Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alternative Title: How Yelena Gives In

May

Seven Months After the Void Swallowed Manhattan

This world is in a perpetual state of razing itself to the ground. Some day soon, stars will shake loose from the sky, whatever crazy powerful beings out there will ravage this planet to its bones, and Yelena will be too weak to save it. She knows this in the same intricate way she knows loss, but she'll still try to make a difference.

This team, if she can really call it a team, is what she will try for. The people of this world are who she will try for. Natasha, too. And herself. Whatever she can do in this universe that’s constantly evolving and reminding her each day of her startling humanity. 

She stands at the windows overlooking Manhattan, fingers fidgeting with her chain necklace. The sun shrinks too fast on the horizon like a fire that’s devoured all oxygen in the room, eating itself until it blinks out of existence. Her sweatshirt’s worn to the point of resembling rags, pliable in just the way she likes, but her jeans are new. She always has her boots on just in case. 

Yelena doesn’t know when she’ll have to run, lately. She doesn’t know what tomorrow will be like. Or an hour from now. Or a minute. 

She used to have the opposite problem. Now she knows what’s coming for her, but she lives with a pit inside her for different reasons. 

The elevator doesn’t ping behind her, but she hears it ascending, and she listens for the footsteps of who has come to retrieve her.

Socked feet approach over the pristine floor. He has a recognizable gait. Not clumsy, but unsure of his next steps. Drifting. 

“Are you okay?” she asks him. The sliver of light left in the sky casts ruby flecks across the reflective windows of buildings below. 

Bob stops somewhere behind her. “Oh. Yeah,” he says. “I just hadn’t seen you. You’ve been down here a lot.” 

It’s one of the middle floors of what used to be Avengers Tower, but Valentina made sure the world now knew it as the Watchtower. Good for reestablishing the brand, apparently.

The upper floors are fully renovated from their apartments, to a shared lounge floor, to the New Avengers headquarters. This floor’s one of the few left that isn’t decorated, let alone furnished. It has more rooms, which means they’re all smaller, but not cozy. They’re barren. One day, they might be lab stations or offices.

She turns to him. 

Judging by the mess of wet hair and droplets of water on his neck, he’s just come from the shower. His soft black shirt and designer sleep pants (that Valentina for sure ordered his room to be stocked with) confirm it. 

“Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.” Yelena starts toward the elevator, having no desire to prolong this conversation, no desire to keep him from accomplishing his goal of getting her to come up to HQ for the weekly debrief, and definitely no desire to be alone with him for too long.

He steps in her path. “If you’re fine, then I’m fine."

He smells like clean laundry detergent and faintly like some stupid musky deodorant that probably has a tree for a name. She doesn’t know how they manage it, getting in each other’s space within seconds of being in the same room. It used to be innocent, but things have been off recently.

Maybe they’ve always been off. 

“Then I guess you’re fine,” she says, slapping Bob’s arm harder than necessary while slipping by him. Always her shadow, he follows closely to the elevator and hovers by her even when they’re inside.

The worst part of the tower is the elevators. Public for the bottom and business floors, private for the upper and residential floors, and the single Avengers lift leading to HQ, the landing pad, and the arsenals. 

A few floors up, in the lounge, they’re biometrically scanned by the wall on the far side of the room, which splits horizontally to reveal the Avengers lift. 

“Are you staying here tonight?” he asks on the way up.

“Is Walker?”

“I dunno.”

She shrugs. “If I do, it won’t be a sleepover.” 

“Obviously.”

He thinks it’s funny that she hates the setup they’ve got going on. When they moved in it was like little kids going to summer camp. It’s what she's come to know as a necessary evil. Valentina threw them into the public eye to save her own shitty ass, and as much as the New Avengers do, in fact, make her scramble to accommodate their needs because she’s scared fuckless of being exposed for her crimes, most of them are contractually obligated to stay in the tower.

It makes sense. Easy to regroup here, there’s enough space for all of them, it’s good for public image, and it’s more than well protected inside and out.

Yelena crashes on couches a lot.

“I’m not the only one who doesn’t like it here."

“That doesn’t count. Bucky’s like a tortoise. He needs his space.”

Yelena holds back a snort. “I’m going to tell him you said that.”

His relaxed posture turns rigid. “No, don’t.” 

“It’s too good not to.” 

“What if he gets mad?”

She smirks up at him. “I guess we’ll find out.”

The lift doors open to HQ. One wall’s lined with monitors, on the opposite wall is a massive screen, and couches harder than slabs of stone sit in the middle of the room.

Before she can poke fun at Bucky, heads turn their way and Alexei booms, “See, Bob? I told you she would come for you.” 

Yelena’s smile falters. Bob notices, because he always does, and he retreats to his usual nook behind the couches near the windows.  

And that’s just it, isn’t it—the root of her problem. 

Sometime along the way, between wanting to keep an eye on Bob and wanting to be there for him as someone who also has an overwhelming past, his presence began dictating where she goes and when she goes there. 

She finds excuses to be in the same room as him.

While away on missions, masquerading as a hero, Yelena wonders what he’s doing and what he’s thinking. She slinks home to the tower and he’s waiting for her, not the others.

Her. 

Bob, when he’s not having a bad day where the past’s crushing weight attempts to pull him under, and when he’s not visibly shaken in a suspended state of temporary memory loss, is not very much like a normal, stable guy.

But he’s still a man, and he likes that she leans on him almost as much as he leans on her.

Without him having to ask for it, she knows what he wants, and she never minds spending time near him or pulling him into the group when he tries straying out of sight like an overstimulated cat.

But she minds that he wants more from her. 

She minds that it affects her. 

It makes her unsteady on her feet. Makes her question herself, because she shouldn't have room for the way she feels.

Not ever again, even the bits of it allocated to this team that PR tries to convince the populace is legit, and structured, and not a bunch of mentally ill soldiers and science experiments trying to make a difference.

Not after the life she's lived. Not after the Red Room. Not after Natasha. 

She's done too much and killed too many to deserve it, and that's as far as she lets herself think before she packs it all deep down in a laundry basket that she seals inside a closet behind many boxes of many things to get stinky. 

But no matter how much she tries avoiding it, Robert Reynolds has taken shape inside her, and it’s more terrifying than anything that could be coming for this planet in the future.

Yelena jots down information about Bob as the days pass. 

In the cold months after the vault and Bob going apocalyptic, Yelena spends quiet nights with him in the lounge and in his room, and even hers on occasion. Bob slowly provides jewel-colored strings that Yelena uses to embroider the edges of the list she keeps on him, creating a picture of everything he is. Like his half-remembered misadventures in other countries, or which moments of his life make up the stones in the pockets of the guilt he wears like a cloak.

Yelena gives him her stories in return, and when he remembers what happened inside the Void, she tells him the reasons for her shame rooms.

She understands him. He understands her.

She should know what the feeling is as spring stitches its presence to her skin with each shared post-midnight snack in the kitchen and the barest brushing of their feet on the coffee table as they watch TV.

By the summer, it’s already a part of her. 

Realization comes more like the phases of the moon; each day a new pale brushstroke appears, its shape growing from crescent to gibbous, and then a full white disk shouts down at Yelena with the answer for what this thing is.

It’s not even surprising, which infuriates her, but time is nothing if not the omen of clarity.

On his good days, Bob fluctuates between being skittish but easygoing. He tries too hard to get along with the team or stays too far out of the way. On his bad days, he’s more like when Yelena first met him. Like a baby deer, eager but afraid to mess things up. He reverts to a dissociative state, and she catches him daydreaming in the same spot for hours. 

Bob likes to sit in the same room as others, even if he’s in the corner and doesn’t speak.

He likes hot tea, but only at night. Otherwise, only coffee. If he’s feeling down, a little frozen treat goes a long way. He likes physics and chemistry, and he likes to draw, and he taught himself to enjoy reading. He’s not often in shoes because his laces mysteriously come untied and he refuses to double-knot them for some reason; his sock collection is always growing.

He never misses the opportunity to steal glances at her or to watch her move—punch, kick, get up from the couch, whatever. The way he lit up stepping foot into HQ for the first time is the same sparkly look he gives her when he makes her laugh. 

Sometimes, when it’s just them together, Yelena spies through the crevices of his bashful demeanor to see what’s underneath. Like, Bob is a thinker. He’s smart, and it pisses her off a lot of the time. Still quiet, but playful. 

Bob has the highest residential floor to himself. 

Yelena doesn’t go there anymore. If he wants to see her, he comes to find her. 

He has trouble sleeping, he finds her. He can’t stand his own mind that day, he tells her. Hand-to-hand combat? He asks for her help, not anyone else’s. 

Yelena, Yelena, Yelena. 

And she’s weak to it.

When she’s alone at night, it’s his face, his body, and the way he looks at her with so much devotion that tangles her thoughts. 

She knows the signs of wanting. Bob shows all of them.

It's not like the thought of sex with him involves bad feelings, it’s that when she does let herself think about it, the images her mind conjures make her mouth water, and then she feels like she’s spoiling whatever they have.

It’s not about sex. Yelena could go out and have a fuck any time she pleased. She doesn’t, because she’s never liked anything quick. She’s barely ever had an appetite for sex at all. It’s too much like protocol. Like a mission.

But she thinks about it. 

He’d take it if she gave it to him, but he’d be crushed when they’re done and she inevitably pulls away because at the end of the day, they won’t ever work out. They can’t. 

Yelena’s comfortable keeping things stiff between them if it means avoiding fallout.

So, as the summer settles over New York City, and the New Avengers schedule is clear for the upcoming days, she really should tell him no when he asks for her help again in the training room. It’d be better if he asked Bucky. Or even Walker.

Yelena has a hard time telling Bob no. 

June

“Sorry.”

“Technique,” Yelena says, winded from going again. "You still swing like you're brawling on the street."

“Well, yeah," he says like, That's what I'm used to. As if she doesn't know.

“I know you can throw me into Canada, but when you get out there and fight, technique will help you pull your punches.” 

“Right.”

His whole body sags as he drops his guard, but he’s physically unaffected otherwise. Instead of exerting himself, it's more like she’s exerting herself on him. 

All of the Watchtower is an open-concept fancy fest with sleek appliances and an ugly mixture of natural rock installations with chrome bullshit, but the training room is practical, like a concrete warehouse with weights and other gym shit. The opaque windows near the ceiling let in natural light.

He shifts his stance back and forth on the tumbling mats, watching his feet.

Yelena turns her nose up at him. “Stop being afraid to hit me.”

“It's not that easy.” he says. She sighs, and without warning, flips him to the ground, tumbling with him so that he lands with a dull smack but she’s upright with her knee digging into his shoulder.

Satisfaction drips through her. 

Despite him heaving, surprised by the flip, he has a glint in his eye. This is why training with him is a bad idea. Bad ideas are her tendency, so she needs to be better at removing the temptation.

Yelena seethes at herself.

“You don’t need to be afraid to hit me. You know you can win, but this isn’t about winning, so I can still beat you. If you’re going to be a part of this team one day, not every threat is going to be about the whole world. Or the universe. If we get a call to clean up a mess somewhere, and a couple of operatives show up with guns, what are you going to do, flick their heads off?”

“No. That sounds awful.”

“Exactly.” Yelena stands, and offers him a hand to help him up. “Technique.”

"Yes. Got it." He squares his hips and tucks his elbows close with his hands in front of his face.

And so they go. Right now, it’s about quick strikes.

“Shit, sorry.”

“Focus on—”

“Making it like instinct,” he interrupts. “I know.” 

“Not what I was going to say, but sure.”

“It’s hard. My instinct isn’t fight, it’s to—” He stops.

“It’s okay to say your instinct is flight. Nothing to be ashamed of, we’ll just tweak it a little. Run at the action instead of away. Which I've already seen you do.”

His gaze makes a lap around the room. “‘Kay. Let’s go again.”

He comes at her first this time, and she breaks inside his guard, hooking her heel at his ankle and sending him to the floor.

“I’ve pulled the same move ten times.”

“I’ve got it.” He pushes himself up, raises his fists. She attacks, dodging, ducking, swinging around him, hooking her heel. He crashes to the floor. 

“Okay, how about—”

“No, I can do it. I promise.” 

Her heart sinks. She has no idea what it must be like for him to be his age with no prior training; to be given so much power and to be terrified of using it because he can’t control the highs and the lows.

And all she’s doing is asking him for exactly what’s out of his reach right now. 

Bob hates failing. 

That’s on her list many, many times.

Yelena looks him over.

Bare feet, black tactical pants, henley shirt clinging to his shoulders. 

“Hey,” she says. “You’ll get this. I mean, look at you—you’re not even sweating.” She wipes her forehead, though she doesn’t need to. “How ridiculous.” 

Bob shakes his head, but he stands a little taller, clearly preening. 

Also on her list: Bob likes to be praised. He pushes himself for it. 

“Let’s go again,” he says.

It’s ridiculous how much that helped. 

He tracks her better, steps when she steps. The waltz begins, and he gets a few chances to strike back, but doesn’t take them. 

“You’re doing it again.”

“No, I’m not.”

Yelena slows, mid-movement, and Bob doesn’t take the opening. 

Anger becomes magma, consuming her.

She drops to mat and swipes her leg at his feet. Face-first into the mat he goes. 

“Come on,” she says.

It won’t always be like this. He’s going to catch up, and then she won’t be able to touch him because he’s on a level so far removed from her that she can’t really comprehend it. Yelena is meant for so many things, but she isn’t meant to be able to do what Bob can—no one is, really—or Alexei, or Walker, or Bucky, or even what Ava can with her powers.

Natasha did so much, but where did that put her in the end? Gone, while others go on ahead. 

Bob pushes himself up from the floor. “That was mean.”

“Out there is mean. I get hit, and I get shot at, and so will you. Let’s go.”

“Yelena.”

“Let’s go, Bob.” She rushes him.

He can fight. He doesn't have to, but if he has the option to control his power, he’ll choose to be the Sentry again. 

She twists around a combination of sloppy blows.

How long will this last? How long until Yelena can’t help in the way the others can?

It’s not inferiority or jealousy she feels; it’s bleak reality.

“Yelena—”

“Hit me back.”

Bob’s focus darts from her fists, to blocking a spinning kick, to jabbing at her liver and missing.

Her boot meets his face, and she has a split second for guilt to burn through her before he catches her ankle on its way down, yanking her close, trapping her arm, and driving her backward into the ground like she's nothing more than old, wet meat.

Her head cracks against the mat. She swears her brain matter sloshes around, blocking all sound from reaching her ears. If only she could fucking see, then maybe she could congratulate Bob on doing what she said he should. 

The room comes back in stages. First, in the feverish heat of another body over hers, too near her sweat-drenched skin. Then, Bob’s wide eyes searching her face and head for damage, brows screwed up like he just saw something terrible. Finally, his voice. 

“I’m so sorry, I wasn't thinking.”

“You’re really strong.”

A harsh breath escapes him, sweeping over her mouth. “Sorry, I'm so sorry.” His hands hover over her shoulders. She’s aware, suddenly, of how close he is, kneeling between her prone body. Her muscles pull tight. 

Her tongue is heavy as she says, “That was my fault. I was pushing you.” 

“But that felt different. I accidentally put some juice into it. That could've—” His words die in his mouth as her fingers skim his cheek, where her boot could’ve fractured his bone if he wasn't him. 

Disgust rots in the back of her throat. 

She’s unraveling. 

“I asked you to hit me. So, my fault.” Her hand drops, and he leans back. 

She props up on her elbows and winces at the ache in her skull. The room’s light is too loud. 

"You need to get your head checked. I can carry you."

"I can stand."

"No, let me help."

Yelena steadies herself with a deep breath. "I'm okay to walk. Give me a second and help me up."

That, he relents to. With gentle hands, he guides her to her feet as if she’s overripe fruit he’s afraid to bruise, then huddles close to escort her to the elevator. It's not a long walk, except that he makes her go slow. Her head wails, but as her thoughts settle she picks up on something he said. 

"Bob," she blurts. "Are you holding back your power more than you’re trying to control the—you know?”

The hand poised at her waist in case she falls skims her uniform. "Yeah, I guess.”

“And the more you go at it, the harder it is to hold back.” He doesn’t answer. At the elevator, the biometric scanner gives a hiss. Yelena needs a nap. Maybe eight of them. “Who else knows?”

“Just you.”

Of course. And here she is, praising him one moment and kicking him in the face the next. Ripping him in different directions.

The doors split. He doesn't enter with her.

"Do you… want me to come?

Yes. She would've said so a few months ago. She almost does now.

"No, stay. I'll be fine. Get in a cool down." She is absolutely concussed. Mildly, but still. "Find me later and we'll talk."

About his powers all of a sudden becoming less tame and him not telling anyone. Everything she was worrying about starting to come true.

He nods.

The doors won't shut with him standing in the way, wringing his hands and looking like he's chewing on something to say.

“Are you okay?”

He doesn't just mean physically.

One of her favorite things about Bob is that he can't keep his thoughts from showing on his face. His history is always there, peeking from the dark. When they first met, she thought of his face as being open. Somewhere along the way it shifted to being inviting, like she needs to mine every thought he has from the tunnel of his mind or else she'll never be satisfied. 

“Yeah, I guess,” she says, and Bob knows it's a lie. She sees it on his face. 

"You sound like me."

He steps back from the doors and they slide shut, burying the conversation before it can begin. 

All the way to the infirmary, where she gets her confirmation of a mild concussion, then back to her room and in the shower, where she stands until her skin is pink with heat, her body screams to rest. To go back and find Bob and apologize for using him as an outlet. To talk to him about her fear, and the way he watches her, and how she thinks about him, and how she wants him to be okay but feels like she can’t be as close with him or else she’ll break and do something stupid. 

She really does sound like him. 

July

They’re in HQ, the whole team, and Bob almost eviscerates Alexei in the middle of the room.

Well, almost is a strong word.

Imagine what you could do, what you could be. 

“Dad,” Yelena says, setting down her holopad and standing from her chair. “Not the time.”

He waves her off. “What? It’s truth. Bob, we love you, but we need Sentry. This was great progress today. You are very strong.” Except, from what Yelena knew of, there was no progress today. Bob is unfathomably strong, and invincible, but he’s stuck in that mental block. Since the training room, he hasn't had another accident of his power just flicking on and moving his body for him. “What improvements you bring to the team. No one will call us jokes anymore.”

Alexei claps a hand on his shoulder and Bob goes still in a way that chills Yelena to her marrow. It’s not his posture that scares her. It’s the way his eyes are far away, similar to how he gets on a bad day when he’s lost in his head.

