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Please do enjoy your stay! 🔞(18+!)🔞

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The Index

Hello everyone~!

In the spirit of revamping this blog, I've decided to alter how I post things as well- one such change being that I'm replacing my pinned post with a master-nav for my entire blog.

Can't leave my mobile gremlins behind!

P.S. Feel free to send suggestions for what I should add here!

— Cont. —

My Archive! You can now find me on Ao3!

Masterlist! All my content!

[storiumemporium]

i was just rereading terminal and i love hearing how you describe agoraphobia and anxiety. i was just wondering if there’s also an element of social anxiety to the terminal character as well or just the agoraphobia from her? i hope all is well with you and i can’t wait to read more!

HENLO THERE!!!

There is in fact an element of social anxiety, though it's something not fully explored because Bug herself doesn't fully know the extent of it. She is aware she gets overwhelmed by people easily, and that it causes her a lot of fear. But it's one of those "everything else is so much worse that I haven't even bothered to examine this."

And all is well! Thank you! I've just been taking myself an extended break following the last chapter (60k is a beastie of a chapter after all) but I do intend to get writing the next chapter soon! Can't wait to see you then.

(Also, thank you for sending in an ask I am gently folding it and putting it in my mouth. I always love people wanting to talk to me about it 😭)

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

IT'S FINALLY DONE

Chapter four of Terminal is literally too long for me to post straight to tumblr so here's the link for the Ao3 page. 62k words baby

[storiumemporium]

Hope everything is okay! Miss the Terminal updates, whatever is going on i hope you feel better in whatever way you need to!

hi there! don't worry, updates are still planned to happen, ya gurl just got hit with several sicknesses and doctors appointments at once so progress has been sluggish, we're sitting at about 23k words and not halfway finished

cya soon (hopefully)!

[storiumemporium]

Your work Omggg is so good the third chapter of terminal gave me chillss

Thank yew 😭😭😭

[storiumemporium]

Terminal

Chapter 3 - Past is Present

| Word Count: 17.1k | Bob Reynolds x Fem!Reader | Chapter Tags: Slight Cliffhanger, Mild Panic Attacks, Trauma Talk, Fluff, Disgusting Amounts Of Cute Shit, New Nicknames, that's all I can think of for now folks |

You've made your very first friend in the entire world, and what that entails. Progress on Enmis is made, but not in the ways you'd like.

WHEN I TELL YOU THIS TOOK SO LONG TO WRITE BUT I'M SO HAPPY WITH IT, enjoy some very very cute shit between Bob and the reader 😌

You take a deep breath in, and stagnancy finds home in your lungs.

Dust, mildew. The air has crossed from humid to nearly wet even in the arid season. Tight clinging, almost physical in a way that made you anxious. That sensation of not being able to get enough, no matter how much you gulped down. It didn’t help that the four walls you sit in are as as small as your exposure to the world.

Around you, above you, a mountain of clothes and shoes. The constant stimuli of it against every inch of your body had once been deeply claustrophobic, to the point you’d cry out of frustration. Now it’s something of a comfort, insulated from anything that goes on beyond the door you face.

This peace, however, is interrupted by the culprit of the cling and the almost-stench that permeates from above. The house you live in - two story and hugging the water - is bordering on archaic, and at some point in the past year a leak had sprung. Festering, pouring through the bubbling plaster of the ceiling until being popped with a pair of scissors by your perpetually dour mother. The consequent drip was tolerated, a bucket placed beneath it to prevent further damage. But with the slow creeping malignancy of cancer it’d found a new festering point to break forth from. Now it was dripping onto your head - mildew, mold - dampening your hair and a shirt reaching antiquity in it’s age.

You’re wondering if they’ve forgotten you. Again.

It wasn’t an abnormal condition to your life. Days whittling away in the darkness, shrunk into a corner and waiting for some sign of life to finally reach you. A sound, shadows moving in the gap of the door. You are devoid of information, and attempting to ignore the steady discomfort of the leak above you. The need to empty the pail of water is growing, but the need to eat strongest of all.

Acknowledging the hunger sets it to bloom like flies, your stomach rattling without reprieve and knocking at your insides with the persistence of a Jehovah’s Witness. The worst part being, the proselytization occurring beneath your ribs is actually true this time.

You can feel the deceptive bite of fatigue setting in.

And wasn’t that the thing, in the end? That the hungrier and thirstier you got, the smaller any other punishment became. Being caught extended the punishment, which then shrunk beneath the gaze of your desperate basic needs.

You don’t realize it now, not for many years. But they were doing this to you on purpose.

The world remains as quiet as a held breath, and the hunger will not abate you any reprieve. You know that you have to do something, the same dance you’ve done countless times at this point. And the first steps start like this: Your face presses into the coats and sweaters and rugs gathered festering beneath you, your available eye peering from the gap under the door to see what the outside world looks like. You’re met with the dark, only cut through by the single dim light above the kitchen sink. Pressing your forehead harder into the door to turn and look reveals the street lights outside, the trees swaying on a gentle breeze. But no signs of movement, a sentiment shared when you look at the glass door that leads to the back porch.

Not even the television flickers with the corpselike presence of your father. Meaning it was either late enough that she’d gotten him to head up to bed with her-

Or they weren’t home.

Your mother has a bit of an unresolved hoarding problem. Things gathered across the house in these designated little zones that your father had deemed ‘acceptable cluster areas.’ One of those spaces, ironically, was here. The closet that you’d found yourself in countless times before. The entire cubby is overwhelmed with evidence of her penchant to take without letting go, absolutely drowning in shoes as it is. There are racks reaching up to where the coats hang, filled to the brim with pairs on pairs of loafers, sneakers, heels, boots, slippers, and the like. But even that wasn’t enough, and they spill down into an expensive waterfall all across the floor and cloistered into the corners. Too many for organization anymore, and yet remain untouched and unwilling to be parted with. It’s a graveyard of vanity. And even where the last bit of floor space remained, it’d been overtaken by coats, sweaters, jackets, and rugs.

The upside to this misfortune is that it made hiding things incredibly easy.

In the far back, sectioned away inside of a pair of boots she’d bought and then wrinkled her nose at no more than a week later. Down in the toe, easy enough for you to collect. A card and a bobby pin, already folded up and shaped for necessary use. You didn’t need to break the lock to get out. It wasn’t a very good one, repurposed from one of the other doors in the house. Which meant that if you jimmied the lock just far enough, you could slip the stolen credit card into the gap and force the door to unlatch.

It used to take you quite some time, you get it on the second shot.

The world is so very quiet right now. No birds, no cars. There’s the steady hum of dark hour insects, the breeze dragging fingers over the roof of the house. And yet stepping out into the quaint kitchen feels akin to walking the jungle at night. You feel unsafe. Watched and threatened by your trespass into the world. It’s without fail the most harrowing part of your journey. And with practiced spite you take your first few, cautious steps forward. Food calls ravenously from the posy pink fridge. Crooning in a tirade that threatens your sanity. But you know better, the world needs to be safe before food can be a thought. So, even with your stomach clenching in protest, you turn for the front door.

Nothing sits in the driveway, and you know that you are free.

Presented with as many options as your unknown time limit provides, you head first for the dingy yellow bathroom closest to the kitchen. It’s small, clean enough, and allows you to quell your protesting bladder. Your reflection is an unfortunate passerby on the way, and it reminds you of what you’ve become. Hair turned into greasy locks rather than individual strands, skin stretched across your body rather than laid upon it. Your teeth…

You brush your teeth the moment you finish relieving yourself.

They’ve yellowed - but that’s to be expected - and hit the stage where your gums are tender and sore as the bristles pass over them. That sort of feel good ache where you’re scratching something you probably shouldn’t be. It’s as upsetting as it is relieving, finally getting to clean them even as you wonder how bad off they are. When you spit into the sink, it comes away red.

Food follows this, any deliberation decided ages ago by trial and error. The quickest most satiating thing that makes little to no mess and can be kept in the closet with you with minimal issue. By that metric, you end up making eight PB&J’s to hold you over. The first four are eaten - until your stomach hurts and you’re queasy and ready to be sick - and the latter four are put in cling wrap to take with, all of it washed down on a colossal cup of orange juice. It doesn’t taste good, mind. It stings painfully at your teeth and has been painted in all sorts of wrong angles by the toothpaste you’d nearly flooded your mouth with earlier. In spite of this, you don’t even blink at it. Going and going until you’re truly certain you’ll be sick if you take even a sip more. You need your fill as quickly as possible, paranoid that you decided to leave your cell right as the wardens would be returning from wherever they went. It was always like this, and you didn’t know that you’d ever be able to stop.

Jelly smeared at the corner of your mouth, breathing heavy, flexing your hands and rubbing at the knuckles of your thumbs, you contemplate your next move. These things had an order in your mind, a necessity barometer that dictated to you the acceptability of failing that task. That’s why - instead of simply moving along with whatever you desired to do, you stood in the bathroom with a stack of ratty old clothes in your arms, contemplating your way into a true anxious paralysis. Do you have the time? Can you shower? Can you finally feel clean after ages otherwise?

You’d gotten the most of it out of the way, your bladder is empty and stomach full. You’d brushed your teeth. You’d empty the bucket right before you crawled back into your nest to wait out the remainder of your trial. Bathing would be nice, but beyond the itch and the ever present fine coat of grime you know you can last longer. You’d done it before.

Still, the greed of opportunity was licking at your ankles, beckoning you into reckless decision-making and a lack of time management. You wanted so badly to feel clean and maintained, and the offer was staring at you. You just had to turn the knob.

Your feet wiggle against the tile, stained by the ceiling light. You could have your shower, you just needed to put the clothes down and step into the tub. That’s it, all you had to do.

It feels like you’re stealing something precious, the moment you do.

The shower runs scalding, hot enough to sear like you were trying to burn off months of filth- maybe like you were trying to punish yourself for taking more than you absolutely needed to survive. You barely stay in long enough to lather and rinse yourself, drop the bar three times out of sheer nervous shakes, and aggressively wash your hair root to tip with shampoo. Conditioner is seriously considered being abandoned, but in the end that little whispering gluttony pushes you- just a little bit further, that’s all you needed.

In the end, no one finds you. The bathroom door isn’t beaten down, you aren’t hauled humiliated and naked back to your boot-laden cell. You wash, and you dry off, and you dress in fresh clothes. You feel clean. And when ever necessity is done, the urge to be out of the room doesn’t leave.

You stand at the center of the living room, paralyzed once more for all the options you’ve been handed, and wonder at what to do.

So, you just start picking at random.

Your father has an old record player, and a bunch of vinyls in a case sitting just beside it. It’s easy enough to peruse, to put something on that croons softly throughout the first floor of the house. You don’t eat more, though you’d like to - you fear the punishment that would come. You look at books, read a few lines before growing bored. You consider turning on the television and that inspires are sort of primitive fear in you that immediately rejects the notion. No movies, then.

You indulge in something mildly voyeuristic. Something that feels prohibited, utterly banned from your life.

You step out onto the front porch.

You don’t go further, and you take a pair of slippers with you. But you find yourself perched on the rickety old railing that lines the front of your home. With the door still open, the soft music of the record player still reaches you in whispers and hums. It’s joined in a comfortable companionship with the sound of distant water, and the rustle of the wind that makes your whole body shiver. Not with cold, but with stimulus. Your hair moves, fresh and light from being washed, and your eyes fall shut to the feeling of warmth in the dark. Summer hugging you lovingly, buying you a beautiful moment before you return to the same four walls. The same clothes. The deafening silence.

You know this will come to an end. It always does. But for a little bit, just a little bit, you get to pretend it lasts forever.

“No, no. I’m telling you— I’m serious, listen-” Bob is laughing. His voice crescendos across his own, wobbling giggles in a desperate war of attrition to get his point out over your own loud protests. You two have been going on like this for the past ten minutes, a cozy conversation that suddenly went awry in the best way possible the moment childhood media got involved. It turned out, you two were mortal enemies, even in the media you shared.

This is the third time you two have done this, and you feel a little strange.

“There’s no way in hell I am letting you - Bob - you aren’t telling me anything other than Silence in the Library is the best Doctor Who episode-”

“But Blink—!”

“I don’t - give - a damn about- about the Weeping Angels, Bob!”

And then you inhale, more like a desperate gasp for oxygen that rips through you loudly.

Followed by a snort.

The entire conversation ground to an abrupt halt. Bob’s gaze boring into the camera through which you watch him. And then, soft with near disbelief: “Did you just… make that noise?”

“…Shut up.”

It wasn’t the bad kind of strange, but it was a feeling you found yourself fundamentally unable to place the exact name of. A sort of squirrely warmth that made you want to hide, and yet the idea of not doing this every chance you got made you very, very crushingly sad. Bob was strange, but it was a flavor you’d had a thousand times- usually being the one carrying the label. Maybe it was why you got excited by the prospect of interacting with him, these brief interludes before returning to your fundamentally separate lives.

Against all irrationality you end up planting your face into your hands as if you could hide from him out of embarrassment, this deep seated urge to vanish from reality cropping up that only blooms more when - subsequently - Bob’s brows find his hairline and he only giggles harder.

“You- you snort when you laugh?”

“I said shut up,” though you put more force into it, you sound like a whiny teenager. And not entirely unintentionally. The way his shoulders had pulled up, smile so broad and unabashed wasn’t something you wanted to take away with a missed tone.

Even if it was killing you a little bit.

The second time you interacted hadn’t been quite so rambunctious as this. Rather, the conversation had comprised of long moments of silence interwoven with gentle small talk. Like you were reaching out for the first, probing touches of each other’s personalities. It was easy to fuck this part up, you knew. Even before you’d dashed everything with the others, you’d known.

“What other- uh- weird noises do you make?” Bob has turned now so that he’s sitting with his legs pretzeled, his hands in his lap as he stares earnestly into the camera that makes up your eyes. He’s slouched back down a bit since the moment passed, but he looks comfortable rather than reticent or somehow unsure. His head tilted, and you know that he’s just fishing for more bait to tease you with. You had learned, rather rapidly, that Bob could be lippy when he felt relaxed.

There’s a second where you contemplate sincerely running down the list of noises you habitually make throughout your life, or even the noises they make that you’ve passively grown used to over the many years they’ve been with you. But in the end, you go for something else-

“Well you see, there’s- there’s this thing…” you find yourself pausing for dramatic effect, your heart hammering with the excitement of getting to execute a joke.

“Yeah?”

And then, voice quivering with the inability to contain yourself, “There’s this string in my back, and for some reason when people pull it I just spout all these weird sentences?”

There’s a beat, anticipation.

“So you’re telling me if I tug on you, you start babbling?”

You think you might actually hear your mind slam directly into the gutter, a steel pipe on concrete. You know that gurgling noise when water goes down the drain? The remainder of your thoughts, arguably even the capacity to have a thought, washing away forever.

Bob, for what it was worth, appeared to be sharing the sentiment. The stages of grief were flying by on his face with the aggression of a bullet through silk.

And then, chaos.

“Oh… my god—”

“I’m- I’m sorry I didn’t even think-” his hands held out in front of him, as he stammers frantically through an excuse or explanation he just doesn’t have.

“Did that just come out of your mouth!?”

“I’m sorry, the joke was just right there and I didn’t even consider how it sounded-”

“You want to get on me about snorting-”

“I thought that was just funny-!”

“Robert Reynolds!” You finally declare, exasperated and grinning ear to ear. Too caught up in the absurdity of the situation to really care how embarrassing your joke might have truly been. “You dirty man.”

You watch him through the screen as you squirm about, entertained to the point that you can only get all of the energy out by wringing your hands and swaying back and forth. Otherwise you might start personally introducing him to all the other weird noises you can make without thinking.

“Did you expect anything else?” He finally settles on, and you can see the red all across his neck and face. One of his hands coming up to firmly clap his face as if he could will the warmth gone. “I didn’t end up here because I was a saint, you know?”

“Still,” you say, a little breathless. You watch Bob make twist his face subtly when he hears the amusement still hasn’t fled you entirely. “I don’t know, the way the others talk about you. I didn’t know you had that in you.”

“It’s hard not to when you keep saying things like that.”

“Like what?”

“That I want to get on you?”

“That’s a completely normal sentence!”

“I don’t think that it is! And besides, you’ve got me thinking about it and now I can’t stop—”

“Thinking about it huh?”

“Okay, I’m jumping off the Tower.” Bob’s voice has turned into a baleful moan, his eyes squeezing painfully tight.

You snort again, Bob’s embarrassed smile only grows more, and both of you are tumbling back into fits of giggles all over again. It’s easy, it’s so easy it’s terrifying. You can feel your consciousness slip back into you, reminding you that you’re not normal and this is an incredibly rare fluke afforded to you by Bob’s disarming oddity. Earnest to a fault that entirely defuses your capacity to feel like you don’t belong.

It doesn’t take the wind out of your sails, no. But you descend into a comfortable quiet as the two of you ruminate on the next path in conversation.

“Hey,” Bob’s voice, sliding through the speakers. Soft, conversational. Something is on his mind.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you called that, by the way?” And he pauses, “If it’s not offensive to phrase that- …that sentence like that.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘that’?”

“Oh- right, uh… Terminal? Why?”

Though he cannot see it - an unfair one-sidedness of the senses - a solemn little smile comes to your face. Head tipping to the side as you ponder the best way to explain a story that’s never particularly comfortable to broach. You don’t need to tell him everything, not yet at least. That would be for another time, if you were so privileged the chance.

“Do you know what a computer terminal is?”

“I guess? Well enough.”

“Yeah… It’s sort- sort of a play on words? I wasn’t the one that came up with it. It just refers to the fact that I do the work that I do, and uh…

That I’m, y’know. I’m sort of a terminal case. No coming back from how bad off I am. So far in there’s no way out.” You laugh lightheartedly, even if the weight of the sentiment is heavy on your chest. Even if it pushes against your sternum like a big, cold hand.

Bob, however, doesn’t join you in laughing.

“What does that mean?” He sounds quietly incredulous, even. It’s a little… accusatory, in an odd way?

You don’t know why, but Bob is fixing the camera under his gaze unwaveringly. It’s uncomfortable, and you can perceive a very sudden shift in the atmosphere, the direction that the conversation is headed. It sends your anxiety creeping higher, anticipating some sort of confrontation with him, though you aren’t sure what you would have done to warrant it. Did you do something wrong? Again?

“I- I mean-” You take a shuddering breath, you’ve stopped swaying back and forth. The kinetic energy shifting from enthusiasm to nerves means that it is isolated into your leg, bouncing relentlessly as you try to explain in a way that won’t worsen the situation. “I- it’s just- just a funny name? I guess?

Like-” You know that you haven’t told Bob everything, who and what you are. The- none of it, really. And some part of you doesn’t want to. You like the way things are, and paranoia whispers that you might lose it if he knows. That he might change toward you. “I don’t know… I guess an, ‘abandon all hope ye who enter’ sort of thing? I mean, it’s not wrong, I’m… Not exactly the kind of person you put a vote of confidence in.”

“…Who gave you that name?”

His reply comes quickly enough that it nearly overlaps the petering, weak end of your own sentence. His voice is still soft, though you’ve not yet known it to be capable of true severity or force, instead there’s a seriousness that’s almost somber.

“…Valentina, some years ago. Why?”

“Because, it’s mean.”

It was such a simple response, and yet you will find yourself lingering on it days, even weeks later. Even your own response leaves a sour taste in your mouth, one that you see reflected in the subtle adjustment of posture from Bob.

“It’s okay… better that than my real name.”

Your attempt to assuage or deflect from his incredibly blunt opinion of your tag felt like you were scraping algae out of the bottom of a barrel with it’s weakness of efficacy, and you think maybe Bob did too.

“I know I’m… I’m not the best guy to be saying this to you but, uh- …if there’s anything the others taught me. That Yelena taught me.

You’re allowed to want more than just better.”

There’s a long moment where you just stare down at your soft, uncanny hued hands, then the desk. Your keyboard with it’s oil-worn keycaps, your slightly dusty microphone. The little gadgets that make your life so very comfortable in it’s isolation, well worn but well maintained. He doesn’t know, and that’s okay. It’s not his fault, it’s yours.

