flickering embers – I
Pairing: Bob Reynolds x OC Tags: angst, romance, mental health issues (depression, bipolar, suicidal, etc), loss, mourning, grief, found family Summary: where the world ended, she found him, a fragile ember in the ashes of everything she couldn't save. in which two souls bound by pain and loss learn to love again. Masterlist
Whoever said time heals never met grief the way I did. Time doesn't mend us—it teaches us how to mask our pain in public, how to feign normalcy. We don't heal. We adapt. We perform.
There are holes in my chest, and I know the name of each person who left them behind. I've mapped their absence like constellations in a night sky I no longer believe in.
They say nothing lasts forever but time, but even that is cruel. I know this. And still—I'm only human. I wanted them to stay. Just long enough for me to learn how to say goodbye without the silence swallowing me whole.
They died with honour. For the greater good. Like the heroes they were. And yet—
I resented them for it.
I felt abandoned—left in the wreckage of a life I didn't know how to live. Like someone handed me a broken compass and told me to find home with no map, no light.
When Bucky found me, I was a ghost myself. I was anything but alive. Breathing, maybe, but just barely. I don't know if it was guilt or cowardice. I was a black cloud floating through someone else's sunny day. Suicide wasn't an option—I had made promises. But I broke them in every way except the final one.
God, I miss them.
Bucky understood. Maybe because he lost just as much. Maybe more. So, he knew what I needed the most: he gave me space, the right to fall apart.
But then, he barged in one morning; there was something important he had to say. "Valentina announced the New Avengers," he told me.
I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. The grass on my father's grave had barely learned to grow upright, and already they had replaced him, us.
For a long time, I stopped watching the news, stopped counting the days. I didn't care what was happening in the world. If it all ended tomorrow—another war, another crisis screaming for heroes—I wouldn't have blinked.
Although I am ashamed to tell you this, you who think so highly of the Avengers, of me, there is not a single righteous bone in my body.
I became the Peregrine not out of virtue, but out of desperation. I needed to prove to my father that I was worth keeping. That I was worth anything at all.
You see, he never wanted a child. His parents died when he was young—left him half-grown, half-healed—and maybe something in him stayed broken. He was afraid he'd become like his father, so he solved that fear by disappearing emotionally, kept his distance.
I learned early on that the only way to make him see me was to shatter something. A vase, a robot, a car. After a few crashes, even that lost its effect. But the day I put on the suit, the day I stepped onto the battlefield as the Peregrine, he looked at me—really looked at me—for the first time.
So, I stitched myself with pieces that I had stolen from others, until I resembled someone who was worthy. And for a while, even I believed it—that I wasn't just a tall child aching for her father's gaze, but an Avenger.
Maybe his failures with me taught him to be a better father for Morgan; that thought should comfort me but it doesn't. It just leaves another bruise that'll never heal.
Before I could get a word out, Bucky placed a manila folder in my hands, in which your whole life was summarised into a few pages.
You were born into a broken home. Got hooked on morphine after a car crash before you were old enough to understand addiction. Life dragged you under like a riptide. Then OXE came along—dressed their greed as salvation, and offered you a second chance: redemption, they called it. You said yes. And they remade you—over and over—until you became more than they'd planned. And so they did what monsters do when something stops being useful: they tried to erase you.
Bile crawled up my throat as I read, so I slammed the folder shut.
"I hate to do this," Bucky said, voice low, tired, "but we really need your help, Clementine. Bob needs somewhere safe to train. You're the only one who still has access to the old Avengers compound—"
"Aren't you tired of this, Bucky?" I interrupted. And then, almost without thinking, I found myself echoing Vision's words: "Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict breeds catastrophe." I paused, letting the words hang. Then said, quieter, almost to myself, "What if we stopped this endless cycle? What if the extinction of heroes is what finally brings peace?"
I knew I was being unreasonable. Delusional, even. But God—I needed it to end.
The world had built itself on a factory line of suffering: take a broken person, turn them into a weapon, call them a hero, and discard what's left when they fall out of use. I was sick of it. Sick of being the cog that turns the next machine. Of watching people like you—like me—become obsolete the moment we stopped serving someone else's purpose.