This silence is targeted, not wandering. 

The hush before thunder.

Bucky stands. 

Walker watches from his seat while Ava reclines back on the floor.

No one’s harder on Bob than himself. 

Maybe they don't keep a list like her, but it’s not that hard to understand. 

Bob stares at Alexei like he’s contemplating what it’d be like to give in. Show him the Sentry. Yelena slides between them.

“Thank you very much, Dad, for that inspiring talk. I think Bob deserves to relax.” Alexei can’t seem to break the staredown they have going, not until Yelena grasps his wrist where he’s holding Bob’s shoulder. She makes a show of sniffing and wrinkling her nose. “Go take a shower or something. You reek.”

“Agreed,” Ava says. “You can go back to teaching super boy some more party tricks later. Let’s hope it doesn’t involve going blond again.” 

It’s harmless teasing, but Bob shrinks.

“No worries there,” he says.

Words tangle behind Yelena’s teeth. She’s not Bob’s guard dog. He can handle himself. 

Sometimes.

Alexei backs away, hands held above his head. “All right, guys. Excuse me for being all natural. ”

Yelena scowls at him and takes Bob by the arm, pulling him up the small set of stairs, behind the useless geometric room dividers.

“What was that?” she whispers. He tears his gaze from where Alexei sits down near Bucky, who scoots away, to look at her. “You don’t usually let him get to you like that.”

“I don’t know.” He says it like something’s leaking from him, spilling too fast for him to stop it.

“You looked like you were…” Yelena lets it hang, and his head bows.

This is what he does to seem like less of a threat: If one of them comes near him, he sways out of the way. Hunches over. Minimal eye contact.

She hates it.

He is a threat. He might always be one, but she still hates it. 

Yelena squeezes his arm. “If anyone bothers you, you know you can say so. You don’t need to censor yourself around any of us.”

“I don’t”—his brow knits together—“censor myself.”

“Physically, you do.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a habit.”

“I get that.” She glances at the rest of the room, and maybe the others are eavesdropping, but they seem to be in their own conversations. “You don’t want us to be afraid of you. But you shouldn’t worry about that. Just be… you.”

“I am me. Around you.”

His arm is solid. His body heat soothes some of the constant anxiety in her chest, and he smells nice. Stupid tree deodorant. 

“Exactly. And I’m not afraid of you, so just do that with the others.”

He searches her features like he’s peering through a veil to catch what she’s trying to hide. 

This, too, she hates. The closer they become, the more she tries to distance herself, and the more suspicious he is of her. 

Thoughts turn to floods. Words become shrouded. Touches become weapons, a storm of arrows raining on her mind at night, spearing her with the want to give him what he wants. To follow him to his room at night. To step close and trickle a hand down his chest; to be a waterfall pooling at his hips. 

Hazard zone. 

“Why aren’t you?” he asks, and she nearly convinces herself that he’s talking about him in general, and the Sentry and the Void, which they’ve talked through so many times. But then he continues. “I messed up the other week. It could’ve been bad.”

After later that day when he gave her the rundown on his control problem, he hasn’t brought it up. Until now.

She lowers her voice. “My. Fault. Not yours. I’m not fragile. If it’d been any of the others, it wouldn’t matter.”

“But you’re you. It’s different.”

He drifts further into her space. It’s such a slight movement that she almost can’t tell. He might not even notice he’s inviting her closer.

“Why?” she asks before she can stop herself. She knows why, and it’s not because she’s not enhanced, though that might be a small part of it. Acknowledging the true reason would be like setting off a bomb between them. “We’re here for you. We’re all on the same team.”

His jaw clenches. “Right.” 

The wall divider’s steel bars gain his interest, and he taps his fingers there. 

The air turns sticky. God, she sucks. 

“Listen, I’m proud of you, okay? And I’m here for you. Always.”

“I know.”

“Good.” Her mouth’s dry. 

Maybe Yelena’s too attuned to his emotions. Maybe she loathes him being upset with her. Maybe she’s weaker than she realizes. Bob likes physical touch, and when he needs comfort, she’s possessed to give it to him. It's simple, like a star shouting light into the dark. 

Her hand slides from his arm, up his shoulder, to the nape of his neck, fingertips venturing to the soft, warm hair there. His pupils expand, and he sucks in a breath.

Metal creaks.

The sound rips through HQ. All other conversations go quiet. Yelena recoils.

The bar is a chunk of glowing metal. He releases it like it scalds him, cradling his hand to his chest. 

“I didn’t mean to,” he says.

Yelena can’t stop staring at the color, winking like lava, draining from the metal as it rapidly cools to black.

Bodies crowd around, blocking the windows.

Shadows yawn high and wide around her.

She registers what’s happening as Walker leans in to inspect the steel Bob just squished like putty, the moment before the world plunges into darkness.

Her heart knocks into overdrive.

She’d just touched him, and he’d accidentally used his powers, and that’s why she’s here. Makes sense. Doesn’t stop her stomach from trying to escape out her feet, though. 

Light sparks overhead, and when she turns around it blinds her. Sulfur and smoke singe her nose. She squints until she can see, and when she can, she can’t breathe.

The field burns with the wreckage of the Red Room, flames distorting the air with heat. Natasha’s in front of her, standing next to her younger self. Black and white. 

She looks so beautiful. She was always so beautiful. 

Then Yelena watches herself limp toward the aircraft, and she knows why this is one of her rooms in the Void. 

“No,” she says as Natasha walks away. Just turn around and talk a little longer. Just a bit.

But the other version of her whistles instead, and Natasha whistles back, and Yelena feels a shriek build inside her, nearly cleaving out of her throat.

She didn’t know it would be the last time. It could have always been the last time, but she didn’t know. 

“Yelena.”

She blinks, and the spitting blaze of metal and fuel disappear, returning her to an overcast New York City and an air conditioned room.

She’s standing at the windows of HQ, not ten feet from where she just was. Ava’s next to her, and the others are still chattering behind them. 

How long had passed? It couldn't be more than a minute or two. A scream clogs her airway.

“Hmm?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

No one noticed. Ava seems more weirded out than concerned, and Yelena makes a show of wincing so as to feel if there are wet streaks on her cheeks. There aren’t, so she’s safe to stop hiding her face.

“Headache,” she says, and she spins around.

Bob gapes at the ground. In a fraction of a moment, he glances at her with such devastation in his eyes that Yelena feels it like a scalpel severing any warmth left in the room. 

The others haven’t caught on. He’s not going catatonic, but he’s flickering with panic, so Yelena mentally scoops up her feelings and stomps them until they’re lifeless on the floor. 

She has to protect him now.

Walker’s blabbing about the chunk of metal that Alexei holds in his hands.

Bucky’s watching Bob watch her. 

“Okay, guys,” she says. “Leave him alone.”

“Tell him he should try to finally fix my shield.”

“This was an accident. Don’t pressure him.” Her boots, thankfully, hide the unsteady first steps she takes toward them.

“No, no. Not accident. Progress, Bob!” He shakes the metal in front of him like he can get it to vibrate. “What I say earlier. See?”

Bob forces out words. “I don't know.” 

She steals the space next him, snatching the metal from Alexei and handing it to Bucky. “Let’s not get too excited. And what I mean by that is: let’s keep going exactly how we have been, and no one mention this to Valentina or she might try to get PR involved before Bob's ready.”

“Sneaky little rat,” Alexei grumbles. 

“Correct.” She hesitates before clamping her fingers into Bob’s shirt sleeve. He’s rigid. “Time to go.” 

He doesn’t protest as she tugs him to the Avengers lift. 

“Don’t forget the marketing brief later,” Ava calls.

“Can’t wait,” she says. “Highlight of my evening.”

Everyone watches them as the lift closes. They’re both trembling. 

When they’re in the lounge, they only make it to the middle of the room before she has to stop.

"Yelena."

Pressure builds in her throat, the image of Natasha in front of her reassembling itself. Her sister. Her sister. “I know what you’re going to say,” she grinds out. “And before you say it, just don’t. This wasn’t your fault, it was mine. I’m so sorry.”

“No—”

“You told me you were struggling to hold it back, and I overstepped.” 

“You didn’t. I was just surprised.”

That’s another issue, too. He doesn’t think of her as overstepping. Bob makes the decision each morning to wake up and try a roundabout way of controlling himself. His power is mostly dormant inside him. One intimate touch and Yelena forces his instincts to surface.

She underlines one of her list entries and adds a footnote. Touching Bob too much is reckless. Dangerous, even.

This is why she keeps her hands to herself.

“It doesn’t happen when you’re not worked up, right?”

“I mean, it’s harder when I’m upset.”

“Good. Okay.” She’s still gripping his sleeve, and she unlocks her stiff fingers. “Then it’s like I said earlier. Don’t worry about us. Just be you. You’re the first person to ever go through this, so small mistakes are bound to happen. Finding balance is really hard, okay? Don’t beat yourself up."

“Then why didn’t you tell them?”

She falters. “Because it was private.”

His face is a shipwreck against a rocky beach, eager to spill its ghosts. Yelena is running through the wet shore—she’ll sink if she slows. 

“I’ll see you later?” He says it like he’s condemning himself, like she already sentenced him to be alone. “At the meeting?”

She could agree and walk away, and maybe go hit something in the training room, and then cry in the shower. 

“Actually, I’d like company… if you’re okay with that.”

“…Yeah, that’s fine.”

They don’t go anywhere. 

Speakers from the kitchen bar around the corner croon a song with plucky strings. A book materializes in Bob’s hands, and Yelena notes for the first time that they’ve filled the many shelves in the lounge with actual material rather than decorative leather spines of Western classic novels. 

She takes one low, uncomfortable leather couch, and he takes another.

Clouds blot the sky, turning it dark gray as rain begins pattering the windows. There are no blazing pieces of the Red Room here. No fire or stench of fuel. Her sister is gone. There is no Void stealing her away. She’s on a couch that smells like it’s been wiped down recently. There’s a dumb contemporary art piece hanging high on the wall. Nothing is forcing her to run right now.

She does not need to run.

Paper rustles periodically as Bob flips pages, much slower than his usual pace. He might not really be reading.

Neither of them speak. He only agreed to stay because he’s aching, too, and they’ve been through this enough to know there’s no use in denying the remedy of each other’s presence.

He’s here for her. She’s here for him. This is how it’ll have to be to keep the peace, by pretending at normalcy from across the room.

It must be hours later when he calls her name.

She finds him from her state of dozing. “Yes, Bob.”

“I’m sorry. For where you went.”

Her chest is made from seams that threaten to burst. All those nights that she told him so much about Natasha. He’s seen her through Yelena's perspective, finally. 

Her eyes well up, and she says, “Don’t be. It was a good place to go.” 

August

Lonely is the state Yelena spent most of her life stewing in.

That’s fine. Really, it was fine. She even misses the quiet sometimes, except that it was actually horrible and she doesn’t miss it at all.

Thing is, she’s not lonely anymore even in her lowest moments riding waves of emptiness. She sees her dad most days and they even have weird, sad talks. Ava’s almost always around. When he’s not with his kid, Walker bursts in and is a quick target for teasing, which never fails to put a grin on Yelena’s face. Bucky is here and there, but they mostly talk business and share stories that all have the same harrowing themes. Yelena sometimes counts the people she helps to save, too. 

But then there's Bob. He fills the room despite taking up the smallest amount of space possible, exerting pressure at arms-length because that’s how far she keeps him. 

Not close enough. There, but she won’t let herself touch. So, it’s not loneliness that she feels, but a ragged, roaring absence.

She's been good about being near him so that he doesn’t think she’s avoiding him because of what happened last month. Touching him lightly on the forearm to get his attention or when she laughs, letting him know, I’m familiar with you, and I like you, and this is friendly, right? 

It’s like living with shards of glass for teeth; every word, she cuts her tongue, and no matter how genuine, each smile bleeds warning. 

Naturally, she slips, like a child trying to avoid a cookie jar, if those even exist outside of cartoons. 

It’s supposed to be easy, nothing more than the usual espionage dirty work Yelena’s used to doing, except the mission is government-sanctioned and PR has a heavy hand in its orchestration. A star-powered Avengers outing meant to make headlines. No deaths, the people praise them, and they all get to intercept arms dealers on the west coast to pinpoint their source of operations somewhere in Eastern Europe where scavenged tech from buried HYDRA outposts have once again been flagged. 

Yelena wasn’t supposed to get shot, but shit happens. Big deal. The gash it left in her shoulder really hurts like a bitch though, and she’s having trouble moving her arm after the drugs for the pain and quick patch up from Bucky.

The jet touches down at the Watchtower, and she tumbles back to reality from the whispering hum of the cockpit. Sunrise is only a few hours away. Sweat cakes the lines of her throat and face, and the fleshy tang coming from her shoulder makes her nose wrinkle. 

Her muscles are cotton. Sleep drags at her. But she’s the first out of the jet and into the building, into HQ, hoping—not hoping—to get a glimpse of him. If he waited up for them.

No screens are on in HQ. The night is a blanket on the room. The jet’s engines blare in their cool down from below, and only the dregs of city lights outline a silhouette on one of the couches.

“You’re back” Bob says, shooting to his feet. As if he didn’t have the trackers up and comms system linked for live feed, awake and worrying and wishing he could help because he always wants to come with them. And to help.

Yelena’s had a long day. She just wants to relax, and that takes the form of marching over to Bob and grasping his hand so tightly she hopes the melting, waxy feeling in her ribs will reverse and solidify.

It’s the first genuine contact they’ve had since July, and Bob accepts it without questioning, leaning into her. 

“Are you okay?” She could curl up on the couch and never move again if he continued speaking to her in that tone; it’s private, like anyone could listen in from below.

Yeah, Yelena made a mistake. He’s crowding her space while focused on her shoulder, gripping her fingers like he’ll never let them go, but he doesn’t touch her anywhere else because she hasn’t offered it. He smells soft and sleepy and his hair is unwashed, flat near his temple but waving in all directions everywhere else. 

She wants him. She wants to go to sleep next to him, tucked close, so they can wake up together.

Jesus Christ. 

“I’m fine. Just tired.” 

“Your arm, though.”

The low lights flick on in the room, and so do the screens. They wrench apart at the same time, not entirely subtle, as Alexei bounds up from the platform below. 

“You didn’t need to wait up for us like this,” Yelena says, too loud.

A grimace skates across Bob’s face before disappearing. “Can’t really do anything else but wait.”

Walker shouts a brief goodnight.

“Yelena,” Bucky calls. “Go get your arm cleaned and checked. We’ll debrief in the morning.” 

“It is the morning.”

“Yeah, and we’re all human and need some rest.”

It’s like the words have thorns. She’s the only one here who fully fits into that category. Yelena does not let the fact that she internally bristles show in her body language. 

Fuck, she must be more tired than she thought.

“Don’t have to tell me again,” she says, good arm raised in fake surrender. 

Later, after she's clean, her stomach swan dives out of a plane when she thinks of Bob half-awake and close enough to bite into.

Giving in might not be so terrible. It’d be good, really good, before it got bad.

Horrible idea.

Everything is better than that idea. 

Stress from work is better (a week and a half later, after her arm heals with the aid of some pretty blue substance they’re growing in the lab).

Also better: scrolling on her phone at 1:37 AM and avoiding clickbait headlines blaming their arms seizure for being too slow as more and more off-world tech shows up in America. 

For sure. So much better. 

The door to her apartment pings, and the screen next to it lights up to show the security feed from the hall outside. 

The flash of Bob standing there is the only warning she gets before the lock whirs, unfastening, and the door glides into the wall with a seamless swish.

Shit.

From her spot on the couch, Yelena shoots to her feet as Bob stumbles inside, looking at the door like it’s on fire, then whipping back around to find her. 

“It just opened,” he says. “I didn’t know—”

“I put your biometrics in the system when we moved in.” And she never thought to remove them because he’d never come unannounced like this before. She’s always let him in herself. 

“Oh, yeah. Forgot.”

Her apartment is open except for the massive en suite and the bedroom that she never steps foot in, and he stands motionless across the room on the wool rug she let him pick out for her from some expensive catalogue. 

Caution colors her tone. “What’s happening?”

“Sorry, I know you don’t—” He swallows hard. “I knew you were awake.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“I don’t know.” He’s not motionless, she realizes. He’s shaking.

Dread rakes through her. “Bob, what do you need?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then come sit down and we’ll figure it out.”

His face crumples like he’s in pain. “I don’t know if I wanna sit.”

“Okay.” She approaches him one step at a time the same way she would a wild dog. He puts his hands up in front of him, a clear warning from someone unbearably vulnerable at the moment, but she doesn’t stop.

“Don’t,” he says. “I don’t trust myself right now.” 

“That’s okay. I trust you.” 

When she’s close enough, she gives him plenty of time to avoid her as she reaches for him. His hand is feverish, palm damp where she grasps it. His grip compresses the blood flow to her fingers. 

“Come here.”

He keeps taking little sips of air, and his words spill over each other. “I can’t.”

“Why?” she asks. He shakes his head. “Panic attack?”

“Not yet.” He drops her hand and stretches his arms above his head like he’s trying to reach the ceiling. His shirt sticks to his skin, blotchy with sweat. She’s never seen him like this. 

She doesn’t know what to do.

“What’s it feel like?”

“Like I need to peel out of my skin or I’m gonna go crazy.” He cracks his neck and yawns, then yawns again while she searches for something to say. That, Yelena recognizes, is adrenaline. Or at least something similar. “I don’t wanna sleep, or work out, or breathe. I feel like I’m burning up.”

She has no idea how his body works. No one really does. Whatever serum O.X.E. developed would’ve remade him at a structural level. He’s something else now. Other. 

What would it feel like to have all that power inside and not use it?

“Has this happened before?” she asks.

“Yes and no,” It's strained. “Not since before Malaysia. Not like this. It’s like itching for—I don’t know. I wanna get high, but I don’t. It’s not the same.” He inspects the ceiling. “I feel like I’m floating and I can’t do anything about it.” 

That gives her an idea. It’s simple, really. 

“Bob.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to touch you now.” 

“You shouldn’t—”

She slides into his space and snakes her arms around his waist. 

His body vibrates with tension, but Yelena tucks her head against his heart and waits.

His heart pounds like it’s trying to rupture its way out from behind his ribs. So does hers. 

Finally, his arms settle around her. At first, it’s a touch light as drizzling dry sand between her fingers, and then he’s crushing her against him and dipping into her hair, shivering.

Bob craves comfort more than he realizes. Another from her list. 

His breathing slows. 