“…I don’t even know what I’d want that’s more than this, Bob.”

“Maybe… maybe take the time to figure it out? I’ll even brainstorm with you. Though- I can’t tell you that it’s going to be great coming from me... I don’t think the serum really unfried my brain from all the meth.”

Bob manages to squeak a little laugh out of you, and though you’re too self conscious to look at him, feeling watched even when he can’t see you, you notice the way his head droops to one side, as if happy to have lightened things a bit.

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that too, someday. If you don’t mind me being a little greedy.”

“Can’t say anything about that either. Larceny and robbery, remember?”

Amused grin, and a voice dipped soft and velvet. “How could I ever forget?”

You feel like a teenager sneaking around, grabbing alcohol to go to a party while your parents are asleep.

It’s strange, because it’s not like Bob and you aren’t adults. But there’s this feeling of a broach of conduct that grows stronger with each passing interaction, each stolen nighttime conversation. You’d relegated yourself to these specific, open areas of the Tower. You’d bound yourself to only show up when they were up and busy, afternoon interactions that teetered somewhere between completely professional and devastatingly awkward.

It wasn’t even that they were cruel to you, though they didn’t particularly like you. But the feeling of being the odd one out somehow managed to grow under the weight of the fact you could guarantee that none of the others realized just how much time Bob had begun to spend talking to you. It wasn’t like you were glued together, days and even weeks would pass without your long, late night conversations.

But still. So many instances of saying a soft goodnight to him after the others had left, seeing him give a lopsided grin and a returning call for good rest. It was something precious to you, and it happening without their knowledge made it feel precarious even in it’s total innocence. Maybe it’s because of one of the very first things Bob had ever told you, that they all had trust issues. Why wouldn’t they expect nefarious ends, they were already convinced you were a spy. And beyond that, it wouldn’t be Valentina’s first tactic to put Bob on her side- or at least under her control.

“I know you aren’t, by the way.” Comes Bobs voice one night, it’s three-thirty in the morning and he’s invited you to the communal area. The cold Bob is nearly immune to, but the wind makes it impossible to read a physical book and - he’d admitted to you - that heights terrified him even when it didn’t feel like it was trying to drag him off the edge.

Instead, your glass eye stares down upon the kitchen where Bob is perched at the counter. He’s eating a cereal concoction that you know he didn’t come up with in front of you, his movements practiced as he fished out the three different cereals that he’d poured into a large Tupperware bowl, nearly a quarter gallon of milk following. Initially upon mixing it he’d just been folding the contents over like eggs, but when you’d laughed and said he looked like a witch, he’d grabbed the large spoon in both hands and begun to stir it all together like a vat of potion. Muttering the fragments of words he remembered from watching Hocus Pocus years ago and only entirely unsober, a light shade of pink to his cheeks when he’s slur over or stammer across the parts he completely blanked out.

Now he’s shoveling it into his mouth, only stopping long enough to talk to you without spraying milk and bits of coco puffs everywhere.

“A spy, I mean. I know you aren’t. I know they think you are, but—” Bob cuts himself off with a noncommittal shrug of his free shoulder, shoveling yet another trough-full of cereal into his mouth to eat. You’re starting to piece together that maybe the super soldier appetite was another something he’d inherited off the Sentry serum.

“You sound awfully confident of that… Any reason why?”

“I mean… You did pretty terribly from day one.”

At this point, the casual calls to your error don’t sting from him anymore. It wasn’t intentional, you knew that. Rather, Bob was just an alarmingly straightforward person that you suspected might be as unaware of social cues as you were. A feat, really.

But truth be told, it helped to have him mention it. It wasn’t some scarlet letter you had to tiptoe around, you errored and this was how. Now do better, because you’re being given the space and the kind patience to do so.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, does it?” You’ve propped your elbow onto the laminate counter that makes your desk, one of the CRT monitors pulled free from it’s casing to sit closer to you than the rest. The arm you aren’t propped on fiddling around with Maruchan ramen, fresh out of the microwave. “I’d argue the best spies can manage to be awkward on purpose, right?”

“Yeah, I guess… But I- I don’t know. You don’t have that thing about you, I guess.”

You shovel a bite of noodles into your mouth, and unlike sweet Bob you lack the decency to not talk with your mouth full. Though he doesn’t seem to mind, you can see a grin as he goes to take a bite of his cereal when he hears you slur through your words. “What thing? Ominous, sexy badass woman vibes? Super murderer essence?”

You watch him tap the spoon against the bowl for a moment, those impossibly dark eyes staring straight ahead into the glamorously massive windows that overlook all of Manhattan. You don’t know this, but Bob wonders if you’re anywhere within sight. Or if you’re across the entire world from him, blocked by the turning horizon.

“Can’t say I’ve had experience with too many assassins or spies, you- you’ve met them all. But… I really don’t know. I’ve seen how they act when they’re trying to get something. Does that- that makes sense, right?

It’s not the same as you. You’re… I don’t know. You feel real.”

Real would be the last word you ever used for yourself, real people went outside. But he doesn’t know that you don’t, so you smile at the screen too close to your face anyways.

“Well… I’m glad you believe that. I know I don’t leave a lot of confidence to be seen that I’m not shady.”

“Valentina.”

“…What?”

“Valentina doesn’t. It’s not you. I mean— you didn’t do perfectly. But that’s not really your fault, is it? She pretty much set you up to fail.” He did that thing you’d begun to pick up on, those moments where- when he had a great deal of conviction about something he was saying, Bob would nod to himself as he spoke.

“I…” You hadn’t really thought of it like that. Sure, you’d been frustrated with her perpetual interference as you tried desperately to form even the most basic hospitable connections. But the onus of the failure had still been as it always was, on you. And you still didn’t believe it wasn’t. You were sure the others wouldn’t have failed so miserably. “I guess.”

It’s very difficult not to descend into a fidgeting sort of silence, placed in this inescapable box where your instinct disagrees vehemently with Bob’s kind reading of your circumstances. You could deny, and then he’d fight, and you’d feel that upset that clogs your throat when he tries so sincerely to be on your side even when you don’t deserve it. Or you agree and feel like you’re lying to him.

It seems - if the way his shoulders droop slightly are anything to go by - that Bob has read you on that.

“It’s okay if you think I’m wrong. I- I can believe it for both of us.”

A weak giggle, sincere but threadbare by the feelings you had to wrestle down like a furious crocodile. “Thanks, Bob… I’ll appreciate it for both of us.”

That managed a snort out of him, that little crooked closed mouth grin he’d do before he ducked back into the food he was eating. Which, alarmingly, was already nearly depleted. Truly, that serum had to do atrocious things to the body for that to be feasible while he remains looking the way he does.

“How’s the hunt going?”

Food has been eaten and discarded, an argument about whether or not Raisin Bran even deserved to be called a cereal has been left to an indomitable stalemate, and now you’ve bunched yourself into your desk. Your elbow serves as a pillow, leaving the rest of you to curve awkwardly off and onto your recliner-turned-desk-chair. You know you don’t have much longer before he leaves, the others beginning to rise with the sun.

You hum at his question, “Sluggish. A lot of leads, but they’re not the kind I can dig into personally. Or I could but— Valentina doesn’t like me going rogue, wants her eyes on everything.”

You notice something strange in Bob’s expression when you mention the limitations you have in place. But whatever crosses his mind you find you can watch get locked away someplace. Maybe to be broached later, when you had more time together.

“Anything I can do to help?”

You scoff a little, “Go knock on their door and ask them to be less elusive?”

“Sure. I’ll uh— set that right next to mastering my control over the Sentry.”

“Oh, could you? That’d be so helpful for us.”

He snorts, something a little acrid and dark- the way you liked him to be. It was fun, to get to know Robert Reynolds well enough to see his darker humor come out without the fear that someone was going to smash the glass and pull the nuclear fallout alarm because his life consisted of eggshells. Worse now than ever before.

“You should go… To bed, I mean.”

His eyes are back on the camera, then. Brows lifting a bit.

“Me and sleep aren’t friends, really.”

“I know… I’m not trying to mother you, just- you seem a little sleepy. Might be good to take advantage, especially with all that serum making you eat a median salary a week.”

You don’t know what expression you’re getting out of Bob. Not yet at least, in the future you come to realize it’s the same expression you get on your face— the one when you realize you’re a real flesh and blood person, and as a result people can learn your tics well enough to call on them. Not even as an accusation, just a natural part of you as you are.

“…Well maybe I don’t want to. I have to wait all day to get to talk to my- my friend in the ceiling, if I do.”

So what if you’re grinning ear to ear, huh?

“Don’t worry, she isn’t going anywhere. She’s quite cozy up here, the spiders are very polite.”

“Well that’s good, I- you know… I wouldn’t want you to feel like an unwelcome neighbor.”

He means it as a lighthearted joke, another awkward attempt at banter that you two hopelessly and unashamedly throw across the link. But it still hits you a bit sharper, a bit harder than that. Because he’s still sincere when he says it, he just doesn’t consider entirely the weight of that desire to you. It’s not like you’ve ever felt welcome before.

It’s not like anyone has ever wanted you to feel welcome before. It’s not that anyone has ever even considered it one way or the other. You don’t think about whether or not a chair likes to be sat in, after all.

“Believe me… It’s the most welcome I’ve ever felt.”

When Bob smiles, he looks a little proud.

You’ve begun to learn something interesting about Bob, the more time you spend talking with him.

It wasn’t one of those things where it was rare and required a particularly astute eye, so much as a symptom of your chronic people watching showing it’s face again. Sort of developed withdrawals from your favorite guilty pleasure, with how much time Bob has begun to take up.

Bob, who’s interesting little quirk is his cadence. His body language. It almost feels like he belongs on a boat, to you.

His voice does this perpetual thing, you’ve noted… No matter the mood that had struck him that day, hour, or conversation. His timbre sways. This winding, soft and self contained tempo that drifts up and down on the currents of whatever his thoughts were. At times he slows down all the more, lingers on these breathy pauses, little hums, eyes batting, head doing that charming little nod that you’d picked up on some time ago as he regains a more solid grasp of whatever it was he was trying to convey to you. It all fell in line with the way he moved. You remember the files on him, sparse as they were, and you remember the recordings from well before your arrival.

His posture had also changed quite a bit, and yet never lost it’s key component. The images from before he ever met the New Avengers, he’d curled entirely in on himself as if wilted- or maybe more adequately as if he was stuck in a perpetual state of anticipated violence. The way a person tries to cover their vitals, his body tense and retaliatory. Skin sallow, eyes so very dull. He was decaying on two feet, and it brokered no surprise that he would join something as drastic as the Sentry program, looking at him then.

The footage that followed had shown another aspect of him, not quite so defeated in the moment. The awkward slouch of his shoulders, the fidgeting of his hands, the perpetual flighty nervousness. Thrown out of his depth and dealing with - what they would all learn later - were the sort of endocrinological shifts that would be fatal in a typical human. Hormonal and chemical imbalances that far exceeded dangerous, metabolic adjustments that were Frankenstein-esque in their severity. His brain screaming out all manner of neurological signals that - frankly - Bob was in no mental or emotional state to even really register, much less address.

Being shot to (attempted) pieces, attacked by his new friends, and having his brainstem reduced to a vertebral slushie inside his nape didn’t help any of this.

And finally, the Bob you’d met now. His hands almost always sat firmly within his pockets, whether they were his pants or his hoodies. He still had that bow in his shoulders, but he stood like he wasn’t ashamed to take up the space of his own skin anymore. His head tucked to one side almost always.

And through it all, he still had that particular gait.

The way he would shift foot to foot, swaying the upper half of his body slightly. The way his shrug would always make him dip toward the right without fail. The way his head would swing when he was fond or bashful, and the rest of him would follow after the motion. He was painted in watercolor and moved like a current, steady and fluid. Summer rain when happy and midnight downpour when not.

He’s with the rest of his team in one of the areas you’d relegated yourself to when not invited by Bob during your late night rendezvous. He’s not dressed the way he normally does, he’s in trousers and a thin white t-shirt, a graphic splattered over the front and a faint discoloration at the collar you suspect to be a stain of some sort. His wrists are both decorated in little leather and bead bracelets, which you learned from prior… studying was a favored form of jewelry for the man.

It allowed him something to fidget, or stim with? That was socially acceptable. It reduced his self consciousness over the need to twist and rub an object between his fingers constantly the way he usually did. And it prevented the inevitable destruction of all his clothes from plucking them threadbare. If he wasn’t spinning the entire bracelet or repetitively tracing the texture on the tips of his fingers, he was pressing the ceramic beads together to listen to the hiss that the friction provided. They were passive things, you didn’t even know that he consciously realized he was doing it, anymore.

He has a calm smile right now, nodding along attentively to whatever Ava is telling him at the moment. She’s cross-legged, her arms draped over her knees with a nearly full large glass of orange juice in her hand. It dangles close to her finger tips, sweat beading down it’s side as the other hand gestures limply, articulating something.

You suspect that she’s recounting from the mission which they just returned, you’d not been needed for it and so stayed out. You didn’t… you didn’t want to intrude on something so incredibly sensitive while they weren’t aware or given ample time to consent to your presence. You knew Bob would end up telling you, it was another he’d himself gone on. He always came back looking a little more alive for a while after these assignments.

Something about getting to help, even if he’s not good at the fighting part of it. Not yet, at least.

That smile widens briefly, Bob nods with a touch of enthusiasm and you watch the way his throat moves. Ava responds with a smile - more like a shit eating grin about something. She makes a comment, Bob’s brows find his hair line and you watch.

You always watch.

That little motion he does again, his eyes blinking rapidly that reminds you of a hard drive reading off it’s data, head turning from side to side as he speaks- clearly considering whatever it was that Ava said. Whatever response it was, you can see Ava’s laughter. It’s not loud like the others, overly obvious, it’s in the rhythmic shake of her shoulders.

You found that everyone quite liked Bob, and vice versa, but that you weren’t alone in… well, in enjoying him alone.

Ava liked to talk to him when it was reduced to the two. You think she might struggle with the group, the noise. Growing easily overwhelmed by the loudness and the raucous behavior and the unpredictability. Bob, watercolor in motion, is a soothing balm. Too self contained to stand out amidst all these bright colors and loud personalities, but a refreshing voice once you’ve managed to escape them.

They have these conversations semi-frequently. Not for particularly long before Ava is directing her attentions to something else, mind. But you can see now like you did then how she’s physically unwinding as his head tilts to one side and he says something to her. Ava looks down, her smile is fond.

Then she’s standing, another hefty swig of the orange juice in her glass. When she passes she stops long enough to pat Bob on the shoulder, a brief pause, then his hair is being mussed before she disappears. Bob weakly swatting at her, though you can tell there’s no really desire for her to stop doing it. Especially with the smile he fires off toward her retreating back.

He stays there, just a little longer. He fidgets with one of his bracelets, presses his fingers into his chest for a moment. Dark eyes stare at the ground, at nothing. He hasn’t stopped smiling.

Then, much like Ava he retreats. Out of the room, and out of your area of sight.

The next time you get to talk is broad daylight, and Bob is in the lobby of the Tower.

You weren’t actually paying attention for once, your eyes preoccupied with a few offhand news articles describing unusual trade activity around Madripoor (already a place known for it’s odd activity) when that familiar voice meets your ears through the speakers clasped lovingly around your head.

“Terminal? You there?”

They react before even you do, the screens shuttering violently as they flick with a nauseating speed to the cameras inside the lobby of the Avengers’ Tower.

He’s standing there looking… well a little flustered, but good. His hair is more awry than usual, and he’s done up in layers. A t-shirt with a blue collar, a cheap cotton-y button up left entirely open. His trusty bracelets are on, and this week you notice a dark color on his nails that has never been there before. Something from Yelena you’d more than bet money on. He’s still in (nicer) sweatpants this time, and beneath are scuffed sneakers that he was ill inclined to part with.

His hand finds his face, rubbing aggressively at his eyes as his fingers twitch faintly. When it drops to his side he looks out into the light, approaches before slinking away. He’s nervous.

“Hey, Bob. I’m here.”

“Oh- oh okay… Good. Yeah- uh… It’s-”

You don’t remember the last time you’d seen Bob stammer this hard in conversation with you. It wasn’t beyond him to do so. Just usually under too many pairs of eyes, where he felt the weight of his words were reaching too far, or were being treated too importantly did he tend to fail at crisp speech. With you it was more that lulling, tidal cadence in his voice than any sort of tripping, scattered legibility.

“Sorry… I uh- it’s not an emergency or anything. I- I just…”

Articles, Madripoor, and Enmis all become background noise. You find yourself turning on your seat, pulling it closer to the desk so that your ribs meet the edge, the corner biting into you softly. His image is moved down to the closest screens to you, taking in the mildly nauseated, clearly restless way that he continues to approach the windows and then flee again. His eyes keep finding the camera you look at him with, and then darting to some unknown subject in the far distance.

“Bob, it’s okay. You don’t need it to be an emergency to talk to me in the daylight, you know?”

Bob nods aggressively, his throat and mouth working as if chewing up the thing he was trying to say.

“They’re uh… they’re having me go- go out into the city, today. I guess there’s this place they want me to try out but it doesn’t do delivery so…” His shrug is a little hopeless, and suddenly the less-comfy-than-normal attire are more understandable to you. He’s trying to make himself feel a little nicer before he steps so deeply out of his element.

“It’s been…. it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to do anything out in the public, or stay out there. So I’m just a little—”

You don’t need him to finish to understand the train of thought. He’s panicking a little bit. You can hazard a guess and assume that Bob had lured himself into a bit of a false sense of security, being able to talk so comfortably with you. You were a disembodied voice in his home, after all. But this is going out there, and you understand above all else the terror of out there.

“Hey… It’s okay to be scared. It’s- there’s a lot of different places and directions, and you’re expected to keep track of all of it, the sights and sounds. To address when people are talking to you, to register what they even said quickly enough to reply in a timely manner. Not to mention the fact it feels like eyes are on you constantly, don’t even know what you must look like to them when you’re just being yourself.”

His eyes once again have not left the camera since you rambled, fixing you with a gaze that holds something deep inside that you don’t quite place. A recognition of some sort, maybe camaraderie, but not quite so simple with the little furrow of his brows.

“Yeah… Exactly… How- how do you handle it?”

You don’t.

“Remember that the entire time you’re out there, you have an entire team on your side.” You pause for a moment, “And that lots of people are just as scared of looking out of place as you are. Let yourself laugh if it goes sideways, they’ll be as relieved as you. And the- the whole memory will feel softer. More bearable.”

You didn’t really know that, it felt like a bit of a falsehood to tell him. But you’d chewed through a good dozen self help books in your life trying to find some grasp on the outside world that would let you step out there. It may not be perfect, but they were the most practical scraps of information you’d gleaned out of what otherwise amounted to homework with generalized feel good platitudes interwoven.

Either way, it seemed to help. Not much, but you watched him mouth the words you’d just spoken. Turning them over in his mind like a mantra as he began to pace again. Less frantic, more like he was doing drills of a sort.

“Hey… Can I- I could make a suggestion?”

His gaze turns back to the camera.

“If… if you wanted- if it’d really help… Put in an earpiece. I can be there with you the entire time.”

You see the recognition of the offer shine in his dark eyes. It doesn’t take long either, the way an impact on still water causes it to fold out, in, then crash into itself a second time. The initial drop, the offer made, and the second-

Realizing that there’s no world in which Bob does this that they don’t notice the earpiece. Or him talking to himself. To you.

“If… If I do that…”

“I know, that’s why it’s your choice. They uh- they don’t really like me, anyway. You’re the one that will get all the shit for this. So… It’s just an offer, no pressure.

If you think it helps, I’m here.”

Bob seems caught by it, like his mind is rubber-banding aggressively back and forth. Enthusiasm at the thought, then terror at being caught, then guilt that he’d subject you to potential further ire. At the very least further scrutiny from a group of people that loved him enough to flank up like bodyguards and protect him from the scary voice in the ceiling.

In the end, he half takes you up on it.

