompted with a pencil and paper, Bob finally sat on the floor beside Yelena. He tapped his pencil on his knee, rocked back and forth just enough to be distracting. Every few seconds he would stop moving to write on his paper, only to go right back to his excessive fidgeting. Ava glanced at Yelena but she didn’t react, didn’t seem bothered. They worked mostly in silence as they moved through the different circle-related formulas, occasionally helping each other when they got confused. Ava was trying to help Yelena with a term she didn’t recognize when she finally hit her limit.

“Could you just sit still, please, Bob?” Admittedly, Ava’s tone carried more of her irritation than intended. She just couldn’t take it anymore, how hard it was to focus when there was a constant moving object in her peripheral vision. “I don’t mean to be rude but the way you’re moving is very distracting.”

The way Bob froze seemed different, somehow, from if he’d just stopped himself from moving. There was clear tension in his jaw, his fingers and eyes lightly twitching as he nodded. He wet his lips as he flipped through his papers. “Yeah, sorry.”

“Thank you.”

Ava turned her attention back to Yelena, to calculating the radius of a circle. She remembered learning it at some point, remembered Bill bringing her an actual blueberry pie to slice and enjoy, but it wasn’t something she ever practiced. Yelena was most familiar with circles in the context of targets, but she caught on fast when presented with the formulas.

They worked mostly in silence, Yelena and Ava helping each other more than they worked as a trio. Bob chimed in now and then, but he wasn’t good at explaining his thought process, at stringing together a coherent explanation. Ava was just starting on the fourth section, finding the diameter, when the sound of a pencil tapping ripped her from her thoughts, punctuated every word she tried to read.

“Bob.” He flinched when she said his name, turned to look at her with eyes that blinked a few too many times. “Can you please just—?”

“Sorry.” Bob grabbed the pencil with both hands, almost as if it was tapping on its own and it took effort to hold it still. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was— sorry.”

Something about the way he reacted made Ava feel bad. She hadn’t meant to scold him, she just couldn’t listen to the tap, tap, tap for a second longer. “It’s all right. I’m not mad, it’s just very irritating when you—”

“I know. Sorry.” He stood up suddenly, abandoning his worksheet and his pencil as he stumbled to his feet. Bob pushed his hands over his face, dragging his hair out of his eyes. “I— I’ll be back in a little bit. You can get started on the Pythagorean theorem without me.”

“No, wait, I didn’t mean you had to—”

“It’s fine, I’m just— I’m fine.”

Bob slipped out of Yelena’s bedroom into the hallway. By the time Ava mumbled a low “shit” and peeked out the door behind him, he was gone. The guilt didn’t fully hit until she turned around and saw Yelena’s face. Though Yelena didn’t say anything to her, clearly sympathetic to both sides, it was obvious that she was bothered by Bob leaving. Ava hesitated before she sat back down beside Yelena and pulled her notebook in front of her.

“So, diameter, then?”

They studied together for another half an hour, worked through the rest of the circles, but they did not continue to the Pythagorean theorem because Bob never came back. Maybe he gave them permission to continue without him, but it felt wrong somehow to move on without the person who’d convinced them to study in the first place.

It eventually reached a point where it irritated him as much as it irritated Ava.

Bob knew that he made her dizzy when he paced in circles around the common area. He knew that he drove Yelena crazy when he mumbled to himself while she was trying to read. The problem was that Bob knew he was fidgeting too much and talking too much but he couldn’t stop. He felt like his nerves were buzzing, like he had an excess of energy that no amount of movement was able to release. If he could stay still, he would, but he physically couldn’t.

He tapped his pencil against his worksheet, leaving tiny marks of graphite across the page. Ava glanced at him, and he forced himself to stop moving. It hurt. It actually, physically hurt to hold his hand still but he did it. He stayed frozen as he read through the explanation for how median worked as an average, as he looked at the first practice question and tried to figure out which number was right; except the page was spinning and he could barely read the words let alone differentiate the numbers.

The pencil snapped before he realized how tightly he was holding it. Both Ava and Yelena turned to look at him and he laughed it off, made some lame excuse about not being used to his own strength. Yelena offered him a new pencil, and he took it before he shoved his hands into his crossed knees. That stopped his hands from fidgeting, but he still couldn’t stop rocking back and forth, couldn’t calm the urge to stand up and walk in aimless circles.

He’d had a headache all day—all week—and the longer he stifled his fidgeting, the dizzier and more nauseous he became. Bob closed his eyes, rubbed beneath them and across the bridge of his nose with one hand. He looked up when he felt a weight on his shoulder, looked down to avoid Yelena’s gaze when she squeezed his arm reassuringly.

“Are you okay?”

Bob nodded and forced a smile. He wasn’t not okay, even with the nausea and the buzzing and the strange feeling of blood pounding in his hands. He was just irritated, and he couldn’t even really explain why. He wanted everything to stop. Wanted Ava to stop glancing at him like he was an annoying child; wanted Yelena to stop watching him like he was something to be pitied; wanted his hands to stop shaking and his mind to stop racing so he could focus on the shit that was his idea to do.

He looked back to his worksheet when Yelena did the same. Her and Ava started talking about something regarding means and modes and he couldn’t follow any of it. Bob took a deep breath and tried to reread the section on medians, squeezed his fists in his lap until his nails dug into his skin, until a warm drop of blood slid down his palm. Tears built on his lower lashes as he read and reread and willed the words to make any sense at all.

“Hey, Bob?” It was Ava who spoke next, who snapped him out of the dizzying cycle he’d gotten stuck in. He glanced in her direction but couldn’t look at her face, at the genuine concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry about the other day. I shouldn’t have snapped at you the way I did.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Bob shrugged and shook his head, twisted his fingers uncomfortably in his lap. He ignored the smeared blood on his wrist. “I get it.”

“You can fidget. If you need to.” He didn’t respond. Bob didn’t need her permission—he was a fucking god, he didn’t need anyone’s permission to do anything—he needed his body to stop having the urges in the first place. “You look frustrated.”

He was frustrated. He was frustrated because his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, because if he stopped focusing on staying still then he’d rock back and forth without realizing it. He was frustrated because his head hurt and all the words on the page seemed blurry and it made him dizzy and nauseous. He was frustrated because he was supposed to be a god, supposed to be perfect, and he couldn’t even remember the difference between mean, median, and mode.

“Whoever named these things was an asshole,” Bob said eventually. His tone wasn’t as humorous as he meant it to be. “Did they have to all start with ‘M?’”

“It is hard to remember them,” Yelena agreed, and Bob felt the smallest bit of relief that he wasn’t the only one struggling with what felt like such a stupid problem. “I think you had a cheat sheet somewhere.”

That was right—he did have a “cheat sheet” printed out. It was just a piece of paper with the vocabulary on it but having it at his side made it significantly easier to figure out what he was doing. Bob always hated his memory, always hated how hard it was for him to remember everything from the smallest detail to entire fucking days. The Thunderbolts helped him by being so patient, by constantly leaving him notes just in case, but it didn’t make him feel better about needing them.

It was after Bob broke his fourth pencil when John got involved. He’d come in and out of the common area a few times since they started studying but never interrupted before then. John tapped Bob on the shoulder, nodded for him to stand up and follow. Bob glanced at Ava and Yelena before he did. A part of him still felt uneasy around John, still assumed that if he wanted to talk to Bob specifically, it was because he’d done something wrong. It was kind of funny, how he thought he had any power over Bob; kind of funny how Bob let him.

“Here, I got something for you.” Bob made a face when John held out what appeared to be a very large elastic band. He raised a brow, too confused to take it without an explanation. “It’s a resistance band. They’re used for strength training.”

“Okay.” Bob took the band, somehow more confused than he was before. “Why are you giving me this?”

The thing about John was that he wasn’t used to having friends. It wasn’t weird, considering none of them were used to having friends, but John was a different flavor of it. John did have friends, at one point, and he’d had the same friends for a really long time before he lost them. He was used to knowing exactly what they needed, and it bothered him that he didn’t understand the Thunderbolts in the same way. Bob forced himself to be patient, to stand still even though every nerve in his body wanted to move.

“I just noticed that you’ve been moving a lot,” said John, and Bob’s gaze immediately dropped. John wasn’t even really sitting with them, and he noticed how badly Bob was fidgeting. He wanted to slap himself not because he disliked himself but because he was so fucking irritated. “On days when I have a lot of energy, I use that to get it out. You can just play with it in your arms while you walk around or whatever. You don’t have to, obviously. I just thought I’d offer it.”

Bob stretched the resistance band between his hands. It was really satisfying to pull on. “Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

When he got back to Ava and Yelena, they were reading the next section about counting and probability. Rather than sit down, Bob did exactly what John suggested and paced as he twisted the resistance band around in his arms. He didn’t manage to wear himself out and Ava still kept glancing at him every few minutes, but she didn’t say anything. They just worked on the math until Yelena decided it was time for dinner, and they called it a night.

Bob decided to abstain from the meal despite an invitation. He’d have to put the resistance band down to eat and he couldn’t deal with his fingers twitching anymore.

When Yelena got out of bed, she only meant to make a cup of tea.

She was having trouble sleeping and thought that it might help if she drank something warm and comforting. So, she got in the elevator with every intention of going to the kitchen. She was actually on her way to the kitchen when she heard the crash that made her stop the elevator and back track two floors.

There were papers everywhere from the second the doors opened. Some blank, some printed, some torn from a notebook. Yelena picked up a few as she stepped out of the elevator, but nothing written on them made any sense. It was all either nonsensical scribbles or study guides covered in incomprehensible notes. She tried to step around them as she moved into the common area but a few still stuck to her foot. It was like a tornado had ripped through, destroyed their notebooks and moved half the furniture.

It wasn’t entirely surprising that Bob was at the center of the chaos. He was surrounded by not only white but colorful construction paper, arranged into crude patterns and shapes. He was bent over on his knees, half his hair sticking up like he’d run his hands through it a dozen times. There were two broken pencils by his feet and even though he was meant to be impenetrable, Yelena felt a pang of fear that the splinters would slice into his bare skin.

“Bob?” He looked up when he saw her, eyes wide as he dragged his right sleeve across his mouth. “Why are you up? What are you doing?”

“‘M not tired. ‘M makin’ the… ‘M makin’ the shit from the questions. ‘M gonna figure out the proba— probi— prob— probab— the toys. The question with the toys.”

Yelena’s heart dropped into her stomach when Bob stood up and stumbled. She’d been drunk enough times to know what it looked like. It was clear from the way he slurred, from how he swayed back and forth just enough to notice, from how his eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks flushed pink. So, she was right in thinking that something was wrong, that Bob was acting weird. Because he knew better than to drink. He knew how bad it was for his recovery, how bad it was for hers.

She took a step closer, made sure to keep her tone soft when she asked, “Are you drunk?”

“No.” Bob shook his head, and Yelena couldn’t decide whether she was most sad, angry, or hurt. He’d thrown away his sobriety, broke the pact they made, and lied to her about it. Her best friend—her first best friend since Natasha—lied. “No, ‘m not— I wouldn’— I wouldn’ do that to— to you. And I can’t drink ‘cause I’m— I’m clean. I’m sober. I’m fucking— I’m a fucking addict. And Sentry wouldn’— it prob’ly wouldn’ let me get drunk, right? It wouldn’ even let me…”

But she saw the empty bottle of vodka kicked halfway under the couch behind him. Suddenly, half Yelena’s anger was directed toward Alexei because she told him not to have it in the tower. She told him it wouldn’t end well. “Just one bottle,” he’d said, “just for a shot now and then,” and he really thought not one addict on the team would give in to temptation. Then again, Yelena never would have guessed it would have been Bob before her.

Alexei thought it was nothing because he was a super soldier, because he couldn’t get drunk. To him, it was just a familiar taste and sensation that he enjoyed even without the effects. To Yelena, it was a reminder of some of the lowest points of her life and a temptation she had to actively resist. To John, it was a gateway to drinking an entire case of beer out of desperation to feel anything from it. To Bob… she didn’t know. Until that point, she hadn’t known whether Bob could get drunk. She wished Sentry worked like the super soldier serum, wished it would protect him the way he clearly thought it would.

“How much?” asked Yelena, because she didn’t know how much was in the bottle when he found it. “How much did you drink?”

“I didn’ drink anythin’,” Bob insisted. He sniffed and wiped his mouth again, then across his nose. “I didn’— I didn’ drink anythin’.”

“Don’t lie to me, Bob. Don’t ever lie to me. Please.”

“I didn’ drink, ‘Lena. I didn’— I wouldn’ do that to you. To us. I wouldn’ do that. I just feel really good. I feel really good and that’s why I seem drunk ‘cause I feel really good but I’m not. ‘M not drunk. ‘M not.”

When Yelena drank herself to sleep, she did it because it felt like the only thing she could do. Because she felt so utterly shitty that it was either drink until she felt numb or throw herself off the roof of a building. All she could think about was how Bob must have felt the same way as she did back then. It hurt to wonder how horrible he must have felt to decide that his best option was to abuse the only substance he could easily get his hands on.

Yelena took a deep breath as she stepped forward. Bob clearly wouldn’t answer her first question, so she tried a second. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. ‘M great. ‘M fine.” Except when Yelena took another step forward, Bob took a step back and nearly tripped over his own two feet. His arms wobbled as he caught himself. He sniffed, an almost convincing smile on his face. “Jus’ excited to get my— my GED. I think ‘m ready for al— alsh— alshebra.”

“If you feel great then why did you drink all that vodka?” She continued to push because she was afraid that if Bob didn’t answer, he would forget. He would wake up the next morning and have no idea what drove him to drink, leaving her without the ability to help solve the problem. Bob shook his head again and she took a deep breath. “I just want to know why so I can—”

“Shut the fuck up, Mom!”

The lights flickered and a glass on the table shattered when he shouted. The use of the word “mom” threw Yelena off so badly that she didn’t know how to react. It didn’t make sense that he would use it as a way to refer to her sarcastically, not with the way his own mother treated him. It didn’t make sense that he would scream it at her when she was so deliberately gentle with her tone.

It was only when she stopped thinking about what he said when she realized that Bob wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the couch to his right, his glassy eyes wide and almost fearful. Yelena inched forward, tried to get closer without startling him. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

“‘Mom?’” she started. “What do you mean, ‘mom?’”

“Nothing,” said Bob quickly, but he kept glancing back to the couch. “I meant— it’s nothing. Nothing.”

The whole team knew about Bob’s psychosis. It was something that had become more apparent the longer they lived together. Some days it wouldn’t seem to affect him at all. Others, he would spend hours talking to himself or looking at things that weren’t there. He’d been honest about it a few times before, opened up to Yelena on a particularly hard night, but it was clear it was something he didn’t fully understand.

Possibly more important than that was Yelena was pretty sure it was something he didn’t want to understand. Bob wasn’t reluctant to talk about his psychosis because he was uncomfortable or embarrassed or didn’t trust her, it was because he didn’t want to acknowledge it. From what he’d said, her best guess was that he didn’t want to accept that it was something he experienced independent from substance abuse.

“Do you see your mom?” Yelena spoke softly, gently, her hands open in front of her. She gestured toward her left. “Is she on the couch?”

Bob stared at her for a long several seconds before he said, “She’s really mad.”

“Why is she mad?”

“My dad drank.” He looked down at his hands as he twisted his fingers in front of him. “He’d drink and then he’d beat her, and I’d stop him, and he— he’d beat me. Not always. He didn’— He didn’ always drink before he beat us.”

He rubbed his jaw, and it made Yelena physically angry to imagine how he’d been hurt before. To remember how she’d been hurt before. He didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve it. Even after everything she’d been through, she’d never understand how someone could be so callous as to hurt a child without a second thought.

“Hey—”

“She told me, ‘don’ be like your dad. Don’ be like your dad,’” Bob rambled, cutting off Yelena’s attempt at reassurance. It was disconcerting, the way he smiled the whole time he spoke. The way he paused to laugh before he finished his thought. “And it’s so fucking funny ‘cause I didn’ turn out like my dad, I turned out like her. I’m fucking crazy and a fucking addict who can’t fucking stay clean. Just like her.”

“Bob—”

“I’m a fucking failure. I can’ stay clean for anybody. I just take fucking— whatever the fuck is there. And you know what’s so stupid? You know why I did this tonight?” She didn’t so she kept her mouth shut, gave him space to laugh at himself again before he finished his thought. She didn’t know what to say. All she wanted to do was hug him and beg him to stop because it wasn’t funny. Why was he smiling when it wasn’t funny? “I just wan’ed to stop fi— fig— figi— ‘M shaking. I’m fucking shaking. I can’ stop fucking shaking.”

That was enough for Yelena to infer his thought process. For whatever reason, he couldn’t stop fidgeting, and it frustrated him. So, he must’ve reasoned that alcohol was a depressant, that it would help subdue that restlessness. He was so desperate to calm his movements that he either ignored or didn’t even consider that the alcohol could hurt him too. That it was horrible for his recovery, that it could affect his psychosis.

It broke her fucking heart.

Satisfied with the explanation and at the end of her tolerance for upsetting rambles, Yelena made her next move. “You should go to bed.”

“‘M not tired,” Bob argued.

“You need to sleep this off. Come on, I will take you.”

“No. I don’— no. I’m not tired. No. No.”

Yelena took a step forward and Bob stumbled back. Between his lack of coordination and the papers all over the floor, it wasn’t a surprise when he tripped. When he caught himself only to immediately bend over and heave the entire contents of his stomach on the floor (which seemed to consist of only vodka, stomach acid, and more vodka).

Bob was pale and shaking when Yelena reached him, his eyes somehow more bloodshot than before. He wiped his mouth with his left hand as Yelena latched on to his right arm and dragged him to the farthest couch. Bob sniffed when she urged him down—lying back but half sitting up so he wouldn’t get reflux—and grabbed a water bottle from nearby. She all but forced him to drink from it before she sat on the cushion in front of him to make sure he didn’t try to move.

“‘M sorry,” said Bob, his hands trembling in the very way he’d tried to stop. “‘M sorry, ‘Lena. ‘M sorry. ‘M sorry.”

Accepting the apology felt impossible and she couldn’t even explain why. “I’m not mad at you, Bob. I’m worried.”

“She’s mad. My mom is mad.”

“She’s not real, Bob. She’s not here. I’m real. I’m here.”

There were times when Yelena felt like she could hold her team together. Times when Bob’s mental health was low and she managed to make him smile and laugh just by being there, by spending time with him. Times when Ava was in so much pain she couldn’t move, and Yelena held her together with cheesy movies and well-timed jokes. Times when John stared at his phone or off the balcony and Yelena talked him down, convinced him to take a walk with her instead.

Yelena knew what it was like to be depressed, to be in pain. She wasn’t a professional, but she knew how to support her friends when they struggled with similar experiences. But sometimes, with Bob, she felt way out of her depth. She didn’t know anything about psychosis, about hallucinations, about why his mood sometimes changed from happy to angry to sobbing on a dime. She didn’t know anything about how to ground him, how to bring him back to reality, how to comfort him when he was dealing with things she couldn’t understand.

So, she just laid at his side and wrapped her arms around him; held him while he rambled incoherently about things she didn’t understand, things she couldn’t see or hear. Eventually, he fell asleep and a few minutes later, she did too.

It was too bright.

Bob squeezed his eyes shut as soon as he opened them because it was too bright. It wasn’t even morning yet but there were enough lights on for it to make him dizzy. The fact that his head was pounding did not help. Bob groaned, tried to shift his leg, and froze when he realized there was a weight on him. He popped one eye open, saw Yelena, and suddenly everything came crashing back.

Well, half of it. Maybe less. He knew he was studying, and he drank a lot of vodka, and Yelena found him, but he couldn’t remember many of the details. He couldn’t remember whether they’d argued or stayed quiet, how they’d ended up on the couch. Bob closed his eye again, shifted back into the couch. He didn’t feel very sleepy, but he didn’t feel like getting up either.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Bobby?”

Every muscle in Bob’s body tensed when he heard his father’s voice. Logically, he knew that it wasn’t real, that his dad couldn’t set foot in the Watchtower even if he wanted to. But it felt real. It was loud and it made his heart race like he was ten years old and hiding in the attic. Bob shoved his hands over his ears. It did nothing. His dad screamed at him for every relevant reason and his hands didn’t muffle it at all.

Bob had left a mess all over the floor with his papers and pencils; he’d made an ass of himself by drinking alcohol when he was supposed to be sober and clean; he was still the little pussy who couldn’t take a hit and threw up on the living room floor if he got punched or spun just right.

“Clean this shit up right now.”

If he didn’t, he would be beat more. Harder. So, Bob carefully moved Yelena’s sleeping figure to the side and stood up. He gathered papers, splinters, and a shattered glass he didn’t remember breaking. He scrubbed the stain where he threw up until it was spotless. He made sure he was quiet enough not to wake Yelena but efficient enough that the room was clean before the sun came up.

And then he stepped outside and stared off the balcony. He gripped the railing until his knuckles turned white because he really wanted to jump and he didn’t even know why. He stared at the sky, the same stars that followed him everywhere he’d lived in his life. He stared at his reflection in the railing, at his tangled, greasy hair and the petechiae blooming under his eyes, and wondered why he couldn’t be better.

Chapter Text

Trying to talk to Bob about what happened was harder than shooting a moving target.

She woke up at five in the morning the night it happened to find Bob on the balcony, mumbling to himself as his legs dangled over the edge. Yelena asked him point blank if he felt suicidal. He told her no and somehow, she knew he was telling the truth. Even though he’d drank himself to the point of vomiting, nothing about Bob read as depressed. She didn’t even really have a word for the state he was in. It was like he was happy but disconnected, more in touch with whatever he was hallucinating than anything grounded in reality.

So, talking to him at that point was not an option. And when his psychosis seemed to subdue, it only got harder. Yelena asked him several times if they could talk but the moment he figured out what she wanted to talk about, he’d change the subject or walk away. Even Alexei had been willing to talk to her the first time she asked, let her explain to him what happened and offered her a hug when he promised he would never bring alcohol into the Watchtower again. Yelena didn’t know if she believed him, but she believed he would never leave it anywhere anyone else would find it and that had to be enough.

But Bob? Bob would make every excuse in the world to not acknowledge what happened. He’d drag someone else in so she felt guilty exposing his secrets, talk over her concerns with musings about their studies. The one time Yelena got him to sit down and listen to her for thirty seconds, it ended with Bob rambling at her for five minutes about how sorry he was and begging her not to hate him until Yelena finally postponed the real conversation because he sounded so paranoid and borderline incoherent. It was irritating, and it was scary, and it worried her so much that when Bucky tried to take them on a mission for a few days, Yelena stayed back because she didn’t feel safe leaving Bob home alone.

“Yelena!” Bob threw his hands in the air when she walked into the kitchen, a pencil in his right hand and a large spoon in his left. On the opposite side of the counter, Alexei faced the stove wearing a gaudy red apron. “We’re making— uh— we’re making— Alexei, what are we making? What is it called?”

“Syrniki,” said Alexei with a smile. He pointed his spatula at Bob. “Tvorog pancakes.”

“Yeah, those. We’re making those. We went out early and we got— we got— whatever that word is that Alexei just said. The Russian cheese. Did you know they sold that here? I didn’t but then again I never heard of it until he said it.”

“Early?” Yelena made a face as she glanced at the clock. It was only nine in the morning. “Didn’t you get back from the mission at like three A.M.?”

“I could not sleep,” Alexei explained. He flipped over the batter in the pan and Yelena was pleasantly surprised to see the pancakes were perfectly brown. “Too much stress from the mission. So, I come in here for snack and find Bob sitting at the counter doing math. He was having trouble with the…”

It was Bob’s turn to fill in the missing word. “Expressions.”

“Yes, the expressions. I tried to help but I do not know this math, so we decided to make everyone breakfast instead. I asked Bob what he likes, he said he likes pancakes, I said I know great pancake recipe, we went to store, now we are here!”

Yelena wasn’t sure how she felt about Alexei taking Bob out alone and without telling anyone—particularly when Bob was in the middle of some kind of mental health episode—but they’d made it back okay, so she decided not to overthink it. She sat down at the counter beside Bob, watched in silence for a moment while he and Alexei bantered back and forth. Part of her felt like it was wrong to interrupt what was clearly an enjoyable morning, but she couldn’t get over the thought that maybe it was the right time. Bob appeared to be in a good mood and Alexei was there to take accountability for the role he played what happened.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she said, “Can we talk about what happened last week?”

“I thought—” Bob glanced at Alexei. He already knew that Yelena had talked to him. She told him before she confronted Alexei, to let Bob know that she would be sharing what happened and to make sure he was okay with it. “We already talked about it, like, four times, you know?”

“No. I have tried to talk to you about it, but you never answer my questions.”

Bob chewed on his left little finger, his right leg bouncing beneath him. “What are your questions?”

Truthfully, Yelena had a lot of questions, but she didn’t think Bob would be willing to or even know how to answer most of them. So instead, she said, “I just want to know why. It’s okay if you do not remember everything but I need to know, outside of the fidgeting, what is bothering you? What are you dealing with? How can I support you?”

“Nothing, I don’t— I’m not dealing with anything. I don’t need help.” He did that thing again, where he laughed when there was no reason to. Bob smiled when he shrugged, like they were talking about the math and not him drinking himself sick and staring over the balcony. “I’m fine, really. I’m fine. I told you the day we met, I have these— these episodes. The good days and the bad days. This is the good days. This is what I’m like when I’m happy.”

“I’m glad that you feel happy, Bob,” she started cautiously, “but when you told me you have highs and lows and good days and bad days, this is not how I imagined your good days.”

“Well, sorry I’m not whoever you wanted me to be.”

Yelena inhaled sharply and forced herself to exhale slowly, to release her irritation, to be patient because snapping wouldn’t help either of them. “That isn’t what I mean. I’m talking about the fidgeting—”

“I already apologized for that.”

“No, I don’t want you to apologize, I— you were hallucinating so bad. When you were drinking, you were hallucinating really, rea—”

“I’m psychotic. You know I’m psychotic. You’ve known that.” It was true, Yelena had known that, but she was shocked that Bob actually said the words he’d avoided for so long. Maybe it was easier when he could blame part of it on the alcohol. “You’ve all known for months. Why are you mad at me for it now?”

“Bob, I’m not mad.” She sounded a little mad, admittedly, but it was because she was irritated. Because it was impossible to talk to him about something that was so damn important. “I’m not mad at you, okay? I just want to understand what you’re going through so that I can help you.”

“I don’t need help. I don’t want your help.”

“All right, all right.” Alexei spun around and set two plates of syrniki on the counter in front of them. Yelena wanted to be mad at him but when she realized how hard her heart was pounding, how short her fuse had gotten, she thought maybe it was for the best. “No need to raise our voices. Let’s take break and try some of my syrniki, yes? Probably ‘Lena doesn’t remember but these were her favorite when she was little girl.”

Yelena did remember that, actually. Macaroni and cheese for dinner and syrniki for breakfast. Although back then he made it with cottage cheese because there was no tvorog in suburban Ohio (and she remembered that because he complained about it loudly on multiple occasions). She took a bite of the pancake and taste of it transported her straight back to those earliest days she remembered. It was comforting in a way that calmed her nerves, that made her stop and breathe.

She glanced at Bob to see what he thought of the syrniki, but he hadn’t taken a bite. He hadn’t even looked at the plate. Yelena opened her mouth to tell him to try it, that it was surprisingly good for something that Alexei made, but he spoke first.

“I’m sorry I drank. I’m sorry,” said Bob quietly, and it was the first time he’d apologized for the incident without sounding halfway out of it. He sniffed, his gaze pointed down and away from Yelena. “It’s so fucked up that I did that to you. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize any more.” It felt good the first time he apologized, the first time he took responsibility for the way it affected Yelena. But the more he apologized, the less it felt like a genuine apology and the more it felt like he was trying to calm an intrusive thought. “This isn’t about me.”

“No, but it is. It is about you because we promised we would stay sober together and I didn’t use my shit, but I used yours. I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

“It is my fault,” Alexei interrupted, his back turned as he flipped over the next round of pancakes. “I should not have had that vodka in the tower.”

“But I’m the one— shit.” Bob shook his head. “You should be able to have that and not have to worry about me making an ass of myself and drinking three-fourths of it.”

Three-fourths of it. It was the first time he gave a number instead of dancing around it and Yelena stopped mid-bite. Bob had drunk something like twelve shots of vodka. Though Bob had managed to get drunk, it seemed likely Sentry still protected him to some degree. That much vodka was enough to push a man his size into the territory of alcohol poisoning, especially since he never drank and had no built-up tolerance for it.

“Maybe,” said Alexei, “but I should not have allowed you access to it. That is my fault. I am sorry, Bob.”

“That sounded serious.” Ava made a face when they all turned to look at her. She was still dressed in cozy pajamas over her suit, her hair tied back to expose a cut on her jaw. Yelena made a note to ask her about the mission later. “Sorry, am I interrupting something?”

Bob shook his head as he grabbed his notebook from the table and bounced over to her, a smile back on his face. He showed her his work, explained what he’d learned for them to study later. Yelena inhaled slowly and turned back to her breakfast. She didn’t know how Bob was able to bounce back so quickly, she just knew she couldn’t do the same.

Ava didn’t fully understand why Yelena was so concerned about Bob until she saw his notebook. Up until that point, she was able to write off pretty much everything as Bob just being odd when he was happy. But the notebook was something else. The notebook was… weird, to say the least.

What Bob said and what was written on the page didn’t entirely line up. She could see the general idea of what he referenced, a few perfect expressions shadowed in the madness, but the overall work was like nothing she had seen before. For one thing, Bob’s handwriting was sloppier than usual. It slanted upwards in every direction, half his notes stopping mid-sentence. There were scribbles all over the pages, harsh marks and holes where it was clear he’d broken pencils over and over again.

She wasn’t judging Bob’s methods; she was just observing them. It was possible, to be fair, that Bob just got bored while he was studying and doodled on his pages and wrote things in funny ways to entertain himself. But given Yelena’s recent concern, Ava chose to file away the things she thought were strange just in case Bob was going through something they didn’t understand yet.

“Are you two doing all right?” asked Ava. They were only twenty minutes into studying polynomials and, admittedly, it was all a little confusing. Especially writing expressions from written descriptions. “Somehow I keep putting my parentheses in the wrong places.”

“I thought the subtraction and addition were simple enough,” Yelena started, drawing circles on her notebook as she reread the directions, “but the division is confusing me.”

“It’s because you’re trying to do long division.” Bob pointed at the handwritten notes on Yelena’s page. “Synthetic division is faster.”

“I know but like I told you before, trying to learn that was confusing me even more. I would rather keep doing it the long way. Maybe once I learn it, you can show me that other way again.”

“It’s really not that hard.”

“It is for me.”

When Ava imagined studying for the GEDs with Bob and Yelena, the last thing she expected was for Bob to act all high and mighty about it. He was weirdly arrogant about his intelligence, even uncharacteristically so, and Ava was rapidly approaching her tolerance for it. There was no reason for him to be a dick about it when Ava and Yelena were struggling with something. The entire point was for them to learn so it didn’t even make sense for him to act like there was something wrong with it when they didn’t know something.

“Bob, can you just—?” Ava inhaled slowly to calm her temper. Her instinct was to just snap but she knew that it triggered him when people yelled, even though he wouldn’t admit to the way his muscles tensed. Plus, it just wouldn’t help anything. “The whole reason we’re doing this is to learn. We aren’t going to know everything in here. Different things are going to be difficult for each of us.”

“Not sure anything is really difficult,” said Bob, as if he hadn’t understood her point at all. He chewed on the end of his pencil between words, bite marks lining the dented metal and wood. “It’s not like it’s— It’s all high school work, right? It’s—”

“You know, a lot of people think high school is harder than college.”

“Am I supposed to have an opinion on that? I didn’t go to either.”

“None of us did,” said Ava, at the end of her rope. “That’s the fucking point. You’re being a dick to Yelena because she’s having trouble with something she was never given the opportunity to learn.”

“I’m not being a dick,” Bob argued, like he was in any position to have an opinion on how his own behavior affected his friends. He pulled his pencil from his mouth and tapped the tip against his worksheet. “Maybe I’m just still getting used to being a god. I haven’t figured out everything I’m capable of yet. Superior intelligence could be one of my powers.”

“All right, I can’t.”

Ava tossed her pencil on the floor before she stood up and walked out of the room. She’d agreed to get her GED because she thought it would be fun, because she thought that it would make her feel good. When Bob was constantly making vain comments and “helping” by rambling semi-incoherently and tapping his damn pencil again and again and again, it felt like the opposite. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t uplifting. It wasn’t anything like sitting on her bed while Bill explained to her how to convert fractions to decimals and vice versa.