His body heat’s practically unbearable, but she doesn’t complain. The more they hold each other, the more her neck aches because of how she has her head bent against him. Still, her eyelids droop. 

“Thank you,” he says, and there’s real relief in his voice.

Yelena raises enough to hook her chin over his shoulder. He presses his face into her neck. 

“Feel better?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She barely begins to loosen her hold on him before his fingers dig into her shirt.

“Not yet.” Stubble scratches her skin.

Fragments of alarm burn in her. This is exactly what she’s been trying to avoid. She shouldn’t let him—or herself—have any more. 

It’s too close. They’re pressed against each other all the way to their hips. 

But it’s so nice. Maybe it’ll help him, and feelings don’t have to be involved. She can be selfish and let herself take from him, too. 

Yeah. Just this time. She closes her eyes, spreading her hands up his back, not caring about the sweaty fabric.

“Why did this work?” he mumbles. 

“Grounding yourself. The same reason why we talk, or why we’ve hugged before.” She tightens her arms. “You were floating, so I held onto you.”

“Oh.”

It seemed like the right thing to do. She’d never have thought of it for herself, or even recognized what might help if it was her dealing with his symptoms. She might’ve reacted the same way, but at least she knew what worked to regulate herself and wasn’t at risk of unleashing world-crushing chaos and pain if she got reckless.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Maybe later. I don’t wanna think about it right now in case the feeling comes back.”

She knows what he means.

Bob relaxes his grip, letting his arms fall to her waist.

He noses her throat as he pulls away, and they get stuck in the detangling, catching eyes. His are clear of the fog of panic.

“Good?” she asks.

He nods.

One long hug, and he’s so much calmer.

Bob is touch-starved. 

And, maybe, so is she. 

That’s all she allows herself, stepping away from him. His hands drop to his sides. 

Boundaries are good and there for a reason.

Bob glances around the room as if he’s never seen it before. Aside from the stock photo picture frames hanging on the walls, there’s nothing much else in here since the rug with its leafy patterns is the only personalization added—only a TV area with a long couch, a modern table and chairs, her smaller couch, and a shit ton of plants lining the floor by the windows—but he finds something to scrutinize. 

“Don’t you sleep in your bed?” he asks, squinting at the short hall to the bedroom.

“No. Have you not noticed?”

“Why don’t you?”

“I guess it’s big. I feel like I’m drowning in it, which makes me worried that I won’t be able to get out of it fast enough if I really need to.”

Him and his freakish talent for staring straight into her soul. “So, you sleep on the tiny couch?”

Said couch is stuffed against the corner wall, leather with a cashmere throw blanket and a pile of worn clothes strewn at the foot of it.

“Yeah.”

“It’s usually got piles of stuff on it.”

“The piles of stuff means it’s mine.” 

“Makes sense.”

They lapse into silence. It’s not awkward, but it’s not comfortable either.

“What did you mean when you said you knew I was awake?” she asks.

Bob does something she doesn’t often see: he shutters his features. Not fully, but enough that she can’t read him well with the scant moonbeams and traces of light pollution from the city streets. His tone is measured. “I just figured. Since I know you.”

I know you.

She can almost taste the words as if she said them herself.

“If you want, you can stay. Take the bed if you want. Or the couch.” Her head jerks to the couch they’ve watched TV on too many times to count. “Or go. Either way, I’m returning to a horizontal position for at least three more hours.”

She makes an aborted movement to walk away, caught by the urge to lean in and wrap herself around him again, but she resists, padding over to her couch in the corner, the leather clinging to the last traces of warmth from her body, and flops down there with her blanket.

Bob watches her, and she watches him watch her. 

Then he turns to the TV couch and folds himself into a ball.

She shouldn’t say it. She should dig a grave for the words. But he looks awful even from over here, hair plastered to his forehead, bloodshot eyes. Alive and resilient and trying. 

“For the record, the door unlocks for you for a reason. If you want to see me, just come.”

He’s quiet for so long Yelena thinks he may have fallen asleep. 

“Okay. I always want to see you.”

The giddy warmth spreading in her is sick.

Don’t worry about the universe, Yelena, just the world. Don’t think about the man you met who helped you find answers about yourself while he found answers about himself in you. Don’t yearn for him. Don’t touch him. Don’t think about him, especially at night.

But why not invite him to your room whenever he wants? Let him stay. It won’t make it any harder to keep him away. It definitely won’t eat up the excuses for not being physical with him. And then what will it hurt to let him touch you the way he looks like he wants to?

She’s fucked.

It’s even worse that being near him makes her feel like she can sleep, so her pounding heart does, eventually, slow to a jog. Then a walk. 

He should be farther from the door so she can take the worst of a potential attack from the hallway. But he’s pretty invincible, so maybe he’s okay there.

She pulls her blanket tighter around her chin and pleads for peace.

Her sleep is dreamless. 

She gets more than three hours.

September

He shifts beside her on the couch, legs wide with his hands clasped over his lap. Yelena doesn’t want to look at his legs, or his hands, or his fidgety thumb pressing crescents into his palm. 

She doesn’t look, but desire strikes as if she’s a gong. Discipline and spite keep it from showing. She measures her breaths and stays still even as her pulse sputters. 

The heart is a stupid, shitty muscle that refuses to listen to orders.

He’s not even doing anything. His sweater’s the color of sleet, but he pushed the sleeves up his forearms ten minutes ago, which is weird. Maybe that’s what happened; Yelena caught sight of his wrists and couldn’t handle the scandal of it all. 

The TV glows with a rerun of a show that was popular during the Blip. It kind of sucks, but maybe that’s because most of the good production crew people turned to dust during this time.

A glance won’t hurt.

He’s got nice nails, she thinks. Trimmed. Clean.

She gnaws the inside of her cheek.

What the fuck is wrong with her? She doesn’t try answering that question, because she knows already. She isn’t one to blame everything on her past because that would be whining, and she doesn’t like to whine.

Yelena decides, in this moment, that the Black Widow name is a paradox. She is a Black Widow. Now she’s the Black Widow.

She can’t shed the name (though PR has brought up a color change a few times), not that she’d want to, because her past is the past and she is who she is. 

But Black Widow is Natasha’s. The name is a mantle, and taking it, Yelena feels like she’s molting her skin, wriggling and exhausting herself only to come out looking the same, just bigger. 

More.

Yelena is more than the compulsion of a mission, the state of starving while in wait, the blossoming executioner. 

Innocence is foreign to her. Death and sex are tools in her experience, but even then at least real spiders eat their mates afterward. Sex was never something to hunger for.

Yelena doesn’t want to eat Bob, she wants to savor him.

Like all Black Widows, she weaves the web how she was trained. With analysis, calculation, and adjustments to her demeanor, voice, appearance, and even her body for the appeal of the target. This is the instinct she wishes she could abandon, and the Red Room is the spindly theatre that raised her.

Every man has a weakness, and she loathes being aware of Bob’s softest points, knowing where she would press and to make him buckle. Being aware means she can exploit it. If she gave in, would it be her or her training behind the wheel? How would she know if she’s manipulating him or not?

Her impulse is to ignore the consequences.

Yelena is stronger than impulse. She is. She has to be.

She could tell him to leave. He asked to come to her room for company, not anything in particular. It’s so late, though. Yelena doesn’t want to shove him out, then reach for a bottle so she doesn’t drown in what ifs. And if he stays, he might dance beautifully for her.

She doesn’t have to let it go far. 

Gradually, her shoulders roll back like she’s stretching, and she tests the strain of her neck in both directions, hiding the scoot toward him in the tension releasing from her body.

He tilts toward her. It’s a delicate movement, a restrained one. A subtlety she never misses with men.

Her ribs are a cage hiding the pump of her blood; it’s full to bursting. He’s giving off heat like a furnace, and she cants her cheek into the warmth of his shoulder. She’s fallen asleep here before, by accident.

The tendons of his hand contract, and then he’s moving it off his lap at a snail’s pace to brush over the back of hers where it sits between their thighs. 

She threads their fingers together, because she’s good at tainting things.

Bob’s other hand slides to the other side of him, flexing where he thinks she can’t see.

The dance begins.

Unlike any other time he’s needed a hand to hold, she pays him close attention by turning his palm over in both of hers, inspecting the hair at his leanly muscled wrist, and she enjoys the way his fingers spread for her as she traces them with her nails. 

Bob audibly swallows.

She sets his hand down, and he gives her his other one.

She feels fucking evil, knowing he’s watching her play with him—that he’s basking in the attention.

The credits of the episode play on screen. She needs some self control, so she laces their hands together again.

“We could watch a movie.” 

“If you want,” he says, hoarse. 

His shoulder digs into her cheek, solid and steady. “Or we could talk.”

“That’s fine.”

“Or we can go to sleep. You okay to leave?” Push. That’s what she does best.

“Uh—that’s fine, too.”

“Are you going to agree with everything I say?”

“Right now, probably.”

Bob, the compliant. Bob, who’ll take anything he can get from her. 

“That’s a lot of power to give someone.” She lifts her head. Gone are the bruised, gray-blue of his eyes, bullied by pupils so large they could be a mouth waiting to be fed.

“Yeah,” he says. 

“You should be careful doing that.” She doesn’t know if she’s speaking to herself or to him. 

“Yeah.”

It’s heady to be wanted this badly. She’s been wanted before, but it’s different with him.

Everything about him right now reads as an invocation for action. He’s a juxtaposition of restraint and pleading. Tension lines his arms, but his knees spread subconsciously. His hazy eyes speak desire. The flush on his face speaks desire. She brushes her foot against his, and his infinitesimal whimper screams desire. 

The next episode loads on the TV.

It’d be so easy. Bob just so happens to want it the way likes to give it. He’ll be so eager to do everything she says. He’ll let her take his sweater off, and he’ll lay down, looking up at her with black eyes when she sits on his face, and his fingers will reach farther inside her than her own.

His brow twitches, and a hint of a mischievous smile tugs at his mouth. 

“What are you thinking about?” he whispers.

“Why do you want to know?” His head sinks toward her as she says it, like he needs to inhale everything she says.

“Because of your heartbeat,” he says, drenched in awe. “It was fast, but then it got so loud just then.”

It’s like getting pummeled in with the butt of a gun and dropped in cold mud.

Time grinds to a halt.

She forces herself not to look away out of sheer embarrassment. 

“Since when can you hear heartbeats?”

He seems confused, like it shouldn’t matter. “I guess… since the serum?”

How, in all this time, she never thought to ask him about what specific enhancements he deals with in his everyday life other than strength and invulnerability, she has no fucking clue. 

Each time she reacts to him, he must know. Every single time, every glance that she stole and he always turned toward her, every innocent contact between them turned to nerves. Every single skip of her pulse. 

She was under the impression that she was the one conducting the push and pull of this moment, but he can read the conflicting emotions on her just as well as she can recognize desire on him. 

He’s just patient.

“Okay,” she manages, stacking distance between them like a wall, dissolving whatever was between them. Surprise flickers on his features. 

“Wait, what?”

“It’s really late.” 

It’s stupid that she feels so stupid. It shouldn’t matter, but she’s rethinking every moment she’s ever felt something for him or because of him. Her heartbeat was probably irregular. And if he's paying attention, then he’s known. 

Reality begins rearranging itself. They’re not normal people. Too much is at stake, and if they do this it’ll hurt them both, and the maybe even world. 

Bob hunches over, hands covering his lap. 

“I’m confused.”

“Me too. I think we just need to go to sleep.”

“Okay…” His laugh is mirthless. “I’m not trying to sound like an asshole, but I’d like to talk about—whatever just happened. Right now, if possible.”

“What is there to talk about?” It rings unfair, even to her.

“I thought we were—I dunno. Can we back up for a second?”

“Sure.”

She stares over his shoulder at the couch she sleeps on, and her blanket. No piles of clothes tonight. She just wants to go to sleep.

Bob’s lips open, close. Open again.

“I upset you?”

“No.”

He waits for her to continue, and when she doesn’t offer anything else, he says, “Are we not on the same page here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you look at me?” She does. He’s wearing his feelings there, spread like a moth’s wing. Delicate. Easy to break. Her embarrassment flares, but the wall she put up loses some integrity. Whatever he sees as he studies her, helps him. “You didn’t know, so you…”

How is she supposed to fill in that blank when she can’t pinpoint it herself?

“I feel like I had privacy, and then… I didn’t.”

“I can’t help that I can—” he gestures around.

"I know. That’s fine. That’s why I can just go to sleep and deal with it myself.”

They’re still quite close. She doesn’t want to be. But she also does.

“I understand,” he says, “but I don’t know why it matters if we’re both…”

Again, he gestures.

Yelena needs the upper hand in a battle.

“What—about to fuck?”

He raises his eyebrows. “That’s one way to put it, yeah.”

“Were we?”

“Going to have sex?”

“Yes.”

He looks like he’s trespassing in his own thoughts. “I thought we were gonna acknowledge something. Dunno how, but I kinda thought, because you—you were signaling. I mean I’m not the best at interpreting stuff.”

She prays for strength. “You’re not wrong. I was signaling.” 

It feels wrong to say it. Childish. Scary. 

Tension empties from him, but not completely. 

“So, is that something we can say, now? I want you, I thought—think you want, y’know.”

Here it goes. “I think it’s better if we don’t.”

He cringes even before he says, “Why?” It’s evident how he’s trying not to sound entitled.

“The last thing on this earth that this team needs is drama.”

“Sorry, why is it drama? Actually, why does anyone else need to know?”

“There’s always drama with sex. Everyone always finds out.”

“Well, it’s not just sex for me. If you were wondering.”

It’s like her skeleton deletes from her body.

Jesus. Bob has major balls. That’s exactly the other reason not to do this. because feelings are involved from both parties, and it’s messy for anyone but messier for them.

She can’t stop staring at him, and it dawns on him, like the moment of an avalanche amputating from a mountainside. He knows about the mutual attraction, but realizes now that she knows about his feelings already.

He grits his teeth, nodding slowly as he processes. “Right. So now we’re even. I know you want something with me, and you know how I feel. How’s that? Big revelations.”

He has a point. The whole past five minutes have been him having a point, and her being shitty. 

He grabs the remote and switches the TV off, standing.

No. This is exactly why she shouldn’t have started anything. She stands, too. “Bob—”

“Yelena, it’s fine. I’m okay. I actually think you’re right about going to sleep.”

She doesn’t think so, not now. He leaves a chance to tell him to stay, but she can't give him anything without ruining things even more. 

The space between them buzzes. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, and then he’s leaving, and the door slides shut.

She stays there until the wet feeling in the back of her throat goes away. 

She tries not to think about how if he’d just made the choice for them on his own, she might’ve gone with it. 

That’s why she hates what ifs. That’s why she shouldn’t allow what she did tonight.

Yelena is tired of her mind splitting open and thinking of things she can’t have.

Chapter Text

September, Continued

Bob, suddenly, is much busier than usual. 

So is she, but it still gnaws at her that he’s seeking company elsewhere. It’s an ugly, bitter thing to be jealous of, especially because she’s the reason why he needs time to process. Why they both do. 

Yelena never claimed to be fair, though. 

Near midnight in the lounge, she finds him and Walker alone on the couches. Warm light bubbles from lamps and the lit fire pit in the middle of the room.

Bob fists chips from a bag, balancing a book on his knees. 

A sad lump of conjoined ice cubes occupies an otherwise empty glass on the side table next to Walker. He doesn’t pay her any attention when she emerges from the elevator doors, but Bob’s already staring, and he wipes the crumbs off his hands.

“I’m just saying if you could do it, that’d be cool,” Walker says.

“So true,” Bob says.

“I haven’t even mentioned it lately, and I’m asking nicely.” 

“I know. It’s flattering. But, much to everyone’s dismay, I can’t turn it on and off on command.”

“Dude, c’mon.”

Yelena grabs a ginger beer from the bar’s fridge, fueling the recreational habit she started at the beginning of the year for the nights she’s craving a drink, which was a suggestion from Walker, actually. The chill of the bottle soothes the heat of her skin.

Bob shrugs. “You can just get another one.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You got a hat.” 

“That’s marketing and you know it.” 

“Your shield markets pretty well, in my opinion. Whaddya think, Yelena?” 

She halts halfway back to the elevator. 

She hasn’t seen much of him in the better part of a week.

Bob toys with the corner of his book’s cover, waiting for her response. 

“I like the taco shield,” she says. Walker glowers at her. “It’s very unique. Has a lot of masculine energy. Like the hat.”

“Exactly,” Bob says. “Like the hat.”

“It’s a beret, which’s meant to be distinguished. It was between that and the full mask, because that’s all PR approved.” 

“I’m so sorry about that. Glad you’re still upset”—Yelena counts her fingers—“almost a year later.” 

Walker sighs, picking up his glass and swirling his sweaty ice chunk. “You guys suck.” 

“Trust me, I get it,” Bob says. “That shade of yellow probably wouldn’t have been my first choice for the Sentry suit, but what can you do?”

It’s like this on Bob’s good days. His confidence goes up and he can be just as antagonistic as anyone else, even if he still carries the outward signs of being uncomfortable in his own skin. 

He’s like a fox stealing food from a dog and yipping over his spoils. 

Usually, it doesn’t fail to conjure a shit-eating grin from Yelena.

“You’re real cocky, Bob. It’s fuckin’ annoying.”

Bob raises his brows, flattening his mouth into a line. “That hurts, man. I might need to tell my therapist you’re making me feel bad for my progress.” 

“Fuck off, that’s so not true. Actually, that’s insulting—”

Bob watches her while Walker continues.

Distance between them becomes a space for Yelena’s imagination. 

Velvet nights where neither of them can sleep. His careful hands as he slices limes to put in his cup of water. Staccato heartbeats.

Yelena lingers between reality and fantasy. She thinks Bob’s trying to blend the two. 

He roams her face from across the room. Are we okay?

There goes the cage of her ribs, oozing words with the stutter of her pulse. Yes, I’d like us to be okay. 

Through the windows the next morning, Bob sits cross-legged on the landing pad. He’s not staring at the maze of Manhattan, he’s looking up at the sky.

His head tips in her direction before she has a chance to step out from the tower’s hangar.

Right. She doesn’t have to announce herself. 

“It was a good sunrise,” he says over the whipping wind. 

She sits next to him. Up this high, she can’t smell the city as much as the faint scent of rubber and fuel from takeoffs. “Why were you up?” 

“Can’t sleep lately. Lot on my mind.”

The morning sun bathes his profile from behind, outlining the unrefined bits of him in a glow. His mouth. The line and jump of his nose. Long, sloping eyelashes. He hasn’t shaved in a few days.

“Was it the usual?” 

