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It’s usually Yelena doing this, dealing with Bob’s—well, John doesn’t want to be an asshole, but there’s no other way to describe it—personal issues, the ones that tend to pull you into the deep end and leave you gasping for air when you make it out the other side.
John and the rest of the team have seen it firsthand, after all, the way Yelena will sit down with Bob in his little corner branching off from the main living room of the Watchtower, just the two of them, thighs up to their shoulders pressed close together on an armchair.
Sometimes it’s quick, but other times, especially on the really bad days, they won’t rise from the cushions until much, much later in the night, bordering early morning hours. Bags underneath their eyes but smiling all the while, tired but content. Theirs is a friendship built on trust, and John wouldn’t say he’s jealous but he kind of is.
Considering his past track record of broken and self-sabotaged relationships, it makes sense. Not that he’ll admit this out loud. But still.
John might be an asshole, but he’s a self-aware asshole, god damn it.
All this to say, that out of the rest of the New Avengers (copyright infringement pending), he’s probably the least qualified to deal with one of Bob’s mental spirals. John doesn’t like to talk things out, nor does he really have any sort of ‘healthy’ coping mechanisms aside from punching someone’s lights out.
He was straightforward like that.
You know what wasn’t so straightforward?
Navigating these goddamn shame rooms, that’s what.
***
John rips off his cowl in frustration, throwing it hard enough to hit the far wall, and it falls to the ground with a quiet flop. He leans back against the door he’d just slammed closed, letting out a ragged sigh.
He can still hear the sound of muffled shouting behind him, accompanied by the wail of a small toddler every once in a while. He squeezes his eyes shut, hands coming up to cover his face and scrabble at his ears.
He and Olivia had their arguments, sure, but this was the one that tipped the scale. The one that keeps him up at night, staring off into the dark corners of his bedroom and asking himself the big and damning question, “Where did it all go wrong?” when he knew exactly fucking where, and when.
It seemed having a screaming match on your son’s birthday, right next to the crib, was all it took for her to serve him the divorce papers over breakfast the following morning.
Honestly, John was even surprised it’d taken that long.
He doesn’t know what it says about him, that he was expecting it all that time, just waiting and waiting until she’d realized how much of a fuck up she’d married. He also doesn’t think that he does want to know, not really.
“Um, are you okay?”
John curses, hand reaching for the gun at his thigh, only to stop upon seeing a mop of messy brown hair peeking out from a tangle of blankets. A kid waves at him awkwardly from the bed, curious blue eyes sweeping him up and down while sitting up.
“Are you lost?”
John blinks.
He looks around.
They’re in a small, impromptu bedroom squeezed into an attic. There are drawings in crayon and marker pinned to the walls, a trunk full of knick-knacks off to the side, toys and small puzzle games scattered across the floor. Dust motes float in the dim light from the half-curtained window, even more details giving the room a grounded feel.
It’s cluttered but lived in, and he feels a small pang in his chest at the sight.
(Would his son’s bedroom look like this, too?)
“Yeah,” John murmurs, remembering to respond. He turns back to the kid, gesturing behind him with a thumb. “Needed to get away from—an argument, I guess. So when I saw an exit, well, I kind of just booked for it.”
“Oh,” the kid lets out, tucking his knees to his chest. His brow furrows in sympathy, and he hums. “Yeah, I understand. Arguments are really hard. Sometimes I need to get away too.” He pauses, hesitating, before scooting over on the bed and patting at the newly empty spot. “Wanna come sit?”
John stares at him, tilting his head to the side. “What the hell, kid, sure,” he says after a brief few seconds of contemplation. It’s not like he has anything better to do at the moment, after all.
He pushes off the door and makes his way across the bedroom, carefully placing his booted feet upon an ancient looking rug littered with odd bits and ends. It hits him then, while he’s gently settling down on one side of the bed, the mattress dipping slightly underneath his weight while he takes off his shield and leans it against the nightstand.