She was only outside the room for around a minute before Yelena walked up beside her. Ava looked away, avoided meeting her gaze or even glancing at the expression on her face. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She just wanted a minute to simmer and be angry because she had every right to. All she wanted was to learn something and have a nice time with the first real friends she ever had and for some reason, Bob couldn’t be the supportive and compassionate person she thought he was.

“Are you okay?” asked Yelena. She set a hand on Ava’s forearm, her eyes wide as they scanned Ava’s face. Ava shook her head, her chest burning with irritation, with sadness because it hurt more that her opportunity was being ruined again than it did when Bob was rude. “I’m sorry about Bob. I know he is a lot right now.”

“Yeah, he is a lot,” Ava snapped, and immediately regretted it because Yelena was not the person she was mad at. Because Yelena was doing everything right, being exactly the friend she wanted to study with. “He’s being an asshole to both of us.”

“I know. I know he is, but I don’t think he means to be. You know Bob. You know he isn’t like that.”

Ava did know. That was part of why it was so frustrating—it was completely unexpected. Bob seemed so happy when he suggested the idea of GEDs to her and he was always in a good mood when they started. She didn’t understand why he kept devolving into arrogance, why he couldn’t stop moving and making noise and getting irritated over every little thing. All she wanted was one quiet, peaceful study session where they just joked around and learned. One study session without an argument or judgment.

“Yeah.” Ava nodded, inhaled slowly to remind herself that Yelena did not deserve her temper, did not deserve to be on the receiving end of her frustration. “I thought at first maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought he would and that was his way of coping with it but right now I just— I can’t deal with this anymore. I can’t. I think I might just not do this GED thing. It’s not like we need them anyway.”

“No, hey.” It was incredible how quickly Yelena was able to change from annoyed to concerned to compassionate. “How about you go cool off and we can study together later? Just the two of us? That way we can get more practice before we try to build on it with Bob next time. Can we try that?”

“Okay.” It sounded nice, hanging out just the two of them. Girl power or whatever. “Okay, let’s do that.”

Yelena smiled before she suggested a time and Ava agreed to meet her. She wasn’t sure how it would go but it had to be better than what they’d been doing.

“You little piece of shit.”

Bob coughed as he stumbled back into the wall. The blood from his nose mixed with his spit as he wiped his mouth with one sleeve. His heart pounded so hard it hurt as much as the bruises on his back, but he forced himself to stand tall. He refused to let himself show weakness when his father grabbed his shoulders and slammed him against the wall again. When his father wrapped his hands around his neck and squeezed until everything sounded muffled and Bob could no longer tell what he was screaming.

As always, his father let go just before Bob passed out. Bob crashed to his knees, tears and spit dripping from his face as he panted on the floor. His mother knelt at his side, and it hurt when she put a hand on his back, when she touched the marks from the week before. He took a long, shuddering breath as he awaited the shouting that was bound to come next. As he waited for his mother to deliver the final blow instead of the comfort he so desperately craved.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Robert?” Bob couldn’t answer if he wanted to. His chest was still burning, his lungs unable to compensate for the stolen air. “Why do you always do that? You know he’s at his worst when he’s drunk. You know you’re making it worse. Why do you always make it worse?”

“I don’t want him to hurt us,” Bob whispered, each word punctuated by a pained, shuddering sob.

“It won’t hurt as bad if you just shut the fuck up and stop trying to be a hero.”

His mom grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. One second, he was stumbling to catch his footing and the next, he was sitting up on the couch in a cold sweat. Bob shoved his sleeves over his face as he tried to regulate his breathing, to convince himself that he was safe. He was not at home, he was not near his mother. He was in the Watchtower, and he had seven layers of security plus a team of superheroes to keep him safe.

Bob glanced at the time on his phone. 9:42. He’d only fallen asleep for about half an hour, then. That was good. At least no one saw him. Bob stuffed his phone into the pocket of his jacket and stood up. He was still tired, but he didn’t want to sleep more and definitely not in the common area. It would be best to just go to bed and lie down, he reasoned. That way he could rest for a bit without actually sleeping or risking someone catching him in a nightmare.

He was halfway down the hall when he heard the voices. Not the cruel ones in his head, no, but kind ones. Happy ones. Bob followed the sound to Yelena’s room. The door was ajar so he peeked in and couldn’t help but smile when he saw Ava and Yelena sitting on the bed, study materials spread out between them. That was nice, he thought. They were helping each other with the problems they had had questions with earlier.

“I get the linear equations so fast,” said Ava, halfway through a laugh he had no context for, “but I have to stare at the quadratic equations for like thirty seconds before it even clicks what I’m looking at.”

It took Bob longer than that. When they’d asked him the day before how he was doing, he lied and said that he was doing fine. He wasn’t. It was impossible to keep the numbers straight when he was battling a constant stream of irrelevant thoughts. When adding in letters made it next to impossible for his brain to process the problems. If he’d just told them he was struggling, they probably would have included him in their extra study session too.

“Right?” Yelena smiled as she wrote something down on her page. The page that Bob had found and printed for her. “I felt a little silly earlier, Bob saying it is so easy, and I was just like ‘I don’t even know what this says.’”

But it wasn’t easy. Bob just said that it was easy because he felt like it should be easy, and it made him uncomfortable when he lacked what he saw as basic knowledge. When dealers asked him for money and it took him a stupid amount of time to count his cash. When people referenced historical events and he had to pretend he knew more than vague details. Bob wasn’t embarrassed by his education, exactly, it just made him anxious.

“Thank you again for doing this, by the way.” Ava nudged Yelena’s shoulder. “I feel like such a bitch saying it but it’s so much easier to focus when it’s just us.”

Just us.

It didn’t even upset him, not really. Everyone turned on him eventually. There was something about Bob that was just fundamentally unlovable. Maybe it was the fact that he spent his childhood so busy hiding his bruises that he never learned to make friends. Maybe it was the fact that he was an addict and even when he promised he would get clean and he meant it, he still found something to intoxicate himself with. Maybe it was the fact that he was just so fucking annoying with his fidgeting and his rambling and his inability to hold a thought.

Somehow, Bob thought it was funny that he didn’t see it coming. That he didn’t expect them to cut him out of the study group when it was so obvious he was weighing them down. It was even funnier that he believed they were friends. That he believed people like them would want anything to do with someone like him. They were strong, smart, superheroes, and he was a psychotic addict with almost no useful skills. What was even the point of having him around?

Well, the answer there was obvious, actually. They were scared of him, or they wanted to utilize him in some way. Because Bob didn’t use his powers, but he could. So, they were either scared of what he might do if they stopped watching him, scared of what someone else might do if they found him, or planning to use him as some kind of weapon in the future. Bob wasn’t their friend. He wasn’t their teammate. He was their prisoner.

He took a deep breath as he stepped away from the door and walked to his room, reassuring himself with the knowledge that at least they wouldn’t hurt him.

Though they’d only had three one-on-one sessions so far, Ava really loved studying with Yelena. She loved having a female friend to chat with and to work with. She loved that they were finally able to connect on a level that had nothing to do with their trauma or their work, that was just about supporting each other and being happy. The fact that she’d almost walked away from the GEDs entirely was an upsetting thought after just a few hours with Yelena, laughing and learning together.

Ava woke up on Yelena’s bed a little after midnight. They’d studied for around an hour and then they were just hanging out until they both fell asleep. They watched a girly movie and painted Yelena’s nails, and it was the tackiest thing Ava had ever done but she didn’t care. Most girls got that out of their system when they were thirteen and she and Yelena never got that chance. They deserved a silly night now and then, just the two of them.

Though it was fun, Ava craved her own bed when she woke up. She slipped out of Yelena’s room without waking her and made her way down the hall. Her eyes were closed as she walked so it wasn’t anything visual but rather audible that alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. She wasn’t even sure where the crash came from until she stopped, backtracked a few steps, and heard a voice from behind Bob’s door.

“I know, I know,” said Bob, not like he was rambling to himself but like he was having a conversation. No person responded before he continued. “I’m making it worse. I make everything worse. I can’t even die right. I can’t even— I should have died with everybody else then I wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. I wouldn’t— you think it would be better if I died, right? You told me it would be better if I died.”

She had no idea who he was talking to, but she was not going to let him continue to have that conversation. Ava popped the door open only for her eyes to widen in shock when she saw the scene in front of her. Bob’s entire room was torn apart. Every drawer and cabinet were opened, almost everything he owned discarded on the floor. His desk chair was knocked over, his curtains pulled off the wall with so much force the rod had come down with them. And in the middle of it all was Bob.

He had on a pair of checkered blue boxers and a gray sweatshirt that was decidedly two sizes too large. He sat cross-legged facing his bed in a pile of t-shirts, blankets, and the sheets from his mattress, swaying back and forth just slightly. He kept talking like he was addressing someone, but his laptop was closed, his tablet was face down feet away, and his phone was nowhere to be seen. Ava lingered in the doorway for a few seconds as Bob spoke semi-incoherently of a car accident, of morphine, of how he or someone thought he should have died as a child.

“Bob?”

The way he jumped was like nothing she had ever seen from him before. Bob was a naturally anxious person, but he was never jumpy. He didn’t flinch unless something triggered him, didn’t startle unless he was genuinely afraid. His chest rose and fell as he turned to face her, his blue eyes wide and bloodshot behind his tangled bangs. Ava hesitated, not even sure what she should do.

“Bob, it’s me. It’s Ava,” she said, because he looked so scared, his gaze unsteady as he chewed on his thumb, that Ava wasn’t even sure he knew who she was. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Nothing.” Every few seconds his eyes flickered back to his bed even though there was nothing on it, not even a single pillow. Ava took a step forward around a pile of pants and a broken lamp. “Nothing. I was just looking for— I thought maybe— I was just looking for something. I was looking for something.”

“What were you looking for?”

Bob shook his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing. It doesn’t— it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.”

“Can I be honest with you?” Ava waited for him to nod before she continued, just to make sure he heard her. “You’re really scaring me right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. No, I don’t need an apology, I just— who were you talking to?”

“Nobody. I wasn’t— nobody.”

Ava knew about Bob’s hallucinations. She wasn’t as familiar with them as Yelena, didn’t know the details as intimately as her. But sometimes Bob asked if she heard something and she had to tell him no. Sometimes she caught him following the Void out of the corner of his eye though he would rarely admit to it. It was likely that Bob chose not to answer her question because the truth was, he was responding to something that he was aware wasn’t real and he didn’t want to tell her.

She inhaled before she asked her next question, unsure if it was the right one. “Do you see someone on your bed?”

“No.” Bob shook his head immediately, his movements almost frantic. He glanced up at her but quickly looked back down. “I’m not crazy. I’m not fucking crazy.”

“Bob…”

“I’m not. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not—”

“Bob, stop. I never said I thought you were.”

The only word she would have used to describe Bob at that moment was scared. He looked down and away from her when he asked, “Do you hate me?”

“What?” asked Ava, because the question was so unexpected, because she had no idea what could have prompted it, because it hurt that Bob felt like he had to ask. Was she that bad of a friend? “No.”

“I’m sorry I was fidgeting.” It was strange the way Bob was curled in on himself, like he was a child waiting to be scolded. “And for acting like a dick. I’m sorry.”

“I still don’t need an apology. Not for anything. Not right now.”

Bob sniffed and dragged his sleeve over his nose. “Can you leave me alone?”

“No.” What if she left and he started thinking he’d be better off dead again? What if he found a way to hurt himself, to kill himself, and it was her fault for leaving? “I don’t think I should do that.”

“You don’t have to be scared of me. I won’t go anywhere or hurt anyone. I won’t…”

The more he said, the increasingly clear it became that Bob was operating on a completely different plane from her. That his whole thought process and everything he said was grounded in some sort of delusion that he wouldn’t or couldn’t name. Ava wished that having that knowledge would help her know what to do but it didn’t.

“I said you’re scaring me,” she started, “not that I’m scared of you. I’m not. I’m scared for you.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not lying.” Ava knelt at his side and held out one hand to him. He looked at it but didn’t take it. “Bob, listen. I think your brain is very busy right now and I think this room is overstimulating. I want to take you somewhere that is clean and quiet so you can calm down, okay? Will you come with me?”

Bob started to lift his hand but stopped before it met hers. “You don’t hate me?”

“No.” That must have been his intrusive thought, the core idea driving whatever he was experiencing. “Of course I don’t hate you.”

“Okay.”

Maybe it was just her. Maybe someone else would be better. “Do you want me to go wake Yelena?”

“No, don’t— no. No.” He looked at her hand again, his own twisting in his lap. “I just want, um, I want a Zyn. I really want a Zyn.”

Normally Ava would have discouraged his habit. That night, it actually sounded like something that might help ground him. “Do you know where they are?”

Given the mess, it didn’t surprise her at all when he said, “No.”

“Is that what you were looking for?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to DoorDash some?”

“No.” And then he finally snapped out of that loop of ‘no’ and pushed his hands through his hair. “No, it’s okay. Can we go somewhere else now?”

Ava nodded and finally, he took her hand. She led him to her room which was clean and quiet and dark. She told him to take the bed, but he refused, citing her chronic pain, so she handed him a pillow and blanket for the floor instead. Bob never closed his eyes but seemed to calm down once they settled in. Once it was calm and quiet and maybe too dark to see what he had been.

And even though he protested when Ava told him she would be right back and left him alone for a few minutes, it was worth it for the way he nearly cried out of something like happiness or relief when she came back from the lobby with a fresh tin of Zyns.

Chapter Text

The thing about Bob was that he knew himself well enough to know when he was being paranoid. He just couldn’t tell which thoughts were paranoia and which were legitimate concerns.

For example, he had a thin coat of anxiety painted over him because he didn’t know the first thing about graphs or functions. He was scared that he was too stupid to understand them, that it would be the end of his attempt to get his GED. He also had a thick, heavy shadow looming behind him, convincing him that the Thunderbolts were not his friends at all. That Ava and Yelena were only doing the GED thing to occupy some time while they were stuck babysitting him in case he accidentally voided Manhattan again.

Out of those two issues, it was clear which one sounded more irrational, and Bob was self-aware enough to acknowledge that. But he was also crazy enough to tear apart his entire room in the middle of the night searching for hidden cameras or microphones because if he could just find a “baby monitor” then he could prove he was actually a prisoner, bring down the mirage they’d created around him. Instead, he got pulled right back into it when Ava found him and talked him down and almost, almost convinced him that she didn’t hate him.

Maybe “hate” was a strong word, but it really made more sense that she didn’t like him, didn’t it? It made more sense that none of them liked him. Ava and Yelena had been acting weird around him, but he understood. After all, he’d acted like a dick to them for no good reason; plus, Yelena had to take care of him when he was drunk, and Ava had to take care of him because he was so out of it he couldn’t even buy his own damn Zyns. The only “good” thing was that Ava hadn’t pushed him to talk about what happened the way Yelena had.

But it wasn’t just them either. Alexei kept making Bob food when he didn’t ask for it, which kept him flipping back and forth between the ideas “he’ll hate me if I don’t eat it” and “he’s poisoning me” and he couldn’t decide which was right. John kept offering Bob different exercises and ideas to let off steam which Bob was convinced meant John was either afraid of or irritated by him. And Bucky didn’t exactly do one thing in particular but he kept using what Bob recognized too well as therapy talk—words like “triggers” and “dissociation” that he hated just as much as when they’d come from random nurses in the psych ward.

“I think this is starting to make sense,” said Yelena. She was three-fourths through the worksheet regarding slopes. Bob pulled his paper closer to himself, hoped she wouldn’t see he was still on the second problem. “How are you two doing?”

“Good,” Ava answered, and Bob rubbed beneath his eyes anxiously. “I’m a little over halfway done, I think?”

Bob forced a tense smile and nodded with her. Graphs were misleadingly simple. They got through the first section (locating points and graph equations) so fast that he got cocky. For some reason, slopes just did not make sense to him. The only reason he finished the first problem was because they had done it together. He really needed help but there was something that wouldn’t let him ask and he didn’t even know for sure what it was. Maybe it was the fact that he was a god and he felt that help was beneath him, or maybe it was that he was embarrassed he was so slow, or maybe it was just that overwhelming sense that they saw him as a burden and a responsibility rather than a friend.

He shook himself off and looked at the worksheet. What is the slope of the line represented by the equation 7x + 3y = 21? How hard could it be to solve, really? All he had to do was isolate y, identify m. Whatever that meant. Bob squinted, stared at the question for a long several seconds before he wrote, 3y = -7x + 21. There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? He wrote down the first part which meant he just had to do… something. Bob blinked, willed the next step to come to him. It didn’t.

There were a lot of things that irritated him about Sentry. The fact that he didn’t really understand his powers bothered him most days. Bob felt like a god but there were a lot of things that still didn’t reflect that he was a god, and it was frustrating. He felt like he should be smarter and he wasn’t. He felt like he should have a better memory and he didn’t. He felt like he should be able to snap his fingers and will away his persistent fucking headache and he couldn’t.

“Bob?” He sniffed and cracked his jaw when he heard Ava, realized that she’d addressed him multiple times already and he hadn’t heard. He forced a smile that did not stay on his lips, buried in his frustration. “Are you ready to move on to proportional relationships?”

“Yeah,” answered Bob quickly, his eyes annoyingly glassy. He wasn’t sad or anxious, he was just so fucking frustrated. Because what would it look like if he said no after singing his own praises? If the GED was just something that Ava and Yelena agreed to so they’d have something to do while they ‘babysat’ him, he wasn’t going to make it harder for them by struggling with something literal children could do. “Yeah, let’s move on.”

The following section made no more sense than the one before it. But if there was one thing that Bob’s father taught him, it was how to lie. If Yelena and Ava had any inkling that he wasn’t keeping up—if they even cared that he wasn’t keeping up—they didn’t say a word.

Graphs were probably the easiest thing they’d worked on so far, at least for Ava. She couldn’t speak for Bob and Yelena, but from what they said and the speed they progressed at, it seemed they were all picking it up quickly. It made the whole vibe of their study sessions calmer, settled Bob down from arrogance to quiet encouragement. He still chewed up every pencil he lifted but it was quiet so Ava didn’t care.

She leaned back on Yelena’s bed, her study guide open to the overview on linear and nonlinear relationships. Again, none of it sounded particularly difficult. She read in silence as Yelena tested out eyeliner at the humble vanity a few feet away. Ava couldn’t imagine buying so many without trying them but as Yelena put it, “Valentina is paying for them and the ladies at the women’s shelter do not mind if they have been used once.”

“You know,” started Yelena as she twisted the cap on a stick of eyeliner and reached for a makeup wipe, “we are almost finished with this math stuff. We’ll have to take the actual test soon. Do you remember what Bob said? We can schedule it for any day?”

“Something like that.” Ava tossed her study guide on the mattress beside her and rolled over to face Yelena. Technically, they’d agreed to study together that night, but they made the plans before they realized how simple it was. She liked that they both showed up to hang out anyway. “You told him he could join us tonight, right?”

“Mmhm. He said he has a headache.”

“Oh. I hope he feels better. Must suck to have Sentry powers and still get those migraines like he does.”

“Yeah. I think it’s very frustrating for him.” Yelena finished wiping under her eyes and tossed the makeup wipe into the trash. She rolled the unopened eyeliners between her hands. “Which one should I try next? Galactic Cobalt, Lime Smash, or… Tealtini? Why do these always have such weird names? Why do they not just call them dark blue and green and teal?”

“To distinguish the different shades of those colors, I suppose.” She hadn’t really thought about it before but once Yelena said it, makeup usually did have strange names. Ava pointed to the one on the far left—Tealtini?—and Yelena nodded as she turned back to the mirror. “So, you think we’ll be ready to take our tests soon?”

“I don’t see why not. Aside from the stuff we have not started, we seem to be getting everything consistently correct. Once we are confident, we take the test, yes?”

‘Confident’ felt like a strong word but when she thought about it, it was hard to argue. Ava did feel confident in her mathematical abilities, maybe for the first time in her life. Not to say she felt like she was bad at math before, it just wasn’t something she would ever be the first to offer to do. But after all the studying they’d done, all the work they’d put in, she felt like if someone were to ask for help with math, she could be the one to jump in and solve the problem.

“Right,” Ava agreed. “Well, we can’t know for sure whether something will come up but if it doesn’t, we could plan to do it maybe next week or the week after? Depending on how the lines and functions go, that is. If we need longer, that’s fine. But I think we’re all doing well.”

“I think so.” Yelena set her eyeliner down on her vanity as she stared at the mirror, at the color she’d drawn beneath one eye. She inhaled before she turned to Ava, her expression a confusing mix of calmness and concern. “We will have to check in with Bob first, of course. I think he is struggling more than he’s saying lately.”

“With the math?”

“No, no. He seemed fine with the math. I just mean… never mind.”

The tone of Yelena’s voice said that she was hiding something just like Ava was. That they were both withholding information for the sake of Bob’s privacy. She opened her mouth to tell Yelena what happened the other night, to tell her how paranoid and delusional Bob sounded and how he was talking to himself, but she ultimately closed it again. It wasn’t that Ava wouldn’t tell Yelena, it was just that she respected Bob enough to want to ask for his permission first. Yelena, from the look on her face, was probably in a similar place.

“Well, since we’re not studying tonight, should we do something else?” asked Ava, eager to change the subject.

Yelena shrugged. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. What do normal women do on girls’ nights?”

“No idea. I’ve never had a girls’ night with anyone else. Maybe Natasha when we were kids, but does it count if it is your sister?”

“Don’t see why not.” Ava swung her legs over the side of the bed, faced Yelena straight on. She racked her brain for a few seconds, tried to think of anything to do. All she found was a funny story instead. “I only went to one sleepover before… everything, and all I remember is this one girl ate so much ice cream that she yakked it all over the stairs. Her mum had to clean it up in the middle of the night. We were all miserable in the morning. Especially her mum.”

“Okay, so ice cream is off the ideas list.” Yelena’s smile was infectious. She chuckled as she grabbed a different shade of eyeliner and started to do her other eye. “We could watch a movie or something. Or you could go. You do not have to stay in here with me.”

“No, no, I… I like the company. It’s nice to have a friend.”

There were nights she preferred to be alone. Nights she lacked the capacity for social interaction and just wanted to curl up in the dark by herself. But there were also nights she craved the human companionship she’d spent so many years without. Nights when she wanted to spend time with Yelena doing anything or nothing.

“I think so too.”

He felt like he was vibrating.

There was really no better way to explain it. Bob wanted to sleep—he needed to sleep—but he had so much energy for no good reason that every time he tried to lie down, he actually started to twitch. He tried to sit with the discomfort, tried to suppress it and deal with the pain because he’d slept four hours in the past five days and he knew it wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t. His thoughts kept racing and his hands kept shaking and he just couldn’t take it anymore.

So, he gave up on sleeping. He didn’t want to be too loud in his room and draw attention again, so he went down to the training room. The first thing Bob tried to do was the yoga Ava taught him, but he made it through all of three poses before he got irritated at the slowness of it. He gave up, jumped to his feet, and just paced. He paced around the room for an embarrassingly long time, his arms swinging at his sides because he just needed to move.

It was after fifteen minutes of nonstop pacing when he punched the bag for the first time. Bob hadn’t meant to hit it more than once. He hadn’t even meant to hit it once. He was just frustrated. He was mad at himself because he couldn’t fall asleep, because he couldn’t stop fidgeting, because they’d spent three hours earlier working on functions and he lied the entire time as he copied Ava and Yelena’s work. Bob punched the bag and his knuckles scraped on its surface and it felt so fucking good that he just had to do it again.

“You were a fucking mistake, Bobby.”

His breathing quickened as he pounded on the bag, as he tried to punch it hard enough for the sounds of the impact and the swinging chain to drown out his father’s shouting. The difficulty wasn’t that Bob wasn’t strong enough, it was that he was too strong—he had to find that perfect balance so he could beat the shit out of the bag without breaking it. He wasn’t as kind to his knuckles, ignored it when they split and splattered blood across the bag.

“Nobody gives a shit about you, Bobby.”

That was why he kept lying, because he knew that Ava and Yelena didn’t care about him. He knew they didn’t give a shit if he was struggling. It was easier to just lie and let them have a fun, easy study session than to burden them with his shortcomings. A non-insignificant part of Bob was even terrified that if he couldn’t do something so easy, the Thunderbolts would realize that he was incompetent and unworthy and try to take his powers away from him; to get him away from them.

“You should have died in that car accident, Bobby.”

He should have died in the car accident when he was twelve. He should have died with everyone else who signed up for the Sentry project. He should have died any of the umpteen times he tried to kill himself and ended up in the hospital instead. Bob almost laughed as bitter tears stung the corners of his eyes. It wasn’t that he was sad or depressed, he was just fucking angry. Angry that he was so bad at everything he couldn’t even successfully die.

“Listen to me, Bob.”

A bead of sweat dripped down the side of his head as he punched the bag harder, harder, until he heard a crack from somewhere above. Fuck, he’d damaged it. That should have discouraged him from continuing but it didn’t. Bob froze for only a brief second before he punched it again. He’d already broken it so what did it matter? He sniffed, blinked away the blurriness in his eyes and struck the bag until he was stopped.

“Bob.”

The funny thing about Bob’s fight or flight instinct was that, more often than not, he would freeze. When faced by a threat, he would just stand there, try to hide or make himself seem smaller. But he swore it was only because of his childhood, because of the shitty lifestyle he led, because of all the trauma he’d developed as a result of both. He swore that deep down, somewhere within him, was a smothered instinct to fight. So, when the hand grabbed his forearm, he did exactly that.

He twisted his torso, threw his right hook at his father instead of the bag. Bob was blinded by fear, by anger, as he yanked his dad’s hand off his arm and shoved him away. His dad stumbled backward several feet before he stood back upright, his hands outstretched. How pathetic. He was actually surrendering. All it took was one hit from Bob to make him quit? His dad said something, but Bob’s ears were ringing, and his chest was pounding, and he couldn’t decipher a thing.

When his dad dared to take another step forward, Bob immediately went on the offensive. He didn’t wait for the inevitable strike to come; he moved in first and grabbed his dad’s hand when it was only halfway lifted. Then his dad decided to retract his surrender and suddenly grabbed at him, sent Bob stumbling back a few feet out of instinct. Bob quickly righted himself, prepared his stance for further defense, and froze like the eight-year-old boy inside of him when his dad’s arms wrapped around him and he started to choke.

“You think you’re a fucking hero, Bobby? You can’t even save yourself.”

Bob struggled for breath as his dad squeezed his ribs, his lungs burning as they tried to expand against the tight grasp. He curled his hands into fists and pounded on his dad’s back as his hyperventilating devolved into frantic sobbing. Why was his dad so fucking strong? Why was Bob so fucking weak? He hit his dad over and over again as he tried to break free, as his tears burned lines into his cheeks. Then, just as he prepared to accept death, his captor shifted his left arm from Bob’s stomach to his shoulders, brushed against his bare bicep, and Bob realized that he wasn’t being strangled; he was being hugged.

“Fuck.”

Because his father did not have a metal arm.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

But Bucky did.

“Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Reality hit him like a freight train. Bob did not fight with his father who wanted to hurt him; he fought with Bucky who wanted to help him. His knuckles were scraped raw, his blood soaked into Bucky’s shirt everywhere he’d touched. He was choking but only on his own sobs, on his own labored breaths, as he struggled to come to terms with what happened. As he struggled to differentiate reality from the screaming and stomping footsteps that he could still fucking hear.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.” Bob pulled his hands into himself and shielded his own eyes as instinct and desperation overpowered shame. He mumbled to himself despite Bucky’s arms around him, the self-soothing rambles doing nothing to calm him down. “It’s fine. It’s fine. He’s not here. He’s not here. He’s not here.”

But it felt like he was there. It felt like his father was looming over him with a belt, like he was on his knees because he was waiting to take it. He could still hear his father shouting behind him, calling him shit and weak and pathetic. Every inhale burned like his father’s hands were around his throat, strangling him until the edge of death but never permitting him that final relief.

“Bob, can you hear me?” Yes, but it was like Bucky was speaking to him underwater. Everything was muffled and for some reason, he couldn’t find the strength to respond. “Take a deep breath. Breathe with me.”

He tried, he really did, but it came out as another sob instead. Bob pushed his hands harder against his eyes, curled his fingers around his hair as his legs shifted uncomfortably beneath him. Bucky did not let go of him for a second, even as he devolved into a wet, weeping mess, even as the lights flickered above them and miscellaneous training materials tumbled off the shelves. Maybe he was just trying to stop Bob’s powers before they got too out of control. Maybe he was just scared of what might happen if he let go.

Every thought sent him spiraling deeper until he was wheezing more than breathing, until his entire face was covered in tears, snot, and his own spit. Bucky tried again and again to talk him down, to get him to breathe or go through the five senses or even respond to anything he said but none of it worked. The voices in Bob’s head were too loud. The voice of his father, the Void, whatever fucked-up part of him it was that kept telling him over and over that everybody hated him.

“Okay, Bob, I need you to try to listen to me.” Bob was trying. What did Bucky think he was doing? It wasn’t like he enjoyed being unable to think or breathe. “I’m about to say something that you’re going to hear as a threat but it’s not a threat, all right?”

But Bob tensed because whenever his dad told him something wasn’t a threat, that meant it was a promise.

“I want to make you an offer because I care about you and I am worried about you.” God, he hated the tone that Bucky used. It was fake, forced, something he’d learned from therapy rather than his natural inflection. “It’s been close to twenty minutes since I came in here and you’re not responding and you’re not calming down. I want to help you, but I don’t know how. I thought you were having a flashback, and I could talk you through that, but now I think it’s something else and I don’t know what that is and I don’t know how to help you.”

Because he was fucking crazy and he should have died with everyone else. Because out of all the people who volunteered for Valentina’s insane project, Bob shouldn’t have been the one to survive. Anyone else would have been better. Anyone else would have been able to control themselves and their powers.

“There’s a crisis center just about a block away from here. They have twenty-four seven emergency psychiatric care.”

And then all he could think about was all the times he’d been restrained and sedated and the sound that came out of his mouth was something like a strangled whine. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“I know,” said Bucky, his grip tightening as Bob bawled. He couldn’t tell if Bucky’s movements were stiff because he was emotionally constipated or because he was just fucking done with Bob. “I know that sounds scary and you’ve had bad experiences with that kind of thing before but it’s a good place, okay? I’ve volunteered there before. They’re good people and they can help you and I will be with you the entire time.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“I understand that you’re stronger than me and that I can’t force you to go but I really don’t know what else to do for you, Bob. I don’t know. So, if you’ll let me, I would like to walk you there and help you find someone who does know what to do.”

“No, no, no. I can control it.” Even though his lungs were still burning, still demanding his focus, Bob put his energy into subduing his powers. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter until the lights stopped flickering, until things stopped crashing and all he could hear were his own strained breaths and his father shouting that he was nothing. “I can control it. I can control it.”

“I’m not worried about your powers,” Bucky told him, and Bob was genuinely confused. If it wasn’t about his powers, then why did Bucky care? “I’m worried about your mental health.”

“You’re fucking insane just like your mother.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob blurted, his hands trembling as he released his hair and shoved away some of the tears stinging his skin. “I don’t know why I’m like this. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t—”

“Bob, I’m not mad, I’m wo—”

“I know you’re not mad, he’s fucking mad!”

He ripped out of Bucky’s grasp as he gestured behind him. The bag slammed into the wall, crashed to the floor as Bob’s heart tried to leap out of his chest. His fingers burned as he curled in on himself, as he willed his powers to stop. Bob wouldn’t look up from the floor, wouldn’t meet Bucky’s gaze, but he could see his face out of the corner of his eye. He could see how Bucky stared at him, how he twisted his expression in disgust as he asked,

“Who?”

But Bob couldn’t explain without making himself seem even fucking crazier, so he just sobbed and said, “Nobody. He’s not real. He’s not here.”

“Okay.” It was weird, the way that Bucky’s face seemed to soften like something finally clicked. “But you see someone?”

“I know he’s not real. I know I’m— I know you think I’m crazy.”

“I think you seem really scared.”

“You’re scared of me.”

“I’m not scared of you.” But he kept staring at Bob like he was fucking disturbing. Like there was something horribly, sickeningly wrong with him. When Bucky finally explained, it wasn’t what he expected. “I’m looking at you however I’m looking at you because about a minute ago, you started peeling the split skin on your knuckles and that has pushed me to the point where if I could drag you to get help, I would. I would because this is not okay. You’re not okay.”

And then it was Bob who was genuinely disturbed by the sheer amount of blood coating the back of his hands, caked on his fingertips and beneath his nails. He hadn’t even realized he was doing it. He hadn’t even felt any pain. Bob struggled to find the breath to say, “Why can I hurt myself?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m supposed to be indestructible. Why can I hurt myself?”