“Nah. Not the usual. Just… thinking.”

There are so many things she wants to say. Please come get me if you need me. I’m sorry if you feel like you can’t. That’s my fault.

Instead, she asks, “And what are you doing out here?”

He considers it. “Being reckless.”

“How so.”

“I’m trying to remember what it felt like.”

She follows his line of sight to the clouds. “To fly?”

“Yeah. Not just fling myself up there—to be able to control it.” He ducks his head. “Not smart at the moment.”

“Why this moment?”

“Just feels like I could do it, which I guess is why I shouldn’t.”

She leans back on her hands. The metal of the landing pad is warm. Sitting here feels good. Being next to him.

“But you’re allowed to think about it.”

“Yep.”

Thinking is usually safe. Except when she does it. 

“Free agenda today.”

“I know. Bucky was gonna show me something he thinks will help with my control.”

Yelena raises an eyebrow. “Really? He’s not trying to meet with Sam?”

“Dunno. Wish he was. I can only take so many breathing exercises before I’m ready to chew on rocks.”

Yelena coos. “He’s helping with your performance anxiety.”

“Wow.” Bob fakes a scoff. “Low blow.” 

Maybe it is. He’s still so afraid of himself, and she can’t blame him. It’s instinct or nothing. What if, when he really needs it, he can’t overcome the fear of the Void?

No, he can. The night they met, he sprinted to his death without hesitation, because that’s who he is. In the summer, when they trained together, she said his instinct was flight. It’s the kind where he’ll put himself in harm's way even if it means taking damage, because that’s just him. He fights in spite of flight.

It’s that lack of control that’s the issue.

She leans forward and punches his thigh. “Low blow.”

“Ha. Funny.”

There’s real amusement there, but it has brittle scaffolding. Yelena allows ten seconds of quiet. Fifteen. Fuck.

“We should probably talk about it,” she says.

“Probably.”

The sun isn’t working hard enough, because a chill sighs between them. He picks at his pants. Yelena’s adrift on the wind, no clue how to begin to say what she needs to. Everything leads into the discussion she’s been avoiding since the summer.

The rooftops of surrounding buildings become incredibly interesting.

“You’re right.” The words smudge in her mouth. “I do want things. And I do know how you feel. And I’m sorry for how I reacted. It wasn’t fair.” 

In her peripheral, he doesn’t move. It’s unusual for Bob to be so still. Motion is his natural state of being. Fingers playing, eyes wandering, posture a preview for his thoughts.

“I shouldn’t have left,” he says. 

“No, that was probably for the best.”

“I don’t really know what to think about that.” It’s not defeat in his tone, but it’s close. Searching for stable ground. She doesn’t know where to find it either.

“I have some things I need to work through.”

“Do they have to do with me?”

“Not all of them.”

Bob stands. There’s the motion. Like waves lapping on a shore, he paces, tugging at the long sleeves of his shirt. 

“So, uh, what kind of want is it?”

Yelena imagines wasps are the cause for the stinging fullness trapped inside her. 

“This is what I meant when I said I think it’s better if we don’t.” 

“Okay.” The wind sews itself to his voice. “This is hard for me. Yes and no. You do, but you don’t. I feel like I’m trying to read what you’re saying through, like, eight walls of concrete.”

She knows she’s being difficult. She doesn’t know when speaking freely became so hard. 

He stares down at her, expectant. This will be an adult thing to say, so she stands to say it on even ground, right in front of him, low enough that the security cameras can't pick it up beneath the blanket of city sounds. 

“The other night, I wasn’t thinking about what comes after, I just wanted. I can’t afford to just want to do things anymore, and I’m not used to being cautious. But you’re important, so I want to be cautious with—about you.” She gestures between them. “I’m trying not to ruin things.”

“I’m not a little kid, Yelena. I know how things work. I’ve had too much sex to even count, some I probably don’t even remember, considering.”

“That’s not what I mean.” 

“Tell me what you mean, then.” Gritty: trying for something soft like patience. “Please.”

“We should go back to how we were when it wasn’t complicated.” 

His breath feathers her cheeks. “I think it’s always been complicated.”

“Then I want to be normal. Just Yelena and Bob. Nothing else. No Avengers, no fucking PR. I don’t want to have to worry about breaking something just so I can be around you.”

“I want that too.”

“Good.”

His head tips to the side. “So…”

“No, Bob.”

He scratches the back of his neck, exaggerated in a way that means he's teasing. “Not even once?”

It puts a slash through the tension. “No. Oh, my god.”

“Okay.” His face cracks, containing a laugh. “Then if normal’s what you want, you need to stop looking at me like I’m wounded whenever we’re around each other.”

Is that how she looks at him? “All right. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize—”

“No, I mean—let me make it up to you.” Ah. That won’t help at all. She has no clue why she’s saying this, and she makes it even worse with: “Lets… hang out.”

“Hang out.”

“Yes. Let’s go somewhere.” Amazing. God, she’s just great. 

“Out?” he says, suspicious. “I’m not supposed to. Not with you guys.”

Well, fuck that. They shouldn't be able to dictate his comings and goings. “PR can suck my dick. I say we’re going out.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. We could just walk.”

“What if someone recognizes you?”

“I’ll wear a hat. We’ll look totally normal. No one will notice.”

“What about Bucky?”

“What about him? He’ll be thrilled to have time to himself.”

Tiny half-smile. “True.”

“It’s settled then,” she says, way more pleased with his acceptance of her stunted proposal than she expected. But there’s an ominous ache in her, as if a foreign object is lodged in her stomach. 

Taking him out can’t be that bad.

No world-destroying threats. No melting sky. All the day has to do is not explode, and things will be fine again.

“Do I look stupid or something?”

“No,” Yelena says, hands in the pockets of her jacket. Midmorning light leaks through the coffee shop’s windows, so thick she could hold it in her palms. Their drinks bounce between hands somewhere in the chaos of milk foam and liquid sweeteners behind the coffee bar.

“You keep staring.”

“Mmm. Who told you to wear that?”

Bob cringes. “No one. It’s what’s stocked in my closet.” 

“Oh, god. I see it now. That has a stylist written all over it.”

It’s nothing special, just different from his usual. And it screams superhero running errands. 

Jeans. White shirt. Brown jacket. Boots. 

With the dusting of hair along his jaw, he looks more his age than she’s ever seen him. 

“It’s casual,” he says.

“It looks good.”

He doesn’t respond, and she doesn’t mind. They both probably come off like any other civilians about to go on an early lunch break, though she’s second-guessing the scarf hiding her hair. Maybe she looks like a babushka. The sunglasses help. Probably. 

A barista calls the fake name Yelena gave. She was quite pleased at Bob’s stricken expression when she ordered in an American accent.

“Thanks for paying,” he says, innocent except for that foxlike quality to his tone.

“Don’t say anything that will make me want to punch you.”

“I’m not gonna.”

Yet his attention idles for too long on her as he holds the door on their way out, and they zigzag the streets of Manhattan without any destination in mind, stopping only when Yelena’s interested. He shortens his stride to match her pace. No one glances their way.

“It’s weird how close I was to all this, but never experienced it until we moved in last year.”

“Manhattan?”

“Here.” He jerks his head at a relatively vacant Bryant Park. “Spent a few months around town ‘bout a year before I left the States. Wasn’t the best time of my life.”

He sips the dregs of his sugary iced coffee.

“I remember you telling me that.” She threw her coffee away ten minutes ago, too used to inhaling sustenance these days. Bob’s on a savoring kick as ordered by his therapist. “I don’t always have time to just walk. It’s nice.”

“It is. Yeah.” His straw slurps at nothing. “Nice.”

“Whatever you want to say, just spit it out.”

“You sure?”

“No, but do it anyway.”

More slurps. “This is kinda like a date.”

“And there it is. Something punch-worthy.” She struts away along the park’s border.

He shuffles to catch up. “I know, I know. We’re just pretending at being normal.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Just kinda seems like a date.” With gentle confidence, his cup goes into a trash can, and so does Yelena’s ability to blur the lines. 

“It’s not a date.”

He pauses. “I should’ve dressed better. For the date, I mean.”

“You’re so annoying.”

“That’s better than being boring.”

“Not always.”

“In my case, then?”

“Nope.”

“So, it’s not looking good for a second date?” 

“Not really.”

“Anything I can do to increase my chances?”

“No.”

“What if I beg?”

Buildings loom over them, scattering shadows and light. “I guess I’ll consider it.”

This is too far, but it’s fun. And she fucking likes his stupid flirting and his crooked smirk and the specific way he emphasizes consonants as he speaks. 

Just two people pretending to be normal. That’s what she wants. So then what’s the point of battling this smile that feels so strong, it’s like it’s trying to etch itself to her permanently?

“I like it when your face does that.”

“Does what?”

He scrunches his nose. 

It’s not cute. Honestly, it’s offensive.

“I don’t do that.”

“You do.”

Cold heat builds at the base of her throat, trickling into her lungs just at the way he looks at her. It's like she’s invented something only he understands, or they both have, together.

Yelena’s steps slow, and so do his. They stand out of the way of foot traffic. 

Bob’s hands are gold. The handsome curl of his hair across his forehead is gold. His mouth is gold.

The suit he wore nearly a year ago was very gold. 

She should curb stomp this moment until its teeth break and it shatters into tiny pieces. Tricking herself isn’t working. She can’t do this.

Teetering, she asks, “What happened to being normal?”

His hand circles his wrist, rubbing there. “None of it’s real. Why’s it got to matter?”

Her list gets another entry.

Bob knows how to play this game, maybe even better than her. He can take and give it right back.

“Why did you agree to come?”

“Because you asked.”

“Did you even want to?” Like usual, Yelena’s big mouth resists containment. His answer matters too much. She almost wants to escape before she can hear it. 

“I’ll take anything I can get with you, to be honest. If you wanna stroll New York and act like buddies when we both know how I feel, then that’s what I’ll do… Sounds pathetic, but I’m used to losing.” He glares at the busy whine of honking cars. “But I won’t lose you—I can’t.”

Breath erases from her lungs. She’s glad for her sunglasses.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s kinda hard not to—you know.”

“You don’t sound sorry.” Nothing about him seems sorry, either.

“I guess I don’t like keeping secrets. Not from you.”

In a step, she could cross into his space. It’s syrupy territory. Inviting. In public, it’s anonymous. No one knows it’s her out here. She could hold his hand if she wanted.

Jesus. No.

Joking about dates is one thing. Real feelings are another beast. 

She isn’t ready to tell him she can’t do this. For herself. For him. It’s too messy and bound to die. Better to stay friends who double as bad self-help gurus for one another. Squish the memory of the other night like an unfortunate squirrel caught in the street. 

Yelena speedwalks away with no further warning, blazing through the next crosswalk as it blinks a countdown for bustling civilians. 

Ways to deflect the upcoming conversation enter her head and leave without sticking. It’d be childish to avoid it. Today was supposed to be clearing the air. Why do her plans never work?

Bob has no trouble keeping up. He tucks even closer than before.

“There are disadvantages to being what people would call an open book.” she says, beating him to whatever he’d been prepping to say.

“Maybe. I mean, you’re not an open book, but I can still read you.”

“Is that right?”

“Most of the time.”

Another crosswalk. This time, it blocks them. Yelena considers ignoring the lit up hand on the pedestrian signal across the street. 

“What do you think you read?” She asks it like she’s poking something scary with a stick.

“You tell me.”

The Watchtower scrapes the clouds in the near distance. “You assume a lot.”

“You’re probably right.” Hints of self-deprecation lace his tone. 

She feels him fixed on her, but she doesn’t give him the satisfaction of peering back because she knows herself; if she wants to look at him at a moment like this, that means she shouldn’t. 

“The point in acting normal is that we’re not normal. Our lives are not normal. I don’t understand how you’re so okay with not caring about the aftermath.”

His laugh’s more like a bark. “Really? I think it’s kinda obvious. Recently-sober addict, kinda floundering but impulsive, feel like I have absolutely no answers… And then there’s you. You’re an answer.”

She tries not to take that the wrong way, like she’s a replacement for addiction. Or a way to cope. But that all reminds her of why this is an awful idea in the first place. 

He should be scared the same way she is.

“I want your answer to be yourself. Not me.”

Codependent. Possessive. Greedy. That’s what she is. That’s what he’s saying he could be. 

They dodge bodies on the sidewalk and migrate back to each other. “What about you, then?” he asks.

“What about me?”

“How come you’ve stopped therapy?”

The residual taste of her coffee turns to smog in her mouth. Of course he knows about that. “I didn’t stop. It’s more like a sabbatical.” 

“Right, right. Why a sabbatical?”

“Because.”

“For sure, yeah. There’s never been a more eloquent answer, like, ever.”

“Well, it was a dick move to bring that up.”

“Was it? I’m just being a normal friend who cares. I thought that’s what this is.”

“It is. I think we’ve been really successful actually.”

“Me too. I’m glad. It’s been refreshing.”

Bob’s a fucking asshole. She thinks she’s never wanted to put her tongue in his mouth more than right now where anyone could see.

It’s so confusing. 

The spot they met up at earlier is across the street, far enough away from the Watchtower that they could lazily—but covertly—stagger their exits. The plan’s to do the same for going back in.

He’s grinning at her, slouching to one side a bit.

See: fucking asshole.

Gold.

“So,” he says, “no second date?”

“Not a chance, Bob.”

“Rats. Guess we’ll have to go back to our usual.”

“Guess so.”

“Isn’t so bad.”

“Are you lying?”

His head cocks. “Answering that’d require me to go back to not-normal territory, so, afraid I can’t say.”

She does not, no matter how much she wants to, let herself smirk. 

“You go first,” she says. His features shift, like he’s about to roll dice on what to say next. Bob gambling comes with an inevitable impact. Yelena braces against it with, “I’ll see you inside.”

Waiting the appropriate amount of time to enter through the lower-level garage feels like nothing compared to the flickering fire in her belly.

She’s in the middle of deciding whether their game of pretend was an entire disaster or not (it’s close, considering she’s more screwed for him than ever before and she can’t do anything but fail to distance herself) when she steps into the elevator. 

It doesn’t matter how she replays it all, or what decision she comes to. 

She’s oblivious to the disaster waiting for her when she reaches the lounge.

“And why didn’t you have your phone?” Valentina spews across the private call. 

The team’s seated in the chairs in front of the main screen at HQ. Bob’s so deep in his spot next to Ava that he could fuse with the seat. 

Yelena stands in front of the screen, arms folded across her chest, suited up in full Avengers gear, because she refuses to be reprimanded while wearing a scarf. “I had everything else with me that I needed for work.”

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were taking him.”

“Bucky knew,” Bob says.

“Is that true?”

Bucky’s stone-faced.

“It’s true,” Yelena says. “Not that it matters where I was taking him.”

Silence speaks in the form of muted news channel broadcasts. Bob’s face is on every one of them.

MYSTERY MAN RETURNS: WHO IS HE, REALLY?

There they are, walking a friendly distance from each other. 

SECRET AVENGER? 

This one’s just him compared to blurry photos from the aftermath of battling the Void last year.

BLACK WIDOW Not on Duty — What Does She Do?

This one’s the worst. Not because they’re reporting on the small accidents around Manhattan that she could’ve helped out with today that are definitely below Avengers-grade threats, even for their shitty team, but because of the accompanying picture. 

They have coffees in their hands, and she’s beaming in a way that’s borderline embarrassing, while Bob’s fixated on her with that look like he’d do anything she asked. Anything.

At least they’re not holding hands. Small fucking mercies.

“What’s damage control looking like?” Bucky asks.

“There shouldn’t have to be damage control,” Yelena says. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if they say Bob’s on house arrest officially. “Okay? It’s my personal time. I can do what I want with it, including going for a walk.”

“Not with him, you can’t,” Valentina says.

Yelena scowls.

“I agree with Yelena,” Ava says. “Not a big deal. This could be anything, a coincidental meeting. Let the press talk if they want.”

“Yeah, but what if they do take it far?” Walker asks. “Maybe it’s better, from now on, to avoid doing this.”

Valentina’s tone takes on a condescending authority that demands a kick to the liver. “It might be time to debut him. Just the idea of him.”

Yelena tenses.

Alexei sits up straight. “You mean the Sentry?”

“Put him in the suit. Yes.”

“No,” Yelena says. “What the hell?” But Valentina’s already yapping.

“Change the design, maybe get rid of the cape in case they connect that with the… other events that happened that day, at least until we have a better story. It’s better than them blaming him and the New Avengers for last October.”

“Do I get a say?”

Everyone turns to Bob. His hands clench into fists. It’s not fair that they’re talking about him like he isn't there. All the power in the universe inside him, all currently unusable, and no help against having decisions made for him.

“Yes, you do,” she says at the same time that Valentina says:

“No.” 

Rage boils inside her so fast that her teeth squeak. “Go fuck yourself, Valentina. You don’t have any power here. Bob’s not under any contract that says anything about putting on that suit. Until you show that to us, leave him out of this. It’s my fault. I’ll meet with PR, just set it up.”

Before Valentina can respond, the call cuts off.

“I hate that bitch,” Alexei says, holding her holopad up at the screen like it’s a remote. “Bob, don’t put on Sentry suit until you are Sentry. We need Sentry, but just Bob in suit would not be a good look for us.” 

“I second that,” Walker says. “Valentina’s just desperate for leverage.”

Bob’s focused on her so heavily it’s almost like a physical touch, like he’s lurking in every atom that makes her up. “Thanks, guys.” 

Yelena takes her holopad. It vibrates in her hands, and calendar updates flash. “That’s just great. PR’s in the building already.” 

“They only want you?” Bucky asks.

“Yeah.” She stalks to the elevator. The Avengers logo spins, splitting horizontally. 

Like a winged thing, emerging from the black of night to orbit a porchlight, Bob materializes beside her.

When they’re shut inside the elevator, he says, “Yelena—”

“It’s just my name on the meeting list.”

“I should be there. This is my fault, too.”

“I took you out. I was reckless. I keep trying to—” She throws her hands up. He’s still dressed from earlier, but his brows won’t unpinch, and a sheen of sweat glistens there. “Look what happened. Normal doesn’t work.”

All she’s done is potentially force him toward his fear of failure.

“It’s not that big of a deal.”

“It is. It is to me. Don’t tell me it’s not.”

He flinches.

The doors open to the lounge. From here, she’ll take the private elevator to the conference floor below.

She steps out, but strong fingers catch her wrist, tugging her back inside with muted force. She stumbles with it anyway, no real say in where she goes if she’s with him.