He pauses for a moment, weighing the question in his mouth, and then decides to just go for it.
“Bobby, right?” he asks, making sure.
The kid flinches, back pressing against the headboard.
Goddamn it, John thinks, and then kind of wants to shoot himself in the foot (he could right now if he really wanted to, but traumatizing kids at point blank range wasn’t on his bucket list). The last time he’d said that, in passing during one of their joint training sessions, Yelena had grabbed him by the ear and lectured him about using that particular nickname.
Well, there go first impressions.
Not like they haven’t already met in the—real world, or whatever you wanted to call it, the universe that existed outside of this one. But this would technically be his first meeting with… little Bob. Bob junior. Bobert.
The kid’s hair is still just as long, length curling up at the neck, and there’s that same sad puppy eyed-look on his face, just without the lines on his forehead or around his mouth. He’s in plain looking sleep clothes, long sleeves covering his fingers and making him look smaller than he actually is. John wonders how old he must be right now.
Ten? Somewhere around that? Fuck.
He wasn’t good at connecting with people.
(And he’s got the personal experience to back it up.)
“Uh huh. That’s me,” Bob mumbles, playing with the edges of his blanket.
John hisses an aggravated breath through his teeth, combing a hand through his hair. “Sorry about that, little man,” he says, turning to look at Bob with as much of an apologetic face someone like him can muster. It feels more like a grimace. “Didn’t mean to call you that.”
“‘S okay,” Bob tells him.
No it’s fucking not, he wants to say, mouth in a thin line, but holds himself back. He’s not a therapist for god’s sake, doesn’t know whether or not the kid would actually take to him, of all people, preaching about learning to stand up for himself.
He’s also not quite sure about how Bob’s memories work here, whether or not he’ll remember this once when they’re both back outside. This younger version of him seems familiar enough with John at least, to the point where he doesn’t mind offering to share the same space.
But still, in the grand scheme of things, Yelena probably would have been much better at handling this than him. So he keeps his mouth shut, just in case he ends up fucking up and making things worse than they already seem to be.
There’s a small tug on his back, on one of the straps meant for holding up the shield, and there Bob is looking up at him. His guileless eyes big and wondering.
“Um,” the kid starts, gathering up the courage and finding his words. “Where’s Lena? She’s the one who comes up here most of the time.” He reaches under his pillow, pulling out a box of playing cards and holding them up in the air for inspection. “See, we play go fish sometimes.”
John takes the box, turning it over in one hand. The corners are worn and the cover is peeling at the edges, but the cards inside are in pristine condition. He shakes it out and thumbs at the edge of one, mulling over how exactly to explain.
“She, uh. She’s kind of busy at the moment.”
To be honest, John has no idea where she is.
In fact, he had no idea Bob was going through one of his spirals in the first place, had just brushed up against the guy while passing him in the hall on the way to his own room after a debriefing, still suited up and with soot and dust caking his skin.
He wipes at his face, surprised to see his hand come away clean.
“Huh,” he lets out, staring at his fingers. “That’s pretty convenient, ain’t it.”
“What is?” Bob asks, sitting up on his knees to look over. His chin hooks onto John’s shoulder, making him startle a little bit, and the kid makes an ‘ah’ sound when understanding settles in. “Oh. You were busy doing something, weren’t you?”
“... something like that,” John admits, not willing to get into the nitty gritty details about a mission right at this very moment. He drops his hand, leaning to the side to support Bob’s weight so the both of them don’t go tumbling off the side of the bed.
“Yeah, Lena says it’s weird. Some things come and go, like your shield,” Bob nods his head in the following direction, hair tickling John’s nose, “but other things, like my cards or the Rubik’s cube over there, they stay here. It’s kind of confusing.”
“No kidding,” John grumbles.
He can’t hear his own voice yelling anymore, or Olivia’s arguments at his expense, the ensuing heated conversation that took place right after—something he’s committed to memory, after so many times playing it over and over again in his head. It’s eerily quiet bar the muffled background noise typical of a household.