A quick elevator ride has him plucking one of the dozens of ear pieces (many ended up collateral during missions, extra was just frugal) laid out in the armory, instructions from you leading him to the terminal nearby. Upon placing it there, his gaze expectant, you could feel as they rooted themselves inside- bonding until they and the wires were no different. You were now attached, nothing could prevent communication, save the electronics being destroyed somehow.

It ends up being crammed violently into his pocket - and some part of you wonders if they were destroyed just then - when the entire gaggle of aspiring heroes comes bulldozing out of the elevator like a party spills out onto the lawn in a college movie. They’re chattering loudly, their voices layered atop each other. Pieces are being removed and tossed aside, light armor shed. It was a local ordeal, and they were stopping by long enough to get out of the unnecessary pieces before ‘Adventures with Bob’ began. John is shoving Bucky, who elbows him in turn. Someone is cracking a joke, Alexei is laughing, Yelena is rolling her eyes.

Absolutely none of them had expected him to be there, his fists crammed tightly into his pockets while he stared at them like they shot his dog in front of him.

“Bob? You okay?”

You watch the exchange go down, mic slapped mute and your fingers perched over your lips. You didn’t want to be the cause of disaster for Bob before the day had even passed by, knowing that the man definitely needed to escape his cage for a little bit. Experience the world, enjoy the sun. Bask in all the things he’s training to protect, rather than holding himself othered from it.

“Yeah! Yeah, I’m- I’m good, I just-” his shoulders bunch aggressively as he looks off to the window. The nerves radiate off him nearly like vapor, and you know that the only saving grace he has right now is their understanding over his fear of heading out for an extended period. “I’ll be fine. I’m fine.”

Alexei is the first to him, enthusiastic with the temperament of a bulldozer. It doesn’t take long for poor Bob to suddenly have a massive arm dropped around his shoulders. He’s being pulled around like a ragdoll, and you see the way insane nervousness melts away into that sort of flustered alarm that only comes with true bewilderment.

Yelena is still watching him, suspicious and invested as she is in his well being. And as Alexei is dragging him by, he’s shooting a hand out to squeeze her bicep reassuringly.

It aches, the way you watch everything in her body soften from head-to-toe, in just one loving gesture.

“Do not worry! Avengerz will be with you! This will be occasion of fun and triumph for you! Feast like the Golden God you are!”

Underneath the chatter that begins to pick up as Bob is functionally kidnapped from where he was standing. You can hear him groan with long suffering weariness at the title. It’s been something he’s mentioned to you a few times, offhanded. The low intensity weight of expectation sitting on his shoulders constantly. The breakthrough that everyone wants him to have. None of them truly pressure Bob for it, he stresses every time you talk. But Alexei is the most vocal, and the feeling still sits there whether they’d like it to or not.

It’s his own expectation, too.

And you watch as Bob finds himself crushed like a sardine in a can, clustered into the very center of the gaggle of teammates as they head straight for the lobby. Yelena is talking to him while the others shout loudly, his head bent down conspiratorially so that her voice reaches him clearer than anyone else.

Then they’re crossing the threshold of the Tower, and Bob spares one last glance into your glass eye before he’s vanishing out of your grasp. You could chase, could haunt every single CCTV feed and doorbell camera they cross paths with like some digital phantom…

But you know this isn’t for you. You’ll be invited, or you won’t. That was for Bob to decide.

In the end, you do end up invited.

In the bathroom.

You can hear the panic in his voice the moment he blares through- so much louder than you’re used to with the microphone being next to his face. It makes you nearly leap out of your skin after an hour of dead silence and doomscrolling the internet under the guise of work.

“Terminal?”

It’s like this that you finally get to hear the gravelly nuances of his voice, not shredded away by poor microphone quality and immense distance. He speaks warmly and in his chest, and you hear the hiss of his teeth on certain words. It’s nice, you think. It suits him.

“Yeah! Yeah, hey. I’m here.”

“Hi. I’m not.” He doesn’t give you long enough to even question what that means, his voice warbles violently- so oddly disconnected from his environment without eyes on him. “I’m- I’m so far gone right now I think- think I’m losing my uh- my shit.”

He laughs then, a little insane and self deprecating and you know from that alone that he’s teetering the edge of a full blown panic attack.

“Okay, Bob? Honey? Listen to me, alright? I’m the only person you gotta worry about, is that okay?”

“…Yeah.”

“Where are you, are you alone? Can you remain that way?”

“Not- not for long. I uh… I stole the bathroom here because I thought I was about to vomit on the table.”

“That’s okay, that’s somewhere quiet. No one else exists right now but me, okay?”

Bob’s response this time is delayed, permeated by distressed panting. You don’t know if he was just having that hard of a time getting the words out, or if he’d nodded before remembering you can’t see him in a room with no cameras to steal.

“Okay.”

“What do you see around you?”

“Uh…” his pause is long again, but you give him a chance. He’s got this, you know he does. “Awf- awful yellow paint, like- like nacho cheese all over the walls? And these um- these really shitty mirrors that I think they got off of amazon or something. Sinks, but not the good ones with counter space. And these uh, these pink stalls. It’s really kind of awful in here.”

And you listen, you listen the entire time. He’s rambling, he’s panicking. But you buy him time. That’s all he needs, time. He can do this.

“Yeah that sounds absolutely abysmal… Are the urinals at least clean?”

“No idea… didn’t- uh, didn’t stay on my feet long enough to see them once I got in here.”

You snort, and you hear the crackle of the receiver at his own breath blowing out hard. “Probably disgusting, if the color scheme is anything to go by…” Then you take a breath, and dive for the worst, “Bob… What’s going on out there, huh? What’s got you so panicked?”

His breath hisses, and he hums out loud again, his brain buffering on how to answer.

“…There were too- too many options. The first order was fine, there was only like twelve things on the list and half of them I hate. So I thought- I thought I’d finally be normal and make it. But then the main courses came and- and there were so many and the nice waitress could come back any time. And they were- were all talking so I couldn’t just think and focus—”

He’s working himself back up into a frenzy he hasn’t even fully left yet. You can hear the ramble starting to trip over itself, too much steam for the rails.

“Okay, okay. That’s fine. Hey? Did you tell the others?”

“God, no… That’s- that’s why I decided to- to talk to you. I don’t want to disappoint them. And- and you already offered so I thought-”

“I’m glad you did, Bob… I’m not mad that you contacted me. I’m just wondering if you ask, maybe they can help? I mean- they clearly know the place. Maybe they’d have an idea of what you like?”

“…Maybe.” His voice sounds wet, hardly a whisper. You know he’s crying. “This is so fucking embarrassing. I’m a grown man and I can’t go out with my friends to order food.”

“It’s not embarrassing, Bob. It’s hard. There’s a difference.”

“Nobody else finds this hard.”

“I do.”

That’s enough to stop him. Not in the way someone who knows they’re being shut down does, but in this heavy, palpable sort of pause as if you’d accidentally revealed something huge. Not this time though. No. This was all you, for better or worse.

“…You do?”

“More than you even realize… And Bob. Those- those people out there. I’ve watched them with you for awhile now. They love you so much. Needing them to help you with this isn’t going to make them think less of you. They’re just happy you’re out and - up until this point at least - having a good time. It’s still progress, it’s just not the amount you wanted.”

There’s these long moments, the beats where all you hear is his breathing as it crackles through. You don’t know what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. It’s a strange position, to be trying to offer this kind of advice to anyone. You don’t know if it’s great, you don’t know if it’s terrible.

“I didn’t used to struggle with this, you know?” It’s not what you expect to hear from him, and he pauses long enough to swallow, the click of his mouth opening audible even to you. “I- I mean I did but… But not like this. Mainly because- because meth makes it really hard to be scared of anything, when your default is just to get really pissed off. But even when I was on the comedown…

I don’t know. I didn’t- I was always scared it just didn’t- feel like I was dying like this.”

You take a moment, a soft, slow moment. Because you know what you say next will be very, very important for him.

“Bob…”

“Mhm?”

“It’s the first time in years that you’ve been entirely sober… and it’s the first time you’ve handled these feelings after being injected with something that’s- kinda notorious for exacerbating a persons feelings like a billion fold.

Of course you feel it’s so much worse. It’s because you’re so much more now. And it’ll take time, but you’ll adjust to the intensity. Everyone is here to help you shoulder it until then, okay?”

And for the first time since Bob’s panicked voice crossed over to you today, you hear the deep- heavy sigh that rattles out of his lungs. Not quite relieved, but like something was settling into his bones.

He doesn’t get to respond to you, for thanks or questioning or even to deny it outright. There’s the sound of thudding, and you hear a disgruntled voice muffled behind a door. It’s easy enough for you to grasp what’s happening even if you can’t understand the words.

“Shit… Okay- okay. I gotta go. Thank you for talking to me. I’m- I’m gonna try. I’m trying.”

You don’t hear from him again that day.

No, not until three in the morning. They tug violently at your mind until you break your self imposed rule and find yourself staring at the shape of Bob in his own bed in the perfect city-lit dark. One arm is hanging over the edge, vividly orange from the lights below, the other scrunched into the soft protection of his hoodie on his stomach. His eyes, though so very dark, glint off the lowlight. You’ve caught him in the middle of saying something, your timing allowing you to get the most important part:

“—Thank you, for this morning… It went better than I thought it would. And it’s because of you.

Have a great night, Terminal.”

You’re with Bob again, it’s the soft of night and you’ve been invited into the last space of your banishment since everything fell apart.

Dark, dark of night, and all the lanterns are turned on low- velvet like the rest. Everything about the space is hazy right now, it’s comfortable the way a womb would be and it cradles the moment just as gentle.

Bob is in his maximum comfort clothes, this massive ratty sweatshirt that swallows him up somehow. Pajama pants, socks, and a thick blanket pulled around him. He’s not even cold, but you learned that the addition of layers worked for him like compression. It made him feel more safe and more comforted.

Bob isn’t doing bad, per se. But it isn’t the same Bob who laughs at your unintended innuendos, who argues about tv shows with you, and who insists that all forms of diet soda are disgusting.

This one is quiet, and subdued. This one is lonely, and has invited you like an intrusion upon his wounds.

The New Avengers received an assignment, and they left. Three days ago.

Robert was okay at first, he’d even enjoyed the initial silence and the freedom to run around how he liked. Shirtless in the common areas, abominable food concoctions cooked gleefully, and whatever he wanted on the big TV.

But with each passing night that was also alone, each early morning without ritual and familiarity. As isolation droned on like a sermon, it had begun to quietly corrode him. His mind wandering into less pleasant territory, his boredom crawling. He wasn’t bad. But he wasn’t exactly doing good, either.

So, so very soft one night, he called after you. And as always, you answered.

There wasn’t much being discussed this time around, soft lulling things traded back and forth as he laid curled on the couch. He was watching the city, and you were watching him.

Then, sparingly, he states: “You’ve never called me that, before.”

“Called you what, before?” You don’t even hesitate to ask, you don’t even think to take the time to consider what he’s talking about until it’s too late and it’s all being put on the table.

“Honey.”

“Oh.”

The silence lingers on for a moment, speech is already slowed to a molasses state. The hour, the emotions, the slow fatigue that you let each other feel. But this goes longer than that, and he presses gently. Brave, but in the way that someone who cares is brave.

“Regret it?”

“No. Not really.”

Especially since it helped you.

“Are you uncomfortable with it?”

“…No. Not at all.”

Another space for the casual admission to sit. Falling like a leaf to the soil. It’s not laden with anything heavier. It’s just an admission of bold faced affection. You care about him, you cherish him, he’s sweet as honey to you. Whether that ever came with a declaration of ‘more than someone you wanted to smile at every day’, is a thing that hasn’t been decided at this point.

“…Do you like me calling you it?”

And for a moment his face furrows deep, those dark eyes are lit only by the glitter of windows and lamps in the street. It makes them look like they sparkle, glow. It makes them look like they’ve been filled with embers.

“…Yeah. Yeah I do.” His voice is colorful gravel, sweet rough instead of pained. You think maybe it’s frightening him to admit that to you. That maybe he yearns to be given a pet name by someone he cares for, to be more than Bob- the only name he goes by. Or Bobby- no- or Robert- court hearings, jail time, prison time, stern authority that never once tried to help.

He thinks it’s nice to be given something new, that the only history honey has is a scary moment in a restaurant that led to his friends clasping him gently on the neck and telling him he did good. He ate, and he enjoyed what he was eating, and he got to go home after a day of sun on his skin and plenty of laughter.

Honey feels good.

“Okay. Okay.” Reaffirmed, and trickling out of the scratchy speakers well above his head.

“I’ll keep calling you it, then. How about that?”

His smile still isn’t sunny, but it’s bright like fire this time. Happy, just in a tired way. “I’d like that.”

The last conversation you have with Bob before all hell breaks loose, you find yourself back at the start.

It’s blindingly sunny out, so much so that you lectured Bob about sunscreen until he laughed and reminded you - not unkindly - that bullets can’t damage his skin, so why would the sun?

It’s so blue it makes you envious, so colorful it makes you queasy with a sort of want that you’ve learned very well to push down and forget before ever taking a moment to acknowledge it. The recognition is what starts the spiral.

Instead, you enjoy how good Robert Reynolds looks in color. Drowning in the rainbow, damn near.

His clothes themselves aren’t that bright - as ever he prefers earthen or deeply subdued jewel tones - but the whole world rises to meet him. He traded a milkshake for a smoothie this time, mango pineapple and so yellow it makes you happy. His back is to that same tree, the thing that makes him safe so high up, and a new book gifted by Yelena sits with it’s bookmark next to his thigh.

In front of him, a half empty box of near-cold pizza. Robert is perfectly happy with this, cold pizza is like a delicacy to him and he’s frankly eaten far more horrifying things while in the depths of despair.

Besides, even if he were a madman that hated it, it’s not like he could ever forget how it came to him.

This is your last free day with him before the team returns, allowed to roam every inch of the building with him, to talk all day and all night entirely unbidden and without a lick of fear of discovery and ridicule. You’d chased him all across the place, had even made a game pseudo-’hide and seek’ where because you couldn’t physically be there you’d just intentionally trip systems and let him chase the noises down.

So, more like goose chase the game?

Anyway, hunger came to him quickly as it always did. Only this time it was a companion in you, so you decided to order pizza. But it’d have been rude to get something for yourself and nothing for your dear friend, so of course you had to share.

Robert had stared at the dinky little RC car with a pizza box strapped to it (and a post-it with shitty handwriting that proclaimed ‘happy lunch!’) for a solid twenty seconds before snapping out of his bafflement and delicately removing the food item. Only to have a solid giggle fit when the little electronic blasted off down the street, ripping around peoples legs aggressively enough to be a nuisance. He had no idea where it was going, and didn’t particularly care.

Now he was here, sharing a pizza with you while you both chattered away.

“Worst thing I ever saw was probably recon in Berlin. I did not need to witness the bare and wrinkled acne-prone ass of a fifty three year old Federal Minister.” You don’t even hesitate to take another bite of your slice, even if the memory makes you shudder violently.

The horror of course, is soothed by the hysterical giggles you’ve earned for your agonies.

“Oh yeah, I would not want to see that.” His head shakes aggressively, as if he were under sincere threat of being exposed to such a frightening image. His free hand taps away at his knee, the other folding up his slice before nearly putting half the entire damn thing in his mouth. He makes sure his mouth is free before continuing, “I think I’ll take accidentally vomiting on myself. At least then nobody was really surprised by me doing it.”

You snort, slouch back in your chair, feet kicked up and shaking away.

“You sure? Don’t want to hear all the awful sex noises geriatric politicians make when they think they’re good at what they do?”

“Okay so maybe I’m not hungry anymore.”

It’s said so despondently you’ve left with no choice but to bark out a loud laugh, one that has him grinning a bit shyly to himself as he reaches for yet another slice. The rate he’s eating, he’ll be done and destroying the smoothie before you’re halfway through.

“Got over the queasiness quickly.”

“What can I say, I’m uh- pretty adaptable where food is involved.”

Another bite, and then-

“I’m a little scared, right now.”

The pivot in conversation is so abrupt that you find yourself thrown into a stupor for a second. Brain blanking, whirring, their rhythmic croons rising as if turning to each other to question what the hell Bob is talking about.

“Why?”

“Because… I think I really like you, but you’re not- I didn’t meet you the way I did the others. We didn’t save each other’s lives, or go- go wandering around in each other’s brains. So it… it feels different. Like I could somehow fuck up being a friend.”

You laugh- and you really don’t mean to, you feel awful immediately. See the way his eyes catch on the lens when he hears it, you don’t know if that’s hurt bubbling up or something else. But you don’t wait long enough to find out, too panicked to find out how he took it.

“Bob. You can’t fuck it up. I promise. You’re a great friend and… and honestly..? My standards are kinda- beneath the dirt, really.

You’re knocking it out of the park as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh yeah? Only had terrible friends, then?”

It’s a sunny day, and it’s warm, and Bob looks soft and open- and he is open. His heart has been laid in the grass this afternoon, and the team is coming back and who knows how long it’ll be before you get to speak with him again. With pizza and smoothies, with emergencies in restaurant bathrooms, with three-cereal-deluxe’s in the kitchen, with stolen moments of watching, with sad and soft and bundled up, honey and fumbling meanings.

“None. Never had even one.”

The quiet descends, and it’s easy because the pain is already there in the words. Even though there’s something disbelieving in his face, even though the shock of hearing that makes it somehow the sharper to bear.

“What..?”

And you shift before you speak. Adjust from reclining to the entire opposite, now you’re laid out with your chin on your forearms on your desk. The microphone is no longer precisely lined up with your mouth though you don’t mind, it gives you the more important angle.

Bob on the screen, as close as is comfortable for you.

“Can I… can I tell you something a little um… embarrassing?”

Pizza, smoothie, book all forgotten. Your little box of color that Bob shifts inside. Adjusting cross legged and directly facing you, his eyes boring into your eye.

Just a nod, a little one.

Your head tips to the side, face resting against arm. It feels heavy to admit, and you feel so tired before even getting the words out. You didn’t know if this will be a conversation, a talk. You didn’t know how much you’d need to clarify, what questions he would ask. But it made you tired. Tired and anxious.

And maybe it’s the exhaustion, the weariness, the anxiety, or something more that has wetness gathering in your eyes. Cloistering at lashes, walking together down a nose. Laying together in divots deep enough to stop gravity. Liquid pleas with no one nearby to help.

“…I… I don’t remember the last time I felt the sun on my skin.” A wet sniffle in, and when you blink your whole face goes hot with the scattering of grief. “Or the wind… I don’t- remember what the sea, or the city, or trees smell like. I don’t even- even remember the last time I ever felt grass beneath my feet. Or saw the sky without a screen…

I have um- I have a calendar up? In my room.” Your voice lifts awkwardly in places, lowers in others. You’re a poorly tuned violin, voice failing to strike harmony. “It only counts up to a single year, so I have tallies cut in beside it.”

As you speak, blurred mournful eyes settle on a flip clock not far off. It’s a shabby thing, all of the leaves have been dinted or scratched in some way. They’re that old, olive green with white typeface overtop, wooden stand. It doesn’t turn on it’s own anymore, so you do it yourself like a ritual each and every morning. The number displayed is eighty-three.

On the concrete wall of the bunker behind it, etched in shallow scratches:

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

“There’s seven of them now, Honey. I don’t remember what being human is like.”

And the response you get is utter silence.

It’s not deafening, it’s not shattering, it’s not cold or hostile, it’s blank and a bit warm. It’s Bob whose eyes have gone some sort of soft around the edges. It’s an expression you’ve never seen on him. It’s a man putting so many bizarre pieces together all at once. It’s the sympathetic gloss in his eyes. It’s the vague horror subdued by deep understanding. It’s sad. And it’s sweet.

“You know you could come here, right?”