“Sorry.” He releases her, but his touch steals the space at her hip briefly. “Just let me come with you.” 

Now isn’t the time. It used to never be the time. Another reason why today was a mistake. 

“No.”

“Please.” Mouth, too close to hers.

Holy shit, when did boundaries disappear? Somewhere between being afraid and spending a few hours pretending she isn’t.

“We’ll talk later.” 

This, Yelena knows how to sever.

Bridges of touch, crumbling. Him, sticking his limbs in her jaws. Her, clamping down until the bones break.

Storms upon storms on his face. 

The entire time she waits for the elevator, he watches from across the room. The hush is dense as smelted iron, as if he has too much to say. As if he’s going to defy her and come anyway.

He doesn’t.

She wants him to so badly, she burns.

Her stomach isn’t even growling anymore, it’s just twisting, hollow pains.

The day is gone by the time PR leaves. Valentina, who showed up not long after the meeting started, goes with them.

Yelena isn’t expecting the ambush outside of the conference room.

Bucky leans against the wall in the hallway. “Can we talk?”

It’s not a question.

In her current state, she’s a meat suit put over an empty structure. Sleep calls and calls, but it’ll have to go unanswered. 

“Can you get me food?”

He sighs in that Bucky way that she translates to, Yeah, whatever. 

They end up a few floors below the residential apartments.

Yelena hasn’t been here in weeks. Since the end of summer, maybe. When Bob kept coming to retrieve her from this floor’s unoccupied rooms, she figured it was time to give up her hiding spot since the others would start showing up, too.

Bucky takes them straight there, so it was probably never much of a good place to hide.

There’s furniture now. Long tables, rolling chairs, ferny plants. 

By the windows, she destroys a prepped meal from Walker’s fridge. Spicy peppers and chicken with a honey sauce.

The lack of talking as she eats is like having to watch a baby animal die. Minutes of Yelena’s chewing and Bucky staring out the window. He’s a patient man. A pain in the ass, yeah, but he’s also been alive long enough to spew some wisdom about biding time.

Yelena doesn’t kid herself. The graver Bucky’s silences are, the more sensitive the topic will be. 

“You don’t know what you’re doing with him, do you?”

Last bites of chicken turn to bland, stringy sinew. She sets the glass dish of meal remnants down on a nearby conference table.

“That’s vague,” she says.

He unhooks a small holopad from his belt and casts images into the air.

Security footage from HQ plays in front of them of Bob’s usual spot near the windows, dated to July. In the background, Yelena and Bob are bowed together, and she watches herself caress a bare hand up his arm and into his hair. Bob goes rigid, and a steel bar breaks. 

In the footage, Yelena drifts away from him like a puppet, her eyes set on nothing.

The footage cuts. 

Heat douses her, knocking from the inside of her cheeks, trying to get out. 

So, Bucky knew. They probably all knew she’d caused something back then, but—

A new file appears. The footage dates to about a week ago, and Bob enters her room without announcing himself, followed by footage of him leaving.

And vanishing from the hallway.

The video to picks back up out on the landing pad, where Bob blinks into existence at the edge. 

It rattles her, seeing him like that again. That casual otherworldliness. 

A star trapped in a body. 

Bob stares down at his hands and trips backward, away from the landing pad’s edge.

“I didn’t know,” she says, barely audible. 

The file changes again.

Hours earlier, the security cameras in the lounge catch all the nuances of them in the elevator: His fingers roping at her wrist. Bodies closer than friendly, too long for it to be a mistake on either of their parts. 

Bob stands there even after she leaves in the other elevator. The video gets darker, like the sunset’s sped up and night’s crashing in, but the timestamp stays ticking steadily by the second. 

No, those are shadows crawling around Bob. Streaking toward him in straight, clean lines. Needlepoints searching for skin.

She didn’t know. She had no idea, or she wouldn’t have left him. But how could she have known? This happened because she left.

Bob’s head shakes, like he’s coming back to himself from a daydream, and the shadows scurry away. 

The feed stops. Outside the windows, the sides of buildings create sporadic grids of fluorescent squares.

“You didn’t know,” Bucky says. “Which is what I meant.”

Yelena is frozen. She has to chisel away at herself until she takes shape again, and feeling returns.

“But you know,” she says. “You’ve been watching.”

“No. I didn’t need to watch until today, when you took him out like that and he came back with his eyes glowing.”

“What?” She can’t find any hint of his annoying jokes as she inspects him. “He was fine when he went in.”

“You’re not stupid, so stop pretending to be. He was grinning like he got all the damn boxes of chocolates to ever exist.”

So, Bob was happy. That made his powers come to the surface. And when she pushed him too hard in the training room, and when she messed up in HQ, and went too far the other night, and rejected his company earlier. All of it.

He’s reacting.

Sweat builds under her suit. 

“So then you watched.”

“Like I said, I didn’t need to watch. It’s obvious to everyone how much he cares for you, and how much he needs you around to really be okay. But Bob and I talk sometimes, and he told me what happened earlier.”

Jealousy lights her like white fire. She should be glad he talked to someone, but everything from today’s been picked apart by other people, and the urge to lash out almost consumes her.

“About?”

“You.”

“Mm. All right. That’s great. So why are we having this conversation?”

“Not that it’s any of my business—”

“Exactly—”

“—But I thought you two were together. He told me you’re not.”

If Yelena had the choice, she’d take an axe to this moment and hack until it was chunks.

“We’re not.”

He analyzes her until he finds whatever he’s looking for. 

“I, of all people, know. I know how messy this is.” She tries not to let it show that she doesn’t understand what he’s implying, or why he thinks she would. “Bob is a human being, one who’s in love with you,” he says. “That makes anyone feel on top of the world or close to six feet under.”

“I know that.”

“But do you know what that means for him?”

“Yes,” she snaps. 

“Then you know what you’ve got to do.”

An axe is too blunt. Even a gun is too soft. Bare hands work best, clenching around her heart and choking until it leaks crimson life everywhere. 

“You think I should leave it alone. Shut it down.”

“I don’t think you should do anything except figure out what you want. We’ve all got issues, but his bring bigger repercussions.” He crosses his arms. “I think it’d be doing us all a favor if he felt more stable with this.”

Her body needs to move, to unpeel from stillness and go blow for blow with him and that legendary metal arm. 

“What, like that’s easy?”

“Of course it’s not. But he’s a grown man, Yelena. You should start treating him like one.” Bucky turns toward the elevator, seeming to not give a shit that she tenses. “An answer is better than tug-of-war. He can handle whatever you have to say.”

Sure. But she doesn’t know if she can handle it. 

Yelena should’ve been faster. She should’ve searched for Bob right then and told him she needed to talk.

It comes hours after her talk with Bucky. 

Less than half awake, with the details of the mission not clear yet, they float around her mind: Distress signal coming from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Old war experiments and possible evidence of test subjects still alive. Black ops through and through, sensitive enough to require the team, but no publicity. The higher-ups intentionally leave it obscure.

She doesn’t even get to say goodbye.

Bucky stays behind to work political collateral. 

The situation only worsens when the signal dies while they’re in the air, but they pinpoint Romania. Track down rumors to Bucovina. Then the rumors die, too.

In the last sighs of September, they move to Bucharest. 

Like a candle, Yelena’s drive winks out. The team knows she’s off. She just can’t focus when the streets begin to take on his features. The cracks in stones become the smear of his image, and the shadows from clouds evolve into the black contour of his body poised in the sky last year. Even the wind begins to remind her of everything she hasn’t said.

They’re recalled only five days after they left, and it’s just in time for one of PR’s planned damage control events. Arrive in the morning, get spruced up for the cameras by noon.

Yelena picks up a bottle for the first time in a year, right before they leave.

The team isn’t dumb enough to think the mission was anything other than the government yanking their chain and measuring the length of the leash. For what, none of them can say.

On the flight home, Yelena thinks of the threats that wait in the cosmos. She thinks of all the people she won’t be able to save.

October

“In almost one year of activity, what real impact have the New Avengers made? Why should we rely on a group of super soldiers to handle any sort of extraterrestrial threat?”

Their feet drag from the elevator as a recap of their press conference plays on the main screen at HQ. An hour ago, they were on stage, sitting at a long table with microphones and their stupid hero nametags set in front of them. 

On the screen, Yelena grits out, “Aren’t we better than nothing?” 

The crowd groans. Security does nothing to maintain the peace.

The same journalist fights for the microphone again. 

“We have Captain America, and he has a team of enhanced individuals. But, by title, you’ll be first responders if a crisis comes. What are we supposed to do with that?”

“Take that up with the government,” she says. 

Then the uproar begins.

Yelena can still feel the spikes of pain from the million camera flashes, not to mention the judging stares from everyone in the world watching the broadcast live.

The screen turns off. 

“Well,” Bob says from his spot by the windows, “you guys were great out there.” 

“It was whatever until Yelena went off the rails,” Walker says. “Then they ate us alive.”

“The whole thing sucked,” Ava says, reclining in a chair.

“No, Bob is right,” Alexei says. “Thank you for positive attitude. Someone has to have it. Be more like Bob, you guys. He is like little bee with the pollen, spreading joy.”

“Bucky should’ve done the talking,” Walker says.

“I said that.” It bursts out of Yelena, a train barreling through anything unlucky enough to be stuck on the tracks.

Bucky frowns at her, but says nothing. He’s used to this shit, she guesses. 

“‘Lena.” Alexei says her name in that same way he did when she was small. 

“Don’t,” she says. Don’t try to do that right now when things are bad for you too. It’s not fair if you only step in when you’re impacted. She claws a hand through her hair and uses any semblance of strength that remains in her to not ream Alexei out, or any of them. “I’m going to bed.” 

“Valentina’s gonna be calling with PR.” Walker says.

“I don’t care. I need to sleep.” 

“Yeah, cool, so do all of us,” he mumbles.

Before the elevator closes with her inside, the last thing she hears is Bucky saying, “Let her go.”

In her room, she chucks each staff from her back to the floor, peeling out of her jumpsuit and flinging it to the side, ignoring the laughable costume stand that appears from the innards of the wall on cue. Whatever comfortable clothes she finds first on the floor are the ones she pulls on.

She needs to sleep, only for a few hours, just to mold herself back into a Yelena-shaped form. Maybe she should stop avoiding therapy, but then she’ll have to face the inevitability of things falling apart again, and yes, she has the others to rely on, but not for this.

For this, she wants Natasha. 

That’s what hurts the most.

Her sister who saved the universe. Yelena could talk to her about this weight, and she could talk to her about Bob. About losing and losing and losing. 

On the floor, the molted black skin of her jumpsuit curls in on itself. Yelena kicks a staff, and it clatters across the floor of her desolate apartment. 

The back corner where her sofa is denies any light from the city’s spread of buildings. Her fingernail snags on the clotted fuzzy side of her blanket as she yanks in from the back of the sofa. Needs a wash. Add that to the fucking list. 

She doesn’t get to lay down, because the door’s sensor pings behind her.

“Seriously, I’m done for the night,” she calls. “Off the clock.” 

Then the door unlocks, sliding open. 

Yelena clutches the blanket tighter. She should’ve taken his clearance away. 

“Hey,” he says.

She turns. “Hi.”

Has she really let herself look at him since she’s been back? They’ve been in the same room twice since the jet landed, not including in HQ just now. Unlike those times, Bob is not acting as a hummingbird flitting about the walls as she maneuvers.

Bob leans against the doorframe, not yet trespassing into the weak moonlight from the wall of windows. 

Here, he is no hummingbird. She doesn’t expect he’s here for his own comfort, or to comfort her. Not at all. And yet, Yelena leaves her blanket behind and lurches toward him, simultaneously too tired to deal with this and too tired to care about her obvious desperation to be near him.

The living area with the big couch and TV is close to the door, and the rug grounds her as she digs her feet into the scratchy wool. 

“I was reading the other day,” he says from the door. “About wolves, actually.”

He’s swimming in his official Avengers merch, the black hoodie with a big, red, embroidered A. It’s got to have more than two Xs before the L on its tag.

Yelena waits. 

He rests his head on the doorframe. “Did you know—it’s pretty rare—but if they're wounded, they’ll leave the rest of the pack and just kind of… wander off to die alone?”

“Really?”

“According to the book.”

“…You read a book about wolves?”

“No, it just had—nevermind. It reminded me of myself.” He fidgets with the hem of the hoodie. “And you.”

Please, not now.

“Ah. Well, I know that sometimes animals will eat themselves if they’re starving. Don’t remember which ones, though.”

“Autocannibalism,” he says with a nod. “Really sad.”

“Yeah.”

The quiet between them stretches, thinning and folding over itself. Yelena resembles its progressively stringier layers. She wishes some sound would carry in here, maybe the bustle of traffic and subways and people could scale the Watchtower and come to their rescue. 

“Can I come in?” 

She could say no, not right now. Turn him away. But then maybe he won't come again. Instead, she clears a portion of the couch from the heap of paperwork she’s never looked at, as if they’re going to be sitting, but really to give herself something to do, and she attempts to trample the self-awareness at the state she’s in. Cotton shorts, extra knife visible where it’s strapped to her calf, slouchy shirt.

The papers go to the coffee table, and Bob takes that as his signal to come inside.

The door slides shut with a whoosh, locking. 

Being sealed in a room with him does nothing to ease the jittery squirm of her muscles from too much caffeine and not enough food after a hangover. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. 

“About the press conference?” He toes the edge of the rug, testing.

“Anything. I don’t want to talk about any of it.”

He’s got that intensity about him like he’s figuring out a problem. “What about what you’re—I dunno. Feeling.”

Grief. Longing. Too much, all at once. 

“Not really.”

“Not really… what?”

It’s like staring down the bottle before they got back on the jet to come home. Being impulsive by nature makes destructive tendencies that much easier to justify. 

“I’m not feeling anything unusual. I’m tired, and I’m frustrated with myself. I’ll be better tomorrow.” 

He’s in sweats and thick socks, and the coffee table is partially between them, but it’s not enough distance. His face falls into frustrated creases. “Okay… Even if that’s true, I think talking will help.”

“I don’t, though. Not right now.” 

“See, I get that. But I’ve tried giving you space, and doing what you want—whatever you want. But it keeps getting worse.” His mouth pinches. “And I don’t know if it’s me. I don’t wanna—I can’t be the reason it's getting it worse.” 

The moon leaves her, skulking behind clouds somewhere out in the night. Her vision doesn’t adjust well to the tendrils of city lights illuminating the room. She imagines everything covered in oil, gleaming all sorts of colors. The floor, the couch, the rug, the walls, all drooling for a simple spark to ignite them. 

“Bob.” She crosses her arms. “Please, can we just not do this right now?”

“But I want to do it right now. You always get to decide when we talk, and I wanna talk now.” And what he says next, he does so like it takes everything in him to ask. “Is there something wrong between us?”

He could throw her across the room and it’d hurt less. 

Her voice is a gash. “That’s not it.” 

“Then what about the avoiding? And the night we almost…” He gives a weak gesture to the spot they sat in on the far end of the couch. “And the date. And after. More avoiding.”

“That wasn’t on purpose.”

She imagines drinking the oil until it coats her insides. She is doing what he’s accusing her of, but it’s an involuntary reaction, like an animal with a sewn up injury, chewing out its stitches on instinct. Wanting to run but also wanting to bury her teeth at his throat and not let go. 

The door is there past his shoulders. Bob surprises her by stepping aside, clearing a path for her to go right to it.

“You can leave, if you want,” he says, quiet as the dark. “Or I can. I’m not trying to corner you. Valentina called and I didn’t wanna be a part of the conversation. They’re all busy.”

No one will bother us, he means. At least not for a few minutes. So he chose now to come up here.

Yelena goes down her mental list until she reaches Bob is very brave. 

Panic strikes like a match against her ribs, but none of them birth a flame in the wet, cowardly mush of her chest.

“I can’t.” 

“Can’t what?”

She shrugs slowly, detangling sounds in her mouth. “I thought I could pretend.”

“With me.”

“With everything.”

His palms raise by his head, equal parts surrender and sarcasm. “Can we not pretend now? Just while we talk.”

Yelena, ever a thief, has to stop from latching her arms at the newly vulnerable area around his waist.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Right. Okay.” He rubs a shaking hand over his face. “Well, if it’s me that’s the issue, I’d like to hear you say it so I can… start to process it, I guess.”

“I told you I’m working through some things. It’s not you.” 

“Considering the circumstances, I kinda find that hard to believe.”

“Well, you’ll just have to trust me.”

“Can I?”

The déjà vu slams into her, and she shudders as she remembers their first time meeting, that moment they had alone in the control room when he reached out to her. She’d told him no back then.

“I’m horrible at this, Bob.”

“Me too.”

“So, what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t—I mean, it’s not like I want you to say anything specific, I just wanna know.”

“Know what?”

She registers a muffled noise from her sofa behind her. Just her phone. 

He observes her like he has to figure out the best way to come at her. Her skin tingles the same way it does when a gun’s pointing her way and she needs to find cover. 

“You know about me. I need to know how you feel.” 

Breathing becomes a conscious effort. Not now. Please don’t try to do this now, of all times. A part of her wants to laugh, because he can be just as selfish as her, can’t he?

“You want to know how I feel? I’m kind of nauseous. I’m annoyed. I care too much about everything. All the time. And I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Look at that,” he says, “finally, some honesty.” And it’s more defeated than anything else, but it still scalds her. 

“What about you being honest, huh? Why didn’t you tell me about your powers manifesting after that night?” She catches the slight rise in his shoulders. “And the other day, after I left you in the lounge.”

“Because… a lot was happening.”

“A lot’s always happening.”

“Yeah. So tell me why having this conversation right now would be any different than having it another time.”

Because she’s tired. And she’s afraid. And she can’t think but also can’t do anything but think. 

He waits through her failed attempts to respond.

“Because,” she says, “it’s a terrible idea.”

“The conversation?”

“Yes.”

“Because you don’t want to hurt me?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Her nails dig into her palms. “This is the worst time to do this. Everything is going to shit. It’s always been shit, but this is shittier shit. Did you watch the full broadcast earlier? Them asking outright about your connection to the Void?”

“Yeah.”

She swings her arms wide. “They’re going to campaign against you because—because I wanted to have one thing to myself, one time. And we’ve had you cooped up in here for a year. And I’m crashing the New Avengers into the ground. And you want to talk about this when I’m the last person who should be in that position to hurt you.”

He takes a short step toward her, and she can’t help but back away. “You’re not—”

“No, listen. I’m the first person who reached out to you when this all started. I saw your bad side, and you like that I stuck around. And I understand. It was the same for me. We’d just met and you knew exactly what I was feeling. You put a word to it. But there are so many layers here that you’re not thinking about, that are all wrong.”