For the first time in months, I felt tears rise—bitter, burning, clenched-teeth tears. Tears of resentment, of hatred, of exhaustion. I hated this world, Bob. This greedy, hungry world that always asks for more and more and more.
Bucky didn't try to correct me. He simply looked at me with a grief I recognized—one that said, me too.
~°~
The day I met you, every fibre of my body ached.
The Tower held too many memories for me—my father and Bruce working in the lab, Steve tearing punching bags, one after the other, in the gym, Nat fixing herself a drink at the bar, and Clint hiding somewhere in the vents, in the nest he had built. Each wall held the remnants of our beginning, of glory, of the fragile, fleeting moments we had once called happiness.
I couldn't breathe. I bit my bottom lip so hard it split open. The sting was sharp, the blood warm. It grounded me, though barely. My body stood in the present, but my mind ached for the past.
Then the elevator opened.
And there you were—all of you. The New Avengers. The replacements.
You were smiling. All of you, except Ava who stared at me with weariness, and Yelena.
God—her eyes. They were Natasha's. Or close enough that I wanted to crawl into the vents and never come out. I'd always thought it should've been me on Vormir. Nat was a star—our brightest. I was only a mote of dust, floating around in her light. Yelena's lips were pursed in disdain, but I didn't need words. I could hear the accusation: You killed my sister.
And I said nothing. Because I had no defence. I had lost a sister too, but it didn't matter. Not to her. Not to anyone.
Bucky had warned me about Alexei and John. And God, he was right. Alexei's booming voice rattled my skull, his eagerness to be an Avenger scratching at something raw inside me. He saw us—the old guards—as legends, and wanted a taste of the glory.
But the worst was John.
The shield hit me first. Then the anger.
I didn't know where to place it. Was it Steve? For choosing Peggy over Bucky and me? For making promises he never intended to keep? Till the end of the line. Ha! What a lie it turned out to be.
Or, maybe it was John, he who had desecrated something sacred.
My fingers tingled, fists clenched. Madness hovered at the edge of my mind, whispering, all it would take was one push, one slip, and I could burn it all down.
And then—
I saw you.
You stood behind the others, trying to fade into the background, and yet, your eyes found me.
They weren't cold or calculating. No, they lingered, soft and uncertain. Like someone reaching through fog with hands that weren't sure they deserved to touch anything at all. My heart stilled, like a bird folding its wings.
You were quiet. But not in the way people are when they have nothing to say. You were quiet like the moments before rain. And in that silence, something in me began to realign. A part of me that had been bent for so long I thought it had grown that way... started to straighten, just enough to breathe again.
I saw it in you, too—that fracture, that longing for gentleness in a world that offers none. You carried pain like I did, careful not to let it spill. It was then that I knew—we were the same. Both of us sharp around the edges, not from cruelty, but from being handled too roughly. Both of us looking for somewhere soft to land.
I don't know how I knew, Bob. I just did.
And then you spoke.
"Y-You probably don't remember," you stammered. "But we met at a kebab place once. Your dad signed my hoodie."
My mouth went dry. I didn't remember meeting you. But I remembered that night. I remembered the panic blooming in my throat. The way my hands wouldn't stop shaking. The way the streetlights felt too bright—like they were watching me.
It was as if the Earth might crack open beneath me. Again.
As if the sky might tear itself apart. Again.
As if the Chitauri were descending. Again.
And somewhere in that chaos—my father, falling, weightless.
Instead of dwelling on the past, I focused on you. "It's nice to meet you, Bob," I said as I offered you my hand. "I'm Clementine Stark."
"Bob Reynolds," you replied, wiping your palm on your sweatshirt before shaking mine. Your smile was wide and boyish, maybe a little too eager. "They also call me the Sentry. But you can call me whatever you want. Bob, the Sen—"
"Bob," Yelena interrupted with a nudge to your ribs. You let out a breath like you'd been holding it since I stepped out of the elevator.
That was the day the universe shifted.
My universe.