Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

That’s me in the corner.
That’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion.
Trying to keep up with you.
And I don’t know if I can do it.

The warehouse roof was a damp island of tar and echo. The storm had scrubbed the city raw, left it smelling like asphalt still bleeding rain. From up here, the lights knotted into bands—traffic, taxis, windows—everything reduced, simplified, like danger and memory had collapsed into the same flat geometry.

John jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders curled forward as if bracing against wind only he could feel. From this height, the world looked small enough to misplace. That distance felt like an achievement: make the world tiny, and maybe memory would shrink with it.

“You look ridiculous,” Ava said, stepping out of the stairwell soundlessly.  

John flinched. He’d never get used to Ava’s Ghost thing—appearing without sound, like a blade drawn in reverse.

“Can’t believe you picked the roof for a smoke break,” she smirked. “Cliché much?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Then it’s worse. Brooding with no props.” She drifted closer, the clink of a bracelet faint against her wrist. “Seriously, Walker. You ever get tired of looking down?”

John shrugged.

“View’s better than in there.”

“In there” means the Watchtower’s lounge, where the rest of the team is still tangled in half-arguments about tactics and jurisdiction. He can picture it even now—Yelena sprawled like a possessive cat across the couch, Bob picking at the plastic film on the remote, Val on a call she refuses to take anywhere private. 

“View’s better,” Ava echoed, head tilted. 

He braced for the questions—are you suicidal, John? are you okay, John?—but his teammate only sighed. 

“Well, don’t fall. We can’t afford the paperwork. Besides, we’ve got that PR tour coming up.” 

She leaves him there, footsteps receding down the stairwell, and John almost laughs. 

Don’t fall. Don’t jump. Don’t slip. People had a hundred polite ways of saying the same hollow thing: please don’t make us clean up the mess.

During the briefing, the Watchtower’s lounge buzzed with half-arguments, flickering TV static, and overlapping complaints.  

Val is rattling off coordinates with the cold ease of a woman who could sell you a smile while she tightened a noose. Bob is nodding along too enthusiastically, and Yelena keeps poking holes in the plan like it’s her favourite sport. 

John sits in the corner, boot tapping, and watches the rain bead against the window beside him. His mind followed it—sliding glass, rooftops slick across the street. He pictured himself on one, arms open, wind shouldering him off balance.

“Walker?” Val’s voice snapped like a whip. “Are you listening?”

He jerked. His mouth snapped open before the thought did. “Yeah.”

The assignment was simple: intercept a freight elevator dead drop, extract an important record, avoid civilians, and remain unseen. 

“Bob, you’re still not field-ready, but the drones keep you useful,” Val decided. 

Bob flushed, but his curls bobbed in eager agreement. He had been working with Val’s security drones a lot more lately, insisting that he wanted to be helpful to the team even if his powers weren’t ready for the public.

“The rest of you: go in, grab the ledger, and get out. No fanfare, no side-rescues, no heroics.”

That would be easy for him, John thought bitterly. 

After the room dissolved into its usual pre-op scramble, Bob lingered. He sat at the edge of a chair, elbows on knees. 

“You okay?” 

“I’m fine,” John said, and because the lie tasted like metal on his tongue, he forced a tighter smile. 

Bob chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Cool. I got your six,” Bob said, fiddling with his sweatshirt hem. “The drones, I mean. Not much strength, but eyes—”

“I’ll be good,” John interrupted, surprising himself with a touch of affection. “Hell, you could drop me off the Empire State and I’d land on my feet.”

Bob’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. 

“Don’t say that.”

The freight elevator groaned down the shaft, steel teeth gnashing—the cargo bay stank of oil, old rain, and cardboard rot. Flashlights flicked in white arcs, carving the dark into slices.

“Walker.” Bucky’s voice cracked through the comms. “Coming?”

He flinched, mask snapping on. The voice he used for the team wasn’t the voice in his head.


“Yeah. Just wanting to get some higher ground.”

“More heights?” Yelena’s voice, clipped, suspicious. 

“I see better from up top,” John forced.

A chuckle from Alexei boomed through. “American like to play Batman. Always brooding in sky. One day, bird shit knock you off.”

The others laughed, even Ava. The sound filled the channel, but Walker stayed crouched on the ledge, thumb digging hard enough into his palm to leave a crescent scar. 

He checked corners, scanned shadows. His grip on the rifle was too tight. They couldn’t see him. Couldn’t know how close the drop pressed. And then—

“John.”

The voice came softly, like a radio signal fading in and out. His brain stuttered—comm interference? However, it didn’t resonate in the same way. It curled closer.

“You already found new partners, huh?”

Lemar.

The syllables were too distinct, the cadence too true. His chest clenched.