“You mean you think I’ve got you on some kinda pedestal.”

“Not really, but sure.”

Vibrations keep coming from the sofa.

He steps toward her again, and she forces herself to stay in place. Closer up, she can see him better. Genuine anger distorts his features. 

“I didn’t think you saw me as a project like the others did, but everything’s just been me misinterpreting you taking care of me. Is that it?”

“What the hell are you talking about? That’s not true.”

“Which part?”

“You’re not a project.”

“But you think of me like I’m a kid who needs to be babied, or something.”

“No. What the—” Her eyes sting as she points to herself. “I think I’m bad for you. I think we work great together as friends. But anything else is a tragedy waiting to happen.”

“Because?”

That makes her lip curl, and she can’t keep her volume under control. “Fucking shit. I don’t need to be explicit every moment of my life.” 

“Well, I kinda want explicit.”

“You don’t always get to have what you want,” she bites.

“Yeah,” he says, voice cracking. “I know.”

Her mouth snaps shut. 

She hates this. The way his hands tremble, and so do hers. The way she can’t seem to stop spilling all of the things she’s trying so desperately to hold, and they scatter on the ground like hundreds of mice. The way the more she tries to simplify herself and everything around her so that she can breathe, the more it feels like erasure. Like butchering. 

The moon peeks into the room again, and then rushes over every surface, banishing shadows except for those cast by the side of Bob’s face that the light can’t reach.  

Yelena forgets how much she likes to look at him. The furrow of his brow. The soft, round tip of his nose. The tiny freckles across his nose only a few shades darker than the rest of him that she aches to chart with her fingertips.

“You should choose someone else,” she says.

“I don’t want someone else.” 

Another slight move toward her. She doesn’t retreat. 

For a second, it doesn’t matter that they’re arguing, or that she hasn’t been this close to him since she left him in the elevator. Reality abandons her, and it’s only him here, smelling like he just showered. His aftershave is woodsy, and the couch is clear of junk and papers next to them, plush and inviting.

The room’s pressure becomes a tangible thing, like the buzz of static threading objects together. 

She pictures him from last year, done up in his flashy Sentry suit. That the haunting silhouette it created in the bland sky when the Void spread darkness over the city. She sees him in that laboratory, facing down the shadow-version of himself. They’d been there to save him. She’d taken that first step, and told him he wasn’t alone. What if she wasn’t there to save him again? 

“This line of work, Bob… helping people takes a lot and it doesn’t give much back. You can’t feel like this without it blowing the fuck up.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he says. “I live inside my head too. I know how scary it gets in there. I’m too afraid to touch anything because I know I’m a second away from destroying it—even you.” He falters, then continues barely above a whisper. “And thinking like that—I dunno. Everything feels like a door to me these days. Doors that lead to more and more doors and I can walk through them, but they go on forever. But then there’s you. And I can’t help but stop. You make me want to stay. I can’t turn that off. Ever since I met you I’ve fucking tried, but I can’t. You’re the one who taught me I can’t push things down, and that I should talk about them. This is me talking. Even if it’s just this one time, because I’d rather have taken the chance than never have done anything about it.” 

He’s close enough to reach out and touch, and he looks so expectant, so hungry for her response that any visible anger dissolves. His lips are wet, and he doesn’t blink, eyeing her like the crow she trained as a kid to leave her trinkets on her windowsill. She doesn’t want to have trained him to do this. To love her. But she wants him so badly she could choke.

She can’t survive on this razor wire fence, cutting her thighs open with each lean to the left and right. The wounds won’t close. They won’t scar. Not from this. 

“I think we’re bad for each other,” she says. 

“You might be right.” He shuffles closer, angling his face down at her. “Or you’re wrong.”

“But what if?”

“What if we’re not?”

Just say yes, his tone says. It’d be so easy to say yes.  

If Yelena knows anything, it’s that temptation is a warning.

Because being with him would be easy, like remembering her own name. It’d be quiet understanding and near-violent laughter. It’d be the morning sun glazing the room in light.

But being with him would also be moving mountains. He’s got enough baggage on his own. Adding hers might be too much of a burden. He still has moments of so much shame, and so much horror. It’d feel like she’s stealing from him, or breaking something valuable enough that she shouldn’t even touch it. It’s not nice to him—having him. Maybe she’s being unfair, and he could say all the same things about her.

They’re both embodiments of imposter syndrome. Too fucking similar. 

In a way, having him would be a futile state of consumption. An ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. She’ll end up where she started, or he will.

“One day, we’re going to have to fight someone or something that we can’t beat, and we’re not going to win.” she says, as clear as she can manage.

“I won’t let that happen.”

“No, Bob. It’s going to happen anyway. I’m going to die doing this. It’s a miracle I’ve made it this far to begin with.”

“Then I’ll figure something out,” he says, fervent. “I’m supposed to be able to do anything, so, if something goes wrong… I feel like I could heal you, maybe.

“And then what? What about when the world finds out what you are?”

The muscle of his jaw twitches. “Isn’t that the plan?”

“The plan is that you’re happy. Doing what you want. But any enemy I make, or that you make, is going to target us. And they can’t really hold you over my head because you’re you. But what about me? If we do this, and I don’t make it or I’m captured, can you honestly tell me that you’d let me go? Or if I die and you can’t save me, what—what happens?” 

Like a bolt of lightning, Bob’s eyes radiate a pale gold for such a short moment, she almost misses it. 

“I’ll bring you back.” 

Awe strikes through the darkness of that reality. 

She believes him. 

“That’s the problem. You’re asking me to put myself in a position to be the easiest way to control you.”

Her last tether to control fizzes where his fingers brush her wrist, blood hissing to the surface. Like he's revealing too much, he says, “But that’s already the case.”

Sweat is a cold sheen across her skin, like her body’s trying to remove its buildup of despair and rapturous desire.

A lot makes sense now. The shift at the beginning of summer, when her list about him started to be confusing as hell. Bob has resigned himself to loving her. By the time she’d caught on, it was no longer an option for him to stop. These last months were a glimpse at Bob when he’s running on hope.

“You’re an idiot,” she says. 

“I know.”

“This is the wrong thing to do.” 

“For us, or for everyone else?”

“Both.”

His touch slips away, and his hands ball at his sides, knuckles going white. 

“Is…” He squints as he trails off. “Is your excuse for not being together that you’re afraid of what I live with every day—that I’m gonna go dark again? But you’ll feel guilty because it might be linked to you.” He lets out a disbelieving laugh. “That is… that’s just…” 

“No,” she says. But hearing him say it, she can’t find any way to defend it, because that’s exactly what it sounds like. She can’t believe she hasn’t thought of it that way until now. 

Her uncertainty must be visible, because he wilts. “I guess that’s my answer, though. I am the issue.” 

It’s not because of him. It’s because of what he could do if his highs went too high and his lows went even lower, and how the attachment they have would be a catalyst for disrupting whatever emotional regulations he’s built. It isn’t him that’s the issue, but it also is. It’s her, too. It’s all of her, and all of him.

No matter what he does, she’ll defend him until she meets her messy end, but there’s still the principle. The responsibility. She shouldn’t put herself or him in that position, not with so much hanging over them. 

“It’s not that simple,” she says.

“You’re acting like it is.”

“How are you not? How am I supposed to handle all of this, and everything I want with you, when I feel like I’m constantly bracing for impact for what’s going to happen?” Her throat’s so heavy she’s sure she’ll sink with the weight of trying not to cry. “There are so many things I can’t do. So many people I won’t be able to save. And I’m just supposed to give in like that doesn’t matter?”

“What?”

“I can’t do this,” she says. “I feel like I need to kill this part of myself so I can deal with the rest. I can’t handle not knowing when I’m going to fail.”

His lips part. A puff of air falls over Yelena’s cheeks. “Who says you need to do it alone?” 

“I do,” she says through clenched teeth. “I say.”

Disturbance from the vibrations on the sofa. Disturbance on his face. Disturbance in his voice: 

“You know, for a hero, you’re really bad at saving yourself.”

“Like you’re any better.” Immediately, regret spits through her like acid. 

His demeanor shifts, like his body’s suddenly too big, and he’s trying to adjust to the size and failing, making himself smaller and smaller.

“Okay.”  

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s fine. I know you didn’t mean it,” he says, monotone. 

“I—”

“Isn’t that the point, though? Isn’t that what last year was about? You’re not practicing what you preached.”

“This is different. It’s you, on top of being useless against what’s coming.”

“What’s coming?”

“Something. I don’t know what, or when, but I…” Don’t cry. Don’t fucking cry.  

“Can I just say something?” he says, tipping toward her. He doesn’t wait for a response. “I’m not trying to live my entire life terrified of what might happen. I’m tired of thinking about what I could be when I can just be me, right now, with you. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know that everything that’s ever happened to me—I wouldn’t change any of it.” He glances away, taking a shuddering inhale, before bringing himself back to her. “Because if I did, then I wouldn’t have met you. And that’s… a lot. I know. And I know I’m not good, and I’m going to make things bad one day because that’s what I do—”

Yelena can’t breathe. “Bob.”

“No, just—I want you to know—”

“I know,” she says. “But I don’t know if I can be like you, in that way. What if this is the best I can ever be?”

“I don’t believe that.”

Like she’s trying to swallow back vomit and still speak, her words strain to manifest. “I’m telling you I don’t know if I can give you what you want, even if I want to.”

She’s not used to sounding delicate. Everything is oil. She’s paralyzed at the thought of fire. 

Shock rends her immobile as his hand finds the side of her neck, burning. His thumb singes where it swipes the line of her jaw. 

Both of them, stationary. Expecting. 

Both mirrors, crookedly bent around each other, gushing thoughts and wishes and things neither of them want to see back into the other. Yelena doesn’t recognize herself anymore. 

“Just tell me no,” he says. “And I won’t bring it up again.” 

Her heart slams. “I don’t—”

An alarm shrieks through her room.

Yelena pinpoints the source of the noise. The tower’s internal comms system gives caller ID on the screen at her door. It's Bucky. They’ve only used the system once before when they couldn’t reach Ava and they had to leave immediately. It’s not the emergency line, but it’s the signal for get your ass in here or people might die.  

When Bob realizes this as well, he easily drags his sleeve free from where she grasped it when the alarm went off, ready to put herself in front of him to handle whatever danger was out there. 

Yelena wants to fucking tear her hair out. “Wait.”

“You should get that,” he says, and it embodies everything Yelena has been feeling lately; she can’t do anything but live in a constant state of withholding from collapse. 

Bob sits on the couch and reaches for the stack of papers on the coffee table.

Bucky’s name flashes. Yelena knows the controls, and that he could force the call through, but he’s waiting on purpose. 

Her pulse climbs and then falls as she puts the call through. Bucky’s hologram manifests in front of them.

“What’s happening?”

“Answer your phone for once,” he says without any real malice. “Business. Lounge.”

The hologram disappears. 

That’s it.

Business means get fucking dressed. Lounge means company. 

Bob stands, watching the air where Bucky was, hands tucked in the front pocket of his hoodie. 

She doesn’t want to go. No one’s in imminent danger. She needs to finish this. She needs to—what, tell him yes? She can’t say that, but she can’t say no, either. 

Not giving him an answer feels like punishment, but so does giving him one. It’s a ritual at this point, suffocating as tar and all her fault. She doesn’t know how to sleep anymore. She can barely taste her food as she eats. She doesn’t want to reduce them both to waiting. Not when he’s trying to live, like he said. 

She hesitates only for a second, but then reaches for him because that’s what she’s always done when he’s hurting or he’s too far away in his head.

He recoils so fast, he could’ve been using his powers.

“Sorry,” he says, overly cautious. “I just… not right now.”

Raw hurt cracks through her. Hammers to her sternum, clumsy crushing of bone into soup. 

“You should get going,” he continues.

And then he’s gone out the door, and she’s caught by the urge to scream—not at him, not at herself, just at anything. 

Everything. 

Her gear goes back on.

Her boots echo down the hall. 

She strides into the lounge, and all heads turn to her, because they were waiting. 

Bob isn’t here. 

But Sam Wilson is. In full Captain America uniform, too.

Bucky’s eyes reveal his age. Yelena sees this often, in the way he watches over the team, and the way he acts as co-leader, nudging her when she needs it and even when she doesn’t. They work well together. Most of the time. 

So after Sam leaves, and they’re all sitting around the couches in the lounge with untouched drinks in front of them and their heads hanging or their elbows resting on their knees, and she finds Bucky has that look in his eye as if the world is ending, she remembers how much he’s seen. How much she hasn’t seen in comparison. 

The reality of the situation begins flooding in.

“‘Potential disaster’ is pretty vague, though,” Walker says to no one in particular. “And do we buy that he knows before us?”

“Yes,” Bucky says. “He would know, because of that team he’s built. Because they deal with what’s out there, and we don’t.”

Out there. What turned Yelena into looping agony for months. Rogue beings of unimaginable power. Something, coming. But she doesn’t know when.

Now she knows, sort of. Thanks to Captain America, who hasn’t been happy with them, but now it’s official that they aren’t friends.

“This is a courtesy. I don’t need to be telling you any of this, but you have no idea what’s coming and I think your handlers are keeping it that way for a reason. Might wanna discuss it with them.” 

She hasn’t slept in who knows how long. Bob leaving her room feels like days ago, when it had to have been less than an hour. 

“They were right,” Yelena says. She can’t quite hear herself, but she knows she’s speaking. “It’s exactly what they were saying at the conference, and the entire last year—we aren’t like whatever team he’s put together.”

“But we have the title,” Alexei says. “Avengers.”

“And how long will that last?” Ava says. “We don’t even know what he means is out there.”

“War,” Bucky says. 

No one has a response. 

What can she do if another war happens out there?

Her sister gave her life to save the world. All she can try to do is the same. Whatever chance comes. Whatever chance she gets. And it’s coming soon. 

She knows now. She knows. It’s not a concept anymore, but a countdown.

Even if she doesn’t make a difference, she’ll have tried. If Bob doesn’t save her, she’ll have lived way longer than she should’ve, and will die causing destruction, but it’ll be on her own terms.

It’s not like a weight lifts from her, but it’s more like she’s spent the last year climbing around a pitch-black cave searching for a ladder below ground instead of above her. Now, she stops moving, hands on the bars.

Alexei sighs. He doesn’t always get caught with nothing to say, but this is one of those times. Walker kicks his boots up on the table, and Ava rests her arm over the back of her section of the couch. Bucky’s hands hang between his knees. 

At least Yelena gets to have this. Them.

And Bob. Despite it all, she cherishes him the most. What she found with him a year ago, but never let herself have. 

What would Natasha say, if she were here? 

The thought jams in her head. 

Sudden nausea hits her so hard she almost doubles over. The back of her throat goes dry, then too wet.

Yelena rises from her seat. 

“You good?” It’s Walker who asks. She can’t rip her gaze away from the windows on the far side of the room, the golden light of the fire pit distorts her ability to see beyond the reflections of the glass.

Natasha wouldn’t need to say anything. 

This feeling is almost unrecognizable. 

“Yelena.” Alexei’s right there next to her where he wasn’t before.

Natasha would give her a look, because she’d know. It would say: This is what you said you’ve been waiting for. So, what now? 

Maybe Yelena’s old enough now to stop telling herself no. 

This feeling inside her. A catastrophe of hope. She wants to sprint into it.

“I’m fine,” she says. “There’s nothing else we can do right now, is there?” 

Bucky observes her like he’s seeing her whole fucking soul. “No.” 

She nods, and she heads right for the elevator.

“Where are you going?” Alexei asks. 

“I have something to do.”

There’s a possibility the world’s going to end soon, and she wants to go knock on Bob’s door. 

They seem to accept her answer, all except for Bucky, who watches her leave.

The elevator doors open. She steps inside.

“Yelena.” Even from his spot on the couch, his stare makes her feel so small. “Make sure you know what you’re doing.”

The doors close.

Hands on the ladder. Up she goes.

Yelena hasn’t been to Bob’s room in months. He’s waiting for her in the doorway, because of course he is. The hoodie is gone, replaced with a simple graphic shirt. He takes a deep breath when she gets close.

Yelena squeezes right past him into his room.

“Yeah, sure. Come on in.” Bob says, following her inside. 

Where Yelena’s room is barren of her personality, Bob’s shines from each corner, lit by lamps all over.

Like everywhere in the tower, its walls are mainly windows, but Bob’s are covered in notes and equations from whatever project he’s been working on that’s strewn over a big workbench. 

Aside from that, everything’s tidy. There’s even a bookcase and a New Avengers poster framed near it on the wall in the large den area with a couch. Through the wall of glass dividing the bedroom from the rest of the apartment, his sheets are skewed as if he was just lying in bed.

Not much has changed.

She waits for the door to secure behind them, feeling so alive inside, like she’s harboring a hive of bees in her belly, suddenly self-conscious now that she’s barged into his space, and he’s just standing there.

“Have you said all you needed to say?” she asks.

“You mean from earlier.”

“Yes.”

“I think so.” 

She nods to herself, then begins pacing the room, inspecting his things. He follows behind her at a distance as she browses his books and the limited edition New Avengers figurines on a nearby shelf.

“Again, I’m not good at this,” she says, surprising herself with how strangled it comes out. “I never have been, with how I grew up. Even with my family it was hard.” She knows from the way he’s scrutinizing her that he has no clue what she’s about to say. “I’m not good at allowing myself something like this.”

“Me either.”

“Yeah.” Pause. “But I want to. Allow myself. With you.”

He wears anticipation like a spark. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Earlier, you—”

“I know what I said earlier. I’m not going to pretend I don’t mean it.”

His mouth twists. “Okay.”

“And I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to hold everything and still be okay, but I know it hasn’t been working. Not allowing myself. It’s fucked everything up, but I want this.”

“Because Captain America told you that something’s coming?”

Was he listening, or was he watching from somewhere? Actually, she doesn’t care to know.

“Because I thought everything felt real before, but it didn’t. It does now.”

For a long time, he’s frozen, and his head’s tilted to the side like when he’s warring with his own thoughts.

“I don’t want you to want me just because you might as well.”

A thought collapses in on her; he’s so afraid that she’ll leave him. How many people have left him, or looked to exploit him? Maybe these last months have felt like her slow departure, and maybe they would have been. Honestly, they almost were. 

Earlier, Bob wanted her to be explicit. Adrenaline makes it simple for Yelena to step into that bubble of heat surrounding him.