“Bob—”

“Why can I hurt myself?”

“Please let me get you help, Bob.”

There was a part of him that wanted to just say yes. To let Bucky take him because he was so desperate for it all to stop. But he had so many years of traumatizing visits to the hospital, to the psychiatric ward, to rehab, he couldn’t imagine how the experience could be anything remotely positive. Bob took the deepest breath he could, but it did absolutely nothing to calm him down. He was trapped within himself and his panic.

“They’ll want to give me drugs,” he said. “I don’t want drugs. I don’t want to take drugs again.”

“If we tell them not to give you anything, they won’t give you anything,” Bucky explained slowly. “It’s not like an involuntary commitment. They only do what you consent to.”

His desperation took over from his trauma. “They’ll make it stop?”

“They can help you. That’s what they’re there for.” Bob wet his lips and wiped his hands over his face again. Bucky gave him a second to process before he asked, “Can I take you?”

Bob squeezed his eyes shut as he nodded. He was at the point where he was in too much pain to keep arguing. All he wanted was for it to stop, for his mind to stop, and if there was even the slightest possibility that Bucky could help him, he was willing to try.

So, despite his intense anxiety, Bob let Bucky walk him to the crisis center. He let a stranger take him into a dimly lit room and talk to him gently until he calmed down; until his hands stopped shaking and his head stopped burning. He let them give him water and a snack because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten or drank anything. He let them tell him that he was psychotic, that he’d had a severe panic attack. He let them recommend he pursue a diagnosis and further treatment and accepted the referral they gave him.

He clung to that referral the entire way home, crinkled it until his knuckles turned white. He made Bucky promise more than twice that he would not tell anyone what happened; swore him to secrecy because he couldn’t deal with the thought of anyone else knowing.

Then, when Bucky finally left him alone outside his bedroom, Bob went inside, closed the door, and threw the referral paper into the trash.

“I think we have evaluated our last function.”

Yelena smiled as she set her pencil on top of her notebook. Ava nodded and finished writing the last few numbers on her own page. Bob stared out the window, the back half of his own pencil jammed in his mouth. Yelena could have sworn she saw him eat more wood and rubber than food recently.

“Yep,” Ava agreed. She slid her notebook away from her knees as she stretched her arm. “Should we start thinking about the first exam, then?”

“Yeah, we can talk about that,” said Yelena. “Bob?”

His response was just delayed enough to be off-putting. “Hm?”

“Where is all the stuff about the test? Me and Ava were looking for it the other day.”

“Oh.”

It was jarring, the way Bob flipped so quickly. He’d barely said a word for the last two hours they’d spent studying but the second she asked him a question, he wouldn’t stop. Bob stuck his chewed-up pencil behind his ear as he explained every detail about the math test. He told them how long they would have, where it would be, when it could be scheduled, even reminded them what the sections were as if they hadn’t spent weeks studying.

After he’d explained everything, they discussed which days might be best to do it and what times. They decided midmorning would get it over with ASAP without rushing them when they woke up. They needed time to eat and take showers, Ava said, and then Bob bit down on his pencil so hard it cracked. He made a face as he pulled out the broken half and set it on the floor.

“Is something wrong?” asked Yelena, her brow knit in concern.

Bob shook his head quickly. “No, nothing. I’m just— I’m really ready to be finished with math. I just want to get this over with.”

“Okay.” Yelena started to turn back to Ava but stopped when something caught her eye. There were no numbers on Bob’s worksheet, just scribbles and swirls. He hadn’t been studying with them at all. “You know, we don’t have to rush it if you are not ready. We can study more.”

“Why?”

She glanced at Ava. “You didn’t do the problems, Bob. You were pretending. What’s wrong?”

His silence was deafening. After a few weeks of it, Yelena had gotten oddly used to Bob’s rambling. The fact that it took him so long to answer was somehow more concerning than his initial swap to talking too much in the first place. Bob wet his lips, adjusted his jaw in that way he did when he was uncomfortable.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said, and his laughter was back but still in the wrong context. He gestured with his hands at the papers between them, only the tips of his fingers visible beyond his navy sleeves. “I don’t know what the fuck any of this even means. Every time you ask if I’m getting it, I just fucking lie.”

“All of it or just the graphs and functions?” asked Ava.

“Just this section. Not even all of it, just… enough.”

“Why didn’t you say something? We would have helped you, Bob. That is the whole point of studying together.”

Bob only shrugged as he stared down at his hands. Suddenly, Yelena questioned everything he’d said and done. The other night, he opted out of their study session. The next morning, his eyes were bloodshot, and his face was speckled with petechiae. When she asked, Bob told her that he had vertigo from his migraine and got sick. But there was another time he got those red dots on his face: when he cried so hard he couldn’t breathe. When he had a panic attack and burst his capillaries trying to calm himself down.

“Are you okay?” asked Yelena. She set one hand on Bob’s crossed knee, tried to catch his gaze when he smiled and nodded.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Do you want to study now?” Ava offered. She reached for the nearest study guide and opened it to the section on graphs and functions. “I don’t have anything else planned tonight if you’d like to work on some of this together.”

“I can too.” Yelena quickly grabbed her notebook not only because she wanted to help but because she didn’t trust everything Bob said. “When did you start to fall behind? Let’s practice.”

Bob was quiet for a moment before he pulled a new pencil out of the box and flipped his study guide back several pages. He still wasn’t confident by the end of the night, but they made progress, and they got him to laugh in a positive context, and that was what mattered the most.

Chapter Text

Ava woke up early the morning of their first test.

It was funny, the way she could never get a good night of sleep if she didn’t have something waiting for her when she got up. If she had no obligations, no responsibilities, Ava would either sleep half the morning or wake up half the night. But when she had something important to wake up for, she crashed. She crashed hard.

Because of her excellent night of sleep, Ava actually felt good for once. She took her time getting ready, even did a quick review of the math study guide just to make sure everything was fresh. She pulled her hair into a low ponytail and draped it over her shoulder as she stepped out her bedroom door.

“Hey.” Bucky exited the elevator when it opened, a relaxed smile on his face. Ava returned the expression with ease. “You’re taking that first test today, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, we’re leaving in about half an hour.” Plenty of time to still eat something and calm her nerves before they left. “Do you know if Bob and Yelena are up yet?”

“I just talked to Yelena, she’s in the common area with Walker. Bob, I’m pretty sure, has been avoiding me since I got back on Friday so can’t say I’ve seen him.”

That didn’t sound like Bob. He was far from extroverted, but he certainly never avoided anyone. At least not any of them. “Did you have a fight or something?”

“No.” The look on Bucky’s face was hard to read as he shook his head. “Not exactly. I have to go jump on a call but good luck with the test, all right? You guys will do great.”

Ava hesitated just long enough for the elevator to almost close before she stepped inside. If Bob were to avoid any of them, she would have guessed John (for his crimes of being an asshole with a broken filter) or Alexei (for lamenting the lack of Sentry one too many times). Bucky, to her knowledge, had never done anything wrong to Bob.

Her curiosity lasted as long as the elevator ride before she wrote it off as humans being hard to understand. It was hard enough for her to figure out how average people’s brains worked, and Bob’s was immeasurably more disorganized, so she didn’t even bother. If whatever happened was important, she would hear about it later.

She stepped up the short stairs into the common area. John was on the couch, legs kicked up on the table as he scrolled on his phone. Yelena was curled up in a chair, a bowl of dry cereal in her lap and a mug of hot coffee in her hand. She smiled when she saw Ava. Apparently, everyone was having a good morning. Ava walked up to their little coffee station and started to prepare her own breakfast.

“You feel ready for today?” asked Yelena. She sounded almost giddy. It may have been the first time in history someone was so excited for an exam. Not that Ava could blame her after all the hard work they’d done.

“I’m ready to move on from math,” Ava joked, though it had been more fun than she expected—mostly thanks to Yelena. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we’re doing this, but it has been a long few weeks. Especially with missions in between. That one when we were gone for a few days drained me of half our studies. You’re lucky you had other work to do here. What were you doing anyway?”

Like Bucky, Yelena made a face that Ava couldn’t quite figure out. She took a sip of her coffee before she answered, “Just keeping an eye on something important.”

“Oh.” It was cryptic enough that Ava didn’t know how to respond. She slid her mug into the coffee maker and turned it on. “Is it safe now?”

“I think so. I’ve still been checking in almost daily, just in case.”

Ava couldn’t decide whether it was socially acceptable to ask Yelena what exactly she was keeping an eye on, so she decided not to say anything just to be safe. When not a result of her sense of humor, the arguments Ava caused were almost exclusively driven by her habit of misreading social cues. Learning about people after growing up in isolation was surprisingly hard.

Part of the reason Ava agreed to get her GED in the first place was because she spent her life knowing things “in theory.” In theory, she knew about math, science, reading, and history. In theory, she knew about her friends, what they did, and how they thought. But before they started studying, she would have gotten stuck on half or more of that algebra. And even though she’d known the Thunderbolts for months, she still couldn’t make sense of them sometimes.

“Do you know if Bob is up?” Ava shook her head when Yelena glanced at her. Out of everyone, Bob was the person she understood the least. The only thing consistent about him was his inconsistency. “I will go check. I don’t want him to be rushed; it will just stress him more.”

“Good idea,” said Ava.

She kept her eyes on the coffee maker and by the time her drink and oatmeal were ready, Yelena was gone. There was a time when Ava would have been uncomfortable alone in a room with John but the animosity they once held for each other was long gone. Ava had actually grown to like his company and especially the way he would just sit and keep her company without pushing for conversation.

Of course, Ava would never tell that to John. Instead, when she was about halfway through her breakfast, she looked at him and asked, “You’re not doomscrolling again, are you?”

Because something else she would never say was how much it bothered her when she caught John perusing his own hate tag on social media. How badly it irritated her when he changed the screen, lied, shouted, and walked away. Ava was still learning how to approach him about it, how to take care of a friend with such a problem, and she knew John would prefer that she just didn’t.

“No,” John answered, but his short tone and the way he tucked his phone under his armpit said he was a liar. Ava opened her mouth to argue but he cut her off, changed the subject before she could speak. “You know, it’s pretty cool you guys are doing this. Getting your GEDs and shit. I don’t know if I’d have the motivation to get through school if I had to do it today.”

“Thanks.” Ava gave a small smile, held back her comment about his lack of motivation having to do with the depression he kept feeding with his phone. “You finished school, right?”

“Yeah. High school and then USMA.”

“What did you study there?”

“I got my Bachelor’s in kinesiology.” The way he said it sounded almost dismissive and, for a second, Ava wasn’t sure whether to be offended by how easy he thought it was or upset that he didn’t care for his own accomplishment. When he finished his thought, she realized what she assumed from his tone was completely wrong. “I thought once I got out of the Army I might go into sports medicine. Help younger athletes, you know? But life didn’t turn out that way.”

“Maybe you could still do something with that,” said Ava, disconcerted by the level of compassion in her own tone. She wasn’t used to holding serious conversations with John. He shook his head, his smile unconvincing. “What was it that drew you to kinesiology? Just because you were an athlete?”

“No, it was more because I was an athlete who got injured and didn’t take care of myself properly. I pushed myself too hard when I was in recovery and gave myself chronic pain. I wanted to stop other kids from making the same mistake. Or help them if they got the pain anyway because sometimes you do everything right and shit still happens.”

As someone who struggled with chronic pain on the daily, the thought of someone wanting to help genuinely touched her. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah, I guess.” John took a thoughtful breath. “I also took this one elective class. It was… foundations of behavioral neuroscience, I think?”

“Sounds difficult.”

“It was. It was but it was also really interesting because we learned a lot about how our brains handle injury, trauma, addiction… it stuck with me because I always blamed myself, you know? For not taking care of my shoulder properly. But that class made me realize there’s a biological component to… I don’t know. It made me think about things differently.”

“How so?” asked Ava, more interested than she’d expected to be when she first questioned his education.

“I guess, for me, it was just this realization that I wasn’t stupid because I didn’t tend to my injury properly, it was just how my brain worked. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s this weird thing about how your brain tries to protect itself and ends up hurting you more. Anyway, that class gave me all these ideas and I had this mind-first based recovery approach I was conceptualizing but that was almost twenty years ago now.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing you can do with that knowledge?” Ava asked because the way John spoke was truly passionate. It bothered her, somehow, that she was pursuing an education while John had seemingly made peace with effectively leaving his behind. “You could volunteer or… you could leave this lifestyle, if that’s what you really wanted.”

“No, no.” John shook his head, his stare distant. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

“Is this why you’re always the first to help us with our injuries?” It seemed strange to her that he’d never mentioned it before. “You’re always so vague when you talk about recovery, I guess I just assumed it was military knowledge.”

“Yeah, well, on this team I am stupid, right? I’m the dumb blond jock. I figured if I got too technical about it, nobody would believe I knew what I was talking about.” John shrugged as he stood up and walked around the table. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of. Good luck with your test.”

“Thanks, Walker.”

Ava didn’t know what to think or feel after that conversation; didn’t speak another word until Yelena came back ten minutes later, Bob in tow. Yelena clung to Bob’s wrist, basically dragging him behind her. He didn’t look particularly ready to leave—his hair still frizzy and his t-shirt wrinkled—but Ava chose not to say anything. There wasn’t enough time for him to do anything about it without them being late anyway.

The nerves didn’t really kick in until they left the Watchtower. The closer they got to the testing center, the harder her heart raced. It didn’t calm down until she was actually seated in the chair, a pencil in her hand and a sheet of paper in front of her beneath the computer monitor. Once she got started, got focused, she realized she knew everything she needed to.

Ava was the first one to finish taking the test. She waited until the others finished and joined her in the lobby, then waited the few days it took to get her results back. Her score wasn’t perfect, not technically, but to her the sheer accomplishment of passing felt like perfection enough.

Yelena got maybe five hours of sleep before she woke up and couldn’t drift off again.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a proper test—if she’d ever taken a proper test—and her anxiety was ridiculously high. It felt silly, given she went on life-threatening missions on the regular, but for some reason the math test just felt so much more daunting. It wasn’t something she was used to, wasn’t something she was particularly confident in at all.

After an hour of lying awake, tossing and turning, Yelena rolled out of bed and headed to the common area. No one else was awake yet so she decided to try to study while it was quiet. Just a little refresher to make sure that she felt good about everything. It had been a few weeks since they properly worked on some of the concepts, after all.

At some point, Yelena must have drifted off because she was alone halfway through the study guide and then when she opened her eyes, John was there. He didn’t say anything, didn’t bother her, just sat on the couch a few feet away, scrolling through his phone. Yelena mumbled a quick “hey” that John returned but otherwise, they did not talk at all while she got up from the chair and made herself coffee and a bowl of cereal.

She ate in silence until Ava came into the room, and then she saw the time and suddenly worried that Bob would be late. Yelena quickly checked with Ava, but she didn’t know if he was up either, so Yelena made her way to his room. She knocked on the door a few times with no answer and assumed that he was still asleep. Until he finally opened the door and she knew he hadn’t slept.

Bob’s eyes were wide, bloodshot, and dilated as they flickered between her face and the wall, unable to hold steady. His hair was visibly unwashed and unbrushed, laying in tangles around his ears. He was wearing navy sweatpants but no shirt, only his cozy bathrobe. He chewed on his left thumbnail, drawing attention to faded scars on the backs of his knuckles that Yelena hadn’t noticed before.

It bothered her that her mind almost instantly flew back to weeks earlier, when they’d just started the whole GED thing. Ava had told her that she thought Bob was high, that he said he wasn’t, and she believed her. Yelena wanted to believe him too but there was something about his gaze and his posture that was just off. She didn’t know what it looked like when Bob was high, but she knew what it looked like when he was okay, and he was definitely not.

“You okay?” she asked anyway, and she immediately clocked Bob’s single nod as irritable. She reached forward to give his arm a squeeze, but he shifted out of the way. “You should get ready. We have to leave in twenty minutes.”

“I’m ready,” Bob said quickly, his voice hoarse. “Just gotta put a shirt on.”

“Okay.” Yelena looked him up and down, her brow furrowed. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look… anxious.”

“No, I don’t get anxious.”

That assertion did not line up with what he’d said about himself in the past. “You’re diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, Bob.”

“That diagnosis is from when I was nineteen,” Bob snapped, as if time and a complete lack of treatment somehow made his condition improve. He crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. “They involuntarily committed me and involuntarily detoxed me. They probably just misread my withdrawal symptoms or something. Meth made me paranoid as shit.”

It was hard to know what to say to Bob sometimes. Yelena wanted to ask more questions, to understand what was going on with him, but she knew that anything else she asked would just irritate him more. She had to remind herself sometimes that Bob’s mental health wasn’t her responsibility, that she could only do so much for him. She could push him in the right direction, but she couldn’t force him to take care of himself. Even if she really, really wanted to.

“Did you sleep at all last night?”

“Yeah,” Bob mumbled, and Yelena was almost surprised to get an answer at all.

She tried her luck with a follow-up. “For how long?”

“I don’t know. An hour?”

The fact that he slept at all, that he was honest about it, encouraged her to move past that topic and on to the next one. Yelena looked at his hair, his open bathrobe, and nodded toward his en suite. “You should take a shower before we go. It will make you feel better.”

For just a second, it looked like Bob was going to refuse. Then he nodded. He turned and walked over to his dresser, grabbed a fresh outfit, and disappeared into the en suite. Yelena sat on the edge of his bed to wait for him, just to make sure that he didn’t lose track of time since they didn’t have long. She pulled out her phone and tried to scroll her social media, but it wasn’t more distracting than the state of Bob’s room.

It wasn’t that it was messy but that it was just wrong. Like he’d taken everything off the shelves and forgotten how to put it back. Everything was impeccably clean except for where it wasn’t. For example, it looked like he’d meticulously dusted and polished his shelf of knick-knacks as recently as that morning but there was furniture spilling out of his hamper all over the floor. Yelena’s eye caught on his study guide on his bedside table and picked it up.

She used Bob’s printed book to refresh her mind just a little bit more while she waited. Yelena flipped through three or four sections before she glanced at her phone and noted that it had been ten minutes. She stood up and knocked on the bathroom door, did not miss the clatter of something falling. The shower water stopped but Bob did not speak first, his quiet footsteps behind the door the only indication that he was making progress.

“We have to go in ten minutes, Bob,” said Yelena, trying her damnedest not to sound too pushy. He was clearly struggling with something, she just didn’t have the faintest idea what. “Will you be ready?”

“I— yeah.” Bob’s voice sounded different, irritation replaced by something else, something softer. “Shit. Just a minute.”

Yelena knew that shit. That shit was the shit he used when something was wrong, and he didn’t want anyone to know. The shit that slipped out of his mouth when he was trying to cover up something that happened to him or that he’d done to himself. Even though she knew it might just make things worse, Yelena leaned against the doorway, made sure that her tone was as gentle and non-judgmental as she could make it.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bob answered, the same way he always did when he was definitely not fine. Yelena didn’t understand why it was so hard for him to just tell the truth. Did he still not trust her? “I just have a headache.”

“Still?”

“It’s the fucking migraine. It goes away for like a day or two if I’m lucky and then it just fucking comes back.”

Bob’s migraines concerned her for reasons she’d outlined to him more times than she could count. At least twice, Yelena had suggested he see a doctor about them but both times he deflected by pointing out that it would probably just cause them trouble. After all, it would be hard for any average doctor to investigate his migraines without finding a hundred things about Sentry first, and they weren’t exactly close with any superhero-adjacent medical professionals.

(Sentry was one of the reasons that Yelena worried about Bob’s migraines, actually. With everything else that the Sentry serum did for his body, it confused the hell out of her why he would still get such strong migraines. There were so many other things he said he used to experience that disappeared after Sentry, but the migraines stayed. Why?)

When he finally stepped out of the bathroom, Bob looked only marginally better. His hair was washed but still unbrushed, his clothes more appropriate for outdoors but thrown on carelessly. He grabbed a jacket off his dresser and tugged it on, ignoring the fact that it did not match his t-shirt at all. Yelena asked if Bob was ready to go and his smile was tense when he nodded.

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him along with her downstairs. The light contact seemed to calm him at least a little bit, his tremors stabilizing when she held him tight. Bob did not speak a word as they went into the common area and met Ava, as Yelena shoved a quick breakfast into Bob’s hands. Aside from the migraine, it was because of anxiety, Yelena was pretty sure—because he finally opened up once Ava admitted that she was anxious too. Once Yelena responded that she also felt it, that she’d struggled to sleep all night.

“What does it feel like when you can’t sleep because you’re anxious?”

Yelena considered Bob’s question before she answered, not quite sure how to translate the feeling into words. “It’s mostly just overthinking. A lot of tossing and turning. My heart pounds a little bit if I start to think of the worst-case scenarios. What does it feel like to you?”

“It feels like I’m vibrating,” said Bob. He shoved his hands in his pockets as they waited for the crosswalk, stared at the concrete beneath their feet instead of at either Ava or Yelena. “I can’t stop moving my eyes and it makes me dizzy. But it doesn’t feel like I’m anxious. Is that weird?”

“Anxiety feels different for different people,” Ava told him. That was true but Yelena couldn’t help but wonder if it felt different for Bob because what kept him up wasn’t anxiety; if it was something even he couldn’t fully understand and that was why he asked. “For me, I completely crash. Like, I’m very anxious but I just sleep right through it.”

Bob nodded but didn’t say anything else before they reached the testing center. The conversation occupied Yelena’s mind while they sat in the waiting room. It took five minutes of staring at the test for her brain to switch modes after she settled in.

The test felt like it lasted forever and like it went by in a second. When she finished, Yelena found Ava already settled in the waiting room. It was a further ten minutes before Bob came out, the look on his face unreadable. They didn’t talk about how they thought they did until the results came in, and Yelena was finally able to relax and celebrate with the knowledge that all her hard work had paid off.

Bob couldn’t admit that he was intrinsically psychotic for fifteen years.

When it first started, it was easy for him to blame it on the drugs. He told himself over and over that he wasn’t psychotic, he wasn’t fucking crazy like people told him, he was just on drugs. It was all because of the drugs. He was involuntarily committed for a slew of reasons but whenever they tried to say it was because he was inherently psychotic, he lost it. He insisted that it was only because of the drugs, and because it could have been the drugs, it was clinically impossible for them to diagnose him.

For those fifteen years—give or take—Bob lived in a land where he was nothing like his parents. He was not violent like his father, the meth just made him aggressive. He was not psychotic like his mother, the meth just made him paranoid. After Sentry, he woke up and thought he was okay; he thought he was right, that his hallucinations and delusions were all just side effects of him doing a stupid amount of meth.

And then they started again.

It was the auditory hallucinations first. The patter of his father’s footsteps approaching when he was alone, the beeping of the hospital machines when he laid in bed. Then he started to see the Void out of the corner of his eye, his dealer on the couch with a baggie when he had an urge. And the thing was, Bob was generally lucid enough to tell when he was hallucinating. He just couldn’t always tell what he was hallucinating.

The fact that he couldn’t discern Bucky from his dad while he was completely clean fucking terrified him. It terrified him that easiest explanation was no longer meth, it was that he’d inherited all his mother’s mental illness and then some. It was exactly why he always insisted it was the drugs, why he never stayed clean in the hospital for long enough to let them diagnose him properly, why he threw the referral in the trash—he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to be like his mother.

He couldn’t be like his mother.

Bob paced across his bedroom floor as he chewed on his thumbnail. He heard the knock the first three times but ever since the incident with Bucky, he trusted himself so little that his instinct was to believe the knock wasn’t real. The knock happened a fourth time, a fifth time as he told himself not to give in to the hallucination. If he just ignored it, then it would stop. Except it didn’t stop so he gave in and was relieved to find the very real Yelena waiting in the hallway.

“You okay?” asked Yelena almost immediately, to which Bob nodded once. He slid to the side when she tried to touch him. “You should get ready. We have to leave in twenty minutes.”

“I’m ready,” Bob told her, his throat raw from pacing and mumbling to himself all night—the same thing his mother used to do. The same thing that kept him up for hours thinking she’s crazy only to grow up and discover that he was crazy too. “Just gotta put a shirt on.”

“Okay.” Yelena’s gaze traveled up and down his body and he saw himself in her; staring at his mother, knowing she was delusional and not being able to call her on it out of fear. “Are you sure you’re okay? You look… anxious.”

“No, I don’t get anxious.”

“You’re diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, Bob.”

The diagnosis was ancient and a fluke and he told her as much. He was nineteen and involuntarily committed after trying to kill himself by slicing open his wrist. The doctors detoxed him long enough to diagnose him with not just one but two anxiety disorders: agoraphobia and panic disorder. Then his involuntary stay ended, and he checked himself out before they were able to get any further.

(And, okay, maybe they were on to something. Maybe. After he left home, Bob did develop an irrational fear of crowds and enclosed spaces and somehow also open spaces. But he was never too afraid to leave his house altogether so how could he be agoraphobic? And yes, he had been experiencing intense panic attacks since he was fifteen. But they happened way less with the Thunderbolts which meant they were probably mostly related to the drugs, right?)

Yelena asked him if he slept and against his better judgment, he was honest and told her only for an hour. Then she suggested he take a quick shower to make himself feel better and he complied because she wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t look fucking disgusting.

There was a non-insignificant part of Bob that wanted to tell Yelena what happened with Bucky; to explain that there was something fundamentally wrong with him and that was why he didn’t shower or change or even brush his hair. But if he told her, she would get distracted, and it could ruin the test for her. So, he kept his mouth shut as he’d done every day since it happened.

Bob’s intention, truly, was just to do as Yelena said and take a shower. But the lights in the bathroom were too bright, like a hammer to his persistent migraine, and it made him dizzy and mad. So, when he got in the shower, Bob grabbed his razor without thinking. He sat down, lowered the blade to his thigh, and stopped. Scars still lined his flesh, but he hadn’t added to them since Sentry. He hadn’t thought he could.

That was why it scared him so much when Bucky pointed out that he was hurting himself, that he was bleeding. Because until he scraped his knuckles on the bag, peeled away the broken skin, left his hands a bloody, aching mess, he thought he couldn’t. He thought he could never hurt himself again. He knew that if he could, he would, and there he was. That was what he wanted. A sharp pain just to distract him from the migraine. Just for a moment. Just to see if he could.

But when he pushed the blade into his thigh, nothing happened.

It was more confusing than upsetting, somehow. It wasn’t two weeks earlier that he’d basically skinned the back of his hands and suddenly he couldn’t put one cut in his leg? Out of desperation and curiosity, Bob scraped the razor along his arm, his belly, and the back of his left hand. His skin did not break once. Why couldn’t he hurt himself? He put the blade back on his thigh, pushed harder, longer, frustrated tears stinging at the corners of his eyes.

His skin was still undamaged when Yelena knocked on the door and he threw his razor in the air like he’d been caught. He turned off the shower even though he hadn’t even touched his soap. Yelena asked if he was almost ready and he mumbled out a “yeah” and a “shit” and of course it worried her more. She asked if he was all right and he chose to blame his tone on the migraine rather than confess his frustration that he couldn’t make himself bleed.

“Are you ready to go?” asked Yelena when he finally came out, probably because he still looked so shitty she couldn’t believe he was done. Because she was embarrassed to be seen with him. “If your migraine is too bad, we can—”

“No, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

The way she took hold of his wrist was strangely reassuring. It made him think that maybe he was being irrational, maybe she wasn’t judging him at all. Or maybe she was just annoyed that he was taking too long, and they needed to leave, so she decided dragging him along was the best course of action. Either way, he didn’t care. He just liked that she touched him because it meant she didn’t find him disgusting anymore.

When they met up with Ava in the common room, she asked if they were ready to go and said they would do great. But she looked at Yelena when she said it, not Bob; not even Yelena and Bob, just Yelena. So, obviously his brain decided to overthink the probably meaningless gesture and convince him that Ava believed he would fail. And, just for good measure, he convinced himself that Yelena believed he would fail too.

(Obviously, he wouldn’t fail. Yes, Bob had struggled at a few points, but it was just because of the migraines and the distracting hallucinations but he wasn’t hallucinating anymore so it wouldn’t be a problem. He was naturally perfect, and Sentry made him even more perfect, and somebody who was perfect squared would not struggle to pass a test equivalent to math that teenagers did every day.)

Bob accepted the granola bar and iced cappuccino that Yelena shoved into his hands; ate it more because it made him feel better to have something in his mouth than because he actually wanted to eat. He used it as an excuse not to join in Ava and Yelena’s conversation for the first half of their walk to the testing center; to not speak until Yelena mentioned she’d struggled to sleep because of anxiety. Bob asked her what it felt like, to try to understand if maybe he was just anxious too, but her experience didn’t really sound like his.

He was about halfway through the test when he started to hear his mother’s voice. He tried to focus on the computer screen, tried to pay attention to the equations, but all he could hear was her. Telling him that he was stupid, a disappointment; that he was wasting his time because he would never graduate anyway. And she was right. He didn’t graduate. Instead, Bob started doing drugs and having panic attacks and losing touch with reality just like her.

They weren’t allowed to talk during the test but when Bob tore his fourth sheet of scrap paper, he could hear the words in Yelena’s eyes as she glanced at him.

Are you okay?

Bob tried but he couldn’t smile. He blinked, rubbed his hands over his nose, and wet his lips twice before he gave her a shrug that said,

I don’t know anymore.

Ava was the first one to finish the test. She smiled at them when she left the room, and Bob stared at all the questions he had left. He noticed when Yelena finished hers, how she lingered on the final screen like she didn’t want to leave Bob in the room alone. He couldn’t focus again until she did; until she stopped looking at him like he was broken. Once he was by himself, Bob was able to push himself through the last of the questions, his hand shaking with every number he wrote.

The second he stepped back into the waiting area, Yelena asked the question she couldn’t. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Bob, finally able to turn his lips once he could no longer hear his mom shouting. “Slow and steady wins the race, right?”

Somehow, Bob convinced himself that he still managed to do perfect. He felt so sure of himself, of his abilities, that when they got the results a couple days later, it actually kind of broke him. Because he passed but not by far. He did worse than Yelena, worse than Ava, worse than he reasonably should have after all the work he’d put in. He forced a smile anyway when Ava and Yelena cheered about their own results.

And when they asked how Bob did, he told them he got a perfect score and deleted the evidence that proved otherwise.

Chapter Text

Once he got over his near failure on the math test, Bob’s motivation came back with a vengeance.

Within forty-eight hours, he was back to where he’d started the whole GED journey—pulling all-nighters as he prepared the next set of study materials. Bob was even more excited for language arts than he had been for mathematical reasoning, not least because he knew he would be good at it. Objectively. He was able to reflect just enough to realize that he had a bit of a god complex going into the math test, but reading was his thing.

Growing up, Bob learned that the best thing to do was make himself quiet. So, he didn’t watch cartoons or play video games or do any kind of pretend play that could risk making the floorboards creak. He read. Books were the one thing that no one could ever take away from him. His father could destroy his toys in a rage, his mother could fall into the television on a bender, but his books were his because they weren’t. Because he got them from the school and any damage to them would cost his parents money, which meant they were the one thing left untouched.

So, he read. He read an unholy amount. When he first started reading, Bob was admittedly slow. Slower than the other kids, even, which frustrated him because his teachers always said he was smart (until his last year of middle school but in his defense, he was high the whole time). He excelled at verbal communication, but he was naturally bad at reading, at writing things down. Bob had bad handwriting, bad spelling, and sometimes he had to read things three or four or five times before he could comprehend what it said.

But Bob read those three or four or five times. Bob read until he found the shortcuts that helped reading make more sense, until he learned how to spell complicated words through sheer willpower. He read until he couldn’t stop, until falling into a book became the only way to feel safe in his own home.

(His parents were also a motivator for his endurance, but not in the way most kids’ parents were. Bob’s parents once had a meeting with his teacher about how he was behind in reading and writing. He was only six or seven and he couldn’t remember what was said during it; just that when they left, his parents were so angry that his dad beat him until his rib cracked and they made him lie about what put him in the emergency room.)

Bob didn’t know how much Ava and Yelena liked reading, didn’t know if they would enjoy the section the way he did, but he hoped that they would. He hoped it would bring them back together after he’d been such a dick about the math for no good reason. He printed out a stupid number of worksheets, stapled together each of their study guides, smiled down at the work he’d put in, and jumped when someone knocked on his door.

Admittedly, it did cross his mind that he was still hallucinating. After all, he’d been thinking of his father and loud, pounding sounds were his father’s trademark. But he could hear voices behind it that he was certain were real—Yelena and Bucky, their tones pinched.

“Hey.” They quieted the second Bob opened the door, his brow furrowed. “Something wrong? Is there a mission?”