John grunts, turning around. “So, how long does this—” and he makes a wide, impatient sweep of the hands, encompassing the whole room, “usually last?”
Bob bites his lip, lowering himself back down. “I don’t know,” he says after a while, fiddling again but this time with the drawstring of his pajama pants. “Just until I—or, um, he—the older me, I mean, somewhere in here, just until he calms down.”
John raises a skeptical eyebrow at him. “What?”
Bob shrugs, despondent, and hangs his head. “That’s all I know, ‘m sorry. Time doesn’t work the way it should in here… does this mean you don’t want to play go fish?”
The question catches him off guard, and damn, but now John feels bad, staring at the top of Bob’s head like this. If it were his son, or some other kid, he probably wouldn’t be hesitating in reaching out a hand and ruffling their hair, trained in PR as he was back when they were still parading him about as the new Captain America, but this was—is a teammate.
John grunts again, turning to observe the room for a moment.
He lets out a bone deep sigh.
“I don’t know how to play,” he admits awkwardly after a long moment.
“You don’t?” Bob asks, glancing up.
“Nah. I was more into video games, if you catch my drift.” He shifts to put one leg up on the bed, taking off his gloves and shoving them into a spare pocket. He holds the box of playing cards out like an offering. “Think you can teach me?”
“Yeah, of course!”
Bob moves around, shoving all the pillows to one side before sitting crossed-legged on the available space. He carefully takes back the box from John, popping open the top with practice and sliding the cards out. He shuffles them enthusiastically, a boyish grin lighting up those cheeks of his, before laying them flat on the bed and spreading them out.
“It’s pretty simple,” he starts, seeing John’s mildly curious look. “Okay, see, if there’re two players, then each player gets seven cards—”
There’s shouting coming from below the floorboards.
They both pause.
“What’s all that?” John asks.
“Oh, um. They’re not usually that loud.” Bob reaches back for the blanket pooled behind him, wrapping it around himself until it looks like he’s wearing a cloak. He sucks his lips in, eyes flicking up toward John. “Just ignore it, please, and I can go back to teaching you?”
“Why are you hiding?” is on the tip of John’s tongue, but it’s answered for him right as the sound of ceramic—a plate, maybe—breaking reaches their ears, loud and sudden in the following quiet.
Bob flinches, tucking himself further into his little cocoon.
John’s attention lasers back in on the floorboards again, the small openings in between where he can faintly make out a dining room table, not unlike the one from the first time they were all stuck in here together. This time though, he actually tries to listen, leaning in despite the persistent finger poking at his backside.
“Not usually that loud, huh?” he murmurs.
He recognizes the sound of chairs being dragged across the tile, the clinking of utensils being put down with more force than necessary. He’s all too familiar with it, can imagine himself doing the same, because he did do the same.
Once, not too long ago.
“John,” Bob whispers, and that does it, makes John turn his head. The blanket covers most of his face, but John can still see the white knuckled grip, the anxious back-and-forth sweep of eyes too big for a face as small as his.
Bob looks scared.
John looks back down.
(Would his son be scared of him too, one day?)
The argument downstairs continues without interruption, sharp barbs being traded across the table. John can’t quite make out what they’re saying from upstairs, but he can still sense the hostile energy in the air, magnified possibly because of the Void’s properties, a mental landscape built on emotional feedback. It feels almost electric, like tangible arcs of tension ricocheting off the slanted walls.
He grips his knee guards, fingers pressing hard into his shins.
“You know,” John says, breaking the silence between them. “I have another idea instead of playing cards. A better idea, in my opinion.”
Bob blinks, fear sliding off his back like water—too familiar, too nonchalant—and then he’s leaning in, blanket slipping from his shoulders. “You do?” he asks, more than a little curious. “What is it?”