Defcon one has gone off inside your chest. Everything singling down to his offer, to how sweet it is, to how terrifying it is, to how impossible it is, to how much you want to, to how much you can’t. You’d finally live your life, you’d die the moment you did it. They’d never accept you. You’d ruin Bob’s life. You’d ruin what little you have of your own life. You’d not get to come back home. You’d never be able to escape wherever they put you. You wouldn’t be able to control it. You wouldn’t know what to do—

“I- I can’t- I can’t do that, that’s- it’s too- there’s so much and it’s all- and I just-”

His eyes widen with alarm at the heel turn directly into panic that you do, but all Bob does is raise a single hand. Just one, his head pivoted to the side. He looks even sadder, his smile guilty and ashamed and aching.

“No, no. It’s okay. Don’t freak out. I wasn’t trying to scare you, or make you do anything you don’t want to or aren’t ready for. It’s just… it’s on the table, okay? I’ll never turn you away, and I wouldn’t let them either.”

And it’s just precious, and it makes you hurt so deeply inside. Like each word - well meaning and gentle - opened up and revealed a new inadequacy in you. The patience becomes as glass inside of you, and you feel it with each ragged breath you take, scraping at your bones. You’re hemorrhaging emotion.

He’s such a good friend, and such a good man. And he offers you everything you’ve ever wanted on a silver platter, ready for the taking.

And you don’t take it. Because you can’t.

“…Thanks… I’ll- I’ll consider it.”

Your tone doesn’t leave much hope for him, or yourself for that matter.

Yet he doesn’t really respond to it, not negatively. Just a little nod of his head. Another beat of silence, this time less strained or agonizing.

“Seven years..?”

Soft noise of amusement, not quite a laugh, like a sharp exhale.

“And eighty-three days.”

“How do you— I mean, food and-”

“I have my ways, like my little guy you met earlier. And using exorbitant amounts of money to keep people from asking questions. No- no one even knows this place exists, or how to get to it. I don’t even let people into the area where it’s at.”

He nods, and he still looks a little mystified. But you can also see the moment Bob chooses to put the entire conversation to the side for now. Maybe because he’s so shocked he needs to mull it over, or maybe because he can tell that it’s taken all of the wind out of your sails.

“So…” Another nod, “Weirdest thing you’ve ordered to your hide out?”

And it’s so easy, it’s just so easy. The conversation dissipating back into comfort and play, instead of shared moments of agony. Such is how it continues for hours, until exhaustion starts to itch at your eyes and the temperature drops enough that even Bob grows uncomfortable in his place. Book, box, and long empty cup are grabbed. Conversation lulls to a soft blur as he cleans up for the night, as you stretch in anticipation to finally get up.

Goodnights are said, and your worlds split from each other again.

In two different places, so far and yet so close, both of you find yourselves in your beds. Your minds consumed by the day, the week, the month, the months.

Robert feels all at once massive in his own body, like his bones were all too big for his skin. The mattress is soft, and sinking around him, and the sort of calm permeates the room that he doesn’t necessarily like. Not- not dislike. But discomfort. It’s unfamiliar to him, even the bed is a bit unfamiliar to him. He was used to couches, to damp brick, to unforgiving and splinter prone old wood. He’s been a squatter most of his life, Egyptian cotton isn’t exactly his norm.

Not yours either, he thinks.

He’s never even seen your face before, he realizes with a soft pang in his sternum. Suddenly finds himself… feeling a little awful?

But not- no- that’s not really the right word.

He’s mulling it over, Bucky had talked to him about how easy it is to get into patterns of- well he’d botched the term, something one of his old therapists had told him? Basically, Bucky thinks he reads his own emotions too negatively, and that makes it come true somehow?

So not. Not awful, not guilty.

No, sympathy maybe. Sad on your behalf.

He can still hear you those first days, when everything had gone so wrong for you. Your voice over the intercom, trembling and weak. You’d sounded unsure of yourself, and he had not idea just how right he was. Had wondered at the time if maybe you were just somewhat frail in general.

Two conversations. That’s all it took. Just two, for you to open up like a sunflower for him.

Loud, and obnoxious, snorting when you laugh, fighting him relentlessly about the best episodes of any show he’d ever happened to watch that you’d seen (it was nearly all of them). Robert refraining from telling you that he barely has a favorite, he just likes seeing you so comfortable that you’d get openly riled over his obstinance. He remembered very little of the things you’d both discussed together, snapshots and feelings. Usually high. Almost always high. Those images have new color to them, not so bleak or insignificant when you connected over them.

Made even brighter, but even bluer understanding why you knew them. Why you latched so hard to him knowing them. Because you had absolutely nothing else.

He mouths it to himself, to the open air, “seven years.”

Seven entire years, no sunlight? No wind, no nothing? Nothing? His mind careens back and forth restlessly between things like wondering who would be able to help you if you got hurt, how you hadn’t gotten sick from the isolation yet, how you got things to you- even if you gave him a vaguely ominous answer. He wonders if you’re comfortable, he knows you aren’t happy. He feels it in the way your voice- it never deflates, but it goes whisper soft when he has to leave. It’s like it pains you to be alone, now.

Of course it would. You lonely girl.

You were so nice to him, and it made him swallow thickly around the feeling of it. Talking him through his panic, offering it in the first place knowing damn well that Yelena would catch it. She notices everything about him, much less if he would have walked around with a piece of shiny metal in his ear… It’s why he didn’t, honestly. It would have been easier up front to have you play interception for him mid dinner. But doing that meant hurting you, and you were already hurting.

Now he knows. Now he knows and everything makes so much sense. That feeling in his sternum gets a little worse.

If this has been seven years… where were you before?

No wonder you were watching them, no wonder you were trying so hard to figure out how to blend in. Their sweet bug in the system.

You lay in a bed the same size as his, in a half dozen more blankets and a mountain of pillows that prevent you from touching the cold concrete walls. You’re on your side, half fetal, blinking out at the darkness. Barely any light is reaching you, from the dimmed overhead that often served as your only way of knowing whether it was day or night. On your mind is an incredibly soft man you’ve only ever seen through a screen.

You- don’t really know what to make of any of it anymore. That you’ve known him for months without chasing him off yet, that you’ve grown closer instead. That you’ve grown close enough to vomit out the secret of your reality. That you’re this pathetic thing in a dark box deep under the earth, and don’t remember what it’s like being with people anymore.

That he wasn’t disgusted, or mean. He was just… he was sad for you?

Even in the near pitch black, you cover your eyes with your hand. Feeling ashamed, feeling too exposed in a place no one else has seen in decades. You don’t want the tears to be visible, not to them, or the dust motes, or the light. Even as you sniffle and squeak sadly, and your body trembles where it lays.

He wanted you to stay with them.

God, why did you have to say no? Why are you like this?

The next three days come with a whirlwind of information, none of which makes you feel anything other than a sudden and deep seated horror.

Enmis is moving, and you’ve been given a good idea of what they want to do.

Over the many years, Earth has been invaded an absurd number of times. This in itself wasn’t the problem— not to downplay the horror and tragedy of the things that had befallen the world during. But frankly, the regular people learned quite quickly that the invasion itself wasn’t where things necessarily went wrong.

It was the aftermath. What was left.

The thing that continues to terrorize you is when the people who already hurt you get their hands on the things necessary to hurt you so much more. And with each invasion had come veritable mountains of materials far beyond Earth’s scope of technology. A bright enough mind, and god only knows what kind of horrors creeps out from the rubble.

That power plant? Easily forgotten in the mess surrounding? Myanmar had been among those to shake hands during the Accords, and one of the major economic keystones of the agreement had been to “share” whatever findings were made among the other governments following the Chitauri invasion (and then, later, the Blip). Naturally, this was bullshit. No one was willingly handing over all the nasty ugly things they had learned and built. But they’d given what they misguidedly believed to be useless scrap to Myanmar to appease their end of things.

Never underestimate a brilliant mind and a deep financial or political incentive.

They’d been on the brink of something, no one knows the exact details of what they were aiming for. But it’d been very good at compressing down and neutralizing highly unstable sources of energy. It’s believed that it might have been a component to an engine on one of the Chitauri speeders. This thing was being expanded upon massively. And now it was gone.

And it was believed it was likely meant to be a prison for your friend.

Or rather, a means to utilize him- like a tool, like a fuel source. Enmis has been hoarding space on the border between South Africa and Mozambique, swaths of uninhabited snatched up quickly enough to flag even for unskilled investigators who happened to trawl political channels in the southern axis of Africa. Materials shipped in at a nauseating pace, and reports of something alien - the same something alien from Myanmar - but much larger than it’d been originally.

They didn’t just want to replicate something similar to Bob’s serum. They just wanted him.

Of course the incredulity had been immense and immediate. They’d seen at least a fraction of what Bob can do once Sentry or - god forbid - the Void comes out to play. But that had been the point hadn’t it? And while you were in no way a scientist or engineer and therefore couldn’t verify the legitimacy of the idea… an alien machine intended to balance and suppress severely unstable energies certainly sounded like the silver bullet if created strong enough.

It wasn’t something you were comfortable making any sort of bets on.

None of them were, either.

It was as simple as that, and so you were suddenly thrown into your very first field mission.

The border between South Africa and Botswana held one of many abandoned outposts that had traded hands between private interests over the decades, the British Army, then HYDRA, then the Soviets, HYDRA again, then left entirely defunct. At least that’s how it should be.

You were familiar with overlooked facilities, though.

The place had seen an uptick in activity over the last seven months, sparse enough that no flags were raised to go stomp squatters out. Since your involvement in the New Avengers that activity had more than tripled, and it was the first good option the team had.

Bob was coming along.

You had been spectator to that fight as it went down. It was Bob’s idea, his desire to participate on the mission. Other things he’d done up until that point hadn’t been without danger, but had been of a considerably lesser caliber than people aspiring to trap - as Valentina had put it - a god in a box to turn into a miniature Dyson sphere. That had immediately been met with concerned resistance, what if they already had something in store for him? What if they had something much worse than guys with bullets ready? Was he prepared for the level of violence necessary, up until this point they’d never made him actually fight so much as remove obstacles with frightening efficiency. It’d been raucous, and you’d watched as they drowned him out of a conversation about him entirely.

And you’d watched the twitch in his hands, the way he squeezed them white and then diverted that energy to the leather straps faithfully bound around his wrists. The twitch of his nose and eye.

You don’t think anyone had heard him shout that loudly before, at least- none other than Valentina.

“Stop! Just- just… Stop. You- you don’t get to decide this for me. Maybe you’re right about all of it. Everything you’ve said, but that means I should be there. I know I’m not- not good with guns or fighting yet, but I’m not a child and this is about me now. I get to have a say in whether or not I go.

I’m- I’m going.”

And that had been the end of it.

He was still in crude armor, barely personally tailored to him in that it fit but nothing beyond that. You’d mustered the courage to ask, and were told there was conflict of interest occurring in the design department for Bob’s new uniform. A proper uniform, Yelena had emphasized.

She didn’t take particularly well to the gold spandex, then.

Now, they were all crawling within the guts of the South Africa-Botswana compound, seemingly abandoned and yet only recently. People had been here, and quite a few of them for an extended period of time. Pantries had been filled and then emptied, crates of supplies brought in and the shells abandoned. Parts for vehicles - both land and flying - and an ass load of the typical detritus you find from weapon assembly, use and maintenance.

You were all on target, you were just too late.

“Well, this was fun and pointless.” John’s voice crackles through into the headphones clasped around your ears. He sounds mildly annoyed, though you suspect most of the edge was taken off just by getting out into the field to do something. He wasn’t particularly the kind of guy who favored relaxation.

“We don’t know that yet, Walker. Keep looking.” Bucky, long suffering as ever.

“What are uh- what should we be looking for?” As sweet as ever.

“Most likely any files, even scraps of paper that seem important. Information tends to be the first and most sloppily destroyed when people are in a rush.” Ava was quite familiar with that particular error, considering her upbringing. Lazily flickering grayscale cameras reveal to you the way she turns her head at him, something like a reassuring look exchanged.

None of them were opposed to Bob’s presence, but you’d noticed that Ava was quietly enthusiastic to have him on board.

In a strange way… you’d found that Ava related to him the most.

Everyone here had their fair share of suffering, their reasons for attaching to Bob and to each other. All of them were equally important, and diverse enough to pique your interest. The thing about Ava and Bob…

They were the only two on the team with powers. The rest were just… people. Very deadly, very trained, stronger and faster, more exceptional. But they were still just people. They didn’t come with the struggles of having so much extra offloaded onto their shoulders compared to the rest.

For Bob, his mental state split rogue into their own entities. For Ava, her body ripping itself apart constantly.

You think in a way, much like she enjoys him most in the quiet moments- she finds some sense of camaraderie in their shared extracurricular struggles. Or maybe hope, that if he can handle it- even with all that’s wrong with him. There might be a day she can too, without a suit clinging to her body forever.

The furthermost room in the intelligence floor of the compound terminates on a central security room for all other areas long abandoned. It doesn’t take long for them to end up there, cursory scrawls of their crude medical and research wings had been more than enough for them to know it was a fruitless search, and left them with their final option here.

It was old, gray and yet browning with rust in places. It looked like there was an attempt to clean or update, parts of panels ripped up and the guts turned out for something new- but renovation had barely gotten off the ground before they made too much fuss and drove themselves out of the region. In all, it’s the most likely to still function and therefore is the best chance at any sort of progress beyond the fact that Bob might be in some sort of danger.

Bucky, Yelena, and you are left to be in control of this sequence of events. The two of them were well trained in espionage and as the decades turned over into the technological revolution, their skillsets needed to encompass the most basic understanding of electronics and their interfaces. It was a blessed revelation, because you were certain that aside from Ava absolutely no one else had any hope of helping. In John’s case, likely to break it.

“I need the central computer turned online, please. The- the entire system will run through it and I sh-should be able to handle the rest from here. If not I’ll tell you otherwise.” An awkward beat, “…Thanks.”

Bucky began to move without fanfare, a goal was given to him and he’d complete it. And frankly, you were counting your blessings that he wasn’t reacting to you beyond acquiescing to your needs. Yelena on the other hand- she wasn’t being obstinate. But you could see the face she made as you stammered over your words, whatever unreadable expression only deepening at your frankly depressing gratitude expressed.

She wasn’t particularly enthused by you, still. And- oddly- her eyes found Bob as she proceeded for the same place Bucky was poking at buttons and flipping switches.

You bit back a cringe of pain seeing the rapid increase of boredom in John and Alexei, who were both clearly itching for something more than playing a game of telephone with them in order to slowly break open a computer and maybe download some corrupted files to pick apart. You didn’t blame them, they were warriors through and through. It didn’t ease your anxiety about getting this done as efficiently as possible and escaping their hair, though.

“Bucky. Stop just pressing buttons, you don’t know what any of these do.”

“She told us to turn it on, I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Did you think it was just going to be some random button on the face with nothing marking it?”

“Well, Lena, villains in the real world don’t typically label their stuff with things like ‘button of self doom’ and ‘the sensitive details of our evil master plan’. So I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Are you kidding me!? That’s all they do. That’s- that’s like their favorite thing. Have you seen what HYDRA used to do back in the day? They had a stamp and everything!”

The two of them are mid-sibling argument as Yelena crosses around the backside of the terminal that holds the central computer of the entire compound. You watch her squat down, fidgeting around with something the camera doesn’t quite see. You don’t need to, though. You can see when the computer gutters, then comes crawling to life with the sort of weariness only an ancient computer stubbornly refusing to die can muster.

“Yes! Thank you, that’s perfect. Exactly what I needed.” Your enthusiastic cry is matched by the harmonic sing-song that explodes up your brainstem and rockets about inside your skull. Clattering enough to almost distract as you let them dive forth with abandon. A new task, like enrichment so they don’t start tormenting you out of boredom.

What you miss, in your enthusiasm, is the look of mild surprise the New Avengers share with each other. Somewhat knocked off kilter in a not unpleasant way by the abruptly loud sincerity.

Unfortunate how it would be cut short so quickly.

You can feel them being funneled into a labyrinth, and the way they blast forth with abandon- completely undeterred, and in no way exhausted by the clearly deliberate attempts to trap them and keep them from reaching their destination. They flood like endorphins, overwhelm coding with savagery. They squeak, chirp, coo as resistance breaks down around them.

And then, you are met with hot white agony.

The power in the bunker flickers, it dims then rises to a blinding sharpness. You can hear them all shriek and even from a world away it is piercing to your ears. You yourself scream, and beyond that you vaguely hear some sort of alarm.

It doesn’t matter, as you fold in fetal and clasp your hands around your ears.

It feels as if it lasts forever, and no time at all. And then you’re left with a deafening silence only broken by your ragged breathing and the pounding in your chest.

Sweating, clammy, your eyes open. Your screens are not your own anymore, and weakly you hear them chirp among themselves with despair. When you look up, you feel very alone, and very afraid.

WE SEE YOU.

[storiumemporium]

hi!! is terminal gender neutral?

Hi there! I'm sorry but Terminal does have she/her pronouns and is referred to as the girl in the ceiling a couple of times.

Thank you!

[storiumemporium]

Terminal

Chapter 2 - How to Make Friends: For Dummies

Word Count: 10.9k | Robert "Bob" Reynolds/Reader | Chapter Tags: Secondhand Embarrassment To The Extreme, Gore, Mild Horror?, The Reader Is Just Going Thru It Yall, Meet Cute KINDA???, that's all I can think of woops |

Things go really, really bad. Things go kinda okay. And... you make a new friend, maybe..?

Air cutting over bandaged knuckles, down a rigid pale forearm. Lungs burn around timed expansion and contraction, sending hot moisture in bursts that warm the air. Bone to muscle meets sand packed in leather and vinyl, kinetic force from wrist, to elbow, to shoulder. Good form, good mark. Bad form, fractured bone.

This was bullshit.

Bandaged feet dig against a foam crash mat, muscles constrict as hips pivot one over the other. Leaving the ground, impacting hard, force meeting resistance quaking the body.

The gym is entirely empty at this early hour, vacated of all other forms of life and sublimated by some sort of hazy and ill defined quality that Yelena could mistake for dreamlike if she weren’t acutely aware of the reality her days soon faced.

When Manhattan had happened, and the consequent rebrand into an Avenger. Yelena had thought that maybe she’d finally gained some iota of control over what direction in life she was headed and what was done to or around her. That from now on, she had the means to call the shots or influence someone else’s. And for the most part that had been true, no one on the team was inclined to do things that directly violated the wishes of another when it came to this place and this work. That was why they, in spite of everything leaning to the contrary, melded so well.

Then, as always, Valentina happened.

Absolute bullshit.

Yelena put her fists behind her feelings because alcohol was an outlet she was attempting to avoid these days, and with each brutal strike exhausting her arms she fantasizes about Valentina being in place of the swinging bag in front of her. Of reducing her to a pulp and dropping her off at some shitty clinic where they’ll botch the reconstruction. She didn’t deserve less with the shit she’s pulled. On all of them, on the general public. Who was she to decide who they’d have to deal with when they go into life or death missions? Why does she think she understands what they need when she’d done nothing up to this point but be glorified PR or a threat to them?

Maybe it was a testament to her comfort in this place, or perhaps to his skill, that she is unaware Bucky is leaning against the boxing ring when she turns.

He fills up the space in his own sort of way, not anything like she’d have expected once. The Winter Soldier was a name you inevitably heard if you toiled in the world of paid violence and espionage, and Bucky Barnes was a name you heard if you were a child in the USA that paid attention during history class. She only half did, so she knew the gist. But Bucky wasn’t this eerie menace that brought a frigid gale with each step or a five degree drop with his gaze, nor was he this boisterous and charming young man who incited a desire to do better or be an upstanding citizen just because he’d smiled at you.

He was a little tired around the edges, Bucky. His smile was well worn, like aged leather or brandy in a barrel. He was… sturdy more than imposing. And Yelena knew that this was a trained image, rather than an innate one. It was the one he consciously chose to have, rather than was given to him. She liked it. It showed more of who Bucky was than he even realized, she thinks.

“What are we going to do about this, Bucky?” She foregoes greetings and knows Bucky expects nothing less, slipping around him as her fingers fetch against gauze bandages that braced her knuckles. Plucking, plucking, then snagging up on the scratchy corner and beginning to unwind with a practiced efficiency. “I don’t care that we have super traffickers or scientists mad enough to make HYDRA blush up against us, she doesn’t get to just decide who invades our team and our home—”

His touch on her shoulder is brief, light. It doesn’t presume anything more than a nicer way of getting her to stop talking.