“No, no, everything’s fine.” Bucky’s smile was fake. It didn’t take an expert to know that. “No mission. We were just wondering if we could talk to you for a second.”

They knew that Bob lied about his math score. He couldn’t think of why else they would go to talk to him together. They must have found out that he lied and decided that was the last straw. If Bob couldn’t be trusted to be honest about what was essentially an entirely inconsequential test, he couldn’t be trusted with anything. His chest tightened and he swallowed hard as he nodded and gestured for them to enter his room.

Yelena closed the door before she asked, “Are you okay, Bob?”

And then Bob’s spiral changed course. They weren’t getting rid of him because he lied on the math test, they were getting rid of him because Bucky told her about his panic attack. He must have told her how Bob was violent just like his father, how he’d physically assaulted Bucky out of nowhere. He must have told her how Bob was just like his mother, so mentally unstable that the nurses at the crisis center said he most likely needed long-term therapy and care.

“You said you wouldn’t tell her,” Bob snapped, his tone half angry and half panicked. “You promised that you wouldn’t tell her. I told you I couldn’t deal with it if you told her.”

“What?” Yelena’s face twisted in concern. “What happened?”

“I didn’t tell her anything,” said Bucky, and Bob didn’t trust a fucking word of it. Not until he looked at Yelena again, at the way she glared at Bucky, and realized maybe he was telling the truth. “We were talking, and we realized that we’re both worried about you, so I thought it would be a good idea for us all to talk.”

“No, it isn’t,” Bob argued. His panic attack was weeks ago. There was nothing else to be concerned about. “It’s not a good idea.”

“What the hell happened?” He couldn’t tell whether Yelena was angry or upset. The way she looked at Bucky seemed mad but the way she looked at Bob was almost soft. “Bucky, what did you promise not to tell me?”

Bob made the snap decision to speak first when he realized it was the lesser of two evils. That if he didn’t explain it, Bucky would. He had to control the narrative while he still could. “I had a panic attack. It’s not a big deal. Bucky helped me.”

“A panic attack? Why? What happened?”

“PTSD, I think,” said Bucky, when Bob failed to answer because he didn’t know. He didn’t know what caused his panic attacks most of the time. He wanted to argue that he didn’t have PTSD, but he was smart enough to stop himself; to realize it was inevitable that if he did see a psychologist, it would probably be the first thing they diagnosed. “I tried to talk him through it, but it was really bad so we—”

“No, stop. Stop.” Bob held a hand toward Bucky and shook his head frantically as he glanced at Yelena. “I didn’t say you could tell her that. I don’t want to tell her that.”

“Tell me what?” asked Yelena, patience clearly wearing thin. “What happened?”

Bob’s feelings about his trip to the crisis center were complicated. He was embarrassed that he couldn’t control himself without the support. He was ashamed that he hurt Bucky and a nurse when his second wave of anxiety hit. He was angry that they gave him such a thorough referral to a real doctor because they thought he was fucking crazy.

And more than anything else, he was scared that he was crazy. He was scared that he was just like his mom and that he would keep spiraling until he destroyed everything and everyone he loved.

“Bucky took me to the crisis center,” Bob said finally, his hands twisting uncomfortably in front of him. He stared at the floor, that awkward, contradicting smile climbing back up his face. “For emergency mental health care because I couldn’t— I couldn’t calm down. But they said it was just a panic attack. It was just a really bad panic attack.”

“They gave him a—”

“Don’t. Just go. I want you to go.” Bob’s jaw clenched as he squeezed his fists, his eyes burning into Bucky’s. He suddenly panicked that his tone was too intense, that Bucky would decide they needed to get rid of him. “I’ll talk to you later, I just— I want to talk to Yelena. I can’t talk to both of you right now.”

Yelena took Bob’s hand when Bucky left the room. She guided him over to his bed, sat beside him on the mattress. A long, heavy silence overtook them as he stared at the floor, and she stared at him. There was a non-insignificant part of Bob that was genuinely terrified of what could happen if he told her the truth. He’d never been completely honest about his mental health. Not all of it. He left out just enough details to make himself sound at least adjacent to normal.

He was upfront about his hallucinations but not his delusions, not his paranoia. He told Yelena about his agoraphobia diagnosis but not panic disorder because somehow, that one felt scarier. And that was what he was really afraid of. He was terrified that he would scare her the way that his mom scared him. Terrified that he would hurt and disturb everyone around him until there was no one left.

Until the Void was right and, just like his mom, he was left completely and utterly alone.

“I can see it’s hard for you to talk about this right now,” started Yelena, and Bob was just glad he didn’t have to speak first. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is because you haven’t been sleeping enough or eating enough or showering enough. How about you do one of those first and then we can try to talk again?”

“Okay.”

Bob felt too anxious to eat, too riled up to sleep, so he agreed to a shower. He regretted it the second he stepped inside and saw the razor. The second he remembered why he’d started avoiding it in the first place. He set the razor beneath the sink before he stepped under the water. Bob didn’t understand the nuance of when he could hurt himself; he just knew that if he could, he’d probably slash his wrists right then and there and he wasn’t even sure why.

“So, you’ve read this whole book before?”

“Mmhm.” Bob nodded as he effortlessly answered question after question on the page. He filled in blank circles like the questions were fast and simple. “Twice. The first time it was assigned in middle school but I was already on morphine, so I forgot most of it, so I read it again as an adult. I was on way harder drugs then but somehow, I did retain more of it.”

That much was obvious. Bob had said that the language arts section would be easy for him, but Ava still didn’t expect it to be that easy. Though, he did have a head start since he was the only one who had read the book already. Ava and Yelena had to make their way through the excerpts to be able to answer the questions. Ava nodded and turned back to her page, tried not to compare herself to the guy who sometimes read four novels in a single day.

Their first language arts study session was fun up to that point, for the most part. Ava was not oblivious to the tension between Bob and Yelena, she just had no idea what it was about. She didn’t know why Yelena kept pausing to look at Bob every few minutes, why Bob was able to maintain eye contact with her but not Yelena. She tried to ask, and they both claimed that everything was fine, so she was all but forced to drop the subject.

“Have you always enjoyed reading so much, Bob?” asked Ava. Maybe if she warmed them up a bit with friendly conversation then they would explain. Plus, she was genuinely curious if and how Bob’s love for reading was something that persevered through all the awful things he’d endured in his life.

“Yeah, basically.” Bob’s eyes flickered across the page on his lap, then stopped. He shook his head slightly and read a little more—or read the same part again?—before he continued. “Reading just— it calms me down, you know? It’s quiet, reliable. It never gets boring because there are so many different kinds of stories out there.”

“What’s your favorite genre?”

“I don’t know that I even really have a favorite. I’ll pretty much try anything once. There’s not much of anything I don’t like reading, just stuff I like less. Well, except…” The look on Bob’s face gave her pause, told her to wait before she pushed him to continue. “It feels like a really loaded word but there’s some stuff that just… triggers me, I guess. When you see me reading a bunch of YA or middle grade it probably means I read something I shouldn’t have.”

Ava had noticed that before, but she never gave it much thought. She liked watching children’s movies sometimes so it never occurred to her it could be seen as odd for Bob to enjoy children’s books now and then. Then again, she tended to watch children’s movies after particularly stressful missions or on nights when she was in so much pain she couldn’t fall asleep. It made sense Bob could find comfort in a similar way.

“You can always talk to me too. If you want to.” Ava smiled to herself when Yelena spoke, when she set her hand on Bob’s forearm reassuringly. The tension between them was fading. Yelena moved her arm when Bob nodded, then turned back to the worksheet in front of her. “I liked to read too. Mostly short stories like fairy tales. But I am faster at reading Russian than English. So, sorry I am taking much longer on these questions.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s—” Bob chewed on the end of his pencil, his expression unclear as he stared at the floor. “Reading isn’t easy.”

“Says the guy who read three full novels yesterday,” Ava joked.

Bob’s smile seemed forced somehow. “Yeah.”

With the top layer of tension broken, they collectively turned their focus back on their studies. They finished the first set of questions and compared their answers. Yelena and Ava both got a couple wrong that Bob was happy to over-explain—a gesture that seemed less like mansplaining and more like an abundance of enthusiasm and a desperate desire to be helpful—and Bob got one wrong.

One.

Just one.

And it fucking broke him.

Not in the sense that he seemed disappointed in himself or that he cried or freaked out or anything like that at all. It just seemed like he short-circuited, like he was so confused by the fact that he’d made a mistake that he couldn’t understand it. In his defense, it was a really easy mistake to make. Ava had almost done the same. The two options were comprised of the same three words, just in a different order.

“Bob?” Ava only became concerned when Bob slid his hands on the sides of his head, his middle fingers subtly covering the holes of his ears. He took a deep, shaky breath, stared at the study guide in front of him, unblinking. “You all right?”

He shook his head and inhaled suddenly, then dropped his hands and massaged his left jaw like it hurt. “I can never just do things the right way like everybody else.”

“I mean, you still did better than both of us.”

“Hey.” Yelena tapped Bob’s hand to catch his attention before she gestured toward her own ear. It wasn’t surprising she asked the question Ava wasn’t quite comfortable with. “Do you hear somebody?”

Bob still did not blink as he opened and closed his mouth twice. He swallowed hard before he shook his head and stood up abruptly. Yelena instantly rose to follow him, but he held out a hand to stop her the moment she took a step.

“Let’s start the second section tomorrow, okay?” Bob suggested. Ava could not read his tone, could not tell what exactly the twisted look on his face was. “I think I’m done for today.”

He closed the door behind him when he ducked out of the room, leaving his study materials behind. Ava considered packing everything up but decided to leave it, to focus her energy instead on the friend who was still with her.

“Did something happen between you two?”

“I think he really needs help,” started Yelena candidly, “and he won’t accept it.”

“That’s his choice.” Even though it was hard to watch him spiral, hard to live with him when he just kept letting things get worse. Ava reached for Yelena’s hand and tugged her back on the floor. “It’s not your responsibility to take care of him.”

“But it is. What if something happens and he—?”

“I really don’t think he’ll hurt anybody again, Yelena.”

“I’m not worried about other people, I’m worried about him.” That made more sense. Ava couldn’t understand why Yelena of all people would be afraid of the Void, afraid of Bob losing control. “What if he hurts himself? What if something happens to him?”

Ava had no answer for that ‘what if.’ So, instead, she reached her arms around Yelena, wrapped her in an embrace, and asked if she wanted to keep reviewing the questions they’d missed. She didn’t know how to comfort someone but after a lifetime of chronic pain and depression, she knew well how to distract.

Yelena had a feeling that she and Ava should have kept their study session to themselves, and she was right.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to study with Bob. In fact, given everything he’d been going through, she wanted to keep an eye on him as much as she possibly could. The problem was that he was so damn annoying that her irritation had begun to outweigh her concern. Not because he was still pacing or because he was still fidgeting or because when he really focused, he had this habit of reading a sentence or two aloud, but because he couldn’t answer one question concisely.

The fourth part of the first section, “tone and figurative language,” was one of the most difficult topics they had covered so far for Yelena. The imagery and analogies and metaphors just didn’t make sense because English wasn’t her first language. There were some that were simple or common enough that she was familiar with them but there were others that were just so strange that she couldn’t wrap her head around what they meant Literally, they made no sense, and when she asked what they meant figuratively, Bob explained like he was writing an essay.

So, she’d snapped at him, and he’d stumbled over his own socks as he made some excuse and disappeared out the door. Yelena buried herself back in the worksheet before she could think too hard about the interaction. When Ava tried to ask if she was all right, she shook her head and said she didn’t want to talk about it. Her feelings were too complicated to explain. She was frustrated by Bob’s behavior, frustrated that she didn’t understand it, and frustrated because she held so much frustration it overwhelmed her worry.

Yelena had started the whole GED thing primarily to support Bob, but it didn’t take long for it to become something she genuinely wanted for herself. Her education was something that bothered her for her whole life, especially when she realized how wrong so much of it was. It didn’t surprise her that the Red Room filled her brain with propaganda, it just made her mad as she grew up and realized how much she thought she knew that she didn’t.

The next time Yelena spoke, it was to ask another question about a simile. Ava’s explanation was much more concise, more compassionate and patient. They fell into a rhythm that was so comfortable and effective that Yelena didn’t realize how long Bob had been gone for until there was a sudden knock at the door. When it cracked open, it was not Bob who poked his head in but Alexei. When he pushed the door open fully, Bob appeared behind him, his shaky hand holding a water bottle.

“How are my scholars doing?” asked Alexei. “You will need your Bob to learn about reading, yes?”

It was the way that Bob shook his head slightly that gave away what Alexei’s intentions were. Bob’s voice was low when he said, “No, I’m just making things worse.”

“I’m sure that is not true. These ladies love your company. Right, ‘Lena?”

She did love his company. Bob was genuinely her best friend in the world and sometimes she wanted to spend entire days with him. But other times, he was a lot and even though she never loved him less, she needed a breather. Yelena nodded and extended her arm toward Bob, gestured for him to sit down beside her. Alexei smiled at them again before he ducked out of the room, left them to their study session.

“We’re working on similes now,” Ava said. She held up the worksheet in front of her, gave Bob an encouraging look that he did not return. His eyes were flickering all over again, seemingly unable to focus even to read. “We were just talking about ‘dead as a doornail.’ Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“A lot of similes are just popular because of their alliteration.” Bob picked at his thumbnail, his hair falling in front of his eyes as he hunched over his paper. “Like ‘blind as a bat.’ I think most people know now that bats aren’t blind—or I hope so—but it’s easy to say so people still say it. ‘Dead as a doornail’ is actually thought to be…”

“You can tell us,” Yelena told him when he trailed off. Because he must have told Alexei that he felt unwanted, that he believed his rambling was more annoying than helpful. Yelena decided she would rather be annoyed than hurt her best friend. “Thought to be what?”

“No, it’s— it’s okay. Never mind.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose before he grabbed his pencil and shook himself off. “Let me get caught up.”

Ava shot Yelena a look, but she only shrugged and turned back to her own work. Hard as it was to accept, Ava had been right before. It was not Yelena’s responsibility to take care of Bob. All she could do was be there to offer support when he was ready to accept it.

It was easy to pretend he was back in his old life.

Bob sat on the ground in the cold alley, his arms wrapped around an item large enough to be equivalent to his old backpack. It wasn’t fully raining but drizzling enough to get him wet, to make his hair drip down his nose when he stared at the asphalt. All he had to do was close his eyes, forget where he really was and what he was really holding, and it was like he was twenty-two all over again.

There weren’t many things that Bob liked about his old life. He didn’t miss living out of a backpack, but he did miss the backpack itself. He didn’t miss being nauseous, but he missed being calm. He didn’t miss being lonely, but he missed his freedom. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to leave the Watchtower without an escort. Even if he just walked two blocks away to buy himself some Zyns, he’d get chewed out if anyone caught him.

So, he knew he wasn’t supposed to be out on the street alone, especially well past midnight, but that knowledge was overwhelmed by irrational thoughts he couldn’t shake. All Bob really wanted was to lie down and go to sleep but he couldn’t. He was plagued by memories of his parents discarding him, by visions of the Thunderbolts doing the same. He tried to distract himself by studying but the whole part about organizing and comparing ideas was so easy it didn’t help at all.

A second attempt to lay down resulted in him feeling as unsafe as he used to; like someone would wake him from his sleep to throw him out or take him to jail. And because his brain wasn’t functioning the way it probably should have, he latched on to what he realized was a completely absurd idea—he needed a weighted blanket. A really heavy weighted blanket. If he just had a really heavy weighted blanket, it would hold him in place so no one could send him away while he slept.

Bob was self-aware enough to realize that it was a completely nonsensical conclusion to come to but delusional enough that he couldn’t stop himself from giving into it. He sneaked out of the Watchtower half-past midnight, walked to one of the many stores that were open twenty-four seven in Manhattan, and bought himself the heaviest weighted blanket that they sold. He intended to go straight home afterward, he really did, but then there was that guy.

It was always during his highs when Bob’s impulse control was at its lowest. Had that man approached him any other time, Bob would have said no; maybe even taken him to get help because that was the kind of person he wanted to be. Instead, when the man looked at him and his sleepless eyes and awful posture and told him, “You look like you need something to take the edge off,” Bob said he did.

He didn’t buy the meth. He repeated that to himself over and over again as if it made it better that he bought anything at all. Meth would have made his psychosis worse, would have made him aggressive and even more alert. But what Bob wanted was to sleep and there was nothing wrong with wanting to sleep, right? He wasn’t chasing a high or trying to hurt himself, all he wanted was to fucking sleep.

And he knew morphine would make him drowsy.

Bob rationalized it with the thought that it wasn’t the worst thing out there, and there was a good chance it wouldn’t even work on him after Sentry (even though the alcohol did). He told himself that it was fine. Other people took it all the time without getting addicted so if he just used it for one night then it wouldn’t matter. Except, even in the state that he was, he doubted his logic and his heart pounded so hard that it hurt. So, he pushed two tablets in his mouth before he could change his mind. The rest went into his tin of Zyns, hidden where no one would ever find them.

His phone beeped and he ignored it. It was probably just an app notification. Then it went off again, again, and then it wouldn’t stop, so he looked. The Thunderbolts group chat was moving fast. They were searching for him. Bob took a deep breath and forced himself to his feet, caught himself on the brick wall when he stumbled. He blinked several times and shook his head, his arms squeezed tight around the weighted blanket. If he was smart about it, he could make it to the Watchtower before anyone could prove he left.

Except the walk home was somehow far slower than the walk to the store. Bob’s vision was blurry, and his chest felt tight and pained. His legs shook just enough that he had to keep stopping to catch his balance, and even though he could barely keep his eyes open, he finally felt calm. He made it halfway back to the Watchtower by himself, about two blocks left to go. Then someone grabbed his shoulder and he stumbled back in shock.

“Bob, what the hell are you doing? Never mind. Don’t move.” John kept his hand on Bob’s forearm when he shrugged, no words coming to mind. He reached in his pocket with his other hand and quickly threw his phone to his ear. “Yelena? Yeah, yeah, I found him. We’re a couple blocks away. We’re walking back. He’s— He’s fine? I think? I’ll talk to you when we get back.” He shoved his phone back in his pants. “The fuck are you doing, Bob? You know you’re not supposed to leave on your own.”

“I’m an adult,” Bob snapped, his speech more delayed than he meant for it to be, “and I’m stronger than all of you. I’m fucking— I’m a fucking god. I’m a god, Walker. And I know that’s scary, but you don’t have to be scared of me, okay? I won’t hurt anybody. I won’t.”

“Look at me.” He stepped in front of Bob, stared the short distance down to his gaze. An uncomfortable few seconds passed in silence as John set a hand under Bob’s chin, tilted his head upward, and squinted. He looked at Bob closely, intensely, like he was searching for something on his face. Bob waited for him to explain but when he dropped his hand, he didn’t. “We’re not afraid of you, all right? We’re worried about you.”

“You’re worried about me hurting people.”

“No, we’re worried about you.”

“Because I’m dangerous.”

“Jesus Christ.” John took a slow, exasperated breath and shook his head. He gestured for Bob to resume walking with him, and he did. Apparently, it was no longer worth the fight to convince Bob he was wrong. “What’s with the blanket?”

“I needed it,” said Bob, too exhausted to remember his filter, to remember that his reasoning was objectively insane.

“You mean you left the Watchtower at one in the morning to buy a knitted purple blanket?”

“No, I left at twelve-thirty, and I needed it so just stop being a dick, okay? You’re always such a dick for no reason. Stop being a dick.”

John fell silent for a long moment before he asked in a far less judgmental tone, “Why did you need it?”

“I don’t feel safe.” Even through his blurred vision, his exhausted mind, Bob noticed the way that John just barely slowed his pace to be closer to Bob’s side. That didn’t mean he gave a shit. It just meant it was his instinct to protect. “Ava and Yelena are sick of me, and Bucky knows I’m fucking crazy and now you— you know I’m fucking crazy too, so I don’t feel safe. I know you want to get rid of me. You all— all of you want to get rid of me, you just need somewhere else to keep me. I don’t want to wake up and be somewhere else, so I needed the blanket. I needed it.”

“Okay.” It was obvious from John’s expression that he didn’t understand a word that Bob said. Somehow, though, he didn’t look as alarmed as he did curious. “So, that blanket is the only thing you bought, then? Nothing else?”

“No,” Bob told him, his tin of Zyns and tablets burning a hole in his back pocket.

“I’m sorry I was a dick about the blanket. If you bought anything else, I won’t judge you for it.”

“I didn’t get anything else. I just needed the blanket.”

If John wanted to say another word, he didn’t get the chance before the front door of the Watchtower opened and Yelena stepped outside. She wrapped her arms around herself as she approached them, her breath visible in the freezing night air when she started to ask, “Bob, what—?”

And then John made a gesture beside Bob that made her stop. Something that communicated, don’t ask, he’s fucking insane. Not that Bob blamed him after the absurd explanation he’d given for his outing.

Bob did not say a word as Yelena looped her arm around his and walked him back to his bedroom. He was grateful that she didn’t ask him to explain the blanket; that she just helped him find some scissors and lay it out on his bed. Even more than that, he was grateful that she laid down beside him and held his hand until he fell asleep. Between her gentle pressure around his palm and the forty pounds draped over his body, Bob almost, almost felt secure for the three hours that he slept.

Chapter Text

It was half past four A.M. when he woke up.

At first, Bob couldn’t remember what happened or when he’d fallen asleep or why Yelena was sleeping beside him. Then he tried to sit up and was hit by an aggressive combination of lightheadedness and vertigo that he remembered too well. It was the same rush that greeted him every time he went back to his gateway drug. Bob clapped his right hand over his mouth and rolled out of bed; made it into his en suite just in time to throw up in the toilet instead of on the floor.

Tears stung at his eyes as he heaved, as his migraine returned in full force. He didn’t even know how much sickness he could attribute to the vertigo and how much he could attribute to guilt. Bob had broken promises to stay clean a dozen times before, but it felt different that time. He usually said it to a doctor or a cop or someone else he would never see again. That time, he’d promised it to his friends, to himself, and for the first time, he’d really meant it. He wanted to stay clean. He’d tried to stay clean.

And he still fucking relapsed again.

Bob choked on a sob when Yelena tugged his bangs back, when she whispered a gentle “shh” behind his ears. She must not have known what really happened, what he really did, or she wouldn’t have treated him with so much kindness. The thought crossed his mind of what might happen if she found out and a fresh wave of nausea struck. He dry-heaved for several minutes before his stomach finally settled, before he leaned back against the wall, dropped his face into his hands, and let his sobs consume him.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, as Yelena pulled him into her shoulder and wrapped him in a hug he didn’t deserve. His chest burned as he inhaled, struggled to find the breath to speak. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Yelena, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Somehow, it made him cry harder when Yelena said without hesitation, “I forgive you. Whatever happened, whatever you’re worried about, I forgive you.”

“No.” She didn’t know. If she knew, she wouldn’t forgive him. If she knew, she wouldn’t stay with him. If she knew, she would hate him. “No. No, I fucked up, ‘Lena, I fucked up so bad.”

“You’re my best friend, Bob. Nothing is going to change that.”

It was almost a relief that he didn’t have the breath to prove her wrong.

“Bob? We’re about to start on the next section. Are you coming?” It took him so long to respond that at first, Ava thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he shook his head, his left thumb halfway in his mouth as he chewed on his cuticle. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I don’t—” Bob pulled his thumb from his lips and rubbed the bridge of his nose with both hands. “I don’t need to study. It’s just arguments, right? It’s easy.”

There were times when Ava would have been annoyed with Bob for his dismissive attitude but, given he’d damn near run away the night before, she allowed him more grace. In his defense, he looked like absolute hell. His face was flushed pink, his eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks were speckled with petechiae.

Ava didn’t know exactly what happened the night before. Yelena woke everyone up a little before one in the morning and sent them on an emergency search because she couldn’t find Bob and she had a feeling something was wrong. All Ava had heard so far was that John found Bob wandering a couple blocks away, brought him home, and he was okay.

It was weird that nobody seemed to want to discuss the details. But since everyone seemed fine for the most part, Ava let it go. She sat on the coffee table across from the couch facing Bob and wrapped her arms around her stomach.

“Are you all right, Bob?” asked Ava.

He put his hand back to his mouth as he nodded, muffled his own speech when he said, “It’s just fucking easy, you know? I don’t need to study this shit. I could take this test today and pass. It’s just easy. It’s a waste of time.”

It rubbed her the wrong way because she felt Bob, of all people, should understand. She thought Bob would get that her and Yelena hadn’t had access to fair educations; that he would realize they wanted him there because the whole thing was his idea and they wanted him to be involved. Bob was inarguably the best at language arts and that was what they needed him for—to support them when they struggled like they’d supported him with math.

“Well, it’s not a waste of time for me because I didn’t have access to all the libraries that you did,” Ava snapped, and she felt like kind of a bitch because she knew that for Bob, libraries were his escape. “And it’s not a waste of time for Yelena because she’s not a native speaker so she’s not naturally gifted at this the way you are.”

For just a second, Bob froze, and then he laughed. He pinched the bridge of his nose as he shook his head, and Ava couldn’t even guess what he would say. Bob was too intrinsically kind for her to expect him to make a demeaning comment, but she had no idea what else would make him laugh the way he did.

“I’m not ‘naturally gifted’ at this shit, Ava,” he started with an awkward, lopsided smile. He looked down to the floor for a moment before he turned to meet her gaze, his eyes wandering as he spoke. “I’m naturally terrible at it. I don’t read because I’m good at it, I read because I suck at it. When I was a kid, my teachers kept wanting to talk to my parents because I was so bad at reading and writing that it was actually concerning. And you know what my parents did?”

Ava wanted to say that they took him to get evaluated, that they got him support if he needed it, but she knew enough about Bob’s parents to know that wouldn’t be the case.

“My dad only went to the first one and he beat the fuck out of me. I had to go to the emergency room, and they made me say I broke my ribs falling out of a tree.” An average person might have cried at the memory. Bob just kept laughing, though his eyes turned glassy. “And it didn’t stop, you know? They kept wanting to have these meetings for a few years until I got my shit together, but my mom would always turn them down because we couldn’t let Dad know. Can’t let Dad know that I’m too fucking stupid, that I can’t do anything the ‘goddamn normal way.’ So, don’t say I’m naturally gifted. I worked my ass off to be good at this shit. The only thing I’m ‘naturally gifted’ at is making things worse.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” started Ava. She didn’t know how to express her thoughts. How to show that she valued his feelings and experiences, but she felt like he didn’t do the same for hers. “Yelena and I went through our own shit growing up too. You know that. And I know our experiences are all very different but we’re all coming from traumatic backgrounds. We’re supposed to be supporting each other and when you say you won’t study with us because it’s ‘too fucking easy’ or a ‘waste of time,’ that’s not being very supportive.”

Given the way things had been going lately, Ava fully expected to incite an argument. She expected Bob to snap at her or even to shout or storm off. Instead, he dropped his face into his hands, grasped at his bangs as he inhaled sharply. He sounded suddenly on the verge of tears as he choked out, “I’m sorry I’m a bad friend.”

“I didn’t say you were. I just meant—”

“No, I’m a bad friend. I’m a bad friend and I’m a bad person. I’m such a bad person.”

“It isn’t about you, Bob. You’re making it about—”

“Hang on, hang on.” Ava hadn’t even noticed when John entered the room. He knelt in front of the couch near Bob, set one hand on his forearm and gave him a reassuring squeeze. It almost irritated her that he walked in and took Bob’s side without even a question. “You’re not a bad person, Bob. You made a mistake. That doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you human.”

“But I’m not human,” said Bob between strained breaths. “I’m a god.”

“No, listen, you got to get out of that mindset. You’re not a god, you’re just a guy who got injected with some really powerful shit.” Bob dropped one hand to his arm, rubbed the inside of his elbow, and John shook his head like he’d made a mistake. Ava looked between them, trying to figure out what the hell she was missing. “Nobody is holding you to a higher standard because Val experimented on you. All that aside, you’re still just Bob, okay? Bob is human. Bob is allowed to have problems and make mistakes. Most people experience setbacks in recovery. You’re not a bad person for that.”

“Wait, wait, what—?”

Ava’s mind raced as Bob shook his head, as John tried to talk him down. If she interpreted John’s words right, what she missed was that when John found him the night before, he was high. Since no one had given details about what happened, she just assumed Bob did his usual late-night run to the corner store, thinking no one would notice. It didn’t even occur to her that something so much more serious might have gone down.

Suddenly, it made sense why studying was not a priority for Bob. Even though there was no way for her to know, and even though she made some good points, Ava felt almost terrible for putting that pressure on him when he was struggling so intensely. Her chest tightened as the why started to run through her mind. What had driven him to buy drugs in the first place? Did he leave the Watchtower for that reason specifically?

“Stop.” Bob yanked his arm away from John. He lifted his head, revealing that his eyes were bloodshot, but his cheeks were dry. “Stop being nice to me. I don’t deserve it.”

“You don’t need to deserve kindness,” John told him. Something on his face changed. “I get how you might think that because of the way you were raised and the way that you lived before Sentry but it’s not true. Kindness isn’t something that needs to be earned, it’s just something that’s given.”

“Then stop giving it to me. I don’t want it. I don’t want you to be nice to me. Why can’t you just yell at me? You’re always such an asshole and now I want you to be an asshole and you’re being nice. Stop.”

He stood up abruptly, kicked a pillow off the couch as he practically leaped across the room. John reached an arm toward him but did not follow. “Bobby—”

“Don’t call me that!”

Rather than wait for the elevator, Bob disappeared through the stairwell. John fell back on his ass as he sighed. Ava set a hand on his shoulder, gave him what she hoped was a somewhat reassuring squeeze. She knew that Yelena was still waiting for her, but it felt wrong to stand up so soon. She needed time to process what happened before she could walk away from it.

Ava hesitated and wet her lips before she asked quietly, “He relapsed?”

“I don’t—” John took a deep breath and shook his head. “I don’t want to say yes because I don’t know. I don’t know. The signs were there. I think he was on something, but I don’t know what it was. I tried to ask but he kept deflecting and then Yelena showed up and— I don’t know, Ava. I don’t— what happened before I walked in?”

“We were arguing, I guess.” It didn’t feel like any of John’s business, but it felt too heavy to keep on her chest. “I said he wasn’t being supportive, and he just went on about being stupid and a bad friend.”

“Stupid?”

“He said he was bad at reading.” John made a face and Ava shrugged. “I had the same reaction but supposedly he was pretty behind in reading and writing as a kid. He did a hell of a job overcoming it.”

 John nodded. “That’s what I was trying to tell him. I’m not going to say he never fucks up but goddamn he perseveres. I’ve never met someone with such a strong will to keep trying.”

“Yeah.” Ava forced a smile. “I have to go. Yelena’s waiting for me. Should we check on Bob, do you think?”

“Probably better to give him space.”

It was a decision they would both blame themselves for later.

He never intended to hurt himself.

Even all the times Bob tried to take his life, he never planned to do it. He never thought about his actions before he went through with them, he just started with one bad thought and spiraled.

The first thought he had that time was that John knew about his relapse. Bob had hoped, at the very least, nobody knew what he’d done. But John did. John clocked him fast, and all Bob could think about was how many people he’d hurt. Yelena and Ava were already upset with him for being a shitty friend and then he went and relapsed on top of that. John had probably told everyone already. That was why they were all on edge. That was why Yelena took care of him all night.

When he remembered that Yelena had to take care of him, it came rushing back that John did too; that they all did. They all had to get up in the middle of the night to search for him. John had to support him and walk him back to the Watchtower. Yelena had to stay with him while he slept and vomited, had to comfort him and hold his hand until he sobbed himself into a second short sleep.

Very rarely, Bob had moments where he considered that maybe the doctors had been right when they tried to diagnose him. Moments when his chest tightened until it burned with each wet cough, moments when he lost so much oxygen that he could barely get somewhere private before he physically shattered. Bob yanked his bathroom door shut and collapsed on the tile against the edge of the shower.

“Calm down,” Bob wheezed as he slipped his arms beneath his robe and hugged himself tight. He dug his fingers into the skin over the curve of his ribs, his lungs burning with each strained breath. “Calm down.”

The more he told himself to calm down, the more he coughed, the more tears stung his eyes. Panic disorder, he reminded himself. They told him he had panic disorder. That was why he felt like he was dying on the floor of the bathroom after a lukewarm conflict. It was weird how he’d denied it for so many years and yet, the moment it consumed him, the diagnosis somehow felt like a comfort. The tiniest explanation gave him reassurance that it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t irreparably broken. Bob trembled, coughed between his knees. He needed to snap himself out of it. He needed something to snap him out of it.