“Walker, confirm,” Bucky snapped through the comm.

“Clear,” he blurted, too fast, too sharp.

He pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, grounded on the taste of copper, but the voice pressed again. 

“You saw me hit the wall,” Lemar whispered. “You did nothing.”

Heat flooded John’s body. Rage lit every tendon like a fuse. His pulse jackhammered. His mouth filled with the retort—I was there, I was there, I broke a man, I did it for you—but the words tangled, raw, useless.

He rushed to join the others, too sharply. His rifle nearly swung wide into Ava.

“Jesus, watch it,” she hissed.

His pulse hammered. He forced the mask back on. “Sorry, Ava.”

But Lemar’s voice laughed—dry, cutting, just behind his shoulder. 

“Look at you, Mr. Liability. They see it too.”

John’s vision was spotted. His breathing shortened.

“Shut up,” he whispered, teeth grinding.

“What’s that?” Yelena’s voice now, clipped. 

His best friend’s whispering voice edged closer.

“It was supposed to be you. She aimed for you. You had the serum.”

“Walker?”

“I’m fine!” The snap cracked too loudly. 

“You sound like shit.”

“Focus on the damn mission,” he spat, the fury boiling over. He heard his voice rise, harsher than he meant, and in the shocked silence afterwards, his stomach plummeted. He swallowed hard, mask reassembling. 

The ledger was taped beneath a pallet. He crouched, cut, retrieved, and handed it up. For a moment, he rode the flush of competence—useful, effective, worth it—and then the thought turned inside-out. If he were worth anything, Lemar would still be alive. The triumph drained cold.

By the time the team exfiltrated, he was hollow again, voice flat over comms: “Package secured.”

Inside his head, though, Lemar’s whisper threaded with the static, steady as a heartbeat.

“You can’t save anyone. You never could.”

Later, back at base, conversations around the living room slid from briefing-room grim to the domestic small talk of people trying to be a family.

Bob sat reading at the table, palms curled around his newest paperback. Walker wanted to mirror his practiced softness, but the habit under his ribs betrayed him: one knee bounced until it rattled the cutlery, another small earthquake.

“Sit still, Walker,” Bucky muttered without looking up. “You’re worse than Alexei on a sugar high.”

“Oi,” Alexei protested, grinning, waving a half-empty bag of gummy worms like a flag. “Do not disrespect the sugar.”

“At least Alexei doesn’t clip people with a rifle,” Ava muttered, soft enough that it was almost a joke.

“I said I was sorry.” John’s voice cut around the table, razor-sharp. Anger pooled beneath it — hot, immediate — the familiar thought-track he could trace to their verdicts: they think you’re unstable. They don’t trust you. They’re waiting for you to crack. He wanted to throw the table, to make the room know the weight he carried. 

Then, without warning, the buzzing in his molars snapped out. The heat fled from his hands, and his hearing hollowed. 

The clarity of fury dissolved into a cold blur: It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Olivia left. Lemar’s dead. They could all leave, too; it would be easier. 

His limbs went leaden, and the world thinned to the distant clink of spoons and someone’s muffled laugh.

Alexei was telling a story that expanded with each retelling, filling the room with laughter until John felt like a visitor in someone else’s life. He listened to their noises — the clink of mugs, Bucky’s quiet snort, Yelena’s humming — and let them knot together without him. 

It should have steadied him. 

It didn’t.

He pushed himself away from the table, muttering something about getting fresh air. 

The East balcony cut out of the building like a fingernail. It was narrow, exposed, and wrapped in sour exhaust. From here, the city was a smear of small lights and distant horns, the highways like arteries pulsing cold. Below, headlights swirled in drunken constellations.

“You know what it felt like?”

Lemar stood in the darker angle of the balcony. He looked the same as he did in Latvia. Sun-kissed cocoa skin, arms folded, expression poised between pity and something that might once have been reproach. 

“No. You’re not real,” John started, the sentence a small, disbelieving animal in his mouth.

Lemar’s smile was the same one he’d worn in afterparties during high school, the one in deployment photos, the one that made everything feel less heavy for a second. “Maybe not. But look at you, man, still seeing me. You just can’t bury me properly, can you?”

John staggered back, the accusation landing like a thrown wrench. “I avenged you. I—” His voice failed him, thin with the weight of things he would not allow to be small. “It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t Karli. I tore the Flagsmashers apart.”

Lemar tilted his head softly. “So why don’t you feel better?”

John’s jaw locked. “Shut up.”

“It hurt, John. You let her kick me like a dog.”

A memory flashed — the angle of a foot, the snap of bone against stone — and John felt it in his mouth like the taste of old money, sharp and metallic. 

“You wanted that shield more than you liked me.”