“I don’t like it either, you know that. But I don’t know that we have much choice,” he’s squinting off into the distance as he moves up alongside her. Bucky didn’t need to adjust his stride much with over half a foot on her in height, feet overtaking hers even as he moved more slowly than he normally would. She watches his jaw work as if he’s chewing on a thought, the threads of it rattling around behind his eyes as he deliberated on whether to spit it out. “If Valentina is right about what they’re looking for, this is outside the scope of discomfort.”

A very nice way of saying, suck it up and play nice so the world doesn’t end- again.

Bucky had a lot of expertise in these sorts of changes, she knew. He’d changed so much as a man and changed the crowds he ran in just as many times. A Howling Commando where every person he worked beside was his best friend, someone he’d seen war with. Lost them, lost himself, been entirely solo for decades, found himself listlessly and poorly matching every color he’d ever tried to blend into, until finally finding himself with the New Avengers. After enough times it likely smeared together. This addition was just another adjustment and he’d take it the way he had every time before, with pinched lips and a deep sigh.

Yelena was less tempered than that.

“No! This isn’t fair, nor is it right. You’ve seen just as much as I have what’s already beginning to happen.”

She knew he had to, because Bucky paid as much attention as she did when it came to the rest of the team.

They’d regressed. Not hugely, but the differences were noticeable where one knew to look. The rest of them had begun to build up walls and crawl into themselves again, with the only noted exception being Alexei as he lived by a simplistic policy of the bigger the better. But John? Ava? Herself? Even Bob who never had anything explicitly negative to say about the decision hadn’t been acting the same, following that introduction with the girl in their ceiling.

He seemed more hesitant to say what came to mind again, his easy cadence eroded slightly by the concept of being perceived without control. And, maybe, more so the realization that Valentina was watching and that meant that his illusory distance from her was dashed against the rocks.

In all, no one was really taking it well.

Bucky didn’t try to deny it, either. “I know. But in the end, this is what we do. Right? And that doesn’t always mean playing it by what suits us. At the very least it doesn’t seem like Valentina is moving her new addition in with us, we just have to handle an uninvited extra on assignments.”

It did nothing to unburden Yelena from the anger, but he wasn’t necessarily wrong. Or at least, she didn’t think so. Even Valentina wasn’t reckless enough to try and introduce a new member to the team and force them into the shared living space that had become something south of sacred for the six of them, especially with as fragile as the peace was. But in truth, combat was just as important as the Tower. When you were out there, no matter where ‘there’ was, you needed to be able to depend on every single soul you brought with. No matter how she clashed with John like a child, Alexei’s penchant for going off script, Ava’s tendency to run solo, or Bob’s total inexperience; they had each other’s backs. There was no world in which she didn’t believe at a dire moment that they could pull together for each other.

This girl, Terminal, there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Yelena had found maybe a handful of documents, they started at most three years back, and they were sparse in what they offered. The most clear information provided was that Valentina had been the one to find her, rather than vice versa. Beyond that? Her name dropped into a few post-assignment reports where she’d done a little more than bare minimum to help, offhand mentioned by other units as a possible avenue to circumvent research needed to be done…

It was the kind of sparse that meant this person either only just came into existence a few years ago, or did ample work to disappear entirely. It wasn’t that Yelena didn’t understand the need, her entire team is laced with bad decisions and deep regrets- but Valentina had something to do with this. Which meant there was no reason for Yelena to believe the sincerity of what was being played at.

She didn’t buy it in the least.

“There has to be another angle,” she knew she sounded obstinate. Unwilling to entirely relent to Bucky’s practicality on the matter. But this- this was important, she wouldn’t allow it to be rendered into something unimportant when it was the first purely good thing they’d all had in quite some time. “I don’t trust it, any of it.”

“Then don’t,” pragmatic and blunt. He didn’t sound judgmental, even frustrated as he turned and made sure Yelena met his eye. “I’m not asking you to discount yourself, I won’t even say you’re wrong. Keep an eye out, watch the way things play, see if you can catch Terminal out on whatever she might doing.

Just… we have to play along regardless.”

She would have with or without Bucky, but the affirmation that this wasn’t dividing them against each other - admittedly - made Yelena’s spirit feel the tiniest bit lighter.

Truly, if you had a gun right now you’d probably put it in your mouth and just pull the trigger. Not even quitting this assignment would be able to recover the damage done to your mind at this point. It simply couldn’t be going worse.

The first two days were utterly frigid. They didn’t acknowledge you even as you were brought into the fold to begin work on Enmis, treating you like a ghost or some sort of afterthought that occasionally buzzed it’s way back into their minds. The only time they really did want to address you was to use you the way they did the AI attached to the Tower.

Basically, you were Google.

And honestly, you’d already found that incredibly painful to deal with. Not necessarily that their dislike or their impersonality was hurtful in some immense way- but that it was a steady low frequency of embarrassment bordering on humiliation to be forced to seventh wheel a group of misfit heroes. At least in the prior jobs that you’d done, when you were forced briefly to cooperate with others they’d acknowledged you and been thankful for what you did. This group didn’t seem inclined to even try, easier to handle it themselves without your addition.

And the thing is, you couldn’t even blame them.

If you didn’t simply back your way out of the situation as quickly as possible to avoid stepping on toes, then it was because Valentina was there. Always there. She acted like the worlds strongest anti-acquaintance barrier you’d ever seen, her utter incapability to let a comment go without some harsh retort, or to snap at you like a dog to do whatever errand she needed. It just couldn’t look good, their opinion of you likely whittled down further with every passing minute.

You didn’t know how you were going to do it, and what occurred a matter of days ago was truly just- just the most lovely cherry on top of this shitcake you’d been served.

You accidentally ousted yourself as having been their creepy fucking peeping tom in the corner.

It was just a reflex, you were already in the overhead with them - though they weren’t particularly addressing you - as they milled about in the communal center of the Tower. This place was casual enough to discuss Enmis, what few leads were had and where they might want to investigate, or have you investigate first. But it also connected directly to one of the overzealously numbered kitchens in the entire building, a place that up until that point they hadn’t known you’d been watching for weeks. So when Bob went looking for misplaced nutmeg, eagerness to be useful for once had thoroughly stomped on your rationale. Directing him accurately to the top left cabinet.

The silence… you weren’t going to forget it.

Even Alexei who had been at that point the most consistently accepting of your presence, even approving, had twisted his brows down with an unpleasant curl of his mouth to match.

“And how is it… that you knew that..?” Yelena, scathing, her eyes had picked just one off any of the cameras in the building, and that cloister of feeling in your nape had the screens filtering with obedience so that you could look at her with the same level of shame as she was looking at you with disdain.

“I- …I-”

“Unbelievable, Valentina has been spying on us then, hasn’t she? That’s why you’re here? Her little pet to see what we’re doing at all times.” A finger had been pointed accusingly, and you’d attempted to sputter out defenses that meant nothing to their ears. Instead curving into a casual onslaught of Russian you were suddenly thankful you had zero fluency in, for the open disdain in which it was spoken left little to the imagination regardless.

“Some sneak you are, hm? Can’t even last the week before fucking it all up. Valentina! Next time, pick someone who knows what they’re doing if you’re going to try to spy on spies.”

The deafening quiet had remained, not long after everyone had lost reason to stay and promptly vacated the room, and somehow worse than being caught out on your sheer stupidity was the shame of driving them from somewhere they felt comfortable in.

There wasn’t much worse in the world to you, than depriving someone of their space.

Valentina, of course, had followed up that night to absolutely chew you to pieces on the matter. Useless, incompetent, pathetic, worthless. She’d spewed on and on in that tone that was utterly degrading and somehow never particularly angry, like you weren’t even worth that amount of emotion out of her. In that corporate tirade, you’d cut your mic and allowed yourself to cry- hiccupping and blotchy with a level of humiliation you hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

Even following that: once she’d cut the call without awaiting your response, you’d slunk your way through the bunker into your bedroom like you were afraid of being seen even all the way down here. In it you’d crawled, curling fetal at the very center and let all manner of ugliness spew out. Staining your sheets and sleeves as you wished above all else that the cotton fiber would split open and let you pass unobstructed into it, that white strands would digest you into a reverie so deep that only bones would be found some day in the far future. Even they quailed inside of you, their noises at your nape turned mournful and scratchy.

What use were you, really?

Why couldn’t you just be left alone?

It was for this reason that you didn’t return for several days, you assumed that maybe Valentina would find someone more competent for the task to replace you. Maybe she’d even drop you and let you finally rot in piece in the tomb you chose, and no longer have to suffer the endless agonies of the one thing you didn’t want to do. Talk to people, or let them realize that you exist.

Instead, you’d been given five days until she was calling on you.

“Where have you been?” She had the audacity to sound annoyed with you, that you’d somehow slighted her again in your absence. It baffled you to the point of absurdity, leaving you only able to respond completely sincerely.

“I… I just didn’t think you wanted me anymore..?” You could hear the mystification in your own voice, watching the gain wheel jump as it picked out your voice into your microphone. Green to yellow to green as you emphasized your tone in places. “I just… I fucked it all up, so I’m done, right?”

“Ohhh no no, you don’t get out of this that easily. What you get to do is get back in there, fix this and get me results on Enmis. None of us needs another Robert Reynolds in the world, or anything close to it.”

You didn’t particularly enjoy the way she spoke about a human being, but swallowed that for the mirror later.

“I don’t… I don’t know how…”

Even without being able to see her, the pause was enough for you to know she was battling some sort of reaction or expression.

“It’s not my problem to figure out how to fix it for you. Apologize? Grovel if you have to! Buy them all gift baskets! Think of something. Now, I’m sending more information to you and to them. Join. That’s an order.”

You were left with the static hum of fluorescents and screens and towers. Buzzing around in a way that made your head throb angrily. You were frustrated, and lost, and being set up for further humiliation. How do you apologize for being a freak? How do you fix the fact that nobody wants you around? You don’t. You take the loss and you walk away, or at least you should if you had any amount of self preservation. But Valentina doesn’t care about things like that, you could grind yourself into sand and she’d only be disappointed if no high quality glass came of it.

So instead, they flick the screens over to the Tower… and you do the one thing you aren’t supposed to be.

You watch.

They look peaceful, like this. They seemed to have unwound since your absence, you were sure of it. Yelena and Ava you find on the monitor to your far left, Yelena’s feet have been tucked under her, while Ava is sat cross-legged. Between the two are a number of different card games, and the pixels twitch slightly as the colors across their faces and the couch periodically change to reflect whatever they were watching at this point. You can see Ava say something, and the moment where Yelena’s face lights up. The recognition of the comment, and the rewarding laugh. Ava just grins back, but you can see in the faint pinch around her eyes that she’s more pleased by this than she lets on.

Alexei you cannot find, and presume he must be in his room at this point. It was the one place you’d refused to invade, much like your odd compulsion against peoples’ indoor cameras. You didn’t lack the curiosity, but whatever tatters of moral conviction kept you at bay. That was a place for them and them alone. Even if… realistically, this was all for them and no less a violation.

Bucky and John are sparring, and by the looks of it it might be teetering something towards more friendly than hostile this time. Though they aren’t pulling punches - even with the audio cut you can see the way their bodies shudder and jolt under each impact - there’s a sort of brevity when they back off from each other. Sorting each other out before colliding once more at the center. John has a lot of brute force behind his movements, and you can see years of military service carved into his shoulders and arms, legs- even in the stockier shape of his torso. Bucky isn’t far off, but he doesn’t move like a military man. He’s almost never on the heels of his feet, sticking to the pads as he nearly glides around his opponent. It’s an odd dichotomy, that he moves in sharp and aggressive bursts at the upper half, but he almost has the lower body control of a ballerina.

For a moment you struggle to find the final element of this chemical slurry you’ve been forcefully injected into, eyes scrolling listlessly over dozens of screens until something mite and sticky electric tingles just beneath your right ear- this way- and your eyes dart to row four, column five. Bob.

He’s outside.

Or rather, he’s in the private garden on the roof.

You’d found him here a few times during your bouts of watching. He did the least of anyone and yet was the most captivating for you, all at once. A strange contradiction you found yourself unwilling to decipher in case you disliked what you found in it.

He’s sitting with one leg pulled in and the other stretched, resting in the grass with his back against a newly supplanted tree. From what you can tell, his eyes are closed, the wind pushing against his clothes and curled hair. He looks at peace like this, enjoying the space and the feeling of sky and weather without dealing with the people or possibly even the noise that often inhabited it as well. You wonder if that’s why color came back to his skin, since those photos and videos from the year prior? An uninhabited little corner of world for him to experience the outside with, and zero shame or mental toll to come with it. The only people who would ever bother him are the ones he’d want bothering him. You can see his throat bob as he swallows, shifting to sink that little bit lower into his contentment.

You switch away, leaving the Tower entirely.

It wasn’t your place to be, and you didn’t belong.

Two days later and you tune in again, and you watch them again like they’ve become some weird obsession.

They’re having a movie night, you think. Snacks are laid out, pillows and blankets strewn freely. Yelena is resting against Alexei, Bucky and John have taken the furthest corners of the couch with their legs stretched out. Ava is on the floor. Bob is in his recliner - one no one else uses and seems to be dedicated solely to him. One which cost enough that your stomach did ugly things when you finally got around to figuring out where it was from.

They’re laughing, smiling. Bob seems happy to watch them, his face a little flushed and rosy. He’s got a sandwich on the table, some sort of orange soda fizzing away.

You watch a few moments longer, and once again switch away. The bunker is dark, and very empty. Your back to nothing, and no one.

It’s another several days of this, before things start to move for you. Or maybe without you?

You watch them, you try to parse out how to talk to them, Valentina has her assistant send increasingly more distressed emails urging you to do something, and you stir about in your shame and your misery at how terribly suited for this you are. That speaking and being were just not your forte. You fiddle about on the internet, invest in retail therapy, pace around the entire bunker enough times that you end up kicking a wall and jamming your pinkie toe, retire to your chair because walking no longer seemed fun.

You’re browsing around on the internet, swapping nauseatingly fast between platforms to see what the goings-on of aquarium owners, birders, tailors and crocheters and knitters, cat owners, reptile keepers and the like were doing at this moment in time. It was the thing that occupied you best, peeking into other lives as they willingly divulged them- and sometimes getting into overly heated debates about whether or not that cry was a warbler until three in the morning.

It’s what you have to do for the evening, too paralyzed by the fact that this is work hours for you to indulge in anything more recreational. Odd, considering your job was to sit there uselessly anyways.

Theretheretherelookthereit’stherethey’retherelooklookingaskinglook—

They’re more active, restless, and it makes your head throb with the warning signs of a potential migraine if you don’t abate them well enough today. You know why they get this way, it doesn’t make it easier to handle when they do. So instead you let them take the reigns, thrown forward into flipping switches and pressing keys until—

“Yo!” The voice crackles through sharp enough to startle you in your seat. The sliding joints thunking quietly when you don’t put enough force in to adjust it to reclining mode, just pushing it until the bones meet. “Uh- what’s your name- what’s her name- computer chick!”

Cutting over the raucous voice of one John Walker, Ava: “It’s Terminal, dumbass. Are you there?”

You gape for a moment, feeling like a hook should be in your lip. Then you remember you have to answer for them to know, and slap the mic live.

“H-Hello? Yes. I’m here.”

“Oh, good. We need your help-” your heart shrinks just that little more at the groan that sounds in the background, a murmuration like some of them were hoping that you truly were gone. That felt a little bit mean. “-for real this time. And not whatever shit Valentina sent you for.

You actually know your way around computers, right?”

Indignancy rises, and is quelled just as fast by the recognition that you’ve done nothing to earn their trust thus far. Just been ousted as a freak on Valentina’s payroll.

“Yes Miss Starr, nothing that was said about me or why I’m here is a lie—” your chin trembles as you work your mouth, seeing the casual disbelief tossed out there the moment you tried to defend yourself.

“—I would be happy to help, what did you need?” They’re in the background, but speaking softly enough that the mics aren’t entirely picking it up. Just hisses of almost vowels.

“Ava, first of all… Unfortunately Enmis seems to actually be ****something, so we’ve still been looking. We think we might have a hit, but the kind of information we need is above our paygrade and our location. Valentina told us that you’re something like a global database, wherever you are. So, think you can break into a facility in Myanmar?”

You practically surge with a potential victory on your breath. They’re giving you a chance to do something, finally. You might, just might have the slightest chance of getting your foot in the door if you don’t catastrophically fuck this up.

“Yes! Uhm- yes. Yes, I can do that. What information do you have already? Otherwise I’ll need to start searching databases and that might take time on account of not knowing—”

“We’re sending it,” comes Yelena, whose voice is not strained but certainly dull and clipped. Whatever happened just before being called here, it seems Yelena was against the decision. Fair enough. “It should give you a general area, and an idea of what they were poking around in when we were flagged for it. We need you to figure out locations, objectives, if it’s worth it for us to touch down there and raid.”

You knew the implications of that. It needed to be big, because if it wasn’t then they’d just be showing their hand with nothing to pay them back for it. Jumping the shark, as it were.

“Okay, leave it to me.” Your stomach and heart are now the ones crocheting together. They feel like they’ve been hard tacked to your intestines. “I promise, I’ll have it to you soon.

And- and I’m sorry about the things that happened before- the uh-”

The thought went nowhere, their faces closing off into patterns of annoyance or coldness. Still, fair enough. Though that one stung just the tiniest bit more.

“We’re not looking to be friends,” comes John again, trying hard to sound tougher than he is. “We just want help getting this job done, then we go our separate ways.”

“…I understand… I’ll do my best.”

You don’t feel much like saying anything else, and they don’t much mind. So contact is cut as you rapidly pull up a dozen different browsers on a dozen different screens to begin the dive.

You don’t notice the solemn look on Bob’s face as the screen he occupied vanishes, replaced with CCTV footage.

Two weeks are spent on this, giving regular updates to your team.

While it’s true that Myanmar appears to be the base of operations, they’ve been passing between Thailand and Laos regularly. Everything you’ve checked indicates that they’re hauling large quantities of some unknown substance along the way, tens of thousands of gallons of it, at that. Flight logs, movement patterns, certificates, and rentals are flooded to their tablets alongside seemingly relevant snippets of conversation over military, police, and local radio stations. It’d made you vomit more than once, migraines that led to nosebleeds and painfully ringing ears, but you managed to digest enough information to learn the gist of Burmese, Thai and Lao- and the word Enmis stood out plainly. You’d seen their bafflement over it, but it was just as they said.

Just a job, right? Doesn’t matter how you’re doing it.

You’re blinking blearily at the your ocean of screens in the dark, each with their segmented priority playing out at you. Some are still relaying footage in the areas you most frequently see what you believe to be their convoys pass through, others are reading off border registry. In your hand is a mug of instant hot chocolate, snug as you are under your blanket and trying your best not to be caught by sleep.

In the meantime, a letter goes out to Valentina. They’re talking to you - somewhat. You’re helping them - kind of.

It’s a half step to progress, you just hope that it counts well enough. This is what you were brought onto this team to do, right? You’re helping.

Enough tasks have been delegated to you that instead of murmuring and unrest, you’ve been given a pleasant lull to sink into. They almost purr with content, their trillions of little sparkles reduced down to something like stars instead of the flashes of cameras or muzzle fire. All of them churn over each other, the interaction slithering up and along your brain placidly. You don’t hurt tonight, and that’s a relief.

Sipping at the chocolate, your hands curl into the warmth and you begin to trawl your eyes over screens. Something about a local festival is beginning to kick up around the area Enmis were last spotted, and you don’t need super genius to assume that they’ll likely capitalize on the movement to exploit vulnerabilities for personal gain. You know realistically it’d be smart to inform your team of this and let them proceed how they like, but there’s this odd slither down your spine, chilly between your shoulder-blades that sing songs at you to stay and observe. You just might accrue something more valuable from inaction, in this scenario.