Bob kicked off his pants and his jacket, didn’t bother to remove his boxers or his t-shirt before he climbed in the shower. He wasn’t trying to get clean; he was just trying to freeze himself back to reality. His hands trembled as he turned the knob to cold, their bright red tips standing out against the white tiles. Bob froze but not in the way that he wanted. His fingertips were red. Red. He lifted his shirt up his back, leaned under the water, and gagged when a trail of blood swirled down the drain. A quick glance at his ribs revealed the scratches from when he’d wrapped his arms around himself, where he forced his nails into his skin without realizing.

He clawed his own sides open.

Once he realized what he’d done, Bob reached for his razor without a second thought. A proper, deep cut would snap him out of it, and he deserved it anyway. He’d hurt Yelena, he’d hurt Ava, he’d hurt Bucky, he’d hurt John—he hurt all of them, so he deserved to hurt. It would probably help if he did, if he made things even in that way. Bob dug the blade into his skin, let out a breath that shook not with panic but with relief. Relief that he was still able to hurt himself when he believed he needed to, that the blood disturbed him enough to distract him from his thoughts.

He cut himself until he lost track of his scars, until his arm went from burning to numb. He dropped his razor and leaned his forehead against the wall of the shower, took in the freezing cold water as his soaked clothes clung to his skin. It worked. Bob stopped panicking, stopped wheezing. He didn’t know how many times he’d cut himself or how long he’d been in there, just that he finally found some semblance of calm. He took deep breath after deep breath, tried to find the strength to stand.

“Yelena!” Bob heard the scream, felt the shower turn off, but then he blinked and suddenly, Ava was halfway through a sentence. “…and he’s not— Bob. Bob, can you hear me?”

“‘M okay,” he mumbled.

“We need…” It was Yelena’s voice, but he could only recognize half her words. “…get him out…”

Oh. He’d finally gone too far. They were finally going to get rid of him.

Bob let out a low exhale. It was for the best. Something warm and soft wrapped around his left arm, then a hand squeezed his right, and then he was on the floor outside of the shower and he didn’t know how he got there. There was a towel wrapped around his shoulders, arms wrapped around his shoulders, and an intense pressure on his left wrist. His head was leaning against somebody, and he didn’t even know who it was.

“…stop the… he’s… bad. So, so bad.” Yelena’s words were shaky, confusing, and Bob realized he wasn’t catching them all, but he couldn’t figure out what he was missing. Her left hand tugged his wet hair behind his ear. “Why didn’t he… kill himself?”

“I can do it,” said Bob, the world spinning around him. “I can— where’s my razor?”

A sob rang in his ear and the next thing he felt was a hand on his face, smacking him awake. Bob winced and tried to move back but there were too many arms holding him in place. He blinked several times, squinted as he realized the person in front of him was John.

“Bobby, you got to stop…” Bob’s eyes flickered shut and another firm pat snapped him back to attention. “We can’t… help… take care of you.”

“I know, ‘m sorry.” He tried to look at John, but his head dropped down, leaned against the front of John’s shoulder. John must’ve been disgusted by his tears because he instantly grabbed both sides of Bob’s face and put distance between them. “Rather die.”

“What?”

He meant that he would rather die than go back to being high every day. That he would rather die than go to rehab and fail the program for the seventh time. That he would rather die than be committed for yet another perceived suicide attempt. That he would rather die than continue to hurt the people he cared about, even if they didn’t care about him. But there was a significant disconnect between his brain and his mouth so what he said instead was,

“It’s funny, you know?” Bob’s lip curled upward, a light chuckle undercutting his words. “I didn’t know I could do this anymore. I didn’t— I didn’t think I could do this anymore. You think I can die? You think…?”

If anyone responded, Bob didn’t catch it. His eyes drifted closed and when he opened them again, the first thing he heard was John saying, “…such a dick… pump him full of drugs, but—”

“No, no, I didn’t— it was just one.” No. No, he was lying again already. “Two. Two pills. It was two. That’s all. Just two.”

“Look,” John snapped as he pointed at Bob’s wrist. “You see what I’m saying? We need him out ASAP.”

Bob laughed again. “You can just let me die. Just see if I die. Maybe I can.”

Once again, Bob did what he thought was blink only to pop his lids up and realize that John was no longer in front of him. Instead, John was at his side, his arms pressed against the towel on his left wrist. But Ava had been there before. Bob blinked his gaze around the room.

“Ava’s mad?” he asked. “Made it about me again. Sorry. Sorry I made it about me.”

“No, Bob, she’s…” Yelena’s arms squeezed him tighter as John spoke, his tone surprisingly calm. “…mad at you for this.”

All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. All he had to do was show up to their study session and be a good friend and help them identify and write arguments. Instead, he ruined everything. He tried to move but John and Yelena held him steady, said things at his side that he couldn’t make out. Bob let himself drift off again. He woke up just long enough to hear the door slam open, to see Ava kneel in front of him, and then his eyes flickered, and he woke up to her desperate tone saying,

“It’s not working.”

“I think his body is…” Bob was dizzy from how many times he’d dropped and lifted his head. Or maybe it was just the blood loss. There was a lot of blood on the floor. And in the shower. And on the towel wrapped around his arm. “Try it now. While he’s awake. Now. Now, Ava.”

Bob didn’t know what exactly it was that Ava tried. Just that he felt a tiny, sharp pain in his right arm and the next time he closed his eyes, he didn’t open them again.

Yelena didn’t panic most nights when Bob went missing. She usually gave it ten or fifteen minutes before she alerted anybody because, despite it being against the rules, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to leave to get Zyns without telling anyone. He’d made the quick trip to the corner store and back so many times that Yelena trusted him to do it. She trusted him to come back.

She didn’t know why exactly she didn’t trust him to come back the night before. She just had a feeling in her gut that told her something was wrong, and she was right. So, she woke everybody up, sent out a search party for Bob. When John found him, she took him straight up to his room, helped him settle into bed—with his new blanket that he apparently needed for reasons she didn’t understand—and laid with him until he fell asleep. She woke up with him when he was attacked by vertigo and vomited, held his hand until he crashed again.

Really, Yelena wasn’t even surprised when Ava said that Bob didn’t want to study with them. She wasn’t even surprised when Ava told her that John thought he might have relapsed. Between the alcohol weeks earlier, the midnight trip outside, and the vomiting the second he woke up, it felt almost expected. Ava said that Bob needed some space, and he didn’t want to study. She agreed that it was fine, that it was easy for him and he needed a day off. They studied alone and it was fine. Fun, even.

Then, about an hour in, Ava left to ask Bob a question. One simple question about using photos as evidence. Yelena offered to go with her, but Ava said no, she wanted to maybe talk to Bob about their argument. Yelena thought that she would be back in two or three minutes tops. Even less than that if Bob felt better and decided he would join them after all. She didn’t expect Ava to be gone for longer. She didn’t expect Ava to scream.

“Yelena!”

Bob was in the shower, his t-shirt and boxers soaked in freezing water and blood. His eyes were closed, his chest barely moving as Ava clung to him without regard for the stream of blood that continued to trickle down his left arm. Not just a little blood like there was an accident; so much blood that Yelena couldn’t see the cuts he was bleeding from.

“What happened?” Yelena dropped to her knees beside Ava, her chest tight. Not again. She couldn’t lose her best friend again. “Ava, what happened?”

“I don’t know.” Ava’s voice trembled, her eyes wide and glassy. Yelena put one hand on Bob’s jaw, stopped him from falling into the wall. “I heard the shower, and he wasn’t answering so I came in and he’s not—” She must have noticed at the same time Yelena did that Bob’s eyes opened halfway. “Bob. Bob, can you hear me?”

“‘M okay,” Bob mumbled, like they weren’t sitting in a growing pool of his blood.

“We need to—” Yelena cut herself off to take a deep breath and steady herself. She just needed to stay calm. Bob would be okay if she stayed calm. “Help me get him out of the shower.”

Bob whimpered when Yelena tugged his left arm around her shoulder, and she apologized twice. Ava supported his right side as they dragged him out of the shower on to the dry tiles outside. The lighting was better there and there was far less blood. Yelena grabbed two towels off the counter. She wrapped the first tightly around his left arm, tried not to think too hard about how fast it soaked with blood.

Yelena was used to blood. Blood in general didn’t bother her. Bob’s blood made her sick.

She gestured for Ava to hold the first towel in place and draped the second over Bob’s shoulders. Yelena looped her arm around him and held him tight as she nudged his head into the crook of her neck. She could feel his shallow breaths on her throat; the tiniest indication that he was still alive, still with her.

“How do we stop the bleeding?” asked Yelena frantically, all her training gone. Because it wasn’t just an injured teammate, it was Bob. She didn’t even know if he would heal like a normal person. “He’s bleeding so bad. So, so bad. Why didn’t he come talk to me? Why didn’t— Ava, do you think he tried to kill himself?”

“I don’t know,” said Ava.

At the same time, Bob tried to move. He leaned forward and said, slurring, “I can do it. I can— where’s my razor?”

“No, no, you— Bob?” Yelena hadn’t managed to finish her sentence before Bob once again went limp in her arms. His entire upper body weight fell against her as Ava clung to his left arm, pressed the towel against his skin as it faded red. “Bob, wake up. Bob. Bob. Please wake up, Bob. Please. Bob.”

“What’s going on? What’s—?” John stopped in the doorway for the briefest second before he rushed inside. He knelt in front of Bob, set his hands on both sides of his face. “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?”

Yelena’s words left her mouth with a sob. “I think he tried to kill himself.”

“Bob. Bobby. Look at me. Look at me. Hey.” John smacked Bob’s cheek each time he spoke until Bob’s eyes finally stayed open for more than a second. “Bobby, you got to stop closing your eyes. Bob. Bob, open your eyes. You need to keep them open. We can’t hold them open for you, so you got to help us out, okay? Help us so we can take care of you.”

“I know, ‘m sorry.” Bob started to lean forward again, and John grabbed his face once more, pushed him back upright and tapped his cheek until his eyes opened again. “Rather die.”

“What?”

“It’s funny, you know?” Of all the times Bob had laughed when it wasn’t appropriate, that was the worst. Bob smiled and Yelena had to physically choke back another sob as she held him. “I didn’t know I could do this anymore. I didn’t— I didn’t think I could do this anymore. You think I can die? You think…?”

He fell back into Yelena’s shoulder and, rather than wake him immediately, John made a face. He moved his right fingers down to Bob’s neck, held them for a second. John mumbled to Ava to move the towel on Bob’s arm, and she hesitated before she did. Despite the gaping, open wounds on his skin, it seemed like the bleeding had stopped. John set the towel back in place.

“Okay, I’m about to sound fucking insane when I say this so just stay with me, all right?” Any other time, Yelena and Ava would have teased him. Instead, they stayed silent. “I put my hand on his neck because I could feel his heartbeat. When he passes out, it’s not just slowing down, it’s normalizing.”

“What does that mean?” asked Yelena, her own breathing shallow.

Ava answered first. “He’s healing himself.”

“Exactly,” John agreed. “I think, maybe unconsciously, he’s putting effort into hurting himself somehow. When he passes out, his body starts repairing itself. Move the towel next time he wakes up, I bet you he starts bleeding again.”

“So, what do we do?”

“I feel like such a dick to suggest this because I’m basically saying we pump him full of drugs, but I think our best option right now is to sedate him.”

It made sense, in a fucked-up way. If Yelena understood John’s theory correctly, Bob was stuck in a cycle of healing and hurting himself. He kept healing himself just enough to wake up, then forced himself to keep bleeding until he passed out again. They needed him to sleep long enough to break the loop, to let him heal himself fully.

The second Bob moved, his eyes half open as he rambled incoherently against Yelena’s shoulder, Ava flipped the towel over. John, maybe for the first time in his life, was right. Once he was awake, somewhat conscious, Bob started bleeding again. Ava exhaled slowly as John nodded.

“Look,” he said urgently, pointing at the fresh blood on Bob’s wrist. “You see what I’m saying? We need him out ASAP.“

Bob’s wheezy laugh cut in before they could decide what to do. “You can just let me die. Just see if I die. Maybe I can.”

When Bob dropped on Yelena’s shoulder again, John grabbed his wrist and gestured toward the door. “Ava, go down to the medical room and see if you can find some sedatives.”

“What kind?”

“Anything but opioids.”

Neither John nor Yelena spoke when Ava left. John held Bob’s arm tight, ready to stop the bleeding if he woke. Yelena just kept her hand on his shoulder, held him tight and hoped that if she hugged him hard enough, he wouldn’t slip away.

Bob’s voice was small the next time he spoke. “Ava’s mad?” He thought she left because she didn’t care. He was in such a bad place that his assumption wasn’t that she went to get help, it was that she didn’t care. “Made it about me again. Sorry. Sorry I made it about me.”

“No, Bob, she’s coming right back.” John was so good at keeping his cool. How many people had he supported during combat? “She’s not mad, okay? Nobody is mad at you for this.”

The five minutes before Ava came back were some of the longest of Yelena’s life and she’d been snapped for five years. It was torturous watching him fade and wake, to listen to his incoherent, self-deprecating rambling. The second Ava came back, she dropped to her knees in front of Bob. She prepped his skin hastily, positioned a syringe against the inside of his wrist, and shook her head when she pushed on it.

“It’s not working,” she cried.

“I think his body is rejecting the needle,” John explained. “You have to do it when he’s awake. That’s when he’s making himself vulnerable.”

Yelena brushed Bob’s bangs aside, watched and waited for his eyes to open before she said, “He’s awake.”

“Try it now. While he’s awake. Now. Ava, now.”

Ava pushed the needle into Bob’s vein. Only seconds passed before he fell limp in Yelena’s arms. None of them spoke as she held him, as John monitored his vitals, as Ava stared at the needle in her hand. Just to be sure John was right, Yelena used a wet towel to wipe off Bob’s arm. A heavy wave of relief washed over her when his skin stayed dry, the cuts no longer bleeding. Bob was healing. He was okay.

John, the super soldier in the room, was the one to lift Bob and carry him to his bed. At Yelena’s request, he helped her peel his soaked clothing off his skin and replace it with his cozy bathrobe. She covered him in his purple blanket, pushed his hair back as she stared at his unmoving face. John and Ava went back to the medical room to get more supplies and Yelena stayed put, her hand wrapped around Bob’s.

Yelena refused to move when they got back, refused to let go of Bob’s hand when John tried to check on and bandage his injuries. She snapped at John and at Ava when they set up machines to monitor his vitals and she felt they were moving him too roughly. John was the one to hit back at her, his temper reignited by micromanaging.

“I’m sorry,” said Yelena, because she wasn’t mad at them, she was scared. She was trying to control what she could because there was so much she couldn’t. “I just love him so much.”

And Bob didn’t even know.

Chapter Text

Bob didn’t wake up for over six hours.

Though the others all came and went, Yelena did not leave his bedside once. She stayed with him while he rested, and she held his hand when he awoke. When he did, before she could say a word, something triggered Bob—maybe the feel of the monitoring equipment on his skin or the sounds of the machines around him or a combination of both—and he forgot where he was.

He had a panic attack, and it was dangerous. He was a danger to himself the way he clawed at his arms to get the equipment off; he was a danger to others the way his fingers turned black and how he fought when Yelena got too close, seemingly convinced she was a doctor rather than his friend. John and Ava heard the noise and tried to help, and together they tried everything they could think of, but Bob wouldn’t—couldn’t—calm down.

So, they sedated him again.

It was the safest option. She and John agreed on that. But it physically hurt her to watch Bob beg them not to. It physically hurt to read his vitals and know he still wasn’t healed; he still hadn’t replenished all the blood that he’d lost. That was what they were waiting for the most. Bob’s skin repaired itself fast but producing new blood was apparently a much slower process.

Yelena did not sleep for a second at Bob’s side. She just watched him, held his hand, talked to him, and let herself cry when everyone else was gone. At some point, she spotted Bob’s study materials on the floor, and she picked them up and got to work. It was hours after midnight. According to Bob’s schedule, they were supposed to start on grammar and language that day. And if that was what Bob wanted to do, she would do it.

She tried hard to focus on word usage but non-standard versus standard language was particularly difficult for her. Every time she got stuck, her mind wandered back to the bathroom; to Bob lying in a pool of his own blood and laughing. Yelena believed, for a time, that Bob was depressed like her. Then she learned about his psychosis, the hallucinations and delusions that went along with it, and realized it was something else. But she had no experience with psychology, had no idea what the hell that something else was.

According to Bob, the only mental illness he’d ever been diagnosed with was agoraphobia. Despite how severe his mood swings were and how intense his psychosis could be, he was never diagnosed with anything related to either. If he was telling the truth, that meant not only that Yelena had a massive gap in her knowledge, but that Bob did too. Bob didn’t know what he was dealing with or how to cope with it, and because of that, his friends didn’t know how to support him either. It fucking crushed her.

“‘Lena.” She instinctively looked at Bob when she heard her name, despite recognizing Alexei’s voice in a heartbeat. She sniffed and glanced at the doorway where he stood. “You should go to bed. You must rest.”

“No,” said Yelena. She turned back to her studies, pencil in hand. Normally, the bite marks around the eraser would have bothered her. That night, it was almost a comfort to see them and know so clearly that they were Bob’s. “I’m not leaving him.”

“He is safe here. Nothing will happen to him if you leave.”

“He tried to kill himself in that bathroom.” She pointed aggressively in the direction of the en suite, frustration boiling in her chest. Yelena blinked back her tears as she shook her head, refused to meet Alexei’s gaze. “He woke up and immediately had a panic attack. He can’t be alone. I’m not leaving him alone.”

Alexei approached the desk chair Yelena was seated in. He set a hand on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off. “I can watch him while you sleep.”

“No, I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving him.”

There was no point in trying to sleep anyway. Every time Yelena closed her eyes, her thoughts immediately spiraled. She thought about everything that had happened over the last few weeks, every sign that Bob was not okay. She thought about all the times she wanted to help him and felt that she didn’t try hard enough.

Yelena knew that it wasn’t her fault, that Bob had severe mental health issues and if he refused to be treated, there was nothing else she could do for him. But Bob was her best friend, maybe the person she loved more than anyone else in the world, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she failed him. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she should have done more, should have supported him better even though she didn’t know how.

No sooner did Yelena press her pencil back to the paper did Alexei cover her in a blanket. He draped the fabric around her shoulders and wrapped her in an embrace so warm, so comforting, that she couldn’t stop the sob from escaping her lips.

“Daddy, I’m so scared,” Yelena gasped. She dropped her pencil and turned to bury her face in Alexei’s shoulder. “He needs so much help, and I don’t know how to help him. I don’t know how to help him. I don’t— I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t know what to do so I just— I just started studying because he wanted us to work on this today. I thought maybe… maybe it would make him feel better if I worked on it.”

“It is three in the morning, ‘Lena,” said Alexei. “I know you are worried, but you must rest. I will get you a pillow and you can take a nap on the floor here, yes? If something happens to Bob, you will be right here with him. All right?”

“Okay.”

She accepted the pillow when Alexei handed it to her, settled in on the floor beneath the blanket. Yelena blinked in and out of sleep for hours, too anxious to relax. Too worried about what would happen if Bob woke up and had another panic attack and she wasn’t at his side to talk him down.

Too worried that he would wake up and she wouldn’t. That he would hurt himself again and by the time she got up, it would be too late.

“That one, I think, counts as wordiness.” Ava used her pencil to cross out the first third of the sentence in front of them. “See how it reads better this way?”

Yelena nodded, her eyes flickering up toward Bob. At first, Ava thought the idea of studying that morning was ridiculous. It was less than twenty-four hours earlier that they found Bob on the floor of his bathroom after an apparent suicide attempt. The very thought of trying to focus long enough to study sounded impossible.

All Ava had thought about the entire night was Bob. Not just Bob, but Bob covered in blood on the floor of the shower. Bob’s weight when he fell completely limp in her arms. Bob’s wheezy laugh when he rambled about how he didn’t know whether he could die. Bob’s hysterical sobbing when he woke up the first time and was instantly triggered into a panic attack.

Really, when Yelena suggested they study, Ava wanted to call her ridiculous. But then she realized why Yelena wanted to study—it was her way of coping. Yelena had latched on to the rough schedule that Bob created for them to follow and decided she needed to do the lesson he planned for the day. Since she wanted to do it in Bob’s room, Ava agreed. It gave them something to do while they kept an eye on him, at least.

“Okay.” Yelena wrote something in her notebook. “I hate when they use two names for the same concept. It’s confusing.”

“Yeah, same,” Ava agreed. She flipped to the next page in the study guide. “It looks like we’re almost at the end of this—”

Ava cut herself off and looked up at the bed at the same time Yelena jumped to her feet and sat on the edge of the mattress. The heart rate monitor increased suddenly as Bob groaned under his breath. He put his hands on his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose before he covered his eyes, his mouth twisted into a grimace.

“Hey.” Yelena set one hand on Bob’s shoulder, and he immediately recoiled, his bloodshot eyes wide and filled with genuine fear as his breath hitched. The look on Yelena’s face was broken. “Bob, it’s me. It’s Yelena. You’re in your room in the Watchtower. You’re safe. There’s nobody here except me and Ava.”

She was trying to combat what they assumed Bob’s panic attack had been about the first time he woke up. Though he was mostly incoherent, based on what he said and what they knew about his past, their best guess was that he had some kind of flashback to his time in the hospital. Bob looked down at his arm and his chest, at all the equipment strapped to him, tears pricking the corners of his eyes.

Bob looked at Yelena, opened his mouth like he intended to say something, but it wasn’t words that came out. Thankfully, after the first time, they were prepared. Yelena pulled his hair back as he heaved into small trash can John had brought earlier. He alternated between coughing and gasping for air for a long several minutes before he finally stopped; returned his hands to his face as he leaned back into the pillows.

“Sorry.” Bob sniffed as Ava hauled the bucket away, as Yelena brushed her fingers through his tangled hair and tucked it off his sweaty face. “Sorry, I’m nau— I’m really— I’m really nauseous.”

“It’s okay. Nobody’s upset with you, we’re just glad you’re awake. Do you hurt anywhere?” It took a second after Yelena asked her question for Bob to nod just slightly and tap the side of his head. “Is that your migraine again?”

“I’m so fucking dizzy.”

Ava quickly grabbed a hand towel from the restroom and soaked it in warm water. She picked up Bob’s water bottle from his nightstand and handed it to him as she draped the towel on his forehead. Though she knew she should probably wait, Ava’s curiosity got the better of her and she asked, “Do you remember what happened?”

One thing about Bob that they knew from the get-go was that his brain tended not to keep traumatic memories. At first, they thought it just had something to do with the Void—that a consequence of those powers was not remembering using them. But then Bob clarified something he’d told Yelena in the vault; explained that memory loss was something he’d dealt with his entire life. Given what they knew about it, it was not just possible but likely that Bob had no memory of what he’d done to himself.

“No,” mumbled Bob. He took a sip of his water and coughed again as he leaned his head toward Yelena. “Did I— Did I hurt anybody?”

Yelena shook her head quickly. She and Ava both understood that Bob was not including himself as part of ‘anybody.’ “No, no, you didn’t hurt any of us. I will explain what happened when you feel better, okay?”

And Bob must’ve felt like absolute shit because for the first time since Ava met him, he didn’t argue. He didn’t insist that he needed to know right away, didn’t press them for every detail. He just nodded and lowered his trembling hands into his lap, revealing his pale, flushed cheeks. It must have taken a lot out of his body to repair the amount of damage he’d done.

“Do you need anything, Bob?” Ava sat on the edge of his bed, glanced between him and the readings of his vitals. Aside from an accelerated heart rate, everything looked okay. “Some crackers, or…?”

“Iwanmazyns,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

Bob cleared his throat before he tried again, just barely louder than before. “I want my— my Zyns. Can I— Can I have my Zyns?”

Because that would help with his nausea. On literally any other day, Ava would have discouraged his habit. That day, she just nodded and asked where they were. When he answered, she went into the bathroom and found the pants he’d discarded the day before, still seeped in blood, a tin of Zyns in the back pocket.

He took the tin without hesitation, but his hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t open it. Yelena reached over to take it from him, probably intending to take out a pouch for him herself, but Bob yanked his arm back when she tried. He tucked the tin out of her reach and continued to fumble with it at his side.

“I know you don’t like needing help,” Yelena started carefully, “but all I want to do right now is help you. Please let me help you.”

“No, I don’t— no. You can’t— no.”

Bob squeezed the tin in his palm and, based on how disjointed his speech was, Ava wondered whether there was a mental barrier that made it feel impossible to accept help. Except he accepted help already, hadn’t he? He let Yelena hold his hair and rub his back while he heaved but he drew the line at the Zyns? It didn’t make any sense but, at the same time, Bob hadn’t been making much sense recently. It was no surprise it got worse after almost a day of sedation.

After another thirty seconds of struggling against his tremors, Bob managed to pop open the tin. He pulled out his Zyn in a second, then clicked the tin shut again and shoved it somewhere under the blanket. Part of Ava expected Bob to throw up again the second the nicotine hit his lip but instead, he actually seemed to relax a little. She would never understand drugs.

“Bob, I’m going to check you over, okay?” Ava stood up and walked around the bed to Bob’s left side, her gaze on his forearm. “Just your vitals and everything. You were injured pretty badly yesterday and I’d like to make sure you’re all right, if that’s okay with you.”

He nodded. “Was— There was— There was a fight?”

“No, no fight. You just had a really hard day. Yelena will explain it to you later.”

Ava had never looked at Bob’s arm. Not really. Not well enough to know, when she pushed up the sleeve of his robe, whether his cuts from the night before had scarred him. The entire inside of his forearm was covered in lines at various degrees of fading. They were too uniform to be accidents, too clean to belong to his car accident, and it hit her hard that it wasn’t the first time Bob had done something like that.

“That one’s new,” said Bob, his voice soft as he pointed to a line near his elbow. His eyes were only half open, his head leaned against Yelena’s shoulder. He tapped another line on the outer edge of his arm and then one an inch down from his palm. “And those two. That’s what you were looking for?”

“Yeah.” Ava forced a smile, trying to reassure Bob before he panicked again. Except he didn’t seem anxious at all, just calm. “It looks like they healed well so that’s good.”

“This was last night?”

“Late afternoon,” Yelena told him. “You haven’t been asleep for a full day.”

“Okay.” Bob sniffed as Ava popped the monitors off his arms and moved to the ones on his chest. He pointed at his desk, seemingly unfazed by his new scars. “You guys were studying?”

“We were hoping to surprise you with our grammar knowledge when you woke up,” said Ava.

“And?”

“I still don’t know when to use a semicolon.”

The tiny curl of Bob’s lips was the closest they got to a smile before he fell asleep again—that time without the help of a sedative.

Whatever happened was what he needed.

Bob had no memory of what he did, no memory of apparently slicing his wrist. All he knew were the snippets Ava and Yelena had given him so far and the three new scars on the inside of his arm. But it didn’t matter what happened, not really. What mattered was that when Bob woke up, he knew it was over. He knew that weird thing happened where he went to sleep and just fucking crashed.

He woke up and rather than feeling restless, he felt like he had no energy to move at all. He saw the study materials on his desk and rather than think he was a genius god who could do without them, he thought he was a fucking failure who should stop trying to fix his past.

They wouldn’t leave him alone for the rest of the day and it distracted him just enough to keep his thoughts from drifting. But eventually, he made them all leave him and go to sleep. Yelena was the most insistent, tried to get him to let her stay like a sleepover, but he refused. She needed good sleep in a real bed, and he needed time to be alone and process.

Except once he was alone, everything felt a million times worse. Bob was barely bothered by the scars when Ava and Yelena were there but then, alone, all he could see were those lines burned into his skin. And the worst part was that it didn’t bother him that they were there, that they were a reminder; it bothered him that they were evidence that he’d gotten so close to ridding the world of his presence and he failed once again.

Disturbed by his own line of thinking, Bob shook himself off and determined that he needed something to calm himself down. The rational side of him said that it was just a bad day, that eventually he would feel better. He just needed to make it to that time and the longer he laid there, unmoving, alone with his self-deprecating thoughts, the harder it became and the more he craved his blade.

Bob already knew that his razor and his pocketknife and all his other sharp objects were taken away. The others hadn’t told him, but he’d subtly checked, realized they’d basically put him on suicide watch. But there was still one thing that they didn’t know about. One thing that had seen him through all the shittiest times of his life: morphine.

He popped open his tin of Zyns after another obnoxious fucking ordeal with his tremors. Inside were not just a handful of nicotine pouches but twenty-eight more white round tablets. Bob pulled out three without thinking, without giving a shit about what he was doing to himself and his progress. It didn’t matter anyway.

Nothing mattered.

And the morphine made him feel better about the fact that nothing mattered so therefore it wasn’t all bad. Once again, his logical side realized that it was all bad, that the relief it brought him was only temporary, but he didn’t care. He just didn’t care because he felt so unbelievably hopeless that even the most fleeting moment of peace was worth making everything else worse.

“Hey.” Bob looked up when the door opened around an hour later and John walked into the room. “Sorry, I thought you would be asleep by now.”

“If you thought I would be asleep, why are you in here?” asked Bob, his tone less accusatory than he intended for it to be.

“Just wanted to check on you before bed. Your vitals and everything. You feeling all right?”

Oh, he felt all right. He wasn’t exactly happy, but he was better than just content. All the anxiety he’d felt after talking to Ava and Yelena had completely faded away, replaced by a vague sense of calm and drowsiness. Bob scratched the inside of his arm. The itching and the dizziness were the only parts of taking morphine he’d never liked. Well, those and the multiple times he’d overdosed.

“Yeah.” Bob wet his lips, blinked several times because it was unusually difficult to see John in the dim light. “Just a little nauseous still.”

“Hopefully that goes away after you sleep some more,” said John. He closed the door behind him and walked to Bob’s bedside. When he reached for Bob’s wrist to check his pulse, Bob complied. “Yelena told you we sedated you, right? That’s probably part of it. Had to do it twice and god knows that’s not fun to wake up from. And I’m sorry we had to do that, by the way. I know it’s kind of fucked to give you drugs but I did make sure they weren’t opioids.”

Bob had to choke back his snort. How considerate of John to avoid giving Bob opioids just for Bob to turn around and take them himself. “Thanks.”

“Ava said you guys were studying in here earlier?”

“Yeah, kind of.” He pretended it didn’t bother him when John ran his thumb over his fresh scars, reminded himself that John was just checking that they were healed and not judging him for his mangled skin. “They were working on the grammar and language section and I’m really good at that already, so I was mostly just lying here while they worked. I probably slept through half of it.”

“That’s good, though. You need to rest.” It was a weird role to see John in. It probably stemmed from his time in the military, Bob realized, the way he took care of his friends when they were injured. “That’s the last section for language arts, right? So, you’ll be taking the next test soon?”

“Mmhm.” It surprised him that John learned enough about the GEDs to know what the sections were, but he decided not to comment on it. “I mean, I could’ve taken this one without studying, you know? I worked my ass off learning all this stuff when I was a kid, way beyond what I needed to. And I’ve actually been such an ass about this whole section because of that. Can’t believe they still want to study with me.”

“Ava told me you thought you were stupid as a kid.”

“I don’t remember telling her that.”

John frowned. “You remember anything from yesterday?”

“Until around lunch, maybe. It gets fuzzy after that.” Bob shrugged and sniffed as he blinked back inexplicable tears. “I wasn’t stupid. I shouldn’t have used that language if I did, I just— I was really bad at reading and writing. I was so far behind everybody else. All the way through elementary school they kept trying to talk to my parents about getting me extra support but my parents, you know, they— they didn’t give a shit.”

“Extra support? In what way?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really remember, it was so long ago. I think I kind of— I had a habit of, uh, skipping lines. Reading the wrong lines. I still do that when paragraphs are really long. And I couldn’t connect sounds to letters. I wrote everything phonetically way too long because I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.”

There was a long, heavy moment of silence as John set his hand on Bob’s back and held it in place. Despite his discomfort, Bob took the hint and stayed quiet until John spoke again.

“Breathing slow. You tired?” That and on a moderately high dose of morphine. Bob nodded. “You ever get tested for dyslexia, Bob?”

“No.”

“Think that might be what your teachers wanted you to get support for?”

“I don’t—” It made sense, maybe, but he wasn’t in the mindset to really consider it. By that time in his life, he’d already put in so much work to overcome his struggles that it felt like it no longer mattered. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Something to consider.” John slid off the bed and stood up, a tired smile on his lips. “I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make at this point, but it might make you feel better about some things. Because you weren’t stupid, all right? If you were, you wouldn’t have been able to overcome it. We’ve all got shit in our brains we can’t control. That’s not your fault.”

“Yeah.” John started to walk toward the door, but Bob called him back. “Hey, can you grab that study guide off my desk for me real quick? My legs are asleep, and it helps me to read before bed.”