“What I said earlier is true, and you know it. But what you said is true, too. I wasn’t being fair. I was stuck thinking about everyone else and pretending that’s what matters because I’m afraid to have what I want. I would, and will, die for someone one day because that’s what I want to do. I want to help.” She’s swerving off-course, and it’s clear from his face that he’s retreating. “But I want to live, too. Like you said. I’m—I’m really selfish, and I’m tired of pretending like I’m not.”

It’s like splitting open a hidden spot in her mind and letting him peer inside. He’s guarded, a rare thing for her to deal with, so she splits herself wider.

“I want to come home to you,” she says. And she means to say so much more, but it all gets crowds together after that. She hopes—fuck, she hopes—he gets what she means. 

I want to be gentle with you, and not gentle at all, and I don’t want to apologize to anyone for it. I want everything. Your past. You, how you are. I want to see all you do in the future because I know how good you’ll be. I just want to see where you’ll go and what’s left to keep discovering about you. I think I’m obsessed with you and I don’t care anymore.

Because Bob is witty and sarcastic and honest. He’s thoughtful and cautiously kind. He likes lime slices in his water. He has a good eye for color theory and loves a good science fiction novel. He’s got a god complex that he compresses beneath humility and fear, though he fights his hardest to overcome it all. He tries so hard at everything because he wants to be good. And he’s mean sometimes, but so is she. He could take over the world and he chooses to be here as Bob. Just Bob, learning to be in his own skin. And Yelena loves him for all of those things.

She can’t imagine having never met him. From the moment she stepped into the Void, she was ready to die trying to get him to come back to himself. And she’d do the same tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. 

All noise leaves the room. 

He scans her from her hair, down her suit to her boots, and back again, like he’s trying to commit her to memory. “You mean it.”

The space between them becomes smaller, and she doesn’t know if it’s her who’s slicing away the distance or if it’s him.

“Yes,” she says.

His T-shirt clings to him. His hair curls at the nape of his neck, and his lips part like he’s stuck between a crooked smile and finding something to say. 

She wants to touch him there, so she does; her fingers graze his mouth, and then cup his jaw, mimicking him from earlier. His cheek bends into her palm, and his breaths fall on her wrist.

She wouldn’t mind being consumed by the heat of his body. 

Everything about him is so much clearer, like she’s never seen him fully in focus before now. It’s the possibility that she’s never allowed herself before, not one of the flashes of them together that she can’t keep from her mind at night. It’s present. Visceral.

It smells like ozone, tastes like a lightning storm. It beckons like birdsong on a sleepy morning. 

Careful, he tucks a wayward strand of hair behind her ear.

Bob chooses to be gentle, because that’s who he is.

That might be her favorite on her list.

In a high, he doesn’t lose that trait, he just cares less, and that’s dangerous. But Yelena can’t find it within herself to let her fear of that keep her away anymore. He’ll take on the title of Sentry again whether she’s with him or not. He could be the one to disembowel the stars from the sky and she’d still think of the ways he chooses to be gentle.

“I wanna kiss you,” he says.

“Yeah,” she murmurs. “Yes, I’d like to—let’s do that.” 

It’s like gravity, the way he sways into her, letting his mouth hover on hers. She tries not to let herself think about how nervous she actually is, because she hasn’t been this close to anyone in so long.

There’s a galloping in her ears. Maybe this is the clamor of a heart when stepping into consequence. Maybe he’s waiting for her to close the gap, but no. He grips her suit at the small of her back and slams his mouth fully on hers.

The first kiss is simple, both of them inhaling and not really moving. It’s really nice.

The second kiss is stiff, like neither of them have done this before, because it’s been a fucking lifetime for Yelena and she thinks it might be the same for him. Overthinking makes her lean away, but his mouth tracks hers and his hand finds the back of her neck and he doesn’t let her go.

The third kiss is all the danger she’s been trying to avoid. She presses against him as close as she can. No space left. Her mind goes dark and she lets herself feel. 

A hand tries gliding up her back, but bumps into a staff strapped there. 

“These—off,” he says against her mouth, and it ripples like the whitewater surface of a river all the way to the bed of her. 

She detaches them both with unceremonious movements, and then her gauntlets, and unzips the top half of her suit to shimmy out of the thick fabric and shoulder armor, suddenly glad she kept on her clothes from earlier and not the usual undersuit getup. 

Then he’s everywhere, touching her like he’s ravenous to feel the way her muscles move and the chills that tighten her skin in his wake. Yelena completely agrees, slipping beneath the hem of his shirt to grasp the feverish skin of his waist. 

He shivers, crushing her against his chest. She wants to know what else he’ll do, so she uses her fingers to count up his vertebrae as far as she can reach, and he bends so far that she has to arch into him.

She tugs at the hair behind his ear and then they’re stumbling. Her tongue’s in his mouth, and he grabs her shirt, scrunching it so tightly it might rip.

She’s never really liked kissing, but kissing him changes her mind. It’s the way he’s trying to consume her, like he’s as desperate as she is. He’s shaking, and he’s hard against her, and she wonders if the rest of his skin tastes the way his mouth does.

The back of her knees hit the couch, and it’s hard to be graceful when Bob’s got his arms around her like he wants to fuse their bodies together, so she trips. He catches her weight before she falls, though.

“Sorry,” he says. 

She hums. This close up, his face blurs in her vision. “Why?”

“Getting carried away.”

She can’t think of anything other than the fact that she loves him like this. Harsh exhales, heavy-lidded, staring at her mouth. Her hands fall to his shoulders, and she squeezes slightly because she can, as if to say, Mine. Down his arms and back up again. Mine. Presses her lips to his, briefly. I can have you.

He swallows. Then his mouth dives against her throat, sending gentle strokes of fire through her limbs.

“Sorry.” It’s wet on her jugular.

“Don’t be.” She yanks his hips against hers and he jolts.

It’s gone from fast and breathless to a molten gold in a blink. He dips into the waist of her jumpsuit, and she tips her weight backward onto his couch, pulling him down with her. Slow, liquefying tumble. 

She didn’t know it would be like this, so out of control. The fog of it all. Clawing at him until her spine lies flat on the cushions and his weight’s between her legs. He’s mumbling at her jaw, and she can’t bring herself to figure out the jumble of his American accent because she’s too focused on trying to get him to roll his hips down.

“What?” she breathes.

“Should we stop?”

Oh. 

Yelena clambers back into her brain and takes in the damage. 

Her boots are locked at his back, and when he withdraws from her, he appears larger than she remembers him during any of their training sessions, despite being in similar positions, but he also didn’t have a hand up her shirt then.

Why stop? 

She’s drunk on the last five minutes and they’ve barely started. But she’s also struggling to keep her eyes open, and her earlier jitters have returned. 

They just agreed to do this.

“Yeah,” she says, “probably not the best time.”

His hand splays wide across her stomach. “Probably not.”

Fuck, she wants to have him.

Yelena has never had many things. She had a family, once. And she had a sister… will always have her. But something like this, no. 

She has things in a way that a scavenger does. She hoards and she indulges. It scares her, the way she wants to possess him, but if he lets her then what’s the problem?

And yet, in the few moments she’s been gazing up at him, her pulse lulls with the cozy warmth gathered between their chests. Sleep closes on her like a coffin.

Bob huffs a laugh as Yelena fights the heaviness in her eyes. 

“You’re exhausted.” 

She grins. “I’m very comfortable.”

And it’s true. It’s not exactly the position, but the circumstances. Yelena puts a name to the sensation soaking through her: 

Relief. 

That she no longer has to guess, or fight this, or—at least for tonight—think about what’s coming for them. Because she knows it’s soon, but it isn’t right this second.  

“Are you sure about this?” he asks. The traces of insecurity bother her, but he’s different from her, so he can’t know that she’s made the leap and won’t be turning back. 

“Yes.”

Yelena has touched their beginning, and she wants to go, go, go. 

But there are things they should still talk about. Things to apologize for, or to explain. 

His hand retracts from her shirt. “I don’t want you to feel like I—”

“I don’t.” She reaches for the mess of hair that falls over his forehead, twining it around her finger, and finds the strength to slide out from underneath him. It’s not awkward, even as she asks, “Can I stay here tonight? Just to sleep.” 

A small, secret smile appears. “Yeah. You want me to take the couch? Or you can have the couch, if you want.”

“Bob, I want both of us to take the bed.”

He blanches. “Do—okay. Yeah, both in the bed.”

“Is that okay?”

“Yes. Very okay.”

“Good.” She stands, offering him her hand for no reason other than to hold it tight and not let go when he pretends to need her help getting off the couch. She pulls him toward his bedroom. 

“Can I borrow a shirt?”

“Uh. Yeah. Absolutely.”

She lets the suit dribble to the floor behind the glass wall divider, and she enjoys the way he stares, watching him think over the reasons why she wants a shirt from him if she’s still in her clothes from earlier. She wears what he picks for her—a plain, thermal-knit shirt—and climbs into his sheets. They give off his scent. The real one, beneath his dumb tree deodorant and shampoo. She buries into his pillows, which might be weird, but he doesn’t seem to mind, gazing at her from the foot of the bed. 

“I know we have a lot to talk about,” she grumbles, half-asleep already. “But we can do it in the morning."

“Talk,” he says. 

“Yes, talk.” Explain. Tell you that you were right some more. Bury a sigh in your throat. Watch the idea of us together grow and grow, no matter the threats out there. Feel you and be present, not outside my body. To let myself feel the same hope that I feel right now.

He gets into bed beside her, and they whisper to each other until she falls asleep. It’s not too different from the few nights they’ve spent in the same room with each other, except for the proximity.

She can’t keep out the thought of his body next to hers, and the thought of kissing him again, and the thought of absolutely everything she can have with him.

But it can wait for the next day. And that calms her more than anything.

Possibilities, even if her days are numbered.

“You should just show up,” she says a few days later, after a meeting.

They’re in the Watchtower’s midsection; the enclosed glass atrium’s renovations added floating staircases along the window-walls, and there are multiple bars on each of its three balcony floors. It’s the only area of the tower where the windows have no reflective qualities on the outside. No privacy. Any helicopter or drone could fly by and catch a glimpse of the festivities inside. 

Strategic.

A team of decorators argue over which statue should go where for the upcoming event. 

“Nah. They just said—”

“Bob, I think it’s time we stop giving a shit.”

He doesn’t respond. It’s an easy silence.

Things haven’t been much different than they were before the summer. They spend their free time around each other, but keep things professional in front of the others. 

Yelena is not one for discretion, so she personally pats herself on the back when no one asks once things are less tense between her and Bob again. Though, she doesn't anticipate how hard it is to steer herself away from him instead of into his space.

When they do end up next to each other around the team, she has to stop from plastering her body to his. Arm-to-arm contact, or hip-to-hip, even leg-to-leg when they’re sitting is a hassle to cover up. 

She’d think they’d gotten away with the shift in their relationship if not for Bucky pointedly not looking in their direction. It’s like saying, I see you, but I’m not going to acknowledge this, because I hate drama and it’s none of my business anyway.

She’d rather him look.

A few more days pass.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she asks from her perch at the lounge’s bar counter. He’s feigning getting a snack at the same time as her. Their private tones go undetected beneath Alexei and Walker’s mooing from the couches. 

“Pretty sure.”

“You should, though.”

He emerges from a cabinet with an unopened jar of maraschino cherries. Yelena wrinkles her nose. The cap pops, and he procures a tiny silver skewer and spears a few cherries on the tip. They drip before they reach his mouth, and in the dim ambience from the underlit countertop, the liquid appears black. 

“‘M supposed to be a secret, remember?”

“Oh, you?” She snaps open her ginger beer. “Worst kept secret of all time, don’t you think? I’ve helped with that.”

He drifts close, and she leans into his heat slightly before halting. 

That’s another thing that comes easy—the invitation for intimacy, despite not having gotten as far as they did almost a week ago. Since then, it’s been easy kisses. Easy touches. Hard conversations that feel like stitching herself to him further and adding little beads to the threads as they go. 

“Yeah, you shouldn’t take the secret out on a date.”

“Fuck you.”

He gives her a wide berth as he heads back to the couches, but not before whispering, “I do wish I could dance with you, though.”

She tries one last time, two weeks after their first night together, the morning that the Watchtower prepares to throw its doors wide for the anniversary of the New Avengers.

“Are you sure?” he mumbles, rubbing his eye with his knuckle. His right cheek is marbled with lines from sleep. 

“Yes, Bob. I like this. It’s more for me than it is for you.” She pauses. “It might get messy, though, so take your shirt off.”

He’s quite gullible. The shirt comes right off.

Yelena is not messy with this, she just wants to feel his skin and ogle him. 

He sits on the massive counter in his en suite, leaning back against the mirror while she’s between his legs.

He nearly falls back to sleep as she shaves his face and neck for him, methodically spreading cream along his throat and jaw, dipping the razor into the sink after each swipe. Her arms tire after the first minute because of the reach, but she doesn’t care.

“It’s your party, too,” she says.

“Not really.”

“Yes, really.”

He speaks through his teeth so as not to move his mouth too much while she runs the blades along his chin.

“They don’t want me there, Yelena. Not part of the team. Liability.”

She dunks the razor one last time before taking a warm rag to his skin, erasing the last traces of white. He tips forward when she’s done. His hair needs a wash. His eyes are very blue.

“We wouldn’t be a team without you.”

His exhale holds many things. In one movement, he slides off the counter and ducks his head into her neck, wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her to his height so he doesn’t have to bend. She doesn’t even feel his arms flex, like she’s paper and he’s trying not to accidentally crumple her, not even give her a crease.

It’s only a tiny space between her toes and the floor, but she goes rigid and braces against his shoulders.

“I forget sometimes that you can bench press a planet,” she says, staring at herself in the mirror, and the curve of his back, and the blades of his shoulders, and the slim cut of his waist. 

“Sometimes, I feel like I could do two at once,” he says against her skin, letting her back down.

“You’ll miss the fun if you don’t come.”

He gives her a sleepy, incredulous look. “Shut up. You can't convince me that tonight will be fun.”

“Ah, well, I tried.”

She kisses him casually, like she’s never done anything else. 

The Watchtower’s atrium glitters from the inside out. Benefactors and government officials cram the walkways and main level, which is currently acting as a ballroom. 

Yelena watches from the bar closest to the main entrance, keeping an eye on those coming and going as bodies twist along to the live orchestra. Every so often, she churns out political jargon to any latecomers from the Must Chat To list PR gave her. 

The air is spicy with drink and perfume, and everything is luminous; glitzy gowns scatter light from chandeliers and the dancing lanterns that levitate around the floors like magic.

Very sparkly. Very performative.

She conceals a smile behind her champagne glass full of water as she catches wide shoulders with a boyish slouch maneuvering through the crowd from the staircase nearby. 

“Fancy seeing you here.” 

The tension in her spine softens at the sound of his voice. 

Bob’s wearing a tux that does nothing to hide his imposing figure. If he straightened his poster and he was only a little taller, she’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to blend in. He leans against the bar and tucks a hand in his trouser pocket, and she can’t decide if he pulls off the nonchalant vibe or if it’s just awkward. 

She doesn’t care, she likes him in-between.

“Fancy is the correct word,” she says, standing straight no matter how much she wants to slump in this dress. She can’t tell if it’s the color of ink or a deep indigo because it’s iridescent like an opal, drinking in light and bending it back out. It clasps at her neck, modest enough to seem professional, but tantalizing enough in its silhouette to keep the Black Widow image they’re trying to sell. “Did you catch the speech?”

“Yeah. Riveting.” 

“Valentina outdid herself.” Yelena sips her water, pretending the swirling couples in front of them are anything but boring. “I’m glad you came.”

“I’m not.” His brow creases, and then raises, like he’s got an idea. “Yet.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Wanna dance?”

Black Widow spinning with the man everyone’s speculating as a secret Avenger, or maybe a terrifying entity. Abysmal idea. But they’d find out soon enough, wouldn’t they? If stars fall in the near future, they’ll need his power on their side. If there’s any world left after the fight, it will know his face.

“Woo me, then,” she says, placing her glass on the stone bar counter, and gripping his hand in hers to tug him into the swaying bodies.

Most people are keeping up a steady shift from side to side, but some rotate in a simple waltz. All of it’s for show to cover up conversations.

Yelena has a sense, as stares turn their way, what those conversations become. At least everyone here signed NDAs. 

“I didn’t really think this through,” Bob says, cradling her palm in his while his fingers burn at her waist. She corrects his touch, sliding it up to her shoulder blade. “I’ve never danced like this.”

“I can lead, if you want.”

He cringes. “I don’t think that’d make a difference. I’m not used to attention.”

“Just look at me,” she says.

They transfer their weight back and forth, and despite the whispers, Bob straightens up as she distracts him.

“Who did your hair?”

It’s gotten long again, wavy and gelled at the sides. It’s classy. The single curl falling in front is very Hollywood.

“Me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he says, affronted. Then his gaze flicks up and away. “Took me an hour. Or two.”

“It’s gorgeous.” 

“Yours, too.” Her hair is practically cemented in place as sloping waves. Many rollers and pins were involved in the process. Retro as hell. “Are we allowed to give compliments in public for everyone to hear?”

“I think everyone’s drunk enough not to remember.”

“Good point.”

“Actually, it’s a great point—we could totally leave.”

A conspiratorial smile tugs at his lips, knotted with relief. “You wanna ditch your own party?”

“With much regret and sadness, yes.”

“Not very family-friendly. How will PR recover?”

“They don’t have to find out.” She leans in, only a bit. He inhales. “I don’t know if you know this, but I have a very risky job where sometimes I, you know… creep around. Be stealthy.”

“Right.”

“Punch some things. Or—” She lifts the hand resting at his shoulder, makes a finger gun, and shoots it between them.

“Wow. Really?”

“Yep. Don’t worry, I won’t get in trouble. You might get in trouble for being here, though.”

He fakes musing it over. “Well, then I’d have to blame the person who invited me.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, see, she really wanted me to come.”

“I can’t blame her. You look good all done up.”

His eyes are bright the moment before he shakes his head. Yelena really doesn’t care that they’re visibly flirting. It’s one of those nights where she’d kill for a drink, and the luster of the bar behind Bob is suddenly a little too enticing, and her joke about leaving is not a joke at all.

“I have a present for you,” she says.

“What?”

“It’s your celebration, too, so I got you a present.”

He frowns. “‘Celebration’ is a stretch.” 

Yelena knows that. One year of the New Avengers. One year since the Void took Manhattan. One night of people asking to shake her hand, leering her and her team. They kept splitting up and reconvening, as was expected of them. Be seen together, be seen mingling. Build the brand.