Still, that’s a matter of days out, so instead you people watch.

All those bodies passing through, short and tall, wiry and plump. Most look absent of much thought beyond their next task that day. Some are visibly annoyed, many smiling and laughing- whether it’s with someone on the phone, or the person next to them.

It’s strange to see all those colors and lives playing out on a screen. They don’t know they’re being seen by an extra interloper, nor do you think they particularly care. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a tiny snapshot in an entire life. Some of these people have been alive several times longer than you, you or your parents. They knew the world before your infinitesimally miniscule intrusion upon it, and there’s no guarantee they won’t live to see the world after you leave it. A few incredibly young and bundled into adoring arms, faces blank and wondering, are near guaranteed to know what that world is like.

Another gulp, a little bigger and it burns on the way down. The cup sets gently against laminate, and you continue to watch that screen with all those little passing faces until your eyes grow dry and your capacity for consciousness entirely depletes.

The festival arrives, and your suspicions are confirmed.

All the CCTV around the city provides you with ample angles with which to watch the world vacate, droves of people going to enjoy their impromptu holiday and the rest electing to remain at home. Streets were more sparse than usual, and it left you with an uncanny image to mull on.

You didn’t particularly enjoy existing, or - at least not in the vicinity of others. But in the same breath, you didn’t like other people not existing. It was more that you were diametrically opposed to the existence of society, not in mind but in body. A virus pushed out by the white blood cell of social etiquette and cultural consciousness. It’s why you observed, really. It was the only way you could learn how to be like that, like people are.

This was without reference, barely even signs of life. All the fingerprints that humanity existed here and yet none of the little creatures you wanted to be just like. Quiet, and still.

It takes a few hours, the time inching over to four in the morning in Manhattan when things finally begin to move in ways that actually mean something.

Initially the sight of cars passing by wouldn’t invoke any sort of notice, you’ve got your eyes on all the major highways through the city and people pass by constantly. But the normalcy of it has been interrupted by volume and the unnatural timing of it, they’re consecutive as if marching and almost entirely all the same color.

It was a convoy, but larger than you’d seen up until that point, and moving in all different directions.

They writhe about in your nape, excited and chattering as you sit up, and all monitors blink away from their assigned individual and group tasks to focus on this. The big moment you’ve been waiting for, what were they doing?

In all, it takes a complete total of twenty-five minutes nearly on the dot.

Five locations are targeted, two are labs, one is a hospital, a military post, and the major grid for over half of the entire city. The outpost goes first while also taking you the longest to get into, their somewhat rudimentary defense is paired by abysmal camera placement, swatting at your nerve endings annoyingly- and then you watch it all, given the live front row view as a steel door crumples like paper.

You still collect the footage from the other locations, because it’s important to know what they want out of labs and hospitals and a power grid of all things- but you don’t watch it. Because you don’t really need to.

The CCTV footage flickers and buzzes- desaturated as a heavily armored vehicle rams through the wall of one of the barracks on site, clouds of dust and bricks spray across and the tiled floor cracks under thousands of pounds of rubber and metal. You can see the structural integrity of the building wane, the wall slouching and the ceiling bowing down. The ceiling lights fall further into view of the camera now off kilter, the wiring come loose under force and now swinging uneasily from side to side while it’s motion is jittered by further rumbles. Shouting, indistinct and grainy, presses through your speakers and grows louder as the people they belong to draw closer. Then the back doors slam open and gunfire follows. But it does little to deter the thing that comes out.

Between each blinding flash that whites out the lens and your CRT as a result, a close interpretation of a human is seen.

It’s warped, whatever it is. This mass of overdeveloped flesh bound by skin colored like a bruise, it’s ears are small and knotted, eyes beady and sunken, but it’s teeth are massive and you can see holes in the cheeks where it’d cut through the soft skin and fat. It’s arms look grotesquely swollen, the arteries filled to bursting and the joints of it’s fingers bending too far as it dives forward, between one flicker and the next there’s new red painting the collapsing hall. And then it’s climbing the stairwell.

The thing you note, is that it is injured- and doesn’t seem to care.

You can’t really make out what shade it is, with how dark it is and how poor the cameras are, but something is sluggishly beginning to mat down the tatters of the civilian clothes this thing is wearing. It presses on, blind and ravenous and seeking the next moving object to destroy- a rolling cart gets caught in the crossfire of it’s motion aggression, and then it descends on an entire group of young soldiers whose faces are crested with legitimate terror before ending. Sharply, violently, and quickly.

Still, that blood-approximate moves more like molasses as it begins to drop onto the ground, holding shape for a moment before pooling like a liquid should between the grout. And on it goes, hateful and destroying everything.

You’re cold all over, and captivated by it’s graceless barbarity when one of them tugs at you to look away- look away and see something else. Something important enough to not bear witness to the absolute destruction of many.

On the opposite end of the site, a group of what appear to be entirely ordinary citizens are flanked by rows of men clad head to toe in armor and lined to the teeth with weapons. They seem impassive, utterly bored by the goings-on a thousand yards away. None of them look like they’re native to the area, either. Two of which you are almost entirely certain you know the identity of, considering what you’re hearing happen elsewhere in the outpost.

Doyenko and Haikali.

The man you assume to be Doyenko has taken on more practical attire for the occasion. The man looks like a sheet of paper against the tropical climate of Myanmar, with an olive colored kevlar vest sat overtop his expensive looking white button up, a pistol strapped to his thigh over his slacks and a knife in one of his boots. His hands and wrist adorned in a watch and rings, lifting it to light a cigarette hanging from his mouth. You can’t hear it but he’s speaking, your ears are still ringing with the sound of gunfire, of people screaming for their lives, an ungodly inhuman shriek drowning them out.

Haikali surprises you entirely. You suppose that when you heard mad scientist your mind made the easy leap to white lab coat and weaselly, palpably insane demeanor. But Haikali is distinctly absent of any armor and clad head to toe in aubergine and coal and gold. Necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings. His hair is done in thick, black locs decorated by jewel encrusted golden beads. Gold rimmed glasses, painted nails, even what looked to be color on his lips. The man was lavish by all intents and purposes, and carried himself like he knew it.

You can see his head turn, the blinding smile as he replies.

A godawful crunch, pitiful gurgling is all that makes it to your ears.

They aren’t particularly happy to be woken up.

You’d been too flustered and disturbed by what you saw to keep it to yourself until a more reasonable hour of the day arrived- so that at four forty-eight in the morning you had the entire half dazed and deeply groggy New Avengers nestled around their coffee table ready to look at whatever it is you had in store for them.

“I uh- I’m sorry to have woken all of you up, but this can’t wait.”

And then you dive into a brief recount of your suspicions regarding the opening the festival had provided Enmis, your decision to not say anything and keep watch. And the unprecedented series of events that had followed.

Showing them the footage, the screams, and the men you believed to be Doyenko and Hakali had thoroughly sapped all sense of exhaustion from their bones. Their posture rigid and their eyes alert and disturbed. You knew it was one thing to see violence of any sort, because that was par for the course in their careers. But this…

“…What the hell was that thing..?” Ava is the one to break the silence first, speaking what came to mind for the rest of the group.

They’d all seen their fair share of atrocities and horrors, they’d seen crazier and scarier things than just superpowered people (Bucky above all else, with hordes of alien creatures descending like locusts on Wakanda) but this was… Disturbing. The blurred eyes of that thing as it’d stared into one of the cameras remains burnt into their minds. The way it dove off walls and even the ceiling, goring soldiers on the ends of it’s elongated and too flexible digits. The sight of it being progressively further and further torn to pieces by bullets and yet refusing to stop. As if numb or unregistering of the damage and pain being done to it. Even as metal shredded across it’s skull, took it’s eye, shattered teeth-

Only once that viscous fluid that comprised it’s blood finally stopped pouring, did it drop. Unceremonious, without retaliation or fear or anger. Crumpling to the dirt and gurgling something awful as it twitched, spasmed, then ceased altogether.

“What we are going against,” was Alexei’s reply. He sounded almost grim, unwilling to look away from the still shots displayed for them. “We were told this was serious, Valentina did not lie.”

There was a moment you had, as you watched this thing bite through the barrel of a gun where you wondered, if they have this why would they need anything near the serum Bob had been given? This could destroy a country, easily.

And then, that thought brewing like coffee and coming out darker and ever more bitter with consideration. What could they create with the serum that had made him?

Bob was lucky out of the lineup that had been given his serum, the only one who had survived. And from it - a highly clinical, very sterile serum made by people with interest in little else other than steady employment and money - came a three-headed pseudo-deity that could submerge the entire world into whatever mind game he so desired just based upon his mental state at the time. If that was what had come from this, then what could a man who made the bloated, gnarled cadaver on the screen do with it?

Bob seemed to have had the same thought, if the way he was curled on a ball on the couch unspeaking and unmoving were anything to go by. He seemed a little frightened, even if it didn’t have anything directly to do with him.

“I’ve patched through every bit of information I gained from the event, and though I’d recommend getting samples off that creature it’s- a bit above my means to send in assets to grab material,” you threaded your fingers together, nodding to yourself as you spoke. “But I have reason to believe that whatever they’re trying to do involves a great deal of power, as they stole something out of the grid that wasn’t named on any official documents.

They’re gearing up for something large, but I don’t know what. I’m sorry that’s all I could glean from this.”

“Good job.”

What?

A laugh, shit- did you say that out loud? “I said, good job.”

It was Bucky, his face a little tight still. He didn’t seem to be in great spirits, though not necessarily dragged down by what you had all witnessed either. It was that sort of resignation before a fight you knew was going to get ugly, like he’d begun to steel himself for the rollercoaster that they were approaching at speed.

“Th- Thank you. I appreciate that. A lot.” And with that you squeezed your eyes shut, only mildly embarrassed by the emphasis on the end. If Bucky had found it strange, he didn’t find any reason to comment. Instead standing from his position on the couch. The other’s leaned back to watch, brows lifted.

“We now know the size of the threat- which is frankly larger than any of us had anticipated,” Bucky sounded almost a little embarrassed by the admission. “Valentina did a poor job of conveying the scale of the situation…”

There was a beat, a thought crossing through his mind- you had no idea what. His mouth opened, then closed again, his eyes darting to the camera mounted above the tv, functionally making eye contact with you.

“Keep up the good work, we’re counting on you. For now we need to be prepared for whatever comes our way, because we still don’t really know what that is. The advantage on our side being that Enmis doesn’t know we’re watching or that we’re a problem in their future, so countermeasures shouldn’t be in place.”

Following that, Bucky had promptly begun to move toward the bar. You saw a deeply overfilled glass of whiskey in his extremely near future.

The rest for their part had stalled longer than Bucky on the information, still looking at the screen and then between each other. Eventually sitting up to nudge against each other, some either beginning to murmur about potential plans or what threats they needed to think of- ways to counteract a monstrous human that doesn’t feel pain. The others bitched about being awake, and were already beginning to move back to their floors to rest for the few remaining hours before sunlight rudely came knocking at full force.

Bob didn’t move from the spot, not until long after the others had slithered away. And even then, he crossed the world the way a ghost would. Silent, and disinclined to have a recognizable presence.

Another week passes almost uneventfully.

More so, the events that did happen utterly paled in comparison to the explosive intro you’d been rocketed through. There’d been more movements, and then Enmis had simply vanished. Myanmar, Thailand, Laos— gone. They barely even left traces. The New Avengers hadn’t yet decided to try and put feet to soil to confront them, and no one had anticipated that by the time a conclusion would have been made, they’d already be gone to the wind.

It’d left you, Valentina, and the others in a scramble trying to pick up some sort of tracks that could hint to their whereabouts. But it was like they’d never existed at all, something that further unsettled Bucky and Yelena as the two with the most experience in the act of vanishing.

So, Valentina cast the widest net she possibly could, and you sorted through it like one of those little filter shrimp. Discarding and keeping pieces almost as quickly as she brought them to you.

And while you did that, you went back to watching.

It wasn’t as aggressive as before. You were starting to develop… non-animus amongst these people you would be working with for an unknown amount of time, and as a result you were disinclined to ruin that by being a total freak yet again. Instead you had arbitrarily limited yourself to a handful of areas, the outside gardens, the rooms you’d already been heard inside of, as well as the lobby and exterior cameras. You left things like personal floors, the gym, even the area that they most often congregated to them— a pseudo peace offering and an absolute apology.

Weirdly enough… it was kind of working?

They were still tense around the edges with you, things were cordial. You weren’t given friendly comments and remarks, you weren’t in on the jokes- nor did you feel comfortable trying to be. But you’d noticed that the abrasion and the need to look over their shoulder had almost entirely vanished. You didn’t know if it was a subconscious thing, or if they’d realized you had permanently vacated a majority of the Tower and kept yourself contained.

Regardless, you were talking to them. That was a victory you’d gladly take.

Tonight you’re looking out into the garden again, it was interesting to see the little slivers of the city the camera offered with it’s million and one glittering lights. The grass and the trees well maintained in spite of absurd altitude and the concrete that they were incased atop of. It was a nice view, not just a nice enough one… and it made you feel a little less lonely somehow.

Something exacerbated when the glass door hisses open, and Bob steps out into the grass.

He looks cozy, done up in his layers of incredibly baggy pajamas and no shoes or socks, allowing the blades of grass to curl around his bare feet. His hair is more messy, like he’d been toying with it a great deal, and though his eyes are tired, he looks content.

He’s quick to find his chosen spot, the same one you’d found him in before those weeks prior and you assume has been to many times since. His back to the wood while he stretches himself out and lets his eyes fall closed. It’s windier today, and where most would be ducking their heads and trying to use something to buffet the annoyance as they get around- Bob seems to bask in the sensation. His hair, already mussed, becoming frizzier and more undefined as threads of the gale cut through it.

It’s nice to watch, he’s nice to watch. It wasn’t like the others who were always either loud or busy- something on the agenda, someone to talk to. Bob had a sort of stillness around him, a tendency to exist in the moment and not obligated to action. It was this, or cooking himself something, or reading a book. Sometimes it was just finding him curled up in front of one of the massive bay windows, watching the rain blanket Manhattan with it’s sodden fingers.

It goes on like this for a little bit, maybe five… ten minutes? Your attention dissolved from all other things just to look at the same skyline as him, to appreciate the silhouette of him in the comfort of his element. It was like your own organic little break time, instead of just deciding you wanted to stop for a moment to wander without cause around the bunker.

And then, you see it-

A subtle twitch of his brow, the way he scratches the back of his neck and scrunches his nose for a second. Then attempts to return to stasis, only that-

“Hello?” His voice breaks through your speakers, wobbly with uncertainty and yet still so sudden that you bounce aggressively in your seat. The movement is met by a lyrical chorus of ‘oooh-’ sliding down the back of your head, before returning to silence.

His eyes flutter open, and then he’s looking dead at the camera, at you.

“Are— …are you there?”

Once more you feel caught out - starting to get annoyed by that particular feeling - and remember after a beat that he can’t actually see or hear you if you don’t respond. And besides, you’re trying not to be a creep anymore.

Your microphone clicks live, and you stammer immediately upon opening your fat mouth, “Hi- hi, um… Yeah, sorry. I didn’t- I was just enjoying the view.”

You wait for it, the reprimand, the disdain that the others held when you fumbled over an interaction or did something off-putting that warranted a side eye.

Instead, you see a little curl of his mouth before he looks away.

“You think it’s nice out here, too? I like the- the city. I get overwhelmed when I’m actually down there but… up here’s… s’nice.”

He’s holding conversation with you.

He’s talking to you. And it sounds natural, and he doesn’t seem upset by it, and-

“Yeah… Yeah! It’s beautiful. Sometimes when I’m parsing through reports I just like to flick over here to look at the city while I go. Most other footage is closer to the street, still nice but more for- for people watching…”

Embarrassment blooms in your chest as you taper off your sentence. You’d barely been talking but maybe it was too much? And maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned that you like to watch people? It was mortifyingly relevant to what you’d been caught out doing before, and you wouldn’t be surprised if it reminded him of that.

“Other footage?” His voice has remained soft, and you think he might be utterly oblivious to your internal panic. You hope so. “Do you watch other places than just the Tower? I guess that makes sense, but—”

God, him mentioning that made you want to bite your own fingers off, maybe your tongue.

“Yeah… I uh- I promise I’m not just some creep staring at you guys all the time,” you say with a timid laugh. You feel cowed and maybe even a tiny bit ashamed of yourself. Once again confronted with the image you presented to them, the abysmal introduction thus far. “I’m sorry about that, by the way…

I know I come off- god I must come off so fucking weird but it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t stalking- or- or spying! I just…”

And then you cut off, defeated, sighing. What do you even say? How do you explain in a way that isn’t somehow fundamentally disturbing or deterring for the one person who has bothered to acknowledge you of their own volition? Who is striking up conversation in the middle of the night, out with the earthborn stars and grass and life?

But Bob is staring off into a direction now, his head tilted consideringly. His hands working into his pants subconsciously as he processes your words, considers what you aren’t saying and what you’re trying to say to him.

“I don’t think you’re weird.”

“Really?”

“…Yeah. I mean— don’t get me wrong, I have no idea how you thought that was a good idea,” he laughs softly, more just an amused expulsion of breath with this wry little smile. It manages to not feel like it was at your expense, and you hum in return. “But I- I mean. I can’t really judge… I’ve done some uh… some pretty weird things too, and these guys seem to like me anyways.”

“I was just nervous.” You blurt it out blindly. The notion of forgiveness or understanding has you immediately diving off the deep end, ready to vomit your entire heart out just for someone to be on your side for once. Or at least, not think ill of you. “I um… I’m not good with people. It’s why I don’t understand Miss— I don’t understand Valentina deciding to do this. All my work before was solo, or with maybe two people talking to me? Quiet things, very background.”

Where you belonged.

“She didn’t give me much preparation for this, just told me this was where I was going and when I was going there. Everything else was on my own terms and I— I’ve never really done this sort of thing before so I tried to figure out how to handle it? And like, I went all over advice forums and those stupid therapy websites and things like that but none of it seemed tangible for what I was about to do, so…

So I tried to study, so to speak.”

You can see even through the distant footage of his face, the less than stellar quality the way some sort of comprehension drapes it’s arm over his shoulder. He almost seems to light up as you speak, like he’s following a mystery novel and finally getting the conclusion.

“Oh! Oh… Okay. Yeah I- I think I get it now. You thought that if you watched what we were doing, it’d be easier to get along with us, right?”

Face finding it’s way to your hands, you thank every god that genuinely may or may not exist out there that he can’t see you. You’re so deeply red, so humiliated and so relieved, and it’s a fight to keep the thickness out of your throat. You don’t want to cry immediately like this, don’t want to ruin the moment so quickly.

“Yeah… That’s exactly it. That’s all. I know that doesn’t justify breaking into your home and- and watching you live without realizing I’m there but… I just-

This is all really scary to me? And it’s the only idea I had. It blew up in my face, obviously. But…”

But thank you, for understanding.

He didn’t need to hear you say it, you could see the way he nodded. Not aggressive, but with his brows lifted slightly and something close to a smile on his face.

“Yeah that was a terrible idea,” and you can’t help but interrupt him by groaning, his voice growing louder and his smile more prominent as he continued over the sounds of your anguish. “I mean literally all of us have insane trust issues, half of us are assassins or spies. You really couldn’t have picked a worse way of going about it. I think Yelena would have preferred if you were just weird.”

“Thanks, thank you. That’s incredibly useful information now. After the fact. So unbelievably far after the fact.”

And then he’s laughing, and you’re giggling at yourself. And you watch him shrug a shoulder loosely, his gaze turning back out to the city and away from the security camera that makes up your eye.

“I get it, though. And- if it makes you feel better? I put everyone in Manhattan in their personal mental torture chambers and they forgave me. So… Give it time, and I think they’ll come around.”

“I… don’t know that that matters, really.” And you pick at your nails, unwilling to look at the screen as you tell him the truth. “I don’t think Valentina is intending to keep me around, and John made it clear he wants me out the moment Enmis is dealt with.

So uh… This might be the first and only pleasant interaction I get before none of us sees each other again.”