His legs weren’t asleep, he was just worried that if he stood up, he’d be so uncoordinated from the morphine that he’d fall the fuck over. Thankfully, John didn’t question it before he said, “Sure.”

Bob closed his eyes to yawn as John turned around. He expected John to hand him the book pretty much right away, but he didn’t. Instead, there was the sound of something sliding, then the quiet flicker of folding paper. Bob opened his eyes and felt a fresh, harsh wave of nausea attack him when he saw the paper in John’s hands.

The best thing he could do, he rationalized, was speak first. “Walker, that isn’t—”

“Why is this in the trash?” The look on John’s face was one of genuine concern. Bob curled his fingers into fists as he looked away. “You went to the crisis center?”

“Bucky made me. It’s none of your business.”

“It is my business because you had a psychotic episode, threw this in the trash, and then a couple weeks later you tried to fucking kill yourself. You need to follow up on this, Bob.”

“No, I don’t. You’re making me sound like I’m crazy. I’m not fucking crazy.” He wasn’t his mom. He was not his mom. “It wasn’t a psychotic episode; it was a panic attack. You, of all people, should understand panic attacks.”

“Don’t throw my PTSD in my face,” John snapped. “It says right fucking here that you were in psychosis. I know about your hallucinations and your delusions and shit. We all do. I’m not judging you; I’m trying to get you help.”

“I don’t need help. I’m not crazy.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“What?”

“That you’re not crazy.” He continued fast, before Bob could even snap at him again that he wasn’t. Though in Bob’s defense, as much as the morphine heightened his mood, it dampened his reflexes. “I know you’re not crazy. None of us have ever called you crazy but you always say you’re not crazy. Those words exactly. Why? What is that? Where is that coming from?”

His dad shouting at his mom that she was fucking crazy when she had an episode. His dad slamming him into the wall mid-panic attack as he screamed that Bob was crazy just like her too. His peers’ parents talking about how it was a shame he came out crazy like his mother when they thought he couldn’t hear. His dealers hesitating to sell to him and asking if he was already tripping because he was acting “so damn crazy.”

“I don’t know,” said Bob weakly. “Why does it matter?”

“Because I think, more than you’re stubborn, you’re goddamn scared. I just don’t understand why.”

Because Bob didn’t talk about his mom. He didn’t talk about her mental illness. Nobody knew about that except Valentina and if he could erase her memory of it, he would.

“And you never will because you’re an asshole and nobody wants to confide in you.”

John’s expression faltered for just a second before he asked, “What did you take?”

“What?”

“I’m not fucking stupid, Bob. I can tell that you’re high. What did you take?”

“Get out.”

“Bob—”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“Bob—”

“No. No, I’m so fucking sick of you all asking if I’m high every time I do something or say something you don’t think is acceptable. I’m not fucking high.”

He was angry enough that it almost sounded believable. Like he really hadn’t already taken more morphine than was safe. But he was the Sentry, and it was less than he’d taken at the height of his addiction so how much could it really hurt him?

“You already took all my knives and shit so I can’t hurt myself, okay?” He said it like it mattered. Like the world wouldn’t be better off without him. “And I won’t do anything anyway; I just want to be alone so I can sleep. I need to rest, and I can’t rest when I have an asshole yelling at me about shit he doesn’t understand. Don’t take that note and don’t fucking tell anybody or I’ll break your stupid-ass taco shield in half.”

Bob didn’t know when exactly he crossed the line into too far. Just that John did not say a single word before he set Bob’s study guide on the mattress beside him—his doctor’s referral tucked into the pages—and left without looking back. It didn’t take a full minute for the anger in Bob’s chest to fold into anxiety, for his seething breaths to be swallowed by sobs.

Yelena was hesitant to ask Bob whether he wanted to take the second test. If they were on any other section, she probably wouldn’t have. But because it was language arts, because it was his passion and his strong suit, her and Ava talked and decided that it would be okay if they extended him the invitation.

They gave it a week after Bob’s attempt. They needed time to study and let him recover before they even considered scheduling their tests. Then, when they decided to, they planned to schedule them for another week out to do more review and make sure Bob was mentally ready.

In theory, it seemed like a solid plan. Then they met Bob in the kitchen one morning and Yelena asked Bob if he felt prepared and he was just a little too quick to say yes. Ava must have sensed his anxiety the same as Yelena because she said that if it was too stressful, they could put the whole thing on pause, and Bob snapped.

“I’m not weak,” he started, his hands shaking as he leaned back against the kitchen counter. Bob had been almost twitchy ever since his attempt, but Yelena hadn’t been able to figure out why. “I’m fucking thirty years old. I can take a test without freaking out.”

“We know that,” said Ava, still seated at the island with her hands around a mug of coffee. “We’re not attacking you, Bob, we’re just asking. We’re giving you options. We trust you to make your own decisions.”

“Yes, and we don’t think you’re weak,” Yelena added. She squeezed Bob’s upper arm reassuringly, instantly felt the way he was shaking. “We’re just worried about you.”

“Why? I’m fine. All I do is read, Yelena, I don’t need to study for this one.”

“I’m not talking about studying, I’m talking about the fact you tried to kill yourself.”

Bob’s expression twisted and guilt pounded in Yelena’s chest. She shouldn’t have been so blunt. Bob swallowed hard and shook his head, rubbed the bridge of his nose in that way he always did when he was anxious. “I didn’t try to kill myself.”

The point he was trying to make was unclear. They had found him on the floor of his shower, covered in blood from self-inflicted wounds, rambling about how he thought it was okay for them to let him die. There was literally no other way to interpret his actions. At least not until Bob made a face and continued without prompting.

“I lied to you, okay? I fucking— I lied. I lied.” Bob’s tone was an aggressive cross between guilt and irritation. Yelena couldn’t even guess what it was he lied about. “I told you that when I was nineteen, they diagnosed me with agoraphobia but they also— I have two. Two anxiety disorders. I just— I don’t like to talk about the other one.”

Yelena glanced back at Ava who, to her knowledge, hadn’t even known about Bob’s agoraphobia diagnosis. “What is it?”

“Panic disorder.” It wasn’t surprising in the least, but it didn’t make it easier to hear. “Since I was like twelve, I’ve had these really intense panic attacks that just come out of nowhere and sometimes I can’t ground myself so I just…”

“You cut yourself,” she finished for him. One pressing question overshadowed her broken heart. “Did you remember what happened?”

“No, I just— I can tell. From where the scars are. I can tell.” Bob clicked his jaw and rubbed his cheek anxiously. “If I was trying to kill myself, I would’ve gone more central. I can see from the scars that I went around the vein, so I think I was just trying to calm down. It’s happened before. I just spiral, you know? I just go too far.”

It was supposed to reassure her but, in a way, it worried her more. Suddenly, all Yelena could think about was whether the test might be too much. Whether something might trigger him and cause him to have a panic attack away from home. That thought made the panic disorder click even harder. Hand-in-hand with Bob’s agoraphobia, it explained a lot.

“Can I give you a hug?”

Bob nodded and wrapped his arms around her the second she tackled him. He was slouched so far down against the counter that they were close to eye-level, just right for an embrace. It was amazing how Bob had had such an awful life and how he could be in such an awful mood and still give such warm, comforting hugs.

It would be a lie to say Yelena wasn’t anxious when they scheduled their tests later that morning. A lie to say she wasn’t worried about how much Bob was twitching. But supporting Bob meant trusting him to know his own limits. If he said he was okay and he was ready for the next test, she had to trust he was telling the truth—even when her gut said otherwise.

Chapter Text

“What’s all this about?”

Ava went into the kitchen with the intention of making herself a quick, easy breakfast. She did not expect to walk in and find that the counter was already lined with a feast of warm breakfast foods. Some looked cleaner and more appetizing than others—it was clear when John took over from Alexei, to say the least—but the whole room smelled fantastic.

“I made breakfast!” Alexei announced, despite the fact that it was John standing at the stove. He gestured toward the plates set out along the countertop, then shrunk his hands to focus on a singular corner of it. “All right, I made these. Mr. Walker helped me with the rest.”

“Wasn’t going to,” started John, his eyes never leaving his bacon, “but he damn near destroyed the toaster. If I have to DoorDash another, I’m going to lose my shit. We’re in the double digits now.”

“How was I supposed to know you do not put cheese in the toaster?”

“General rule of thumb is if something starts smoking, you turn it off.”

Though some days it annoyed her, that morning it was nice to hear the goofy banter of her teammates. It’d been two weeks since they’d found Bob in the bathroom; two weeks since the whole atmosphere of the tower changed. What exactly changed wasn’t easy for Ava to pinpoint but it was like there was a layer of anxiety and tenseness that held them all in a chokehold. Like they were walking on eggshells even though there was no reason to.

(Because as far as they could tell, what Bob did had nothing to do with them. It was just something in his own head that snapped, something that would have done regardless of what they said to him. Plus, Bob had barely been around; he just isolated himself in his room and spoke to no one unless they deliberately went in there to keep him company. And it was hard to find an excuse he would accept when he had no interest in—or perhaps no motivation to—study language arts with them.)

Ava quickly thanked both John and Alexei for their thoughtfulness and effort before she made herself a plate that was far too small for the grandiosity of the meal. Even though she felt confident that she understood everything they’d studied, she still had a nervous pit in the middle of her stomach. Maybe it was just because she’d never taken tests as a kid. Not school tests, at least. It was low-risk pressure but a new sense of pressure all the same.

Not long after Ava began to eat, Yelena entered the room and joined in the banter. She got on Alexei’s case for trying and failing to make something he’d apparently failed at a hundred times before; told John in a sarcastic tone that it was “cute” how he claimed he didn’t care and yet cooked breakfast for everyone without hesitation. Yelena plated a meal for herself and sat down beside Ava, picked at her eggs just a little more anxiously than Ava did.

“Do you feel ready for the test?” asked Yelena.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” Ava shrugged and twisted her fingers around her braid. “I mean, I feel more confident than I did about the math so that’s something.”

“Me too, I think. It feels a little easier since we’ve done it before once. But I do worry about the metaphors. Some of those just do not make sense to me. I blame English. It is a stupid language.”

“It really is. You can tell that it’s just—”

“So this is where everyone is at.”

Ava was cut off by two sets of high heels approaching at a fast pace. Valentina strode into the kitchen and made a face at the breakfast assortment, Mel just a few feet behind her with her iPad in hand. Mel glanced at the team, her expression blank aside from a trace of anxiety. Valentina plastered one of those trademark fake smiles on her face as she looked between the four in the kitchen and then at Bucky on his phone by the window, malice in her eyes.

“We’re having a little feast in here this morning, I see.” She gestured to the counter like it was something stupid, like they were children proud of a half-baked Easy Bake cake. “Is that what you’re spending all my money on? Extravagant breakfasts? You can just DoorDash that stuff, you know. It’s much easier than doing all that work.”

“Cut the shit, Val.” John glared at Valentina, did not flinch at the way her gaze narrowed to match his. He turned the stove off and crossed his arms. “What do you want now?”

She forced a laugh. “Didn’t you just hear me? I want to know about my money. Because I very generously gave you two credit cards to use, didn’t I? Buy anything you want with the stipulation that I know everything I’m paying for. I thought that was more than fair but apparently somebody decided to buy something they didn’t want me to know about. Is that right? Was it one of you?”

The fact that literally none of them responded either meant none of them knew what she was talking about or none of them would confess to it. Ava was the former. She hadn’t used the credit cards lately at all, aside from ordering a few things on her phone. Usually, Bucky had one of the credit cards and Yelena had the other. Everyone else had to ask to use one. Not because they weren’t trusted but because it made sure that they were safe in one place rather than being constantly passed around.

“Okay, don’t answer. That’s fine. Mel?” Valentina’s assistant perked her head up the second her name was spoken. “How much money was taken out, exactly?”

Mel tapped a few places on her screen. “Twenty-four hundred dollars.”

“And that was in cash, so I have no idea what it was spent on. Not to mention when it was taken out of the ATM. When was that, Mel?”

“Two forty-seven A.M. on the twelfth. So, not last Wednesday but the Wednesday before that.”

Ava couldn’t even remember what she’d done that day. Studied, maybe? That was just a couple days after Bob’s attempt—not attempt, according to him—and they pretty much hadn’t left him alone, so she was probably in his room studying with Yelena while they kept him company. She glanced around the kitchen, confused as to who would have left the Watchtower to take out money at almost three in the morning. What the hell was so urgent and why did they need cash?

She didn’t have to think hard before she circled back to Bob. Bob, who was doing so poorly he sliced his wrist open. Bob, who told them repeatedly to let him die. Bob, who spent almost two decades using. Bob, who John was fairly certain he’d brought home high.

When Ava lifted her gaze, she almost immediately met John’s. He raised his brows at her, and she shrugged weakly. She didn’t know what to say. If Bob wasn’t using, she’d feel horrible to accuse him of it. If he was, she wanted to help him, but it was clear Valentina was there to demonize, not understand. Yelena nudged Ava, trying to ask what the look was she shared with John, but Ava didn’t answer. Not in front of Valentina.

“Oh, and I’m going to find out, by the way. This visit is a courtesy.” Ava wanted to punch the smile right off Valentina’s face. If she weren’t financing the whole thing, one of them would have thrown her out a window a long time ago. “I already know whoever did it corrupted the security footage from that night, so I have my people ready to go in a second. If you don’t tell me what you’re hiding from me, I’ll have them rip this building apart. No more secrets.”

“What’s going on?”

Ava wanted to grab Bob and throw him out of the room. She wanted to take him back to the elevator and walk him somewhere safe and tell him that he was fine and they weren’t mad at him and they didn’t judge him no matter what he’d done. But she couldn’t, not without giving it all away. So, she just sat there as he glanced around the room, his eyes tired and confused. He looked pale but marginally better; dressed cleanly for the first time in weeks.

“Why don’t you tell me, Robert?” asked Val. She pointed at the others. “Because all these guys don’t seem to know what the hell I’m talking about so it’s giving me a sneaking suspicion that you’re the person I’m looking for. Am I right?”

Bob blinked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It would be Ava who suggested postponing the test until later and Bob who refused; and it was nothing short of a miracle that she still managed to pass after everything that went preceded it.

Bob slept on and off throughout the night, but it couldn’t have totaled to much. He was still exhausted when he woke up. More exhausted than when he’d gone to sleep, even. It was irritating, trying to sleep and waking up over and over for reasons he couldn’t even remember.

He had at least two brief nightmares. He remembered that. But mostly, it was just his stupid anxiety that kept flaring up for absolutely no reason and making him freak out about things that didn’t matter. Bob was so fucking anxious about everything and anything that he went so far as to freak out about the language arts test. The logic that he barely studied kind of made sense, but he barely studied because he knew it so well. He was more than capable of passing and somehow, he no longer believed that he could.

So, some time around six in the morning, Bob popped open his tin of not-actually-Zyns and took just a small dose of morphine. Just enough to help calm his anxiety and make him drowsy enough to drift off to sleep. And when he woke up four hours later, he took a dose three times as large because all the anxiety was back for no reason and he wanted to throw himself out the window and he needed that feeling to go away. It was easy to justify his drug use with the thought that he couldn’t take the test while he felt suicidal.

(Of course, it probably wasn’t a great idea to take the test high either, but he was honestly far more comfortable being high than he was being suicidal. Especially since he now had people who gave a shit if he died for some reason he’d never understand.)

Bob waited long enough for the morphine to kick in before he left his room, not least because he didn’t have the energy to stand up without it. He didn’t convince himself to take a shower, but he washed his face, brushed his teeth, even put on an outfit worthy of leaving the house in. He almost felt okay. Almost. And then he stepped out of the elevator into the kitchen, saw Valentina and Mel, and his heart dropped into his stomach.

“What’s going on?”

Everyone stopped and turned to look at Bob, question marks in their eyes. He swallowed hard and laced his fingers together in front of him. It was hard to read the expressions on everyone’s faces, to understand why exactly they all stared at him the way that they did.

“Why don’t you tell me, Robert?” asked Val. She used her left arm to point at the others, a condescending smile on her face. “Because all these guys don’t seem to know what the hell I’m talking about so it’s giving me a sneaking suspicion that you’re the person I’m looking for. Am I right?”

Truthfully, he’d done so many things wrong that he didn’t know which one she was referring to. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about twenty-four hundred dollars, Robert. Somebody took twenty-four hundred dollars in cash out of my bank account in the middle of the night two weeks ago. I could not figure out what on earth you idiots were thinking but then it hit me: you’re an addict.”

His heart started pounding. It wasn’t an intervention, but it felt like an intervention, and he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want anyone to tell him he was wrong for finding solace in the only thing that took away his pain. Nobody had ever been there for him as reliably as drugs were. Nothing had ever stabilized him or soothed him the way that they did (even though they also made it worse, so much worse).

“I’m clean,” said Bob, like he hadn’t taken morphine less than an hour earlier. Like he hadn’t taken a dosage higher than his body was used to and he wasn’t sick to his stomach. Like his pupils weren’t tiny, like he couldn’t tell because the sun seemed so bright. “You really think that I—”

Then it hit him why they were all staring at him: because they all believed it was him. They all believed that he took the money and bought drugs with it. Somehow, it hurt more that they immediately believed he’d break his sobriety than that they were right. It hurt more that they didn’t trust him at all than it did that he’d fucked up the best chance at a new start he’d ever gotten.

Bob’s eyes shimmered gold as he walked up to Valentina, as he stared down into her cold, bitter eyes. She just barely flinched beneath him, just enough to make him feel satisfied. Valentina opened her mouth to say something, one hand gestured toward Mel, but Bob spoke first.

“Get the fuck out.”

“Robert—”

He didn’t think about it before he put his arm around her throat. He didn’t care when he grabbed her and dragged her to the elevator as Mel hurried behind them. He didn’t listen to the threat she made as she walked into the elevator, Mel at her side, and left him with one last glare. He didn’t feel anything when the doors closed and they disappeared, at least temporarily.

And then he turned around and saw the looks on his friends’ faces. Shocked by his actions, horrified at his complete lack of control. He let his gaze drift between each of them, at the emotions written on their faces, and the fear in Yelena’s eyes specifically made him stop and realize who he was.

His father, with his anger and physical rage.

His mother, with her instability and her lies.

There was something about the idea of being not just one of his parents but both of them that made him physically sick. Or maybe it was just because he’d taken a higher dose of morphine than his body was used to and it made him dizzy and tired. Either way, he felt nauseous. He felt frozen. He had an urge to leave, to never come back, to rid the team of the burden of his existence. He was half a second from bolting down the stairs when Bucky spoke.

“Bob, we need to talk.”

He thought about it before he replied. Considered the way the whole team was gathered around the table; how Valentina had aired his business to all of them; how John had already called him out for using once. Bob wet his lips and blinked several times before he said simply,

“No.”

Bucky made a face. “No what?”

“I’m not doing this.” Bob shrugged, tried to keep his gaze on Bucky so he couldn’t see how the others all felt. “I’m not sitting through an intervention.”

“It’s not an intervention,” John started, but the way he looked at Bucky said it was. The way they ganged up on him said it was. “We just want to talk.”

“No. I’m not high. I’m not fucking high.”

“Nobody accused you of being high,” said Yelena, even though Valentina literally just had. Maybe she didn’t say the word ‘high’ but she accused him of buying so she accused him of using. Not to mention the way they all stared at him like they knew exactly what he took and how much. “We are just trying to understand the situation. Did you leave the tower in the middle of the night to get that money?”

Bob felt like he was in an interrogation room, listening to cops scream at him for a confession when they knew damn well that he was a thief. He felt like he was in a hospital bed, sobbing as he tried to convince the nurses that he wasn’t crazy. He felt like he was on his childhood porch, failing to convince his dad he wasn’t high because he was fifteen and even with the abuse, he was terrified of being homeless.

“So, you just don’t trust me, then?” Bob posed the question impulsively. He was projecting his depression on them, and he didn’t even care. “All this— This has all just been a fucking lie, right? I’m not your friend, I’m just a weapon, right? You’re just babysitting me.”

“We are your friends,” said Ava, her tone genuinely hurt. “We’re not mad at you, Bob. We’re worried about you.”

“Worried I’m going to get high and lose control and destroy Manhattan?”

Yelena’s expression was too sad, her voice too soft when she said, “We’re worried about you because we love you.”

He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t. Nobody loved him. Nobody ever loved him. From the day he was born, he was fundamentally unlovable, and he’d done nothing to change that.

“This is a really bad intervention.” They looked at him like he was fucking insane. Or maybe they were just confused and his feelings about everything were amplified times a thousand because his depression was somehow still more powerful than the drugs. “You’re supposed to cry and tell me how I’m hurting you and how I’m ruining your lives.”

“It’s not the time for that, Bob,” Bucky told him. “This isn’t an intervention.”

“But it is true. I am ruining your lives.”

“We’re just trying to understand you,” said Yelena.

An impossible task. Everyone from his parents to the cops to the doctors had tried. Bob didn’t even understand himself. “Well, stop. Just stop. Just be mad at me.”

“What?”

“I want you to be mad at me. Stop acting so calm and just— just yell at me.”

“Bob—”

There was a vase filled with flowers on the small table beside the elevator. Bob used his powers to shatter it against the wall, didn’t flinch when he realized that his hands were fading to black from his fingertips past his knuckles. The rest of the team just kept watching him. Yelena stood up, approached him slowly, but she didn’t yell so he tried again.

Bob used his hands the second time, thought it might be more frightening. He grabbed the table itself and smashed it against the floor. It shattered into two shards of metal and a million tiny glass pieces; each reflecting Bob’s tears of frustration as he grabbed a painting off the wall, snapped the frame, and ripped the canvas in half.

“Why aren’t you mad?” He punched the wall the way he used to when he was ten and he was angry; the way that made his father throw him down the stairs as he screamed at Bob for being out of control. “Yell at me. Yell at me.”

He punched the wall a second time, stopped before he went for a third. Because Yelena’s arms wrapped around his waist, careful not to make skin-to-skin contact as she leaned the side of her head against his back. His chest hurt so badly that he couldn’t breathe, each attempt a shallow and painful wheeze.

A sharp hiccup punctuated his words as he asked again, hoarse and desperate, “Why aren’t you mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

Bob opened his mouth but found he didn’t have an answer beyond such a strong feeling that she should have been. Because he basically stole money? Because he spent it on drugs? Because he was high? Because he was having a tantrum like a child because he wanted to be yelled at? Because he was deliberately trying to scare them the way that his dad scared him?

He shrugged off Yelena and ran down the stairs faster than he could be followed or caught. There were some things his powers were good for, even though he couldn’t always control or even tell when he used them. Bob gasped for air as he pushed his way out the Watchtower’s back door, dropped his hands on his knees, and lost it.

In all honesty, it was probably the morphine that did him in. He craved a dose as high as he used when he was years deep into his addiction and, even though he knew he shouldn’t take that much, he did. He decided that since he was the Sentry, it would be fine. And maybe it was, maybe half of what he was feeling was just anxiety and placebo. But he was still dizzy and nauseous and couldn’t properly breathe.

Bob leaned one arm against the wall as he emptied his stomach of nothing but water and drugs. His chest burned as he heaved, his eyes stinging with unspent tears.

What the Thunderbolts still didn’t seem to get was that that was who Bob was. He wasn’t the Sentry saving the world or the Void destroying it. He was just Bob, the guy who got too high and threw up in dark alleys.

Just Bob, who would always be alone.

Just Bob, who was a failure at everything.

Just Bob, who somehow got a perfect score on his language arts test while he was high, depressed, and so sick he almost forfeited his results to throw up twice.

She found him in the alley.

Bob had his left palm pressed on the wall to support himself as he leaned over a clear puddle; drool, sweat, and tears stuck to his face. It confirmed to Yelena that she was right. If Bob was anxious enough to make himself sick, he wasn’t really mad. He was just testing them. He wanted to see if he could push them away and he failed. It didn’t matter what he did, what he said, how he scared them or hurt them, they wouldn’t leave him.

(To a maddening degree—Yelena actually had to argue with them all to let her go alone. She insisted she could handle the Void if it came out, helped them understand that too many people would just make him feel worse.)

Yelena tucked herself under Bob’s right arm and helped him walk back inside the building. They sat on the couch nearest to the door, nothing but the empty lobby surrounding them. Bob said nothing. Not when they moved, not when they sat down, not when Yelena covered her hand with her sleeve and set her palm on the back of his.

“Are you okay?”

She already knew the answer. Bob was pale and trembling, his eyes bloodshot and his cheeks flushed pink. He nodded as he wiped the drool from his chin with his opposite sleeve and stared at the tile beneath their feet. His movements were sluggish, his pupils unnaturally small. Yelena squeezed his hand.

“Bob, I want to help you, okay? But I need you to be honest with me.” Bob sniffed but didn’t speak, didn’t look at her, didn’t respond. “Are you using drugs?”

He hesitated just too long for her to believe it when he answered, “No.”

“I promise that if you were, I wouldn’t be mad. Okay? I just want to help.”

“I’m not.”

“What was the money for?” It didn’t surprise her that he didn’t answer. That instead, he just sniffed and turned his head the other way. “Okay. Listen, Bob, you’re my best friend, and I love you, but you scare me so bad sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob breathed. “I’m just like my dad.”

Though she would never say it to his face, it could be extremely frustrating talking to Bob at times. However his brain worked, he had a habit of deeply misunderstanding what Yelena said and refusing to change his perspective on it. Maybe it had something to do with his delusions or his paranoia, she didn’t know. She just knew that sometimes she would say things and, just like that, he would jump to an extreme she never even would have considered.

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Yelena chose her words carefully, tried to craft them in a way Bob couldn’t dispute. Language was an art, she reminded herself. She hadn’t studied for nothing. “I’m not scared of you; I’m scared for you. I’m scared because I really want to help you, but I don’t know how and you won’t tell me. You won’t even let me try. And I’m so, so scared something really bad will happen and I’ll lose you. I don’t want to lose you.”

Bob stared at their overlapped hands, as the tips of his finger still fading to black. His voice was thick when he admitted, “I don’t know what you can do. I don’t know if you can do anything. I was always—” He stopped to sniff, rub the bridge of his nose. “I was always on meth when I saw doctors, you know? And they can’t diagnose you when you’re using because they can’t tell the symptoms apart, so I don’t— I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Yelena, I don’t know. I don’t even know what was wrong with my mom.”

“Hey…”

“I don’t want to be like this but I am. It’s just who I am. I tried to tell you in the vault, remember? I told you about my episodes. This is one of my episodes. I’m sorry it’s really intense but sometimes they’re really intense. And if it’s too much for you guys, I get it, you know? I get it. I don’t— I don’t want to be around me either. You guys don’t have to keep me here. I’m sure there’s somewhere else Valentina can—”

“Stop, Bob. Stop. No.” Yelena moved her hand up to his shoulder and he glanced at her just long enough for her to see the tears in his eyes before he turned away. “We don’t want to get rid of you, we want to help you. We want to learn with you. Whatever it is that you have and whatever you’re dealing with, we want to support you. We want to get you whatever help you need.”

There was a painfully long moment of silence before Bob whispered, “Sometimes I wish you would just give up on me like everybody else.”

Yelena wanted to tell him that she never would, that she loved him more than anyone ever had, that he never had to be afraid that she would leave him. But she didn’t find the words before the elevator opened. Ava looked a little guilty when she stepped out, arms crossed against her chest, like she knew she’d interrupted an important moment. She walked over to them and hesitated before she spoke.

“Bad timing, I know,” Ava started, “but I need to let the testing center know if we’re not coming.”

Bob responded before Yelena had the chance to consider it. “No, we can— you should go. It’s fine.”

You should go. Yelena couldn’t tell whether Bob meant that he didn’t feel up to it or if he was trying to get them to leave him behind. Her instinct was to say it was both, but Bob had already tried so aggressively to push them away that she actually leaned more toward the latter. She gave his arm another reassuring squeeze, tried her best to catch his downcast gaze.

“This whole thing was your idea, Bob.” She glanced at Ava, got her nonverbal permission to proceed. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t go either.”

“But I didn’t even—” Bob took a deep, frustrated breath and rubbed the skin beneath his eyes. He looked at Ava, then Yelena, then back to the floor. “Okay. We should go.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel like—”

Bob stood up abruptly. “No, you guys worked really hard on this. Let’s go. I just need to wash my face first.”

When Bob came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Yelena looped her arm around his and didn’t let go until they got to the testing center. It was strange the way her anxiety around the test had all but disappeared. She was still a little nervous, maybe, but overall, it felt hard to even see the test as important until she was actually at the computer answering questions.

Even then, she found she kept glancing over at Bob. Half the times she did, he had his face in his hands. He was so good at language arts that she knew it meant he wasn’t frustrated, he was nauseous. Given his skill, it felt unlikely he would’ve been sick with anxiety over the test so it must have been about something else. Or caused by something else he wouldn’t confess to.

Yelena forced herself to pay attention to her test when Bob finished and left the room, but she couldn’t relax until Ava followed him. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving him on his own, not knowing if he would wait for them or if he would run away.

Unfortunately, shortly after Ava and Bob both left, Yelena hit the most difficult section for her—word usage and sentence structure. She had no visual support to boost her, no idea if her friends were even waiting for her in the lobby. She hoped they were, imagined they were, but she wasn’t confident until she shakily pushed through the questions about metaphors and similes and made it outside to meet them.

She let out a breath of relief when she found that Bob and Ava were waiting for her. They were seated side-by-side, Bob’s face hidden behind his left hand and Ava’s arm around his shoulders. Yelena knelt in front of them, set one hand on Bob’s knee, and asked, “You okay?”

“He was in the bathroom throwing up when I came out,” said Ava quietly. “He told me he got sick, but he hasn’t talked since.”

“Bob? What happened? Are you anxious?”

A long, harsh moment of silence held between them before Bob answered in a low, cracked voice, “No, I’m fucking high.”

And Yelena meant every word that she said. She wasn’t mad, she wasn’t disappointed, she didn’t judge him for his actions. She just reached her arms out, invited him into a hug that he accepted with a sharp, shuddering inhale. She just held him close to her and pretended she wasn’t terrified, pretended it didn’t hurt like someone stabbed her in the heart.

She didn’t let go of him or leave his side for days. Not when he cried. Not when he lied. Not when he shouted. Not even to celebrate when the results came in and she learned that, against all odds, she’d somehow passed the second test.

Chapter Text

Bob never elaborated on what he admitted to.

He confessed that he relapsed, that he was high, that he was the one who took the money, but he wouldn’t say anything more. He wouldn’t say when he’d relapsed or what drug he was using or how much he’d bought. He wouldn’t even tell Yelena if he had more left; wouldn’t answer when she asked if he was high or still using.

In many ways, Bob’s silence was even more frustrating than his lies. She understood it, on some level. He no longer wanted to lie but he wasn’t ready to tell the truth, so he trapped himself in a limbo of doing neither. And Yelena was pretty sure that he was still using, that she’d seen him high throughout the week following the second test. She just couldn’t get him to open up to her about it.

When he walked into the common area after their agreed-upon week off from studying, it was the most he’d talked in days. His voice was slow and unenthusiastic as he spoke about the third topic—social studies. It was hard to tell whether Bob was disinterested because the first section was more “reading for meaning” or because he just didn’t care anymore. He answered every question Ava and Yelena asked but his tone never lifted, never showed a hint of excitement.

So, it wasn’t really a surprise that when they actually started working on that first section, Bob fell completely silent. He sat on the couch behind Ava and Yelena’s setup on the floor, contributed next to nothing to their conversation. Though he added a few words here and there at the beginning, it reached a point where they went something like twenty minutes without him speaking a word. Yelena didn’t want to force him to talk if he wasn’t up to it, but she worried about him isolating himself too. She opened her mouth to ask him a question about the vocabulary and then stopped when she turned around.

Bob was completely asleep.

Yelena sighed as she rose to her knees, just high enough to grab the blanket off the back of the couch. She draped it over Bob as Ava gave her a look, one brow raised. Yelena said nothing when she shrugged. She shifted back closer to Bob’s head and set one hand on his forehead. His bangs were a little greasy but not sweaty. His temperature wasn’t high, and his breathing and his heartbeat sounded normal.

It wasn’t something she ever did before he admitted to being high. Despite Bob’s distrust, Yelena never felt the need to check whether Bob may have overdosed. She never questioned whether a nap was just a nap or if his twitching was just anxiety. Her default was not to assume that Bob had done something wrong but to assume that he was trying his best to do things right. That only changed when he told her he wasn’t.

(And it wasn’t even that she thought he would intentionally overdose. It was just that, the whole day after he admitted to using and on several occasions before that, he kept throwing up. He kept complaining he was dizzy and nauseous and lightheaded. Bob still wouldn’t say what he was taking or how much, but she understood his symptoms enough to know that the dosage was more than his body could handle, even as the Sentry.)