“Stop it!” 

The shout thundered out between them. It echoed off steel and the hiss of traffic, returned to the blond as an accusation of its own. 

The sound of bone against marble replayed in his skull—snap, final. He covered his ears with shaking hands, as if that might muffle a voice that came from inside.

“Walker?”

John’s hands jerked away, shame crackling through him. He blinked, and Lemar was gone, with only shadow and the cold air remaining. 

Bob stepped out, carrying two mugs as peace offerings. He handed one over without ceremony. John took it because John Walker took what he was given. 

“You were lurking,” he muttered, trying for disinterested, but his voice broke on the edge. 

“Well, you left before dinner,” Bob said. He leaned against the railing, shoulders broad and slow. “Thought you might want cocoa. 

The cup in John’s hands was the kind of thing you can hold when language collapses. He wanted to fill it with all confessions: the pocketknife in his jacket, the rooftops, Olivia, his son. He thought of saying he was sorry for not saving Lemar, which was the whole truth and nothing at all. 

Instead, he let the words jam behind his teeth. 

“You ever think about your life before this?” Bob asked after a while.

“Sometimes.” The truth was small and honest. He thought of the Hoskins’ porch, yellowed grass, Lemar’s laugh too bright for the eye, Olivia’s hair catching sunlight. The image slipped and refolded into court transcripts, black-ink headlines, sworn names repeated in a loop until memory tasted like pennies.

Bob watched him long and steadily before taking a long sip from his mug. “You don’t have to talk about it,” he said finally.

John wanted to shove the younger brunette away and build a wall of litigation, tiredness, and excuses between them. He wanted to say he was tired, that he wanted to be alone, that he wasn’t worth the space. 

Instead, surprising himself, he asked, “You ever feel like you’re climbing something you’ll never get to the top of?”

Bob hummed. “Mm. The bad days. But it feels less impossible when you’re not climbing alone.” His hand landed on John’s shoulder in hesitant intimacy. The contact should have been something comforting. Instead, that brush of skin lit every edge he’d been smearing spit on to dull: Lemar’s laugh cleaving air into concrete and bone; Olivia’s voice rolling away down courthouse steps like water you can’t scoop back up; the way his son’s face was already blurring in John’s mind. 

It wasn’t only failure anymore. He imagined himself as a slow poison that leaked hurt wherever it pooled.

John could still see the exact angle of that kick that finished a life. The sound at the back of the skull had an echo that lived behind his eyes, and every time it played he measured his hands against it and found them empty. He’d tried to feed that ledger with work: arrests, missions that left splinters in other men, grand public gestures that read like apologies in headlines. The scales refused to balance. His best friend’s grey, accused face stayed at the back of his eyelids as if glued there.

Olivia’s leaving hadn’t been a single slam of a door so much as a patient dismantling. The dinners he skipped, the promises he treated as options, the nights he came home full of other people’s violence and left her to sweep up the ordinary ruins… all that arithmetic added up. 

When the boy was born — almost four now, he thought, and the fact of it felt like a judgment — John gained a new, sharper terror. Every glance at the crib tightened some cold certainty inside him: he was contagious. If whatever violence lived in him stayed, it would find roots in the child.

She did the sensible thing, leaving with him.

Outside, the world had a verdict ready. The internet’s shorthand stuck like tar: America’s Asshole, dangerous show-off, fake hero. The name that had once been a shield had become an arrow — point and explain your fear. He was exposed, punished for being human; criticized both for failing myth and for failing to be something softer, something less lethal. Strangers reduced him to a headline and then spat at the result.

All of this logic funnelled into one cruel calculation: John Walker was a hazard to the people closest to him. 

If he could inflict pain in a place that could be counted, perhaps he could make the other damage less likely. Hurt that could be mapped could be bargained with. Pain that could be named could be rationalized. 

It was a clinical thought, unromantic and terrifyingly seductive: ledger, wound, close.

He waited until the Watchtower breathed like a sleeping beast, the building’s settling a distant, regular inhale that thinned the world to a narrow strip of night. 

Then he braced his forearm across his knee and let the pocketknife do what words could not. 

Skin split until fat gave, until the slippery, red muscle twitched and protested. 

The shock came white-hot and immediate, a clean, ridiculous relief that steadied his chest for a single ragged breath.

As the super-serum in his veins answered with its indifferent mercy: closing, smoothing, folding the wound back into a surface, John felt nothing but a savage, reflexive urge to rip himself apart again. 

Lemar kept visiting, slipping through the hours between doses of quiet and blood. Sometimes he crouched in a shadowed corner, sun catching his jaw, and looked at John with that precise, unbearable mixture of pity and accusation. Sometimes he was only a voice, echoing off tiled rooftops with one sentence, perfectly tuned and terrible:

You wanted the shield more than you liked me.