It goes quiet long enough for you to look up, to see him staring into the lens and at you. You don’t know what he’s looking at, or what he’s seeing. There’s miles of difference, mountains of dirt and stone and concrete and metal dividing the two of you- and yet you feel somehow very exposed under that gaze.

“You think this is a pleasant interaction?”

“I mean… Yeah..? Was I- Am I misreading—?”

“No… But uh- do you want it to be the last one?”

“…No.” The admission is a small shock even to yourself. “It’s been kinda lonely, if I’m honest. So this is… this is nice.”

And once again Bob returns to silence, droning on for several moments as he listens to the breeze and watches traffic inch through Manhattan. From up here you can’t really hear anything- and certainly not through the subpar microphones, but there’s a sort of disconnect that comes with the intersection of total quiet in the heart of a megacity.

It’s all magnified by the man you watch, by that stillness you’d taken note of before. Something you suspect is both the gentle quietness native to his personality, and that something more that lurks underneath. Regardless, he takes his time with what you’ve said and you’re not inclined to force him to hurry. He as always, doesn’t seem like he’s been constrained by the clock. Maybe that was one of the things he was learning to give up.

“You can come talk to me, then.”

You don’t know why but the words land physically for you. It’s such a small consideration, an incredibly casual offer on his part. But he barely knows you and again- again- you’ve done nothing but be an astronomical fuck up and an embarrassing oddity your entire time here. It would be so easy for him to give you a ‘that’s rough, buddy’ and keep it moving.

You blink away the blotchiness, and smile though you know he can’t see it.

“I’d really like that, Bob. I- I think I’ll take you up on that, if you don’t mind.”

His smile again, head dipping slightly so his hair falls further.

“I don’t. I wouldn’t have offered otherwise, y’know? If I’m honest… it’ll be nice to talk to someone different, for once. I love them, don’t get me wrong. It’s just-

The same people all the time. I should probably be working on handling more than that.”

You think that if anyone else had told you that the way Bob did, it would have come off horrifyingly insulting. Instead it’s just earnest, sweet. He wants someone to talk to, and you want someone who doesn’t think you’re awful.

“Well then… You can expect to hear me around. I’d say see but-” and from where you sit, you gesture at the arsenal of tech both old and new that allows you to exist in his space without being there.

“Yeah… I’ll hear you around.”

The two of you linger in the silence with each other for a bit longer, Bob returning to enjoying the scenery he’s planted himself into. And you enjoying being allowed to freely observe without judgement or, worse, feeling like an intruder upon his space. It’s a sort of camaraderie that builds in the breaths between as you begin to switch monitors to your work, the only ones whose faces are left unaltered being those that Bob occupies off in the corner. You wonder if he feels you the same way you feel him, like this. Though maybe he did, if he had somehow come to realize he was being watched earlier without your conscious input.

The night smears into a soft haze, the world gone a bit golden warm. Your patterns of function slowing down, their symphonic chimes in your head reduced to a croon, gaze turned bleary and unfocused. It’s been a long few weeks, and today feels like more of a victory than the festival did- just a personal one this time.

“Hey, Bob?”

You hear him hum, see from your periphery how his head lifts from the book he’d grabbed at some point during your shared silence. He’s looking at the camera again, looking for you.

“I think I’m gonna call it here, tonight… It’s- it’s been really nice sitting with you.” You offer it with a stammering cadence, tripping on your sincerity and landing face first into a wet puddle of sheer nerves. But he just smiles back, small and sweet.

“Okay, I understand. Goodnight, Terminal.”

You smile wide, eyes crinkling at the edges, and think he might hear it in your voice.

“Goodnight, Bob.”

[ladyorlandodream]

[storiumemporium]

Terminal

Chapter 1 - Spring Cleaning

It Happened™️did I think it would happen? No. But it happened and here we are and it's terminally bad 😭

Bob Reynolds x Fem!Reader | Word Count: 7.3k | Mature | I don't think it has any tags quite yet? | Future tags - Experimentation, Child Abuse, Agoraphobia, Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, General Cute Shit |

“What can you do?” “Well…” you start after a pause that goes on too long. “I am- I am one of the foremost black hats in the country, cracking code is sort of my thing. I’m- Miss de Fontaine wishes for me to become the brain for your operation, handling the technological side of your missions so that you can focus on the physical parts.” "Is that why you’re not here, then? Keeping your identity concealed?” “Oh God no! No… I just- I work best from where I am right now.” And nowhere, nowhere else. --- Fourteen months following the void out of Manhattan, Valentine Allegra de Fontaine has you assigned as the newest member of her struggling superhero team. The New Avengers. You serve as their eyes and ears, their brain, and their personal AI in the style of famous JARVIS, though you lack the cool accent. Oh, and you also haven't left your home in nearly a decade, so.

Bucky thought himself to be a long suffering kind of guy.

Just… you don’t make best friends out of Steven Grant Rogers - any iteration of Steven Grant Rogers - without an unusually high penchant for tolerating bullshit in your day to day. Oh, your buddy is ninety-seven pounds and picked a fight with a guy bigger than you are, Buck? No problem, go get your ass kicked too if it means keeping him out of the hospital.

Oh, your buddy entered an experimental program while you were locked away in some HYDRA camp? No problem, just follow the lunatic wherever the hell he decides he wants to go.

It just didn’t matter, if Steve wanted to do something then Bucky was the guy.

The problem is - and half a dozen therapists have forced him to accept it by now - is that this isn’t just a Steven Grant Rogers thing. This is a James Buchanan Barnes thing.

Which is why he now is in charge of all of these assholes.

Fourteen months and twelve days since the New Avengers made their entirely unplanned debut to the world, and the barely rebranded New Avenger’s Tower had become something like a home and a hub all in one. It wasn’t as if the informally known Thunderbolts had anywhere else to go. Alexei wanted to be with his daughter, Yelena wanted to be an Avenger like her sister, Bob just wanted to be with people who cared for him, Ava did not oppose the lavish new means, and John was… himself.

Bucky? Well. He was between things, except the between period had only gotten longer and longer, and he was having a harder and harder time imagining being anywhere else than here. They’d grown on him, like mold. Or tumors.

Truth be told, they needed each other. It wasn’t outside the realm of Bucky’s psychology to understand that going it alone just wasn’t feasible. It wasn’t for ordinary people whose worst traumas were the goldfish they accidentally killed as a child, and it definitely wasn’t for people like them.

So he stayed, and really, he didn’t even try to figure out a reason not to stay.

The Tower, since it’s renovation, has undergone a nauseating trading of hands across the members of the Thunderbolts in a way that reminded Bucky of old school Tom n’ Jerry until finally landing on it’s longest and most comfortable configuration. The things that had stayed the same: all communal areas of the Tower remained squarely in the dead center, just above the neighboring office buildings, and positioned so that everyone had to be equally inconvenienced on travel time through the skyscraper. Bucky remained in the same floor he has been since they moved in- nobody was really willing to fight him on it on account of stubbornness. Bob got to keep the floor closest to the communal center, directly beneath. He didn’t like heights, and no one had the heart to force him to be far away.

Yelena took a floor close to Bob, Alexei took the floor closest to Yelena. John made sure to take the furthest floor he could from Bucky, leaving Ava in the middle.

Somehow this still created conflicts. Mostly in the fact that John and Bucky shared an elevator and the bastard was always racing him to use it first, leaving the other waiting there god knows how long dependent on where they were going.

In spite of their infrastructural warfare, the arrangement was nice.

Everyone stuck close by even with the immense amount of space afforded - often made uneasy by the scale - and the communal spaces of the Tower ended up being the most used for all things, sometimes even sleeping when nightmares or thoughts got severe enough to warrant not being alone. They all had them, but it was most often a divided line where some needed that space distinctly more often than others.

Bucky had categorized it into type S and type C, he was told type Stable and type Crazy were a little too harsh. So it’d been rebranded to Stable and Catastrophizing. He liked to think of himself as belonging to type S, sitting squarely alongside Yelena and Ava.

Progress for them meant a slow and arduous crawl from one rung of a seemingly infinite ladder to the next. Months on end of grueling and thankless work filled with uncomfortable conversations and deep personal confrontation to hopefully inch the tiniest bit forward on the path. The type of progress that Bucky knew intimately felt as if it wasn’t actually progress, at least in the moment. All these changes so minute that they could be overlooked in favor of all the places you should already be. You had to look back over the weeks, months, and years to really see how much you’d improved yourself.

John, Alexei, and above all else Bob belong to Catastrophizing.

He’s watched them make massive leaps and bounds seemingly in a matter of months, comparatively overnight versus his own progress. The sort of rapid adjustment to life that Bucky could bite steel over. Cutting their hair, putting on - conversely losing - weight. New clothes, a better outlook on life. It felt like some romanticized iteration of recovery where a hug and a ‘you matter!’ were enough for them to simply be cured of their afflictions.

Then the crash would come.

They would fall harder than Yelena, Ava, even he himself ever had. Possibly even combined*.* A total square one restart, if not at times worse*.* Like they’d taken eight steps back from when they first met each other. Somehow spitefully stuck themselves even deeper into the mud. It was always a titanic, catastrophic sort of mess. The kind of thing that couldn’t truly be prevented, only patiently waited out.

For Alexei that usually meant hiding the alcohol, forgiving the disappearance of food. Not acknowledging the couch has been robbed days in a row as he was robbed of the willpower to get off it and sleep in his own bed. Quiet nights spoken in Russian between himself, Yelena and Alexei. Tender with his daughter, reminiscing with Bucky.

For John, sparring matches that turned into outright fistfights. Vicious words that weren’t truly meant, met with stone until the soldier would hiss and seethe and retreat into himself and his room. He’d only reemerge days later looking a husk, a peace treaty offered by coffee and a conversation no one really wanted to have. Shave, Walker. Fuck you, Barnes. The shadow gone from his face and his eyes by next morning.

Bob? Holding on, no matter what. Sometimes that meant dealing with the ache of seeing him recoil harder from a gentle touch than he would a harsh slap. Dark, soft blue eyes turning beady and sharp with paranoia at the concept of freely given love and companionship. Catatonia met with meals, victories if he took even one bite. For Yelena, washing his hair when he couldn’t muster it. For Bucky, offering a hand Bob wasn’t afraid to crush in his sleep. When he needed to feel not-alone, but not-terrified of his own strength.

It was a system. A bad, fucked up, ill conceived one. But it worked, it was theirs.

They were getting better, their way.

This month has proven itself to be comparatively light in the mentalympics department, as Ava had called it and it had stuck. None of the Thunderbolts have been required to leave the Tower at any point in the last few weeks, taking it as their paid-for vacation meant that the only times anyone braved the city that never slept was to stock up on large amounts of booze and snacks- too impatient for the weekly drop off to arrive. From there? Game nights, movie nights, show nights. Charades has come up an alarming number of times with Yelena topping the scoreboard most frequently and Alexei consistently failing to guess almost anything. John and Ava have made a running pool on how many times the man can somehow derive Soviet era propaganda out of the weird undulations another member of the team is making.

All of this is pockmarked with training sessions, evenings taken to snoop around the tower (a year later and new things still keep getting found). And sometimes the overhead being stolen to play music while everyone brings blankets and pillows from their floor.

Ava and Yelena started it. Bob joined without much hesitation. Alexei joined with no hesitation. John and Bucky were pretty helpless to deny what they knew was coming.

The sleepover tradition.

Still, it’s early in the morning and there’s no guarantee anyone will posit that tonight be the night everyone clusters the sunken conversation pit with all manner of malleable objects to sleep on. Instead, Bucky scrolls through the The New Yorker on his phone while drinking dubiously spiced coffee out of a mug labeled ‘badass babysitter’ on the side with little cartoon flowers strewn across it in pastels. He’s already fully dressed for the day, and the deep navy blue and sheer black contrasts entertainingly with the salmon colored ceramic. Alexei’s word, not his. Across from him is Yelena, phone also in hand and feet on the table. John has been warring with her penchant for climbing on furniture for some time now, Bucky knows he’s already lost. She’s adorned in one of the many bundles of Avengerz clothing Alexei had procured for the team since everything went a touch sideways, avidly denying to ever be seen in public with it and yet unable to deny the softness of the pajamas. Her hair is unkempt, pale tresses scattered about and her face bare of any makeup. She looks unguarded like this, just taking space rather than commanding it per her usual.

“Do you think it’s been too quiet, lately?” Yelena’s voice cuts abruptly across the table at him, her head suddenly lifting from her phone and toward the ceiling, conversational but loud enough for the muscles in Bucky’s shoulders to twitch reflexively. Her brows pinched like she was wrestling with a puzzle. “I mean, there hasn’t even been a fire in the kitchen this last week. It feels wrong. We’re never this pleasant to be around.”

Bucky’s phone clicks dark, clattering gently on the steel-and-glass surface provided by Valentina’s many interior designers. Sterility was in, apparently. “Hello to you too, Yelena. Don’t jinx it, maybe?”

To that, Bucky is rewarded a shit eating smile from his friend. Though she’s still not exactly turned to look at him, her head has canted further in his direction knowing that he’s taken her bait for the morning. “Please, better to know now so that you’re prepared when all the good behavior comes back as something much, much worse for you later.”

The ‘for you’ was pointed, badass babysitter glinting ominously on the side of his cup as he took another sip from it.

“Well, I would like to continue believing you’re all just finally beginning to grow up. I’m very proud.”

“Who- uh, who is growing up around here?”

Bob found his way up from the floor below, finally. Though the man struggled with sleep it didn’t typically make him any more of an early riser, certainly not the way Bucky was- instead, if Bob wasn’t already camped out in the living room watching the sun come up, he was often close to the last to arrive.

“Absolutely no one, but we can let the old man dream.” Yelena is grinning once more at him, a little less sharp as Bob passes around the two of them on his way to the fridge. “I was just saying that this place seemed a little too quiet as of late.”

And without a beat missed; “Don’t see that lasting too long.”

“See! I told you.”

Eggs are tossed onto the counter, organic as demanded by John. A pan retrieved from it’s designated ‘we don’t care what happens to this one because it’s cheap and maybe someone stole it?’ spot, also known as Bob’s favorite spot in the kitchen (he lacked guilt if these ended up destroyed in some way or another) to be placed on the electric burner and warmed. Scrambled eggs, or omelettes? He was feeling pretty good, so maybe something a little fancier this time. He liked to treat himself in these tiny ways, because it felt like a reward but one he had to… earn? You don’t get nice omelettes if you don’t learn how to cook them yourself, type of thing.

Just as fluidly as he’d entered the conversation, Bob slips free of it, electing to become a background ear to the chaos of Yelena and Bucky chattering at each other. Their voices morphing into a fuzzy blanket over his still waking mind. A metaphorical radio turned on low so that he could focus on swimming to consciousness rather than the creeping anxiety of too much silence. The cadence of their voices soothing, the familiarity of it cozy and predictable. Today it seemed they were bickering over whether or not the Tower was going to be - wait, he wasn’t exactly paying attention. Something about firebombing the garden?

He hoped not. He liked it out there. Being outside without, y’know. Being outside. Still wasn’t quite good at that one.

Omelette to plate, plate to table, Bucky watches Bob situate himself dead in the center of his exchanging of light barbs with Yelena. The food passing into his mouth without much consideration, dark eyes blinking out at the windows across from them. This, itself, was an update for Bob. At the beginning even false tensity tended to make the mans’ hackles rise, waiting for the moment it turned severe and he needed to duck out of the way of whatever aggression was working it’s way out.

Now, he snorts to himself when Yelena calls Bucky frostbitten.

He’s a little like Yelena in that regard, in that he feels like a person inhabiting a space these days. But where Yelena hid behind a deadly persona, Bob had just seemed ashamed to need the same air they did. A little ghost with his shoulders to his ears. Now? Now he lets the tongs of his fork clink against the plate without wincing, and openly pays attention to the conversation he hasn’t reentered himself into.

John and Ava have returned after their first round of disturbing Bucky’s well needed relaxation in the breakfast area, and Alexei is finally arriving for the first time that day as Bucky is retrieving his and Yelena’s third cup of coffee, Bob’s first. (He wasn’t the most fond of coffee, but he appreciated the pick-me-up, especially when a frankly nauseating amount of creamer was involved.)

“We really need some kind of big spectacle, yknow? Just- yeah we can say we’re the Avengers and we can live in the old crews place, but we really need to kick some ass to secure our hold in it.”

“Well what do you propose, John? Beam a signal out into space? ‘Hey aliens, come here and pick a fight with us so we can look cool to the other people here!’”

“Pfft, no. They’d never agree to that.”

Ava is squinting at him from her position, close to Yelena who has now moved close to Bucky as the chairs shuffled around to accommodate the other three bodies clustering in. Bob has started to hit proximal capacity, with his shoulders squeezed slightly even though no one came close to brushing with him. It didn’t help that the man got caught between Alexei and John for company, both make their brand of obnoxiousness into a flag they bear proudly.

“Look, I’m just saying! We wouldn’t be having these problems if we were doing more than fight people the public never get to hear about in the first place.” John was poking at his second breakfast of the day, something he’d apparently ordered off Doordash? to be brought to the tower of all places, pushing around browned sausage and crisp hashbrowns and gravy and other assortments of things. “At this point we’re just doing the same thing we always did but together. And with matching suits.”

“Matching suits are good! Make us look strong, united!”

“It’s better that the public doesn’t know,” Bucky interjected over Alexei’s enthusiasm of identical attire, and had an elbow on his armrest now, waving about the other hand freely as he spoke. “If they know, that means we didn’t get there in time to stop them from doing something.”

“So you’re saying we’re too good at our job?” Ava, incredulous and scathing as ever.

“Yes!”

“No, not exactly. Just that sometimes this is thankless work.”

“Well maybe I’d like to be thanked.”

“Or at least keep getting paid.”

Bob’s eyes are darting about the conversation, watching how it develops without any really desire to partake. It’s not that he isn’t part of it, exactly. But that he doesn’t necessarily… care.

So what if they aren’t Avengers? Do they need to be? Isn’t the important part that they’re helping people?

His mouth opens to posit that question - dumb as it might be - to his friends, when:

“Ladies, gentlemen! I hate to interrupt.” It was like dousing ice across everyone in the room, for all the way all warmth and fondness fled out the windows and down the stairwell to some place they did not occupy.

Valentina’s voice still inflicted some sort of deep seated anger in Bob, he wasn’t sure why. Though he knew she was the one originally trying to kill all of them in the vault, and that according to Yelena and Ava she’d done… something with him while he was in his Sentry state, he wasn’t exactly sure what.

Maybe the part of him that twisted with rage still did.

It had him smacking his lips irritably, pushing the plate away curt enough that it let out a mild whistle against the surface of the table that didn’t go unnoticed. John’s eyes were on him steadily, recognizing that flare of temper for what it was. It was one of the few more serious conversations they’d ever had with each other. Anger, and managing it in ways that didn’t result in broken furniture or self inflicted bruises. He didn’t need to say anything for Bob to nod at him. I’m cool.

Little could be done by way of explaining the idiosyncrasies of a body fundamentally divorced from itself.

“There’s an exciting new update for all of you. Something very important. Non negotiable. Head for the boardroom, you have thirty.”

---

Less could be done to provide comprehension to the scope of deprivation it required to no longer feel apart of the species you were, by all rights, born to.

Basically, you were a rather difficult creature to explain or understand. Not that you had much by way of practice in doing that.

So, here’s the thing:

Manhattan, New York is one of the wealthiest areas in the world - much less the country, that you could live. Brownstones, historic districts, lavish parks, beautiful boutiques. It was a gorgeous place, green and lush, industrial and waiting with open palms for those who had the means to take it.

You were buried a quarter mile beneath Manhattan.

With the cold war came the advent of nuclear hysteria, the world ever terrified for a mushroom cloud apocalypse that would bring with it the winter to end all winters. The world would crumble away to ice and decay and all life would slow to a crawl until only the most adapted and isolated of creatures could outlast the Earth repairing it’s destructive near-end.

And then none of that happened, actually.