“Is he all right?” asked Ava quietly.

Yelena nodded, her fingers lightly stroking Bob’s hair. “Just sleeping. What was the next question?”

They continued to study for a further hour, and Bob never woke, never stirred. He was still enough that Yelena was able to wipe off and repaint his chipped, pale blue nails without them getting smudged; still enough that Ava was able to brush his hair and weave a small braid into it without a tangle left behind. They started their study session in the late afternoon, and Bob did not wake up for dinner, did not wake up when Yelena checked on him before bed.

He just slept for hours on end and, even though it worried her, Yelena was so relieved that he finally got a few hours of uninterrupted rest that she never once tried to wake him.

“Oh, there you are.” Yelena popped out one of her earbuds when Ava spoke, her head tilted with curiosity. “I was just looking for you. I was going to ask if you wanted to get some studying in before we’re out all day at that thing, but you and Bob weren’t in your rooms.”

“I went for an early run,” said Yelena. She furrowed her sweaty brow. “Bob wasn’t in his room?”

Ava shook her head. She hadn’t looked for either of them extensively—they’d survive one day without studying anyway—but she was sure Bob was nowhere on that floor, at least. Ava and Yelena walked together to search his other usual places, including his chair and the kitchen, but they didn’t find him in either. Instead, they found him in the common area; asleep on the couch exactly where he had been the day before.

It probably would have freaked her out if John wasn’t already in the room with Bob, sitting on the opposite end of the long couch. He had his phone in his right hand, his left hand holding the top of Bob’s right foot. He didn’t seem to notice when Ava and Yelena walked in, too busy reading whatever was on his screen. When he finally looked up, his eyes seemed tired, his hair messy like he hadn’t brushed it since he’d gotten out of bed.

“Is he okay?” asked Yelena, and John just nodded. “How long has he been asleep?”

“Pretty much since yesterday. So, like, twenty hours?” John’s eyes followed Yelena as she walked toward Bob, stopped short of the couch. “He’s woken up a couple times, but he just groans and goes back to sleep again. Thought he might be sick but when I asked, he said he’s not, he just doesn’t want to wake up. I don’t think he can die—at least not like this—but to be completely honest, he’s crashing hard enough I’ve been holding his foot for an hour just to keep an eye on his pulse.”

“You can do that with his foot?”

“Mmhm.”

John didn’t elaborate but Ava remembered what he’d told her before—he had a Bachelor’s in kinesiology. She trusted him to know what he was talking about. If she had to choose anyone to keep an eye on Bob’s vitals, it probably would have been him. Not that she would ever say that to his face.

Normally, Ava hated to disturb Bob’s sleep. No one on the team had a regular sleep schedule but Bob’s was one of the worst. Depending on how he was feeling, it seemed like he either didn’t sleep at all or slept way too much. That day, knowing he’d been on the couch for almost a full day, she felt like it was okay to wake him. Ava knelt in front of Bob, placed her hand on his shoulder, and gently shook him until his eyes fluttered open.

“Hey.” Ava smiled when he looked at her, his gaze tired and unsteady. “Are you all right, Bob?”

“Mmhm.” Bob nodded against the pillow. “Tired.”

“Not sick at all?”

Of course, he interpreted her question at its most extreme. “I’m not high.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t believe me but I’m not. If I took what I wanted to then I wouldn’t feel like this.”

It was Yelena who asked, “Like what?”

“Like I wish I was fucking dead.”

It was next to impossible to find the right response to the admission. Ava herself had imagined death too many times to be foolish enough to ask again if he was okay. Plus, she knew Bob well, knew that he wouldn’t want to elaborate anyway. She dropped her hands into her lap and took a deep breath. Patience was key. Patience and the understanding that she had no understanding of what it was he was experiencing.

She kept her voice calm but not patronizing when she said, “Yelena and I were going to study. Would you like to join us? We’re going to work on the vocabulary section so you can flex all your knowledge if you’d like.”

“No, I hate words,” Bob grumbled. “I’m too fucking stupid for words.”

The reason Ava said it was because Bob was so smart. Because even the vocabulary he didn’t know, he remembered fast enough to remind Ava and Yelena when they forgot it. “What?”

“He made me take a test and it said I’m fucking stupid.”

“It didn’t say you’re stupid, Bob.” The frustration in John’s tone was palpable, like he’d already told Bob that exact thing a hundred times. He let out a long, slow exhale as he glanced over at Yelena and Ava and shook his head. “It was a dyslexia test. It said he’s probably dyslexic. It’s not a big deal. It’s not even anything official; it was just something I saw online.”

“It’s not a big deal to you because you’re not a fucking idiot.”

“Bobby—”

“No, stop. Stop arguing with me.” And that would be why John was frustrated—Bob wouldn’t listen to his logic. “I fucking hate taking tests because they always say I’m stupid or— or fucking crazy and then they try to tell me I’m not but is says right fucking there that I am.”

“You’re not stupid,” John snapped, any empathy swallowed by his temper. “Stop saying you’re stupid.”

“I got one forty-nine on the math test.” The tension in the air could have been cut with a knife. Truthfully, Ava was not upset that Bob lied so much as she was upset that he felt the need to. “Fucking four points off from failing completely. I don’t want to do the GEDs.”

Yelena’s tone, on the other hand, was nothing but empathetic. “Bob, we’ve already—”

“No. I don’t want to do them. I can’t. I don’t know what I was thinking, I don’t— you do them. I want you to do them, but I don’t want to do them. I just want to go back to sleep.” He shoved his face into the pillow and waved off Ava’s hand when she tried to touch his shoulder. “Just leave me alone. I don’t want to be awake anymore.”

Ava looped her arm around Yelena’s when she rose back to her feet and shot John a look. It was clear that Yelena wanted to stay at Bob’s side, but it wouldn’t help either of them. Ava had noticed how Yelena’s mental health seemed to drop along with Bob’s. She felt some kind of responsibility to him that was too much for her to carry; blamed herself for not knowing how to support him when he was going through an extreme, complex mental health episode.

It was better for them to stick to their plan and do a little studying, just the two of them. Bob seemed content to let John stay by his feet, so it wasn’t like he would be completely alone. It also didn’t sound like he was planning to get up or do anything any time soon. He was safe there on the couch and, as much as Yelena hated to be separated from him, Ava knew it was best for all of them to take a breather.

She detoured to her room to grab her study materials while Yelena jumped in the shower and changed out of her running clothes. It had been a while since the two of them had studied in Yelena’s room. It had been a while since the two of them did anything alone together, really. It was hard to pry Yelena away from Bob when he was struggling, and hard to relax in general when it seemed like everyone was constantly on edge.

When Yelena stepped out of her en suite, Ava was settled on her bed, her notebook spread in front of her. She barely looked up, expecting Yelena to just sit down, but she didn’t. She stayed in the doorway, watching Ava with a blank expression. A few seconds passed before she finally spoke.

“I don’t like studying without Bob,” said Yelena, and Ava pretended it didn’t hurt. She pretended it didn’t bother her that Yelena had basically dismissed some of the best nights of her life. “Do you think he’s really giving up?”

If Ava truly thought about it, the answer was yes and no. Yes, she thought that Bob was giving up. No, she didn’t think it was permanent. Bob had his highs and lows. It was inevitable that, at some point, he would loop back around to a high and get a sudden rush of motivation to finish. The question wasn’t if but when. And as much as she felt like a bitch to think it, Ava didn’t know if she had it in her to wait for him.

She never expected her life to be a long one. Every time they went on a mission, she did it with the mindset that it might be her last. Ava wanted to get her GED. She wanted to take the last two tests, to accomplish that for herself before anything happened to her. Still, she chose her words carefully, knowing that her feelings were complex and could hurt Yelena if communicated poorly.

“I don’t know,” Ava answered, “but he said he wants us to keep going so I think we should.”

That was all the convincing it took for Yelena to sit down. Their study session wasn’t nearly as fun or lighthearted as the ones that came before it, but it was something. They still learned, still helped each other and spent time together, and Ava decided that was good enough.

Yelena really wanted to get her GED. She did. Everything else aside, she put a lot of work into it. She gave up so many hours of precious free time to study things she never thought she’d learn. They were already halfway there, already finished with two of the tests and starting to study for the third.

But without Bob, all of it just felt wrong.

Having an occasional study session alone with Ava was different from Bob removing himself from the endeavor entirely. She loved studying with Ava, loved it even more when they stopped early and switched to just spending time together as friends, but knowing Bob wouldn’t join them again bothered her. It bothered her that the entire thing was his idea, that he’d walked away so quickly, that Ava was willing to let him give up without a fight.

So, half an hour before their next planned study session later that week, Yelena slipped into Bob’s bedroom. Because after he finally got off the couch, he isolated himself in his room. Yelena didn’t know what he was doing there most of the time, just that he kept locking his door and wouldn’t let anyone in. Thankfully, that afternoon, the door was open. But Yelena’s relief dissipated the second she saw the state of his room.

Bob was generally a very neat person. He had a way he liked his things, and he did not like it when people disrupted that. According to him, his mother used to regularly tear apart his room to the point where he gave up on keeping anything where he wanted it. So, as an adult, he wanted his belongings tidy. Everything had a place, and most of it was in its place, but it was surrounded by things that were not.

Laundry spilling out of the hamper on the floor. Towels piled on his desk chair. A dozen coffee mugs littering his table at different stages of rot. And in the middle of it all was Bob—or, rather, a distinctly Bob-shaped lump underneath the purple weighted blanket he’d brought home.

Yelena walked past Bob’s desk, took in the pile of unorganized and untouched study materials before she sat on the edge of his bed. Bob had his back turned to her, his hair just barely peeking out the top of the blanket. Yelena set her hand on his head, gently stroked his curls and worked a tangle out of them with her fingers. It was better not to speak right away, to allow them both to find a sense of comfort in the silence. Otherwise, the tension would linger and consume them.

“We’re going to study soon,” said Yelena, like Bob didn’t already know. Like they weren’t observing the schedule that he drew up in the first place. But maybe he didn’t know. He hadn’t left his room in so long, maybe he didn’t remember what day it was. “Do you want to come join us?”

“No, I don’t need to.” Bob’s voice was hoarse, probably because he’d barely spoken in days. “I quit. And even if I didn’t, I got a perfect score on reading for meaning on the last test, so I don’t— I don’t need to study that.”

“You got a perfect score on that? You must not be as stupid at words as you thought.” She said it with a smile, trying to reassure Bob, but he didn’t answer. Didn’t react at all. “You don’t have to study with us if you don’t want to. We would really like your company if you want to just hang out. Spend some time together.”

“No. I don’t want to get up.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He didn’t sound fine. He sounded like he was hovering on the verge of tears, like if he tried to elaborate at all he would crack. “I’m just cold. I don’t want to get up because I’m cold.”

That didn’t make sense. Bob was never cold. He’d told them the first day they met in the vault that he ran hot, and he’d never retracted that since. If anything, he’d repeated it several times in several different ways. The room was not cold; Bob was not naturally cold; there was no way that was the sole reason he was hiding beneath his blanket.

Yelena’s first concern was that he was experiencing paranoia again. John had told her what Bob said about the blanket, about how he felt like he needed it to be safe. Maybe he wouldn’t get out because he didn’t feel safe. Her second concern was that he’d taken too many drugs again, and they were affecting his body’s ability to regulate temperature. Yelena combed her fingers through Bob’s hair, searched for the right words to ask.

“Do you feel safe, Bob?”

“Yeah,” said Bob with a sniff. “I guess.”

“Have you—?” Even knowing that he’d relapsed, Yelena hated asking. She hated it when it seemed like she didn’t trust him. “Have you taken any—?”

“Yeah. Yeah, but I don’t— I don’t feel any better.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I just want to take more, you know? I want to—” He ran his hand over his face and shifted deeper into the mattress. “I know that if I keep taking more eventually I’ll feel it, so I— I can’t stand up because I know I’ll go get it and I’ll take more. Probably better to just lay here and wish I was dead than take a bunch of pills and make it happen. If I even can die.”

Bob’s suicidal ideation was not anything new. It was literally one of the first things Yelena learned about him in the vault. But at that time, his feelings were more passive; like he didn’t care if he died, like he was willing to sacrifice himself. Since then, she’d seen him at his lowest. She’d known him when he wanted to die, when he tried to die. Yelena tried everything she could think of to talk him down, but nothing ever worked. And no matter how many times she told him she loved him, it never seemed to click.

“Don’t talk about that,” Yelena snapped, more forceful than she’d intended. Because it hurt her when Bob talked about himself like that and he didn’t seem to understand it. He didn’t seem to understand how his pain reflected on his friends. Maybe because he’d never had any before. “I don’t like it when you talk about yourself like that.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Bob curled into himself, deep beneath the blankets. “You get mad when I don’t tell you the truth and then you get mad when I do tell you the truth, so I don’t know what you want from me.”

“Bob—”

“And stop asking me to study because I don’t want to. I don’t even know why I thought it was a good idea to try and get my GED in the first place. The whole thing is so fucking overwhelming that it makes me feel sick when I think about it. I didn’t even want to take the last test. I only went because you and Ava said you weren’t going to go if I didn’t. I was so anxious and— and fucking high I felt like I was going to throw up the whole time.”

That didn’t surprise her in the least. The way Bob acted about the test made her think that was the case, even when he denied it initially. “Do you want to wait a few days and revisit the idea? There’s no time limit. We can take a break if you need to.”

“No, I’m just not doing it.” She couldn’t tell if he sounded more frustrated or tired. “What’s the point anyway? I’m never going to accomplish anything. I’m never going to be anything. I’m—”

“Stop. Stop talking about yourself like that.”

“Fine. Shit, Yelena. Just leave me alone.”

“Wait, I don’t mean to—”

“Leave me alone.”

He yanked the blanket fully over his head and tucked himself into a ball. Yelena reached her arm toward him but stopped just short of touching his shoulder. He didn’t want her there, she reminded herself. It didn’t matter that she wanted to help him. It didn’t matter how hard she tried. Bob didn’t want her help. He said that he was the one who would never be anything but maybe that was Yelena. A shit hero, a shit friend.

Yelena took a deep breath as she stood up and walked toward the door. She stopped a few steps back when something caught her eye. To the side of the door, under the edge of Bob’s dresser, was a tin of Zyns. Some strange instinct made her reach for them, glancing back at Bob every few seconds to make sure he didn’t see her. Bob was so clingy over his Zyns that it just seemed weird that they were so far away. She tried to tell herself it was just an empty tin, but it wasn’t.

It rattled when she lifted it, and she quickly forced it still between her palms. She slipped out of the room, closed the door as quietly as possible so Bob wouldn’t know exactly when she left. Then she leaned against the wall, popped open the lid, and felt her stomach drop.

That was what Bob meant when he said that if he got up, he would get the drugs. He’d thrown them away from himself. Yelena wasn’t completely confident she knew what the small, round tablets were, mixed in with the actual Zyns, but the ‘M’ stamped into each of them gave her a good idea. The first drug Bob ever got addicted to. The one he never fully quit even as he hopped from substance to substance.

She probably should have thought about the consequences of her actions before she took the pills into the bathroom and flushed them, but she didn’t.

“Which one of you took my pills?”

It was impossible to tell by the way they looked at him. Bob hadn’t slept in a week, hadn’t consumed anything but a few handfuls of cereal and coffee that did nothing to motivate him. He must have looked like absolute shit, his hair unwashed and his outfit the same one he’d had on for three days. Not to mention he was sweating and shivering and his eyes and nose kept running.

Bob needed his morphine. Like actually, physically needed it. He regretted telling Ava and Yelena the truth not because he didn’t want them to know but because they didn’t understand. They didn’t get that he couldn’t just stop using, that mentally and physically he needed the time to wean himself off.

“I know the answer isn’t nobody,” Bob went on, when none of the team gathered in the meeting room offered him a response. Probably because he was fidgeting and pacing and his eyes hurt and he didn’t know if it was because they were over dilated or if he was going Sentry. “So, why don’t you just tell me so we can get this shit over with?”

Ava was the one to speak first, her brow knit with concern. “Bob, are you—?”

“No. I’m not okay. I’m literally never okay so just stop asking. Just tell me where my pills are.”

He must have looked truly fucking crazy because for once, none of them spoke. None of them tried to support him, tried to question him, tried to pressure him. They just stared at him as he stood there trembling, sweating, eyes watering because everything seemed so bright.

The next person to speak was Bucky and he didn’t tell Bob what he wanted to hear. “You remember what I said before I took you to the center?” Bob nodded but it wasn’t true. That whole night was fuzzy. “Can I make you another offer?”

“No.” Bob shook his head and shoved his hands over his eyes. There was one big light over the meeting table, and it felt like he was staring into the sun. “No, I just want my pills.”

“You need to see a doctor, Bob.”

“Right, because there’s any doctor who understands how my body works after all the shit Val did to it,” Bob scoffed.

“I don’t think he means that kind of doctor,” said John, and Bob’s breath hitched. Because John and Bucky were the two people who knew about his referral. They were the two people who already knew that he was crazy and wanted a paper to prove it.

“No, fuck you.” They all looked at Bob like he’d spat on them, Yelena especially. Her eyes were wide and filled with genuine hurt and he almost, almost felt bad about it. “I’m tired of you all trying to control me. I can make my own decisions. You don’t understand what I’m going through at all so just let me deal with—”

“But that’s the point,” Yelena interrupted. Her shoulders sagged as she shook her head. She sniffed before she went on. “You don’t understand yourself either. You told me you don’t know what’s wrong with you and you don’t know what kind of support you need. We want to help you figure that out and you’re not letting us.”

Because he was afraid. He was terrified that they would finally diagnose him, and it would be some huge, awful label that would scare everyone off. And it was probably stupid to be afraid of that when he was doing his damnedest to push everyone away himself. But, in a way, it was easier to be a dick and make everyone hate him before they could leave because of something he couldn’t control.

He didn’t even understand why they hadn’t given up on him already. It would have been easy to drop him in a protective cell somewhere and just let him rot. It wasn’t like he had the motivation to escape. He would probably feel better knowing he was alone and couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. He didn’t understand why they ever gave a shit in the first place. Nobody else ever had.

“Okay, well, you don’t get it, okay?” Bob rubbed his hands under his eyes and shrugged overdramatically. “I’m a fuck-up. I have fucked up everything from the day I was born. My mom always said I always make things worse, and she was right. I do. You’re offering me this help, but you shouldn’t. I’m not— I’m not worth it. I’m not. It’s not— It would be better for everybody if you just stopped trying.”

“Bob—”

He didn’t let Ava speak. “I don’t care how worried you are or how mad you are or annoyed or whatever, you don’t ever fucking touch my drugs, okay? Even my Zyns. Don’t ever fucking touch them. And I’m sorry I sound like a dick but I’m— I’m shaking. My whole body hurts and I’m nauseous and my eyes are burning, and I just want my drugs. You can’t just take them. You can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Yelena, and for some reason, the fact that it was her fucked him up even more. Because he trusted her the most. She was the only one his belief never fully wavered in, and she was the one who took his pills. “I wasn’t trying to—”

Bob left the room before she could finish. He had no idea where he was going, his direction driven by frustration, anger, and withdrawal. He just couldn’t look at them anymore, couldn’t think anymore. Yelena was the only one who never judged him, the only one who had never made a slight even toward his Zyns, and she was the one who took his pills. She was the one who was so fucking done with him that she decided to take it into her own hands and try to force him to stop herself.

It was an anxiety attack, he was pretty sure. The way it built slowly, had tangible reasons for its manifestation. His chest pounded, the nausea from his withdrawals intensifying as he stepped out on to the hangar. Fresh air. That was what he needed. Just some fresh air. He shuddered as he walked to the edge, grabbed one of the railings to support himself. He squeezed his eyes shut to avoid looking down as he struggled to breathe, knowing full well his irrational fear of heights would make everything worse.

His heart pounded so aggressively in his ears that when Yelena walked out the door behind him, he couldn’t tell what she said. All he could think about was how his chest hurt, how he felt sick, how he just wanted his fucking morphine. Bob was pretty sure Yelena was trying to apologize more, trying to talk him down from his anxiety attack, but nothing registered enough to make a difference.

“I want to be alone.” She kept her distance a few feet back when she approached him. Bob opened his eyes, stepped away from the railing. Yelena shifted forward and he moved back and to the right, to the side of there the railing ended. “Stop. Stop trying to help me. You can’t help me.”

“Bob, I love you.” Yelena’s words were punctuated by a sharp inhale. “You’re my best friend. I’m not giving up on you.”

“But you already did. You gave up on me when you took my pills.” She didn’t trust that he could control himself. She didn’t trust that he could ask for help if he really needed it. She didn’t trust him. “I told you I was using because I wanted help. I want— I want help but not— not like that. That’s not helping.”

“I don’t know how to help you.”

“Well, maybe we should both just give up.”

Yelena took a step forward and Bob lurched back, unable to accept the compassion. His foot went over the edge, and Yelena screamed his name as he fell backward.

He stayed conscious just long enough to acknowledge that he should have flown back up before his fear of heights gripped him and everything went dark.

Chapter Text

The good news was: Bob was okay.

The bad news was: the sidewalk was not.

Admittedly, it could have been a lot worse. It was nothing like the crater that he’d made in the desert, and nobody got hurt. There was, however, a vaguely Bob-shaped hole that needed to be repaired and a whole lot of damage control that needed to be done. Because first, people thought someone tried to commit suicide off the Watchtower. Then they realized he wasn’t dead and suddenly everyone was asking who Bob was—what Bob was—and Bucky had to employ his congressman training of deflect, deflect, deflect.

But Yelena couldn’t worry about any of that. She couldn’t even think about any of that. All she could think about was Bob and if he was okay and if it was all her fault he’d fallen. After all, she was the one who took his drugs. She was the one who weakened him, who put him into that state, even though it was unintentional.

John was the one to pick up Bob and carry him back into the Watchtower. With Yelena beside him, reminding him to be careful every three seconds, he brought Bob to his bed and set him down on his left side. She finally went silent as John sat on the edge of Bob’s mattress and checked all his vitals. His gaze kept narrowing, a frown tugging at his lips, and all Yelena could think was that something was wrong with Bob. It was more than a little surprising when John said instead,

“He’s okay.” His body language didn’t match his words. He shook his head as he slid back, his gaze not meeting Yelena’s. She was two seconds from demanding answers before he gave them. “Everything’s a little elevated. Heart rate, breathing, temperature. He’s sweating like hell. Can you run to my room real quick? Medicine cabinet in the bathroom, there’s a bottle of clonidine. I need it.”

Yelena knew that it was wrong to take Bob’s pills. She realized she made the wrong decision in an emotional moment. But the idea of giving him more drugs still terrified her. “Are you sure that’s—?”

“It’s not an opioid,” said John, his tone sharp and urgent. He kept one hand on Bob’s wrist, following his pulse. “It’s designed to calm down the nervous system. It won’t ‘cure’ him, but it’ll help with his heart rate, blood pressure, everything. Please, Yelena. I don’t know what else to do for him.”

So, hesitantly, Yelena did as she was told. She ran to John’s room down the hall, dug through his personal medicine cabinet to find the bottle he wanted. It surprised her how many kinds of drugs and items were in there; how much he kept and how much he used. Her hands trembled as she brought the bottle back to him, her grasp just a little too tight when she handed it over. John released his right hand from a cold towel on Bob’s forehead, popped open the bottle, and for some reason, Yelena couldn’t look when John gave him the pills.

It took thirty minutes before John was able to confirm that Bob’s vitals were slowing down and normalizing, and an hour before Bob finally stirred. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut tighter as John once again pulled the cloth from Bob’s forehead and gave him space to move. Yelena stayed put in her desk chair, unsure whether Bob would want to see her after finding out that she was the one who took his pills. That, in a way, she was the one responsible for his fall.

“Hey, Bobby, how you feel?” asked John, his voice unusually quiet.

Bob pressed his right palm into his forehead as he let out a low sound of pain. “Hurts. Everything— Everything hurts. And I’m cold. Fucking cold.”

“All right.” John adjusted the comforter around Bob’s shoulders. Just one. Yelena’s instinct was to get him more blankets, but she resisted the urge when John said, “I know you feel cold but you’re actually really warm, okay? So, it’s going to be uncomfortable while you ride this out. I’m sorry.”

“No. No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Yelena hesitated before she proceeded with her own question. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Not all of it,” said Bob, his voice hoarse and barely above a whisper. He pushed his palms over his eyes. “It’s pretty fuzzy but I’m so— I’m cold and nauseous and I feel like I weigh a ton, so I know I’m having withdrawals.”

“Okay.” John took a deep breath, glanced back at Yelena. He wet his lips, shook his head slightly as he pressed the back of his hand to Bob’s forehead. “You just need to get some rest, all right? You’ve been through this before, you know it’s really damn hard on your body, but we got to get you detoxed. One of us is gonna stay with you the whole time. It’ll be all right.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. You can choose who you want to stay with you but we’re going to get you clean. You can’t live like this anymore.”

Bob sniffed. He was quiet for several seconds, seemingly considering what John said. Then he asked, voice small, “Can I keep my Zyns?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” That habit annoyed them at first, but they’d all made peace with it, Yelena included. Sometimes it did bother her, knowing that Bob was still constantly using drugs, but she’d rather he use nicotine over morphine any day. “Not yet though. I don’t want the nicotine to get in the way of your healing. What if we say you can have them once you can sit up on your own? That’s probably a good indication you got some strength back.”

“Okay.” Bob stared at John for a second, then shifted his gaze to Yelena. He looked at her with eyes she couldn’t read, bit down on his lip like he had to physically restrain himself from speaking. He turned back to John. “Can you stay, please? Yelena can go.”

Because she took the drugs. Bob didn’t trust her anymore. Maybe he was even furious with her, hurt by her. Yelena stood up before Bob could elaborate on his decision, before John could question it. She’d been thrown away enough times in her life to know when she wasn’t wanted.

“Maybe we should just put this whole GED thing on pause for a bit.”

It felt like time stopped. In a way, Ava really hated how attached she’d gotten to their endeavor. She hated how much it hurt when Bob gave up on them and when Yelena decided that Ava wasn’t enough. She’d been so reluctant to join in the first place that she felt ridiculous for letting it grow on her the way it did; wished on some level that she could go back to not caring.

The thing about it was that it grew on her in more ways than one. She loved that it was something she did with her friends, loved that it was something they did together. But she also came to appreciate her own intelligence and capabilities in a way she never had before. Ava never thought she wasn’t smart, she just never considered that she was; too busy fighting for her life to stop and recognize what she had. She was proud of herself for finishing the first two tests, for passing with good scores, and she wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“No,” said Ava impulsively. She crossed her arms and leaned back into the couch. “No, I’m not pausing. You and Bob can pause if you want to, but I need to do this for myself while I still have momentum.”

Yelena nodded. She still had her pencil in her hand, hovering above the worksheet in front of her on the floor. She hadn’t written a word in ages. Neither of them had. As much as Ava tried to ignore it, Bob’s absence was heavy. He’d barely spoken to anyone since his fall. He shut down on himself completely, refused to talk or even get out of bed. Ava tried exactly once to include Bob in a study session and his depression was palpable. He was not coming back; at least not soon.

“I do want to do this together,” Ava added, when Yelena failed to respond. “I just feel like if I stop, life will get in the way again and I’ll never finish. Or we’ll go on some mission, and something will go wrong, and I’ll die without reaching the end. I really want to do this, all three of us, but I’m not going to stop right now. Not when I’m already halfway through.”

“I understand.” Yelena took a deep breath and tugged her hair back, her gaze low when she continued. “I think Bob is really upset with me for taking his drugs. He won’t really talk to me. And I feel like if I keep doing this without him, I’m— I feel like I am betraying him more somehow. He is so overwhelmed, Ava. He told me he doesn’t want to do the GEDs because he feels sick with anxiety. He’s— I have never seen him like this.”

“I know. He’s struggling a lot. But you’re overwhelmed too. Maybe all of us are. I don’t want to be mean because I know it’s not Bob’s fault, but it is not easy to live with him right now. It’s not healthy for you to try and shoulder all of his pain. I feel like I’m collapsing watching you collapse watching him collapse. We’re all in this destructive cycle and it needs to stop.”

Yelena dropped her pencil on the floor and dragged her hands over her face. Her eyes were bloodshot, tired, brimming with tears. Her breath shuddered as she shook her head, seemingly trying to find the right words to say.

“You’re right,” she said quietly, her voice thick with emotion. “I know you are right, but I feel so guilty that I can’t help him. I feel so guilty that this was his idea and we’re doing it without him. I saved him, Ava. I saved him and I brought him here where I thought he would be safe, and I feel like I’ve done something wrong because he’s hurting so bad. Why is he hurting so bad? Are we bad to him? Am I bad to him?”

She was pretty sure Yelena already knew the answer. Nothing any of them did caused Bob’s issues. Maybe they made mistakes sometimes, maybe they triggered him sometimes, but almost everything that happened would have happened anyway. The theory was that Bob survived the Sentry Project because his mind was fractured to begin with. It was able to compartmentalize and utilize the powers in a way most people couldn’t.

His mental health issues were severe, and they were undiagnosed and untreated, and that made it nearly impossible to help him. He was thirty years old and had incredibly strong superpowers so if he didn’t want to get help, there was nothing anyone could do to force him. All they could do was offer him support even when he wouldn’t take it.

“No.” Ava reached a hand toward Yelena, gently closed their palms together. “This is just who he is, Yelena. It was going to happen eventually. He told us he has those episodes of delusion and depression, and I think maybe we just didn’t realize how bad it is. It’s not your fault. It’s not any of our faults. We’re just not equipped to help him, and I know that feels really shitty but it’s true.”

“Yeah.” Whatever Yelena was thinking must have been too difficult to put into words. She fell silent for a long minute before she sniffed again, released Ava’s hand, and gestured toward the study materials. “I want to keep going with you. I just don’t know how to do it without feeling guilty every time we study.”

Ava had to choose her solution carefully. If she didn’t, she could just as easily end up shouldering Yelena’s pain the same way she shouldered Bob’s. She glanced at the study materials around them, gave herself a moment to think.

“Well, we have all these materials that Bob prepared for us,” she said, an idea slowly formulating. “What if we break it down? Little steps at a time? I know that we’ve gotten a bit off track since he stopped setting everything out for us so how about I lead now? I’ll look at what he set up and make a new schedule and it’ll be very flexible. If you’re not feeling it one day, that’s fine. We’ll postpone. That sound good?”

“That sounds good.” She smiled but her eyes were glassy as she reached for a nearby folder. Bob’s notes. “But I’m not giving up on him, okay? I want him to finish with us.”

It would have been easy for Ava to argue with logic that the likelihood of Bob rejoining them any time soon was slim to none. Instead, she wrapped her arms around Yelena and gave her friend a proper embrace.

Bob wanted to die.

It was the only thing he could think of. The only thing the voices in his head would tell him. He wanted to die. He should have died. When he fell, he should have cracked his head and died and never gotten up again. But his dumb ass had to volunteer for the Sentry Project, had to be the one person who survived and became something akin to immortal. When he hit the ground, it was the ground that took damage. So, instead of being dead, he spent his days in bed resenting that he wasn’t.

He knew that it got bad when he reached the point of calling Valentina. There was nobody actively in Bob’s life that he hated as much as he hated Valentina, but she was the only one who he thought might be able to help him. Bob called her once, twice, even three times over the course of an hour but she never answered the phone. It would have made him mad if he had the energy to feel anything more than vaguely irritated and fucking depressed.

Once he realized a call wouldn’t get through, Bob tried texting. Valentina ignored him that way too, didn’t answer anything for another hour. She finally conceded when he told her to come over so they could talk, and she agreed. It was hard to get himself out of bed to meet her downstairs. His limbs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds and even though John had painstakingly weaned him off the morphine, Bob still ached for a pill.

Bob was so far beyond his limit mentally, emotionally, and physically, that when the elevator opened and Valentina wasn’t there, he almost lost it. Of course, she sent Mel in her place. She wouldn’t ignore Bob all morning and then suddenly agree to see him. She just got tired of his messages, so she wanted Mel to go and shut him up for her. Bob stood up, tried to shove past Mel into the elevator, but she stopped him.

“Wait, wait.” She tugged on the sleeve of his bathrobe with one hand. The look in her eyes said she judged his disheveled appearance, but she didn’t speak a word of it. “Val said you were trying really hard to get a hold of her. She’s being… Val, you know, but— what’s going on? You’ve never asked to meet with her privately. Is something happening with Sentry?”

“No. No, this is me.” He hated the way that Val and Mel talked about Sentry and Void like they were somehow separate entities from him. Especially Val. Bob thought, on some level, Mel only did it because Val rubbed off on her. He tried to go easier on her but sometimes it was hard. “I needed Valentina. You can’t help me with this.”