John brings an arm up, flexing it in the air. He pats at his bicep and feels a smug smile tilting up the side of his mouth. “You’re looking at the guy who punched your dad that one time. Wanna see me do it again?”
Bob’s eyebrows rise in surprise, but not outright alarm.
“Lena says violence should always be a last resort,” he says, though he doesn’t sound like he’s all too behind it.
John will take what he can.
Clapping his thighs, he gets up, doing a little jig on the floor to warm up his limbs. “You know, she’s probably right,” and then he does a ‘so what?’ gesture, “but it’ll probably make you feel good. Hell, I feel good just thinking about it.”
Bob licks his lips in thought for a moment, before nodding his head. “Okay,” he finally responds, beaming up at John. He swings his legs to the side and jumps off his bed, toeing on a pair of house worn slippers, and then—to John’s surprise—takes him by the hand.
“Uh,” he eloquently says, looking down.
“It’s easy to get lost in here,” Bob tells him, all matter-of-fact, guiding them to the same door John had come in from but painted a slightly different color, the knob brass instead of gold. “So stay close for now, okay?”
John flexes his fingers, nodding. “This is happening,” he mumbles to himself, quieting his footsteps as they sneak downstairs. He spares a quick look behind him through the closing bedroom door at his shield, still leaning against the nightstand, but ultimately decides to leave it there for the time being.
Bob tugs at him again, and John follows suit.
They’re on the ground floor now, just around the corner from the dining room and connected kitchen. Here, he can hear the conversation more clearly, finally able to make out some of the words he couldn’t before.
“Don’t tell me how to parent my son!”
“Bobby’s our son, goddamn it!”
Bob’s shoulders come up to his ears, back ramrod straight, and this time it’s John who’s pulling at their interlocked hands. There’s a silent apology in it, something he hopes Bob can see etched across the features of his face because John just doesn’t think he can put it into words. He never was good with things like that.
But Bob seems to understand anyway, because he nods up at John.
“You can say it,” he whispers. “I don’t mind when it’s you.”
John stills, caught off guard. “Are you sure?” he asks, incredulous.
“Uh huh,” and Bob leaves it at that, pulling the two of them inside, slippers making little to no sound on the tile in all too practiced motion. He hesitates, watching his parents argue, the both of them unaware of the new presence in the room, or maybe continuing to argue in spite of it. “Oh, um, my mom…” he mumbles, floundering for a moment.
John understands, and he nods toward the woman sitting at one end of the table. “You go to her,” he instructs, watching with a keen eye as Bob lets go of his hand, a lingering warmth in its absence, to tip-toe to the chair, hovering at his mother’s shoulder.
“Mom,” Bob murmurs, gently nudging her out of her seat. She furrows her brow, looking surprised to see him there, and opens her mouth.
But nothing comes out, like an actor without a script to read. John had briefly wondering how exactly the Void pulled off making these rooms feel so real just by digging through their memories. But, like anything else running on fumes, it had to glitch out at one point. Them showing up seemingly out of the blue like this must have been just enough of a curveball to throw the whole thing off.
Like the place didn’t know what to do with it.
“You should be up in your room,” she finally gets out.
“What’re you doing here?” Bob’s father demands, shooting his son an accusing look, and then he’s standing up and slamming both hands onto the table. “No, no, no. Both of you stay where you are, now. We ain’t done here.”
John comes up from behind, cracking his knuckles. He taps none too gently at the man’s shoulder, waiting until he turns around, and only then can John fully take him in.
The eyes are all Bob’s, of course, dark blue at the edges and lighter in the middle. Even the cut of his jaw and the curve of his cheeks are all too familiar, and it’s uncanny, the way he can almost see adult Bob superimposed right on top of this man in front of him. But there’s a foreign coldness behind the turn of his mouth, a hardened look in the aged lines of his face.
This is a man who yells at his family, and scares his son, and doesn’t care that he’s splitting his family apart from the inside out. John hates him.