But the important part of that is what came from it. What you got out of it. Circa the 1960’s full terror had gripped the nation that our world was going to end, but if you were a particularly savvy (and exorbitantly rich) hotel owner in one of the nicest areas of the entire country, you were building fallout bunkers and you were doing it before it was cool. And with so many of these incredibly intelligent wealthy individuals making shelters of all different shapes, sizes, and needs… Some of them just slipped through the cracks, entirely forgotten about.

Which made them ripe for the picking, if you happened to stumble upon one that hadn’t been registered with local authorities.

This place was your baby, your home. Eight feet of solid concrete reinforced with steel, shored up with external struts to protect against water instability from the surrounding ocean, heavily ventilated, and thoroughly treated. Vault door, cameras everywhere, back up generators, a pantry you’ve meticulously stocked over the years. This thing was frankly massive, built to sustain an entire family comfortably, and not just a singular societal reject.

This place was built for the end of the world, and now it’s your entire world.

Most of your days are spent right here, well - okay - all of your days are spent right here. But not all of them in this exact spot. With your feet kicked up on the dashboard of your very own surveillance system. Thirty-two chest-sized CRT screens imbedded into the wall stare back at you with footage from all across the city on their static clung faces. Traffic, weather cameras, even random footage from peoples’ doorbell cameras. You weren’t invasive enough to go inside, even if the curiosity ate at you sometimes.

Your station has been meticulously equipped over the years of your stay. Some of it is as brand new as you could get, others are classics. An IBM Model M is sitting in front of you, retro old keyboard in the same dingy green-yellow-beige that the rest of the bunker is, unaided by the old fluorescents flickering above. It’s what you use to do your work - what they use to do all of your work for you. More like a marionette to their ministrations. Beside it are a DAC and amp stack for a nice pair of German headphones found on Guitar Center or Amazon, and a bougie Shure microphone you acquired by shorting people out of bidding on it on eBay. Your guilt assuaged by running a cursory background check on the seller, wife beaters don’t deserve money.

Right now, your heart is in your throat.

There was a reason you came down here. A reason you stocked and live in this place that you illegally siphoned hot water and AC and all the other good shit to, without anyone ever knowing. Because you didn’t want anyone to know.

People… the outside… It’s terrifying. And not in the- the casual shakes or the nervous rambling or even the puking kind of way.

In the way that you’d open a manhole cover and crawl down it, wait there for hours until you were starving to make sure absolutely no one is around, scrambling from tight corner to tight corner to find your den to hide inside. That level of fear.

Blood curdling terror.

Now you’re willingly going to be introducing yourself to an entire group of people. Digitally. But still.

You knew them too, sometimes New York has something interesting happen to it and you’re so far beneath the crust that you get to witness it like a fun little spectator. So when a massive chunk of the city had - they recently dubbed it - voided out, you didn’t get to experience the misery and the terror the people up top did. You watched it all happen from your wall of screens and your expensive speakers and your everything else. Insulated and safe.

You also watched the people you’re about to talk to, stop the void. Somehow. Nobody really knew. It just kinda- unvoided everyone and thing. Lucky, y’know?

Valentina had contacted you after months of relatively low interaction, mostly just sent missions where you surveilled and reported back to her team whatever movements or information you could gather from your eye deep, deep beneath the sky. And then collected the paycheck that let you buy all the nice things that currently sat around you.

Pain in the ass to get here, mind. Since you didn’t let anyone so much as see the area that leads to your home. Better safe than sorry, besides, the locally delivery guys have come to an understanding with you. The extra hundred for every delivery without inquiry helps.

Now though?

“It’s time.” Her voice, grating as ever, made worse when it sounded over the heavy speakers you had set around your home base. “You’ve coasted by on little jobs this far, but we finally have need of your assets. You’re coming out of the dark, Terminal.”

This wasn’t what you were built for, but even with all the skills at your disposal money still became a necessity after a point. Not everything you could ever want or need could be procured by scams and technobabble-savvy. Not everything came without a hit to your conscience.

Still, the laminate counter and all the peripherals you’d accumulated have been dusted and disinfected three times now, all thirty-two screens have been fussed at to no end and you’ve shocked yourself enough times that the muscle in your ring finger was beginning to respond angrily to the uninvited stimuli. The whole place hums passively, the buzz off the fluorescents had grated your last nerve over an hour ago and have been relegated to some incredibly old desk lamp you stole and repaired from an abandoned library ages ago. The room, usually bright and weirdly pear colored has now been reduced to shadow and blue and a blanket of orange. Your shape cut across the concrete floor. It makes the place feel smaller, somehow.

Admittedly, and you knew this was an incredibly morally dubious choice to make, but you were kind of… stalking them?

It was a little too easy to get inside the New Avenger’s Tower, the artificial intelligence that Valentina supplied in the wake of JARVIS and FRIDAY being disbanded was little more than a rudimentary shadow of it’s predecessors. It could lock and unlock areas, manage cameras and microphones, knew the locations of every room in it’s premises, could tell time, and weather… But that was about it. It was a glorified app hiding in the ceiling. This meant that what you thought would be a battle that could backfire and get you in hot water with Valentina slipped by so easily that you were watching your future teammates make dinner, oblivious to your existence.

And the intelligence, CASEY (Central Authority, Surveillance, something-something. Valentina had tried to tell you and it’d already been terrible before the third letter in the abbreviation) was either none the wiser or not well programmed enough to alert anyone of the extra eyes in their home.

It felt wrong, it was wrong, but your excuse to yourself as muttered into a dingy mirror in your bathroom was that it provided you with pregame knowledge and ample preparation. So you wouldn’t fuck this up, or react too badly to how they react to whatever is about to happen. It was just you doing your own reconnaissance! Don’t head into enemy territory unprepared.

Maybe you shouldn’t be thinking of them as enemies. But- oh well.

It’s t-minus thirteen to the formal introduction and conversation has been entrenched on the big reveal, the big you. Some think it’s going to be good- two, precisely. The rest are thoroughly geared toward this being a disaster because Valentina’s print is on it. Not, honestly, a bad way to gauge it. Still, it had your teeth sliding against each other in anticipation. They won’t trust you, they probably won’t like you. It’s an uphill battle from go, and the worst part is that your odds are lower than terrible with her branding all over you. Not- not literally. But still.

If she has a hand in it, they’ll think you’re just as bad as her. And that’s something you have to fight past, starting in a matter of minutes.

“Listen, she doesn’t have control over us, we can just ignore whatever the hell kind of stunt she’s trying to pull.” Crackles over speakers situated at each corner. They’re a good quality, but the microphones installed at the Tower are not, so that it almost rings every time sound pushes through.

“But do we? We have no idea what this is going to be, and no guarantee we can worm our way around it.” Distinctly from James Barnes, arguably the most easy to identify of the entire group. His arm a glowing beacon of acknowledgement for who he is and who he was.

Again. Fundamentally untrusting people. You’re walking into Siberia in a Hawaiian-dad shirt.

“She hasn’t done anything too crazy since this began, and it’s been an entire year. Maybe she knows better with all of us being the face now, you know, after attempting to set us on fire?”

In a morbid way, you wish you didn’t already know about that. It would have been a good distraction from the lead ball in your gut. But alas, O.X.E. has had you in their pocket for awhile now, and that means you’ve been panty raiding their intelligence for ages at this point. The moment you’d seen her face pop up on national television following the blackout, you’d gone on a fun little deep dive to see what she fucked up that badly.

So much. Like an embarrassing amount, really.

Another candy wrapper is discarded to the half full trash can at your side. You’ve pretzeled your legs into the recliner you use as your desk chair in perhaps the least professional display of your state anyone has ever witnessed. Only topped off when you drag a blanket off the back and burrito yourself into it.

Walking into humiliation with comfort.

The screens switch camera to camera without your added input - they handle it for you as you worry away at lifted skin around your cuticles, taking not chewing your nails as enough victory for the evening - as they pass through something like a million tons of steel, marble, granite, concrete, and two inch thick panels of tempered and laminated glass on their way to the room where your debut will be announced to them post hoc.

Good god, you’re going to be fucking sick.

Valentina is already standing there when they arrive, and even through fuzzy and less than pixel perfect resolution you can see the ripple of discontent. They didn’t realize she was already in the building, and they didn’t like the following thought.

She’s as polished and corporate as ever, every texture and color her suit and jewels were clad in most likely approved by an entire team of stylists to convey a particular image and sentiment just for this evening. Like armor of a slippery, slimy variety. They all sit as her face stretches around an interpretation of a smile, her eyes dark and flat and calculating. She’s judging how difficult the sell is about to be.

“Thank you for arriving almost on time, perhaps this time next year you won’t embarrass us in front of national press by showing up when you’re told.”

“Look if you’re just here to berate us about the quality of our answers on what ice cream is our favorite—”

“Oh, Jesus no. I know better than with any of you. No, I have something much better for all of you to get used to.”

Again, as your fingers curl in tightly enough around your pants for the material to sting against your skin, the room seems to get even more coiled without you physically being there.

“Terminal, my dear. Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

Fuck. Fuck.

You go to introduce yourself, realize your mic is cut, set it hot and clear your throat at once. A part of you, however small but certainly tangible and real, dies horribly. Why didn’t you clear your throat before the mic was live, dumbass?

“Well, I- I believe the introduction has just been made for me, but hello there,” this part has been rehearsed for you a thousand times. You’d written out a script and paced the entire bunker for a solid week following this day, editing, scrapping, and then rehearsing the things you wanted to say. To sound perfect, polished. Like you might not be a total mistake for Valentina to introduce.

Your voice is a little squeaky and off kilter, instead of energetic like you’d been going for. Your delivery feels as rehearsed as it is, and the tackiness developing on your ankles has you kicking the blanket you used for comfort mere moments ago away and onto the floor.

“I go by Terminal, and Miss de Fontaine - if she does not mind me saying - has brought me on board to be a-”

You can hear the quiet groan that passes from someone’s mouth, and your voice flattens unintentionally as you wish more and more that the bunker would suddenly lose all structural support and simply turn you into red mist.

“-a new member of the team. I hope that… we can get along, and I am- excited, to get started.”

Again, because the first two times weren’t good enough: Fuck.

There’s a ripple of disbelief and apparent anger, resignation, even a touch of outrage in some of their faces. Barnes seems the most ready to roll with it, his slow head bob visible from where the camera is fixated upon them. Walker immediately the most outraged by this, shouting something to the effect of how she could expect them to work with someone without their approval or - even knowledge that this was going to happen.

“Who the hell is this guy? And why don’t we get a say in it-?”

“There’s no way you’re going to just- forcibly slot some random person in and expect us to be okay with it-”

“Oh, please, more members are good for team! Means we get stronger and more official looking, eh?”

Their objections and affirmations blend into noise, and your head hits the back of your recliner hard. And then a few more times, for good measure. It was honestly just more frustrating, for once damning the cushion for not letting you get a satisfying thunk out of the abuses you wished to laud against your own skull.

Then, across the table and cutting everyone off:

“What can you do?”

It’s the one that nearly destroyed Manhattan, you realize after a stunned pause. He’s sitting there somewhat folded in his seat, his elbows on his knees as he stares in a random direction. Like he’s aware of your presence but maybe a little too oblivious to notice he should be staring at the camera that just moved to point directly at him.

He doesn’t seem particularly invested, one way or the other. Instead, just… curious maybe? There’s a sort of innocence in it, like he’s more fascinated by whatever specialty you’ve been given than the fact that Valentina is trying to throw off all the team dynamics because she can.

It’s also not a question you were particularly ready for, given that you thought Valentina would use that opportunity for further pitching you to your new team.

“Well…” you start after a pause that goes on too long. “I am- I am one of the foremost black hats in the country, cracking code is sort of my thing. I’m- Miss de Fontaine wishes for me to become the brain for your operation, handling the technological side of your missions so that you can focus on the physical parts.”

“Is that why you’re not here, then? Keeping your identity concealed?”

“Oh God no! No… I just- I work best from where I am right now.” And nowhere, nowhere else.

Bucky seemed to right himself then, more of his face becoming visible within the eye of the camera you’d hijacked some time ago. He still doesn’t look particularly happy with what is occurring here, and yet unlike the others - there’s some level of acceptance.

“There’s a reason you’re doing this, Valentina. We haven’t needed a tech up until this point, what’s going on?”

The wobble of her expression is visible, even here. “Can I not just bring in more hands for the New Avengers? Does there need to be a reason?”

“Yes.”

And just like that, the polish erodes and something annoyed and acidic and acrid crosses her face. The posture never leaves, but her hands move in a way that’s far less diplomatic and vastly sharper. Little stabs and slices that indicate the deep set dislike she holds toward the man who has called her on her shit.

“Fine. There’s a situation. Look- O.X.E. has reason to believe that someone is looking to replicate what was done with Robert. They’re sifting through old files, poking about in shut down facilities. I’m not concerned that they’ll find anything on account of the fact that we got rid of the evidence, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop.

We’ve grabbed what intel we could, and beyond a few dozen mercenaries with almost as many murders under their individual belts as our favorite Widow here. They’ve also begun to collude with the likes of Mikhail Doyenko and Aantu Haikali.”

Manila folders are thrown by Valentina into the center of the conference table they’d clustered around, and after a moment of heavy pause, each member of the New Avengers reaches forward to grab their copy of the report. It’s thick, filled with a few dozen pages of information on the named individuals as well as the organization they’d fallen in with.

Enmis.

Their known goals are listed, what little scraps were found from each abandoned base O.X.E. has raided, too late to get them while they were still escaping. They were slippery, skilled, and growing vastly more dangerous by the day. You knew because you’d read the same thing they were, days ago.

“I recognize the name, Doyenko.” Belova is the one speaking, the Widow with the pale hair and the eyes too clear. The one who had charged headfirst into pitch darkness and managed to save the world in the process. “He’s a trafficker, isn’t he?”

“Precisely, but worse than your regular. He specializes in the enhanced, whether that’s serum or something else.”

“Which means he’s got the experience and the equipment to handle a group of super soldiers.” Comes Barnes’ following reply, voice steady as he follows what Valentina has provided on a candy trail.

“I mean, c’mon! How good could they be, just some random souped up idiots this guy snatched off the street to sell? We’re actual soldiers, we have combat experience!”

“And we are team, they most likely run alone, no? Not prepared to be overwhelmed by the mighty Avengers!”

You were glad to be irrelevant in the conversation again, your little tatters of self esteem were still smoldering after being so thoroughly dashed on your lack of communication skills. The most successful exchange you’d had today was one of the members of the team asking you what you even do to warrant being on the team, though you suspected that maybe that was a more harsh reading of his question than he’d meant.

Robert Reynolds, Bob. The Sentry, or The Void. Supposedly the very strongest on that entire team, but in a sort of arrested development situation. From what you’d gleaned off your own eavesdropping and the information Valentina offered you to try and use to your advantage, Bob - as he preferred to be addressed - had not initially been an active member of the team following the void out on Manhattan. It was only as he grew more listless from being left at base constantly, combined with the burgeoning realization that just because he wasn’t using his more extracurricular power hadn’t negated the part where he’s bullet-proof that they decided to put him on the roster.

Bit of a disaster, at first. Some reports about near void-outs, some things being destroyed that were meant to be preserved. Lots of communication issues. Just the whole gamut of throwing a random- random guy into the middle of active combat. Even training looked to be a bit of a doozy, if the recordings you’d plucked were anything to go by.

It wasn’t that Bob didn’t try, he tried very hard- and what he picked up on he seemed to learn reasonably fast. But the issue came in the fact that- a lot of sparring tended to involve one side losing in order to learn from their mistakes.

Bob can’t… exactly lose. Hard to get the physical element of training by failure when kicking him in the head as hard as you can might actually break your ankle before it bruises his head. So instead of learning instinctively through the pain and the mistakes that cost, Bob has to go about it the long and conscious way. Deliberately taking in the lessons he needs instead of it just becoming imprinted on his dislocated shoulders and broken collarbones.

In spite of this, he sees rather regular combat in the modern day. He’s less of an aggressive force and more of their bulwark. A big living meat shield, bulldozing clean through walls and tearing reinforced doors off their hinges to make progression almost frighteningly convenient. All the while he served as a happy lookout while they took on all the action. He was quite content with this arrangement, it seemed.

He definitely looks different from the initial photos the press released, back when no one knew who the hell this guy was and yet he’d been cloistered into the center of the group of heroes you see now. He’s gained weight and his hair is - well, not short. But certainly shorter than it had been. Curling wildly in these thick ringlets that caress his ears and neck, dangling down in front of his face where he habitually pushes them aside as he speaks, offering timid bits of opinion and potential advice that his team receives with a surprising level of openness. It looks healthy, he looks healthy. More flushed and alert than he had been when those reporters descended like hawks to snap every picture they could get.

“Haikali is the bigger problem,” Valentina cuts into the discussion as it turns about. Drafting up early ideas of how to circumvent Enmises silver bullet for seemingly half of the entire team. “Doyenko might be a problem in combat, but Haikali worked on Riptide back during the blip. The man is a genius and a certified lunatic, if anyone would come into approximation of what we did here with Robert, it would be him. Issue being, it would be a far uglier and more botched serum, and he wouldn’t care. They don’t need to survive long, they just need to get the job done.”

And that was the crux of it, now wasn’t it? Bombs didn’t last beyond one use, they just needed to take everything else out with it.

It sets a sort of unsteadiness throughout the group, even you who sits with your knees to your chest and your chin propped as you parse through the cadence of everyone you are now expected to get to know.

“Terminal, it’s your turn to take it from here. Whatever they need, you get it. Got it?”

“Y-Yes, de Fontaine.” Your eyes squeeze tightly as you response, desperately believing that you don’t sound pathetic as you address her.

“Well, with that in mind. All of you play nice with each other! I have six interviews this week to try and deal with yet another one of your messes.” Valentina had abandoned any false pretenses of amicability, and her clicking heels manage to reach the microphone as she heads for the door.

“We’ll get you more information when they become active again, in the meantime. Do something that seems at least a little heroic, hm?”

When the door closes, you’re left with the crackle of your speakers and the deafening silence of their rigidity. They’re about as happy as you expected them to be, which is absolutely none at all.

This was going to be torture of the worst kind.

[guerrillatech]

[wordsandshadows]

See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.

Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.

[nessa007]

We’ll have to do dinner Thursday night instead.

[scoobycool9]

You can’t reblog this again until October 2024, so do it now.

[palamedeeznuts]

You can’t reblog this again until October 2030, so do it NOW.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

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tumblr in october

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

every october someone brings this back… every october i regret my decisions…

[izhunny]

I’m sorry in that I am not sorry OP.

Happy October!

[hil-arrr-y]

Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:

This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Shout-out to @ms-demeanor for putting these on my dash again, I’d like to add this exceptional interview question “answer guide” that explains traps and “the best” way to answer over 64 common questions. I don’t know who to attribute it to, but here it is: PDF from tri valley one-stop career center.

[the-real-numbers-deactivated202]

Hey some of these answer templates helped J get an offer letter from her dream job; strongly recommend you read them if you’re job hunting

[transformers-earthspark]

IMPORTANT: TUMBLR HAS MADE A DEAL WITH MIDJOURNEY/OPENAI.

YOUR ART AND IMAGES ON TUMBLR ARE BEING USED TO TRAIN AI MODELS.

The opt-in is automatic, but you can turn it off in settings.

Go to "Blog Settings" -> "Visibility" -> "Third-Party Sharing" and turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog]". (This post shows how to do it on browser and on mobile.) You need to do this with every sideblog. (Note: The option in settings might not appear if your app hasn't updated yet. You can still opt out via browser.)

Spread the word. Everyone on Tumblr needs to know about this.

[madsciencepottery]

You have been visited by the twocumber. May you receive twofold luck in the coming days

[los-plantalones]

You have been visited by the pairrot. May you receive a pair of lucks in the near future

[ordinarytalk]

You have been visited by the twinana. May you receive twice as many luck in the days ahead

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

gege said canon gojo was incapable of normal relationships and people forreal took that as womanizng and not that he is actually so fundamentally burdened by jujutsu society and responsibility he would never ever want someone he loves to bear that with him or for him . anyway