But it’s also close to a year of when Bob regained his memories from the Void. She remembers the day it happened, and the horror he carried on his face for weeks after.

The crooning strings transition to a new song, and as people stop dancing, they linger around the two of them. 

Abruptly, being anywhere but alone with him rakes across her nerves. Fuck these people, and fuck what anyone thinks.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“You serious?”

Her fingertips brush his. “Meet me in my room in thirty minutes. I’m going to make my rounds again and come up.” And, louder for anyone listening, she adds: “Thank you for the dance.”

She strides away, and he clears his throat behind her.

It’s fun, sneaking around. Pushing limits. Kissing like teenagers do in movies. Having the best nights of sleep either of them have gotten in at least a year because they have each other to hold on to, even if she wakes up sweating because he ends up curled around her with his head on her chest. 

Yelena finds Walker. And Ava. Bucky is simultaneously the best and worst mingler among them. She doesn’t have to search for Alexei because his laughs are loud and constant.

Handshakes. Jokes she doesn’t spare smiles for. She wears poise and lethal elegance like a shield until she escapes the web of the atrium. All the while, her blood thrums at the image of Bob in that tux. And him not in the tux. Maybe her taking him out of the tux.

Her apartment is dark.

She finds Bob sitting on the edge of her bed with his hands folded in his lap. Patient.

“Get the lamp,” she says, and he flicks on the floor lamp beside the bed, casting the room in mellow light.

It was a simple request so they could both see the gift, but she has to suppress a shiver at his silent obedience. 

The bed’s only been used on the few nights they’ve slept here instead of his room. She stashed the unwrapped gift beneath the frame, and it’s a feat to bend down and retrieve it with her tight dress, but she waves off Bob’s offer for help. 

“Here,” she says, handing him the unbranded cardboard box.

She shouldn’t have ordered it. Jesus, she should’ve at least wrapped it. 

Too late.

Bob seems shocked, as if he can’t believe she actually got him something. Then he can’t keep that flustered look off his face, which Yelena really adores.

“Oh.” He holds up the book from the box. Its top corner reads: The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

“Good, right? You don’t have that one, I checked. It’s supposed to be interesting. Pretty zen.”

“Yeah.” He turns the book over, this way and that. “I read about this one.”

She claps her hands together. “I’m so good at this.” 

“You are.” His voice reminds her of a downed moth; dusty, delicate wings. “Thank you. You didn’t have to.”

She uses his shoulder to steady herself as she sits next to him on the mattress. “Like I said. It’s your celebration too. I’m proud of how far you’ve come.”

He runs a finger over the book’s cover design, and it’s such a youthful gesture, somehow. She usually thinks he looks younger than he is, like the years he spent in darkness haven’t quite caught up with him. But the way his face opens, and his thoughts come in like the tide, hints at the depths of the history he carries. 

“Do you think I’ll ever be able to control it?”

The temperature in the room drops.

“I… don’t know. But I won’t think any less of you if you never can.” 

If he always battles himself and can never find a balance, she’ll be surprised. He’s too determined to give up for good, even if he seems like he’d rather keep all his power contained rather than deal with it, if possible. And he has that power for a reason, Yelena knows it. He’ll have to use it sooner rather than later. 

“Shouldn’t have said anything. Stupid.”

She puts a hand on his, squeezing. “It wasn’t stupid.”

“It was.”

“No, it was valid. You’re allowed to wonder.”

“I don’t wanna wonder when I’m trying to spend time with you.”

“You are spending time with me.” He opens his mouth to argue, but stops himself. He’s fighting his way through his thoughts, wading through the deep end. So, Yelena does what she does best. She fights, if only to help change the subject before he spirals. “Look, will you help me get this off?”

She picks at the halter top of her dress.

“Yeah,” he says, brows scrunching as he comes back to himself. 

And it’s not an invitation of any sexual nature, no matter what she imagined doing with him on her way up here. But Yelena stands, turning her back to him, and he takes a strange second to follow.

His shadow stretches in the lamplight when he gets to his feet. He’s like a wall of heat behind her, and his fingers make contact with the skin of her neck when he goes to undo the zipper of the halter top. Down it goes, his concentrated breaths caressing over each uncovered peak of her spine. 

Maybe he took it as an invitation. 

Would it be a bad thing to initiate something right after he seemed so lost? But then, the way he scrambled for the light a few minutes ago gave her an impression, the same one she’s always had that he’d take anything from her if she offered. 

It was the same two weeks ago when they finally talked it out. He opened the chance to shut down where they were heading, and deferred to her lead when she agreed. Would he have kept going if she asked, even with how emotionally charged everything had been? 

They’ve settled enough to touch each other, sure, but this is new territory.

“If you want,” she starts, “there’s a clasp at the top.”

Bob’s hands stall at the small of her back. “Do you—want?”

“Yes.” She’s so aware of him behind her, close. One step back and she’d be against him. Their faint outlines reflect in the windows across from the bed. “Do you?” 

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

Heavy-tongued, the word leaks out. “Yes.” 

There is a choice coming toward her. Move with caution, or let instinct be her unbecoming. 

“Undo it,” she says.

It rings, echoing through him as he pinches the fabric still hanging at her neck, fiddling with the clasp until it gapes at her shoulders. She holds it in place at her chest. 

He’s trying not to look at her when she turns, and she says, “So respectful.” 

“Well, yeah, it’s—”

She presses her lips to his. A quick touch, not even a very far reach because of her heels. Then she does it again, because she can. “We’re adults here. We sleep with each other every night.” And, because she wants to see him crack: “I’ve felt your hard cock through your clothes plenty of times now.” 

His pupils blow wide, black smoking out blue. “I know.”

Yelena ignores the nerves trying to flay her raw from the inside. “Would you like to see me?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see you first.”

His breath hitches, then he’s fumbling with his bowtie and tossing it to the floor. She interrupts him from going further, sliding her fingers beneath his coat and helping him shrug it off. His shirt buttons go one by one, splaying open to reveal carved planes of muscle.

She never understood when people described an animalistic urge to touch. Touch being not to enjoy or admire, but to devour. She gets it now. Her hands itch to rip off the fabric at his waist because it’s simply doing the job of covering the skin there. She wants to see what’s below it, and she wants to hear how he sounds when she touches him, and she wants to climb inside his bones and live there.

She holds his gaze as she goes for his belt, allowing him time to tell her no.

The trousers drop, and he’s in his underwear, cock tenting the briefs, so turned on he’s forgetting to be shy. But maybe he’s not shy with sex. This may be one of the only instances she’s witnessed where he isn’t shy with his body, now that she thinks about it. 

When he wants, he’s not ashamed of it. He’s confident. Every bit the titan that he truly is, a man able to bring calamity to this world and all others they know of. 

And he’s holding his breath. Waiting for her.

She guides his hand to the straps of her dress, and he slips them over the slopes of her shoulders.

Fabric slithers to the floor. She steps out of it, making sure not to catch it on her high heels. Her underwear is thin, and she has no bra on because of the dress. It definitely does something for her that he seems about to drool.

“I can—” Bob stops short, sinking to his knees and undoing the straps at her ankles.

Yelena goes lightheaded at how fast heat coils in her.

This is what she knew it’d be like. All those nights, unable to keep the thoughts at bay. That night on the couch when he looked at her like he’d do anything just to get her to praise him.

How will he act when this isn’t new? What will he want to do to her? 

Curiosity colors her.

He helps her step out of the heels and she kicks them away. The gel in his hair catches as she scrapes a hand through it, and loosens as she fists it between her fingers. 

His lashes flutter. 

Holy shit.

Being wanted by someone she also wants so badly is another type of power she doesn’t ever get to feel.  

“Come here,” she says, and he rises, hands scalding her waist as he uses her to anchor himself. 

She knows what to do next. She knows how to hook her thumbs in his waistband and peel it back, giving enough room that it doesn’t catch on his cock on the way down. But she’s unfamiliar with how her pulse is so strong between her legs, and just how different it is to be doing this with someone she loves. At the same time, it’s also natural, like they’ve always been meant to end up here, stripping off their armor. 

“Do you want to?” he murmurs, silky in the quiet. She’s never heard him sound like that.

She grins. “Yes.” 

And she shoves him onto the bed. He bounces a bit when he lands, and she has to wrestle down a laugh as she lifts her knee to one side of his hip.

“Can I eat you out?”

Yelena pauses. She pictures it, can practically feel how his tongue and fingers would push her over the edge. But then she glances again at his underwear, and her mouth waters. “Next time. I want you inside me.”

He audibly swallows. “We can do both. It’ll feel better for you.”

“It’ll feel really good having you stretch me open.”

His brow screws up, like he’s in pain. 

“‘Kay,” he chokes out. “All right. I just haven’t done this in a while. I won’t last.” 

“That’s fine. It’s been forever for me.” She crawls into his lap and immediately finds his mouth with hers. His arms circle her waist and she grinds her hips down, and fuck, this is nothing like stealing, nothing like ruining.

It’s like creating. It’s desire flaring like feral violence turned inward, toward herself, and the only way to keep from lashing out is to spread her legs wider and taste him with her teeth.

Tenderly, he flips her onto her back, an ember colliding with ice, rewriting the rules of the world to keep from melting her. 

But then he’s pushing her into the comforter when his hips, his lips and tongue at her jaw, then her throat, and she doesn’t spare another thought for how gentle he can be.

“Off,” she says, tugging at his underwear, and he leans back to comply, awkward in the way he has to shift his weight to keep them from tangling at his knees and ankles. She lifts up to remove hers, too. Both pairs hit the floor somewhere.

This is right, she thinks as he settles back over her on his forearms, and his skin slides against hers, and his cock glides through the slick of her, and she’s trying to angle her hips to catch it at her opening. 

She’s so deep in her body that, at first, she thinks she’s imagining his trembling—thinks it might be her own body too full of adrenaline, but then Bob locks up. 

This all happened fast, she realizes. Slow, considering the buildup, but maybe maybe she rushed it. Maybe she’s ruining it. 

The trembling turns to full shaking.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.” Even his voice wobbles.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m just overwhelmed.” 

Her thighs fall open where she’d been squeezing his waist. “Let’s slow down then.”

“No, I’m—” He grinds his teeth loud enough that she hears. “This is. Fucking stupid.”

He’s boiling where their skin touches, and she brushes away the hair sticking to his forehead and temples. 

“It’s not stupid.” She gets it. Nerves manifest like this, but for her it’s mostly the crazy pounding of her heart in her ears, overtaking everything except what’s in front of her.

“Hard to be vulnerable.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got you.” She laces her fingers behind his neck and brushes her knees against his ribs, and his hips grind down.

She gives a little gasp. 

Fabric tears, ripping somewhere near her head.

They both freeze.

“What was that?”

He glances at his hands by her face, then hides in her neck. “Your duvet.”

There’s something indecently attractive and simultaneously funny about him shredding her bed by accident. 

“Getting too worked up?” she says in his ear.

“Can’t focus.”

“Too much for you?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.” She kisses his hair. “We’re going to switch, okay?” She bucks up into him, trying to tip him over, but she quickly understands that if he’s battling with control, she’ll never be able to move him unless he lets her. It’s like trying to punch a mountain and turn it into sand with her fists. 

He takes a second to catch up, stiff all over, balancing on his elbows, and Yelena makes sure not to allow contact at their hips as they switch places.  

He’s still trembling, staring up at her. “I really think this will do the opposite of help.”

“You’re struggling to move and regulate at the same time. Do you still want to do this?”

He nods. 

“Then scoot.” She gestures behind him at the headboard. He swivels out from under her and sits in the middle of the bed. “This way, you just focus on me.”

His gaze tracks her mouth, so he misses her reaching between them to take him in her hand. 

He hisses. “Fuck.”

He’s feverishly hot and so hard, the feeling of him makes her throb. 

“How do you like it?” She twists her wrist. 

“That.”

“Yeah?”

His hands constrict in the duvet next to his thighs. “Uh-huh.” 

She eats up every small detail about him. The smooth texture of his skin at the juncture of his neck, the shadow along his jaw already visible from her shaving him this morning. The curve of his earlobe. The way his lashes are wet sends spiking heat through her, because he wants her so badly that he’s ready to cry. 

“Criss-cross your legs,” she says. He does, and she climbs into his lap. “Is this all right?”

Another nod. 

She hovers there, wet enough to drip, and guides the head of him to notch right where she wants. She holds his face and says, “Watch me.”

Despite gravity making it hard, her goal is not to hurry. Even with the awful stretch, it feels so fucking good. 

His mouth hangs open as he bottoms out, and he makes a noise like all the air left his lungs. 

She agrees.

Her legs wrap at his waist and his arms fold around her back. His palms scorch anywhere he can touch, like he can’t decide where to go first—her ass, her shoulder blades, everywhere between. 

Like this, she reevaluates how much bigger he is than her. It’s usually not a huge difference in her mind because he makes himself small, but she’s level with him here, maybe a little above him. 

She tilts her hips as she kisses him, and they both sigh at the contact.

“Slow?” he asks against her mouth.

“Mhm.”

She rocks back and forth in his lap, and he keeps one hand on her hip to support the rhythm she picks. 

His shaking wanes as his eyes glaze over. 

Yelena props a hand behind her, on his knee, and shifts her weight there so she can really get the angle right.

There, that drags a moan from him, and he shoves his face to her throat. He’s getting lost in it, she can tell from how he pants against the crook of her neck and his fingers grip too tight.

Her free hand threads through the hair at the nape of his neck and she hauls him back so she can look at him, because it’s almost as good as how he feels inside her.

She wants to keep his pleasure as the focus, but the more she moves, the more she keeps dripping into a pattern that puts her closer and closer to a blank, buzzing mind. Her muscles dissolve, vision narrowing to his eyes and his mouth.

Snug, easy slide. Almost-too-much pressure when she rocks forward, an addictive spot to hit again, again, again.

They’re not kissing, more like breathing each other’s air.

“Good?” she asks. He makes a small sound into her mouth. “Yeah? It’s good for me, too.”

His gaze trails from hers, down to where her hips ride him. That short moment where the base of his cock appears before vanishing inside her again. 

He squeezes his eyes shut. “I can’t—”

She likes it. Likes that he’s fighting to hold himself together. “Touch me.”

His hand sinks between them, thumb finding her with little difficulty, and he doesn’t really need to do anything but keep it there and she’s already hurtling toward the edge. 

Bob mumbles a string of words that make no sense and she barely pays attention to anything but the sweat and friction and clenching around him and all of it feels like the incarnation of yes, more, please. 

It rips through her, deep and curling as every muscle seizes, lasting as long as she can take it without her legs trying to close of their own accord.

She goes gooey and satisfied in his arms, failing to catch her breath.

His trembling returns. She blinks, finding him staring at her like she’s a fucking star, a mixture of restraint and pain-pleasure distorting his flushed features.

She maps his cheekbone with a finger. “You held out.”

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead—how do you want me?” Euphoria, that’s what she’s feeling. She’d let him bend her in half if that’s what did it for him. “Like this? On my back? Turned around?” She raises an eyebrow.

He kisses her in response, messy and wet, and tips her backward. As soon as her head hits the mattress, he slurs out, “Can I?”

She doesn’t really get what he means. Finish, maybe? Inside her? That doesn’t matter, not after the Red Room. 

“Yes,” she says, then adds, “please,” because she wants to watch his reaction. It’s a dazed look, one that reminds her he’d do anything for her. Then he’s driving into her while she traces the seam of his mouth with her tongue.

There’s no rhythm to his hips, it’s all clumsy and feels too much and not enough at the same time. 

Her ankles lock at his lower back. 

Impossibly, the room gets hotter. And, behind her eyelids, brighter. All the lights in her apartment snap on, and she only has enough time to say his name in a panic before the room plunges into darkness with the sound of a sucking hum. 

That’s when he spills inside her. She digs her nails into his arms as he presses too far in.

When he comes down, a laugh builds in her chest until she bursts into full-belly cackles.

“Don’t,” he says into the mattress by her head. 

“You blew the lights out.”

“Shut up.” 

“That’s amazing.”

“I’m really glad you think so.” 

She turns into his neck, tasting the salt on his skin. “What if it was the whole tower?”

“It wasn’t. Promise.”

They unravel from each other, sticky everywhere. It’s unpleasant but Yelena can’t bring herself to give a shit.

They stare at the ceiling with their hands linked together. 

“Thank you,” he says. 

A part of her bristles at the comment. She doesn’t want anything sexual between them to be an act of service. But, as it fills the space between them, she knows he meant it as a way of showing reverence. 

And she feels the same. 

All of this time, from last winter spent learning about him, and the spring spent loving him gradually, and the summer spent denying herself, she’s so happy it led them here, and wherever they'll go next.

“Thank you, too.”  

November

Thirteen Months After the Void Swallowed Manhattan

The Avengers set down on the Watchtower’s landing pad as the afternoon sheds to night. Yelena heads straight for a shower, thankfully free of injuries from a day of pomp and press, but she doesn’t truly relax until she takes the elevator to Bob’s room.

He’s slouching at his workbench, pencil in hand. 

“Hi,” she says. 

“Hey.”

“What’s that?” she drapes over his back, chin hooking at his shoulder. 

“An idea.”

The white light built into the workbench makes the paper in front of him transparent and the lines of his sketch blacker than ink.

A feeling emerges, the legs of a creature scuttling out of the dread-pit in her gut, delicate as a ghost. 

The boots look the same. There are less geometric lines on the suit. Still a cape. Thicker gold on the belt. 

He taps the pencil against the table.

“You redesigned your suit.” He doesn't comment on the trip of her heart, even if notices.

“Just in case. For when I’m ready,” he says.

She steps around him to rest her hip against the table. 

He looks up at her. Tired. Resigned. 

Sam Wilson hasn’t told them any more about this threat from another world, and the government seems to have knowledge of a coming crisis, but that’s it. 

Bob is planning.

“What happened to living in the moment?”

“I still am.” He puts the pencil down and pushes the paper away, reaching for her hand instead. “Like I said—an idea.”

“Well, I like it better than the other one.”

They'll have to leave each other some day. He'll go where she can’t, because she knows he will. Because he's good, and he will keep trying to fight himself. Maybe they’ll spend a long time together. Maybe, in the future, she’ll be the one waiting for him when he gets back instead of the other way around. Most likely not. Whatever happens, they’ll meet each other at the end of the world. 

The event at the horizon.

“Thanks,” he says.

His palm is warm, his fingers solid where they twine with hers. For now, this is close enough. 

A thousand suns subdued in her hand.

End