(John will not become him.)
“Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here,” he spits.
“Think of it as a family intervention,” John shrugs.
He reels back his arm, fist clenched, and clocks Bob’s father straight in the teeth.
***
The room spins, or maybe it’s all inside John’s head, the way the paint on the walls seems to be peeling off in strips, dim yellow lights flickering above them. The dishes on the table tremble, almost as if there were some small earthquake taking place, and then it all slowly comes to a complete stop.
Time fluctuates, like a rubber band bending and about to snap, and it’s hard to tell exactly how long they’d been stuck in that sort of limbo-like state.
“Okay, that was weird,” John says, looking around, but another door hasn’t appeared. The room still looks the same as it did moments before. Broken plates here, pushed back chairs there. “How’re you holding up back there?” he calls.
Bob doesn’t answer him, but John doesn’t worry too much about it. The kid’s probably just as freaked out as him or hiding under the table. John wouldn’t blame him, he’d do the same in his position. Not everyday you see the literal foundations of your mental landscape rock on its axis like that.
John shakes out his hand, hissing at the pain. He blows on the bruised skin, raising an eyebrow in mild disbelief. “You know, for a figment of imagination, your deadbeat dad has a really tough face. I mean look, the back of my hand is all red—” and he turns around, still complaining, only to come to a screeching halt in his tracks. “Oh. Hey, man.”
Bob—the older him, the one who reads self-help books and does the dishes and drinks chocolate shakes as a treat when he’s feeling down—is staring back at John, fiddling with the hem of his shirt. No kid him or parents in sight.
“You’re back,” John points out lamely.
Bob sniffs.
John raises both hands in alarm. “Are you gonna—? I can’t deal with this. Kid you was really into me punching your dad, so I kind of just went for it.” He pauses. “So if you’re mad about that, technically, you know. It’s your fault.”
He makes a face at himself.
“That sounded really bad. It’s not your fault you have a fucked up dad. Or that I punched him. Twice, now. I’m not apologizing for that, just so you know, just for the—well, I’m sorry that he was really shitty, is what I mean.” He lets out a breath, putting his hands on his hips as if he’d just run a marathon.
Bob laughs, sounding choked up and wet.
He’s not crying, not really, but there’s this sheen to his eyes that John has no idea what to make of, a nuance in his expression that John wants to turn away from but finds that he can’t. “Walker,” Bob rasps, stopping to wipe at his eyes with the back of one hand, long sleeve rolling down his forearm.
He takes a step forward.
After a moment of thinking, Bob corrects himself, “John.”
He leans back. “What is it, man?”
The other man smiles, mouth trembling but lips tilted up just so, a flash of teeth and a glimpse of a well hidden dimple. John stares at it—at him—and then there are arms throwing themselves around John’s shoulders, pulling him into a tight hug and breathing into his neck, damp and real.
“Thank you,” Bob says, muffled into John’s skin.
He slowly, cautiously, winds his arms around Bob in turn, patting awkwardly at the man’s back. John stands there, a weird myriad of emotions brewing in his stomach that he can’t name, nor does he really want to, making him feel a bit hot under the collar. Embarrassment, definitely, and maybe something else just as humiliating.
He coughs, clearing his throat. “What’re you thanking me of all people for?”
“For fighting for me.”
Bob’s hands find each other behind his back, fingers grasping at his suit, and John still isn’t sure what’s happening, whether to let go or keep holding on. “It’s what I’m best at.”
“No it’s not,” Bob says with little flare, like it should be obvious, like it is obvious. He shakes his head in the hollow space between John’s neck and shoulder, and then lets out a warbly laugh. “And, you know, thanks for giving my old man what he deserved. That too. It was a long time coming.”
John feels the vibration of it through their chests, as close together as their bodies are, letting it travel through him like a pulse of warmth, like a small hand grabbing his and guiding him down the stairs, a wordless acknowledgement and acceptance all rolled into one.