Everything he felt internally must have been bleeding on to his face because Mel’s tone was flooded with genuine compassion when she said, “Let me try.”

And Bob didn’t really want to talk to Mel. He didn’t really trust her. But if there was anyone in the world aside from Valentina who knew the answers he needed, it would be her. After all, she was the one who pushed the button the first time.

“Are there any other fail safes?” Bob asked.

“Fail safes?” To Mel’s credit, she looked legitimately confused. “What do you mean ‘fail safes?’”

“Like the one you tried to kill me with. The one that brought out the Void. Are there any other ones?”

Any doubts Bob had about whether Mel was truly a good person faded in that moment. Her expression dropped as she stared at him, eyes wide, lips curled downward as her brow furrowed with worry. “Are you asking me if we have a way to kill you?”

“I want to die,” said Bob before he could stop himself. He tugged at a loose string on the end of his sleeve, suddenly unable to meet Mel’s gaze. “All I can think about is that I want to fucking die. Normally, when I’m like this, I don’t have the energy to do it but right now I— I have the energy, I just don’t know how. I want to know how. I want to know if there’s a way.”

“Okay.” Mel dragged out the first letter of the word, her expression something between worry, shock, and fear. She stuffed her phone in her pocket, gave Bob all of her attention for the first time since they’d met. “How about we just set that aside for a little bit? Have you been taking care of yourself lately? Maybe you should try taking a shower or eating something.”

“Why would I do those things if I’m going to kill myself anyway?”

“You’re not— come here.”

Mel grabbed Bob’s wrist with one hand and dragged him into the elevator behind her. Bob didn’t resist, confused as to where they were going and still aching for answers. He expected her to go down to the lobby, to take him outside the building somewhere—maybe to see Valentina—but she didn’t. Instead, she made the elevator go up.

She didn’t let go of Bob for a second, even after the elevator stopped. Bob was too baffled to resist when Mel tugged him toward the kitchen. They ended up stopping not far from the elevator, at the small dining area away from where food was prepared. John was seated at one of the smaller tables by the window, a coffee mug in one hand and his phone in the other.

“Walker, thank god.”

John set both items down when they started walking his way. He rose to meet them, his brow knit in concern. “What’s going on?”

“Um, so, Bob here just told me that he wants to kill himself.” Bob yanked away from her grasp and started to leave but John pulled him back. Somehow, the light tug on his bathrobe felt impossible to resist. “You know him better than I do so I think it’s better I leave him with you. Just keep an eye on him. I’m going to go make sure we don’t have any fail safes that he can use.”

Mel wasted no time getting herself out of the situation. She walked right back to the elevator and disappeared into it, leaving Bob as John’s problem. John kept a hand on Bob’s arm for so long that it was both irritating and comforting. He started to walk without saying a word, without telling Bob where he was going or asking Bob to move with him. Bob complied because he didn’t know what else to do.

Everything, including fighting, felt completely and utterly pointless.

John walked with Bob to the kitchen where they found Bucky at the counter. Bucky set down his lunch the moment he saw Bob, and once again, all Bob could do was wonder what the hell was so wrong with his appearance. John pulled out a stool on the opposite side of the counter and gestured for Bob to sit down. As he did, his heart pounded, but he couldn’t quite explain why. Not until John turned to Bucky and said in a low, serious tone,

“I think it’s time, Bucky.”

Bucky glanced at Bob before he nodded. He hesitated for a long moment before he spoke, his words clearly carefully chosen. “Bob, we want you to know that you’re in a safe place, all right? Nobody is judging you, nobody wants to hurt you, and nobody wants to send you away. We’re all very worried about you. You’ve been struggling for a while now and I know it’s scary to think about, but it’s gotten very serious.”

There it was.

Bob’s instincts were right, they just hit too early. That was the intervention he’d felt on the horizon. That was the intervention he convinced himself was coming. He just expected it to be about the drugs, and it wasn’t.

“I told you I have highs and lows,” said Bob quietly. They just didn’t understand him. He needed them to understand him. “I had a high and now this is— this is the low. This is the big low.”

“That’s right, you did tell us that.” Bucky was trying to be kind, but it felt patronizing instead. It felt like he was talking down to Bob, like he was a child who didn’t understand his own feelings. “But the way you described it was as something very general, very simple. This is not simple. Me and John, we’ve been making a list of everything we know, and we think that this isn’t just a high and a low, you’re having a complex mental health crisis. John?”

He was fucking crazy just like his mom. He was scaring everyone around him just like his mom. He was going to be committed just like his mom. Bob shoved his hands over his face, refused to look at John when he started to read off his phone.

“Hallucinations, both auditory and visual,” John started, “intense paranoia, delusions of grandeur, fidgeting and restlessness, mood swings, irritability, conflicting behavior, suicidal ideation—”

“Stop. Stop it.” Bob tugged on his bangs, a sudden onslaught of tears caught by his palms. The idea of an intervention scared him in theory and yet, in practice, all he could think about was that they cared enough to intervene. Somebody actually cared. “I know I’m crazy. I know I’m fucking crazy. Just stop. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Bob, we want to help you,” Bucky told him. “You already have that referral from the crisis center, all we have to do is give them a call. John and I will help you. Please let us help you.”

A sob escaped Bob’s lips when he finally admitted, “I’m scared.”

“Why?” asked John, his tone uncharacteristically gentle, willing to listen and ready to understand. “What’s scaring you?”

“My mom.”

The way she treated him growing up, screaming at him if he didn’t feed into her every delusion. How sometimes she disappeared for a week, and he was left all alone with his abusive father (and he didn’t know for years it was because she was committed the way he would be too). How everyone thought she was crazy, how she was crazy, and how the last time he heard about her, she’d been locked in a hospital for months.

Bob’s admission on its own didn’t make sense. Bucky was the one to ask, “What about your mom?”

“It’s all from my mom,” Bob choked out, his voice trembling. He’d never told anyone before, not outside of a psychiatric ward. “She had all this stuff too. The highs and lows and— and psychosis. Everybody thought she was crazy. I thought she was crazy. She wasn’t like my dad, but she hurt me because she was— she— I don’t want to be like her.”

“Did she ever get help?”

“No. She just got worse and worse and then they locked her up.”

“Then you’re already doing better than her if you do.”

“None of us think you’re crazy, Bob,” said John, a thin layer of emotion breaking into his own words. He sat down beside Bob, set one hand on his shoulder. Finally, Bob dropped his hands, turned to meet John’s gaze as a tear rolled down his cheek. “When we look at you, we don’t see ‘crazy,’ we see pain. We can tell that you’re hurting a lot. And yeah, you’re hurting us too, but we’re not mad at you. We’re not trying to get rid of you, we’re trying to support you. Please let us support you. We won’t make you do any of this alone.”

“I don’t want to get help.” Bob inhaled sharply, trying and failing to hold himself together. “I just want to die. I want to die.”

“We aren’t going to let you die, Bobby.”

“Can we just try doing one thing at a time?” Bucky proposed. “The first step is just to submit the referral. Not even going to the appointment, just requesting it. Can you do that? Can you let us help you do that?”

Bob’s instinct was to say no. He wanted to push them away, to tell them that he was irreparably broken and no amount of help could ever fix him. But something about the way they looked at him and spoke to him made it feel like they really cared. Bob opened his mouth to speak but no words came out.

It took every ounce of strength in his body to nod.

It didn’t surprise Ava that Yelena struggled to keep to the new schedule. It also didn’t bother her. She just appreciated that Yelena kept trying, that she still showed up every day even when Ava didn’t expect her to; even when she wasn’t able to focus for more than fifteen or twenty minutes before she closed her book and left. That was all Ava really wanted anyway: to keep trying. To continue making progress even if it was slow.

They were seated back on the floor in the common area that afternoon, Yelena reading from one of the study guides while Ava pondered a question about identifying propaganda. That was when Bob walked in. He had the tip of his left thumb in his mouth, chewing lamely on his nail as he stopped a few feet away. He hesitated before he walked over to Ava and Yelena and sat on the couch behind them.

Bob didn’t say anything for a long time. He just sat there while Ava and Yelena continued to study. Even when they talked about a question, Bob didn’t speak, didn’t move. He watched, hands twitching anxiously, gaze glassy and unsteady. Yelena kept glancing at him but didn’t say a word to him, almost like she thought it wouldn’t be welcome. A tense silence overtook them for ten, fifteen minutes before Bob finally spoke.

“Can I talk to you guys for a minute?”

“Yeah.” Ava nodded. Yelena’s eyes were wide, even hopeful as they both turned to face Bob. Except he hesitated again, and then they were just awkwardly looking at each other, waiting for him to continue. “Are you all right, Bob?”

“No.” Bob twisted his hands in his lap as he shook his head. His every nervous habit wrote itself on his body as he swallowed, wet his lips, blinked at the floor. “No, I don’t think so. I think I’m— I think I’m really fucked up. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for not being okay,” said Yelena. She scooted closer to the couch and reached for Bob’s hand. He stared at her for several seconds before he let her hold it.

“I’m not apologizing because I’m not okay, I’m apologizing because I hurt you. I hurt all of you. I’ve been treating you like shit and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Ava didn’t need an apology, and she felt sure that Yelena didn’t either. But it did feel nice. It felt somehow validating for Bob to apologize, to take accountability for how he’d acted even though much of it wasn’t his fault. He was a good person at his core, but he was so full of pain that it drowned out his love.

Yelena must have read the same signals that Ava did because neither of them spoke again before Bob did. They gave him space to think, to breathe. Ava stayed quiet as Yelena squeezed Bob’s hand, gave him one of the most reassuring looks in the world.

“I’m going to see a doctor,” Bob told them quietly, and it felt like Ava’s heart skipped a beat as a wave of relief crashed over her. He was going to get help. He was finally going to get help. “When I went to the crisis center, they gave me a referral and— Bucky and Walker, they— they helped me call the doctor. So, I’m going to see a doctor.”

“Bob, that’s—”

He didn’t let Yelena finish her sentence. “And I know it sounds stupid because I’m the Sentry and whatever, but I’m really scared. I think they’re going to tell me there’s something really, really wrong with me and it’s going to freak everyone out and they’re going to put me on a whole bunch of drugs, and I don’t—”

Yelena’s hand didn’t leave Bob’s for a second as she slid on the couch beside him. She wrapped her arms around his back, held him for a long moment of white noise and broken breaths.

“I know that to you a diagnosis is scary,” Yelena started, her arms around Bob’s waist, “but to me it is a relief. It will not scare me or ‘freak me out.’ I just want to know how to support you. Whatever it is, I want to support you. We want to support you.”

It was only then that Ava understood why it bothered her so deeply that Bob gave up on the GEDs and Yelena tried to pause. Because Valentina put them in the vault to kill each other and somehow, against all odds, they became a team. They became the Thunderbolts, a shockingly strong support system for each other. When Yelena tried to walk away, it felt like it was crumbling. When Bob refused to accept help, it felt like it was broken.

Ava reached her hand over and gave Bob’s knee a squeeze. Maybe a diagnosis wouldn’t fix everything, but it would give them enough answers to make them stronger.

Chapter Text

Yelena really thought that once Bob got over the hill of making the first appointment, he would finally be able to relax and start to heal.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Somehow, Bob didn’t seem to feel any relief after he made the decision to seek help. Rather than lift weight off his shoulders, it was like someone had dropped a boulder on them. After talking to Ava and Yelena, he’d retreated into his room and refused to leave. He cocooned himself in his blankets, buried his face in his pillow, ignored every attempt to get him to stand. And because the fastest they could expedite his appointment was a week out, there was nothing they could do to make him move.

Because of her promise to Ava, Yelena tried her best to study. She tried to focus on the lessons but all the history in the study guides felt irrelevant compared to Bob’s near future. Their near future. She couldn’t find a reason to care about what happened thirty years before she was born when she had so many issues in her present. All she could think about was whether Bob was okay, whether he was safe, whether he was alive.

“Hi.”

She had an irrational need to check on him several times a day. To her knowledge, Bob could not kill himself, and the chances of him getting out of the Watchtower without being seen on security footage was slim to none. But he had managed to cut himself, and his powers were near limitless. Her brain thought up every doomsday scenario from Bob willing himself dead to somehow turning invisible to sneak out the window and run away.

“Hey,” whispered Bob, only the top half of his head visible above his blankets. It seemed like he spent his days staring into space, like he never got bored or feared his own thoughts. “You don’t have to check on me every hour, you know.”

“It’s not every hour,” Yelena argued, but she hadn’t been watching the clock. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was. Maybe she was at the point of being that damn anxious. “Ava is out for the day. I don’t feel like being alone. Can I study in here?”

Part of Yelena felt guilty for manipulating him the way she did. She knew that Bob would crack for his friends, that he would cave if he thought it wasn’t about him. If she said, “I want to keep an eye on you,” Bob would tell her to go away. But the simple request for company made him soften and agree.

There was a small piece of Yelena that convinced herself if she studied beside Bob, he would join in. That if she pondered her questions aloud, he would answer or jump in to speculate. That wasn’t the case at all. Bob did not speak a word as she pretended to work through the day’s worksheet, and did not chime in once even when she deliberately muttered questions she knew he held the answers to.

“Do you think you might change your mind?” asked Yelena suddenly. She reread the same paragraph six times, and it still didn’t make sense because she still couldn’t focus.

Several long seconds passed before Bob asked in a small voice, “About what?”

“About the GEDs. You already finished half of them. I think you can do it.”

“No.”

“No, you won’t change your mind or no, you don’t think you can do it?”

The latter gave Yelena hope that she could change his mind. She believed in him, believed in his abilities, believed in his intelligence. Yelena didn’t just think but knew that if he tried, he would be able to finish with her and Ava. It was just a matter of unlocking his confidence. But the second Bob opened his mouth, sucked in a harsh breath, Yelena knew she wouldn’t get the answer she was looking for.

“Both,” said Bob. “I can’t do it, ‘Lena. I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea. I can’t even— I can’t remember why I started doing it and now the thought of continuing makes me physically nauseous.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s so much. It’s such a big commitment with all the work and the studying and there’s the tests and what if I fail? I almost failed the last test. What if I just fucking fail and I—?” He cut himself off with another sharp inhale. “And then I keep thinking John is right and I’m fucking dyslexic and then I think it’s so fucking stupid that I even give a shit. Why should that diagnosis bother me when they’re about to tell me I’m fucking insane?”

It finally clicked then.

Bob wasn’t just lying in bed because he was depressed, he was lying in bed because he was crushed by devastating anxiety. The same way that Yelena couldn’t stop worrying about Bob, Bob couldn’t stop worrying about the himself, about his appointment, about what they would say. She stood up from his desk chair, walked to the side of his bed, and took one of his hands into hers. He needed to snap out of that mindset. He needed to get out of bed, get out of that room.

“Can we go for a walk?” The look in Bob’s eyes made her add almost immediately, “We don’t have to talk about this. I just think it would be good for you to move.”

“Okay.”

He wasn’t out of bed for thirty minutes but to Yelena, at that point, any time at all was a win.

Bob felt like he was dying.

It was the morning of his doctor’s appointment. Yelena had told him days earlier that she intended to take him to the office and she stuck to that promise. She woke him up an hour before they needed to leave and told him they would take it all one step at a time. All he had to do was get out of bed, take a shower, get dressed, go downstairs, eat breakfast, and on and on.

As simple as it sounded in theory, Bob felt paralyzed by the amount of steps there were. Every time he felt like he couldn’t take one more, Yelena pushed him to do it. She held his hand as he climbed out of bed, waited outside the bathroom while he showered, chose his outfit for him so he wouldn’t have to make those tiny decisions. She walked him downstairs, fed him the small and manageable breakfast she’d had Alexei make, and took him to put on his shoes.

For the briefest moment, Bob actually felt like he was capable. He felt like maybe he could be brave and finally go to the doctor, finally face whatever was wrong with him, finally learn how to cope with it. But the moment only lasted until they got in the elevator to leave. When the collar of his t-shirt suddenly felt like it was strangling him, when his body started shaking and his heart tried to burn its way out of his ribcage.

The anxiety had been building in him since the first second of John and Bucky’s intervention. Like a swarm of bees constructing a nest in the pit of his stomach, growing and growing until it finally got too big to carry and he couldn’t keep them inside anymore. All he could think was that he was pathetic for needing help; that he was too fucking crazy to be fixed; like going to the doctor was the scariest thing he’d ever done in his life despite the amount of abuse he’d endured and the intensity of the superhero-related incidents he’d been involved in.

Bob was fully sobbing by the time the doors opened into the lobby, and he couldn’t even explain why. He backed into the corner as his knees gave out and he dropped to the floor in a hard crash. He pulled his knees up to his chest and yanked on his bangs with his hands as Yelena sat beside him, her hand hovering above his shoulder like she wasn’t sure whether it was okay to touch him. Bob didn’t know either. If she made contact, it was equally as likely to make him flinch away as it was to comfort him.

“Listen to me.” It was the first sentence he actually understood, the first to break through the endless pounding in his ears. Yelena’s fingers laced themselves through his, squeezed his hand tight like it could bring him back to reality. It almost did, in a way. Just not fast enough. “Bob, take a deep breath. Breathe with me. Bob. Bob.”

He couldn’t do it. How the hell was Bob supposed to go to a doctor and open up about all the shit he’d been going through when he couldn’t even take a single deep breath? When he couldn’t even face the idea of reliving his trauma, facing his present, without sinking to the floor in a wet, sobbing mess? Bob shook his head as he wheezed, as he sobbed, as he tried and failed to convince his body that he was safe.

“I can’t do it,” said Bob through a shattered sob, his words nearly indecipherable past his shuddering breaths. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

“All you have to do right now is breathe,” Yelena told him, her fingers squeezing his like she was clinging to him for dear life. “Just breathe, okay? Inhale, exhale. Bob, breathe.”

“I can’t.”

“Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on?”

It was probably stupid to care that John saw him in that state when he was the one to stage an intervention in the first place, but Bob was in a place of feeling stupid in general. He choked on his inhale when John dropped a bag of groceries outside the elevator and knelt in front of him. John and Yelena kept talking but he couldn’t process half the words, couldn’t bear to listen to them talk about how utterly fucked up he was.

Bob snapped his eyes open and his head up when John’s hand landed on his ankle; a gentle, grounding touch that balanced Yelena’s grasp on his other side. Warm tears streaked down his cheeks as he stared at the collar of John’s t-shirt, unable to meet his gaze.

“Bobby,” John started, words quiet but clear, “can you hear me?”

The only thing Bob was able to say was an embarrassingly strangled, “It hurts.”

“Tell me something you can feel.”

He could feel his heart pounding so hard it was like it actually touched his ribcage. He could feel his lungs burn with each failed attempt to breathe. He could feel his legs, half numb and shaking, as his knees pressed into his chest.

“Yelena,” he choked out. “I can feel Yelena’s hand.”

“What about something you can hear?”

He could hear his own labored wheezing, grating like nails on a chalkboard. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, so loud it drowned out almost everything else around him. He could hear Yelena beside him, her own breaths unsteady, afraid or ashamed of what he’d turned into.

“Cars,” was what Bob went with. A safe, realistic answer. “I can hear the cars outside.”

“Something you can taste?”

He could taste salty tears that wouldn’t stop falling from his eyes. The spit that escaped his lips with each sob, coating his chin in a disgusting film. The faint residue of cleaning products left behind by the staff Valentina overworked and underpaid.

“Zyn.” The never-ending taste on his tongue. “I have a Zyn in my lip.”

“Something you can smell?”

He could smell the same lemon and bleach that he could taste, mixed with the faint lingering of Yelena’s peach perfume. Something coming from John—maybe a cologne—that smelled like musk and a citrus far more pleasant.

“Coconut,” mumbled Bob, his breaths less heavy. “It’s my shampoo. I just washed my hair.”

“Something you can see?”

He could see the unspent tears brimming at the bottoms of his eyes. The lobby outside the elevator doors, how huge it felt when he knew it hadn’t changed size. The Void, haunting the corner of his vision only to vanish when he tried to look directly at it.

“You.” His unwavering support system, picking him back up when he didn’t deserve it. Holding him together when he felt that it was time for him to accept that he was irreparably broken. “You and Yelena.”

With all five senses addressed, Bob’s mind finally started to calm its panic. He was still sweating, shaking, covered in spit and tears. But his breaths were normalizing, the world stopped spinning, and it was like the temperature in the room dropped thirty degrees. John and Yelena gave him several long minutes to settle down before either of them spoke again.

“Do you know what triggered this?” asked John.

Nothing. Everything. Bob cracked the day of the intervention and since then, every bit of pressure just damaged him more. He couldn’t get out of bed because he felt like he was suffocating, couldn’t motivate himself to eat or shower because he felt like he didn’t deserve it. What it was that made him crack, he couldn’t say. The fear of what the doctor might tell him. The anxiety he had around doctors in general.

It was Yelena who answered for him when it became clear he had no words to say. “It just started while we were coming down. His agoraphobia, maybe?”

“Agoraphobia?” Right. He hadn’t told John about that yet. Thankfully, the look on John’s face was more understanding than judgmental. “Were you going to his doctor’s appointment?”

“I can’t do it.” That was what triggered him. The pressure behind the fact that he was supposed to learn what was wrong with him. The anxiety of knowing it was just the first step in a lifetime of treatment; that they would almost inevitably tell him he needed to spend the rest of his life taking some kind of drugs when he’d worked so hard to get clean. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

Yelena glanced at John’s watch. “We won’t go today. It’s too late anyway.”

That fact both made him feel better and made him feel so guilty that a whole fresh wave of tears escaped him. John and Bucky had gone through the effort to help him schedule the appointment for nothing. Yelena took the time to help him through the morning for nothing. The doctor cleared out her schedule as fast as she could for nothing.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” He leaned into Yelena when she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him down into a tight embrace. “I’m such a fuck-up. I don’t even know why you keep—”

“Because you’re our friend,” started Yelena, John slowly nodding in agreement beside her. “Because we love you. We don’t just support you out of necessity, we support you because we want to. You matter to us. You’re not a fuck-up for experiencing the exact thing we’re trying to get you help for.”

“I’m never going to get help. You can’t fucking help me.”

He spent the fifteen years he lived at home slowly watching his mother’s mental health deteriorate. The last he’d heard of her, she was hanging on to reality by a thread. That was the way Bob was going, the way he would end up. If the Sentry Project couldn’t fix him, what the hell could?

“I’ll reschedule the appointment,” John said, his hand still on Bob’s ankle. “We’ll try again and if you still feel like you can’t do it, we’ll figure something else out, all right?”

“I know you feel badly right now,” added Yelena, “but I am really proud of you for trying. Okay? I’m proud that you tried.”

Bob would have given anything to feel the same way.

They made a pact to never tell Bob what they created after that day.

Based on what he said, it seemed his biggest fear was that his diagnosis would somehow be scary, that they would somehow see him as more threatening or dangerous. So, the last thing he needed was to know that the entire team was on 24/7 “Void watch,” as Bucky called it. That they weren’t just “coincidentally checking on him,” they’d created a thorough schedule to ensure he was never fully alone.

Ava did feel guilty about it. It did bother her that they were doing exactly what Bob was afraid of, that they were essentially babysitting him the way his paranoia convinced him they were all along. But John and Yelena were very clear when they explained how Bob’s hands had begun to turn black, how he hadn’t even seemed to notice the shadows spreading around him in the elevator.

She reassured herself with the knowledge that they weren’t babying him and then whacked herself with the thought that he was a genuine threat. Bob didn’t have full control over his powers, couldn’t promise safety if they took their eyes off him. Even beyond the possibility of the Void, Bob had already demonstrated that he was a danger to himself. Their “Void watch” might as well have just been suicide watch.

“Sorry I bailed on you.”

They were in the common area, Bob lying down on one of the couches and Ava curled into a nearby chair. She hadn’t said a word since she sat down with him, didn’t want him to think she was there for reasons other than she wanted to be. The sounds of late nineties cartoons filled the silence, laughing for Bob when he couldn’t seem to find the strength to feel anything at all.

“What do you mean?” asked Ava. There was no context to his apology, no follow-up to explain. Just silence like he expected her to understand.

“The GEDs,” Bob answered quietly, his gaze fixed on the TV, not smiling at any of the quick-witted jokes. It took him so long to elaborate that Ava almost spoke again first. “I feel bad, you know? I— I came up with the whole idea and talked you guys into doing it and then I just bailed. That was a really shitty thing to do.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Ava that it was something he should apologize for. She didn’t even really want an apology, though it was nice of him to acknowledge how his actions impacted her. Ava was never mad at Bob for giving up on the GEDs, she was just disappointed. It was something she wanted to do with him and Yelena, and his mental health got in the way. That wasn’t anyone’s fault.

“Thank you,” Ava said, more because she thought he needed to hear it than because she needed to say it. “But I don’t need an apology, Bob. I’m not mad that you’re struggling, I’m just… I’m disappointed. I wish you would keep trying.”

“I want to.” Bob shifted his head against the throw pillow beneath him, chewed at his left thumbnail as he blinked behind his bangs. “I want to do it, I just— I feel like I can’t.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Executive dysfunction? I don’t know, really. It’s like there’s this wall between me and studying and if I try to climb over it, I get hit by this massive wave of anxiety. I dropped out of high school because of drugs but I have this irrational feeling that maybe I did it because I’m not smart enough to graduate.”

Bob had his moments, sure, but he was easily one of the cleverest people Ava had ever met. Even when he fell behind in the math section, he caught up far faster than Yelena and Ava had learned in the first place. Maybe he didn’t do well on the test but that wasn’t a reflection of his intelligence, it was a reflection of how he was feeling that day; a reflection of how much he was struggling before he’d been willing to say.

“I know you aren’t going to believe me,” started Ava, “but you’re a hell of a lot smarter than you think. You have a lot of issues that get in your way but that doesn’t mean you’re not smart. You just need more support.”

“Right, I’m thirty and I need support to learn what a teenager can do alone.” Bob sniffed and shook his head. “Fucking pathetic.”

“No, it isn’t. Yelena and I needed each other—and you—to learn too so don’t say that. That’s diminishing to all of us. It’s incredibly difficult to learn new concepts alone. That’s why we study together. And that’s not even what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“I meant that there are accommodations you can get for the tests.” She’d seen them when scheduling the second test. She couldn’t remember the exact details but after how anxious and nauseous Bob admitted to feeling during both, she wondered if it might benefit him. “Extra time and breaks, things like that. After you go to the doctor and get a diagnosis or a note from her, you can try again and request whatever accommodations make you feel more comfortable.”

When Bob again fell silent, Ava’s instinct was to believe that he would say no. That he would feel embarrassed or ashamed of the fact that he needed that support. She gave him space to consider it as she stared at the TV, more just to have something to look at than because she was actually interested in the cartoon. Then, finally, Bob spoke again—but he didn’t say at all what Ava expected.

“I don’t really want to do it alone,” said Bob softly, “and I can’t do it right now, and I don’t want to hold you back, so I don’t… I don’t think I’ll do it.”

“You’re going to the doctor next week, right?” Bob’s mumbled response clearly communicated the answer. He was supposed to, but he didn’t know if he would make it after what happened the first time. “Okay. Yelena already wanted to put a pause on studying so I’ll let her know I changed my mind. We’ll wait for you, at least for a week. See how you’re feeling after that. Maybe you’ll feel different once you know what you’re dealing with.”

Bob’s only response came in the form of a whispered, “Thank you.”

“Bob, are you awake?”

It was the morning of his doctor’s appointment. Again. He was awake, seated on the floor beside his bed. It felt like the last week and a half had gone by in a blur. He could barely remember what he’d done, how so many days had passed already. In his memory, it was all just one long anxiety attack that his brain chose not to remember.

“We need to leave in an hour,” Yelena went on. She closed the door behind her and walked over to Bob. A pang of embarrassment struck as she kicked away the clothes he’d thrown on the carpet, unable to motivate himself to even put them in the hamper. She sat on the clear space beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” Bob wasn’t worse than he had been. He wasn’t better than he had been either. He was stuck in a cycle of psychosis, depression, numbness, and no breaks in between. “I can’t stand up.”

Yelena rested her head on his shoulder and looped her left arm around his right. “What are you thinking about?”

Nothing, surprisingly. There were no real thoughts going through his head, just a vague sense of anxiety that wouldn’t go away. Like he knew that something bad was going to happen and he just couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. Bob shrugged and sniffed. The feeling was impossible to describe, as was the reason he couldn’t find it in him to stand.

“My mom,” said Bob.

“She was abusive?”

It was Yelena’s way of asking for context. She wanted to understand exactly why Bob was sitting in a pile of dirty laundry nebulously thinking about his mom. The problem was that Bob only had half an answer, and she’d asked a question that held no clear yes or no.

“I guess,” said Bob, unsure whether he was overstating or understating the truth. “I feel like if I told you everything she did to me, you would say that she was. And some of the stuff she did definitely was. I’m not saying she was all good, I mean, I did go no contact with her, but she— she wasn’t like my dad. He hated me, you know? He never loved me. But my mom…”

Bob had never told anyone about his relationship with his mom before. He’d talked vaguely about his dad because it felt more clear-cut. Yeah, there were nuances he didn’t get into, but it was easy to say, “my dad beat the shit out of me.” It was harder to explain his mother’s years-long descent, the way that her mental illness spiraled and drove the majority of what she did. The older he got, the worse his own mental health got, the more he understood her actions in the sense he didn’t understand them at all.

“I think she did love me,” he finished, his gaze stuck on a crumpled t-shirt on the floor. “Especially when I was really little, I think she loved me. But she was like me or I’m like her, I guess. She had the psychosis and shit like I do, and my dad wouldn’t let her get any treatment. By the time I was a teenager, it was harder to be around her than it was to be around my dad. Because I always knew that he was going to be a dick and that he would probably beat me, but I never knew what she was going to do. I never knew if she was going to hug me or hurt me.

“Sometimes she would be really nice when my dad wasn’t around. She’d take me to get frozen yogurt or walk me down the beach and just for a little bit it felt like everything was normal. But it was like a trade off because sometimes it was just a good day and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes when we got home from getting frozen yogurt, she’d take me inside and force me to throw up because she was paranoid my dad could smell it in me. Sometimes halfway through our walk she’d decide I was evil and hold me under the water until someone stopped her.

“There were days she would say that nothing that my dad did to us was my fault and days she would say that it was all because of me. That I made everything worse from the moment I was conceived. She— I don’t— I loved her, but I couldn’t trust her. She hurt me more than she ever loved me, that’s why I had to cut her off, I couldn’t— our relationship was so fucked up, and I just— I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Yelena whispered, her hand grasping his, as if she hadn’t grown up in a situation far worse. Bob shrugged and forced a smile as he shook his head. “Are you scared you’re going to be like her?”

When she actually asked the question, Bob realized that the answer was no. When Bob was using drugs daily, he convinced himself that his instability came from the intoxication. But ever since Sentry—with the exception of his morphine relapse—he’d been clean. He’d been clean and yet he was still unstable. If anything, his episodes felt more intense and unpredictable because his feelings weren’t numbed or stabilized by the drugs. His friends had told him that he was hurting them, that he was hurting himself, that he desperately needed help.

“I’m scared that I already am.”

Everyone was already walking on eggshells around him. They had been since the day they met, though he couldn’t exactly blame them after seeing him as Sentry and the Void. But he’d tried so hard to prove that he was more than that, to prove that he was capable, and all he’d done was show that he was wrong. To show that he was right. Everything the Void said about him was true. He’d always be alone because he pushed people away the same way his mother did.

“We’re not afraid of you, Bob.” It was easy to say that, but Bob wasn’t stupid. He could see the way they spent time with him in shifts, ensuring that he was never truly alone. Whether they feared him or his powers, he wasn’t sure, but they feared him in some way. They didn’t trust him; the same way he couldn’t trust his mom. “We love you, okay? We are worried about you, but we are not afraid of you. You are one of the kindest people I have ever met.”

“Last week I called Walker an asshole and kicked him to his knees.”

“Well, he had it coming.”

“My criminal record is a mile long.”

“And not one of the charges is for anything violent.” Yelena shifted back far enough to meet Bob’s gaze, her eyes filled with compassion and care. “There is nothing you can say that will scare me away, Bob. I love you. I want to help you. Let’s do just one step at a time again, okay? Will you stand up with me?”

It took Bob several seconds to nod, and a full minute to actually get his legs to work. But he pushed through it, step by step, because Yelena believed in him. He made it through his morning routine, through the lobby, and took a long deep breath when he got outside the front door because he’d done it. He made it.

Then it hit him that the hardest part hadn’t even started yet and he squeezed Yelena’s hand so tightly it almost broke.