“What the hell are you guys hugging for?”
John blinks, quickly untangling himself from Bob’s arms to squint at Yelena, who’s staring right back up at him with a matching expression. He rubs at his eyes, heels digging in, before opening them again to find them all standing in one of the corridors back at the Watchtower.
Bob, hands now to himself, lingers at John’s side. He continues wiping at his face, trying to rub away the last vestiges of teary-eyed emotion left behind, but it doesn’t work all that well, cheeks still splotchy red.
“... I got your text pretty late, sorry, I had no connection where I was,” Yelena explains after a moment. She wiggles the phone in her hand pointedly. “You said you were having one of those days?”
Bob shuffles his feet. “I was,” he starts, “but, uh. Not anymore. Thanks though! For—coming back so soon, to help. Looks like, uh, you were busy?” he says, more question than statement, motioning at her getup.
“Just running detail with the ops team,” she murmurs distractedly, before shaking her head and crossing her arms. “Okay, the both of you. What happened here while I was gone?” she demands, equal parts concerned and confused.
There’s a moment, and then,
“I punched his dad,” John says.
“He punched my dad,” Bob echoes right after him.
“Again?” Yelena furrows her brow, looking back and forth between them in quick succession as if she can’t quite piece together the story, even though John thinks they summed it up pretty good just now all things considered. “In one of the rooms?”
“It was really therapeutic,” Bob adds.
Yelena blinks at them. “Okay,” she says, dragging the word out. She gives both of their shoulders a solid pat. “I’m—happy for you. Congrats? I don’t know what to say in this situation.”
“I don’t know either,” John admits, shrugging. “Doesn’t it usually take you a couple hours or something to get out?”
Yelena nods slowly at him. “Yeah,” she ventures after a moment, narrowing her eyes at John like she’s just realized something and isn’t quite sure what to do with the information. “A couple hours, right,” she repeats, distracted.
“What’re looking at me like that for?”
“Nothing,” she says, muttering something under her breath in some combination of English and Russian. “You’re okay then, Bob?”
The man in question smiles at her. “Yeah, Lena,” he says, eyes crinkling at the edges. “Thanks for coming back for me though.”
“‘Course,” she says without hesitation, and then squeezes between the two of them despite all the space in the rest of the corridor. “Gotta make a call and tell them that things are all good over here and that I’m heading back,” she explains, pointing at her phone.
Bob waves at her retreating form, and John notices that he’s wearing the same clothes his kid self was wearing, albeit bigger and more fitting. It’s then that John also notices the weight of the shield at his back, the tired ache in his joints and the grime no doubt still splattered across the planes of his face.
It’s like reality settling back in bits and pieces, an adrenaline crash after a high.
“God, man, I could really use a shower and nap, in that order,” he says, filling the sudden quiet between them. He shifts his weight from one foot to another. “What’re you gonna do, now that you’re not all—” he waves his hand around awkwardly and hopes that Bob gets the gist of what he’s trying to say.
“Oh.” Bob licks at his lips. “Uh, nothing much.”
John clears his throat. “Right,” he says slowly, walking backward. “I’m gonna go take that shower now then.” He makes it to the corner before Bob calls him back.
“Wait, John.”
John stops.
“I’m waiting, Bobby,” he says with raised eyebrows when all Bob does is look at his feet, the nickname slipping free from his mouth, a permission granted by a little kid but granted all the same.
The comment brings a smile to the other man’s face though, small as it is, and John feels a flare of something in his chest in response.
“Were you serious? Back there in the room?” He pauses. “About… learning to play go fish, with me. ‘Cause I have cards, if you’re still up for it.”
John doesn’t look away. “Yeah,” he says, shrugging his shoulders like the answer should be obvious. It isn’t, not to someone like John, but it feels right. “Lemme just clean up and then, I guess, we can meet up in the living room?”
Bob grins at him. “Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan.”
The nap, John thinks, can wait until later.