John found himself answering under his breath, bargaining aloud, apologizing into nothing: I tried. I tried. I did what I had to. 

A week before, he had lain in this same bed with the faceless glow of a screen and chewed on headlines like a bitter habit. He scrolled through the mockery with mechanical detachment until a single comment landed like a stone in his gut:

I wish Walker had gotten the death penalty.

John Walker: bad husband. Worse father. Terrible friend. The arithmetic was painful in its simplicity; he couldn’t see any ledger that balanced, no restitution he could pay that would buy back what had been lost. 

He was certain that walking to the edge required less work than turning back. 

How many more rooftops until one finally lets me go?

Chapter Text

I thought that I heard you laughing.

That’s the line Bob writes later, in the margin of his notebook, but it starts at the dinner table.

Alexei’s in the middle of another story. Bob’s not sure if it’s a new one or just the latest retelling of the one about the bear; the details keep shifting depending on Alexei’s mood. Tonight it’s about how he fought the bear with his bare hands, in the snow, while drunk. Yelena is laughing so hard she actually snorts into her glass of water, which makes her laugh even harder. Ava tries to smother her smile behind her hand, but it sneaks out anyway. Even Bucky chuckles under his breath, though he rolls his eyes like he’s above it.

And John laughs too.

Except it’s late — too late, like the sound got caught in his throat and had to be hauled out. It could almost be mistaken for the man choking, except Bob knows he hasn’t really been eating, only pushing his plate around. And when that sound finally comes, it doesn’t sound like laughter. Not really. It sounds like a cough someone disguised as a laugh. It’s the wrong shape, too tight in the jaw, too sharp in the teeth.

No one else seems to notice. Or maybe they do and… don’t think it matters.

Bob notices. Bob always notices.

He blurts it out before he can stop himself: “That wasn’t funny.”

The table goes quiet for a beat. Alexei pauses, holding his fork halfway to his mouth. “What? Was very funny. Bear is classic story. Always funny.”

Yelena smirks, wiping water from her nose. “It’s stupid, but it is funny, Bob. You just have a funny sense of humour.”

“I have a normal sense of humour,” Bob insists, heat creeping up his neck. “I just—Walker’s laugh didn’t sound like a laugh. It sounded like—”

“Bob,” Bucky interrupts, voice sharp but not unkind, just cutting him off. “Let it go.”

John looks at him then, just a flicker of his eyes, before he ducks his head and grips his glass tighter.

Bob makes a mental note to grab his journal after dinner. 

I thought that I heard you sing

The scrawled print tilts diagonally across the margin because his hand shook. Bob leans back, notebook balanced on his knees, and reads over what he’s already written today. The ink trails off in cramped half-thoughts, looping arrows, diagrams that only make sense to him:

• Walker pulls at sleeve, left side. Consistent!! 
• Avoids eye contact if touched suddenly. Flinch? Or just hates people. 
• Laughed at dinner. Sounded wrong. Not belly, not chest — throat-laugh. Hollow, weird. Weird noises in general? 

It looks obsessive, he knows. Yelena once called his journals “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Bipolar” and Ava nearly choked on her coffee laughing. He laughed too — because, let’s face it, it was Lena and it was, admittedly, pretty funny— but later, he wrote: Don’t let them see you journal. Makes you look that much crazier!! 

He only keeps notes because he’s bad at forgetting. And worse at ignoring.

“Bob. Bo-ooo-oo-b. You’re chewing your pen again.”

Yelena’s voice cuts through the quiet like a knife. She’s sprawled on the couch, boots on the table, looking at him with that wide-eyed smirk that means she’s already entertained.

Bob startles, pen clattering. “I wasn’t— okay, maybe I was. But it’s… It’s a thinking aid. What do you call– er– oral fixation? That sounds weird, I know, but it’s… like fidgeting, perfectly normal!”

“You look like squirrel. Squirrel with a stick,” Yelena says, grinning wider.

From the other side of the room, Ava doesn’t even glance up from her laptop. “Freud would have a field day. At least he’s not pacing. Yet.”

“I don’t pace,” Bob blurts, too fast. Then he backtracks, fumbling. “I mean, sometimes, but only if I’m— never mind.”

They exchange that teammate glance again, the kind that isn’t cruel but still makes him feel like the punchline. He feels the heat crawl up his neck, and he tries to salvage it, words tumbling out before he can stop them.

“Walker seemed off this morning. Quieter than usual, which, granted, isn’t saying much. But he kept doing this thing—” Bob tugs his sleeve over his wrist, mimicking the US Agent’s grip. “Like he didn’t want anyone to see his arm.”

Yelena shrugs, unimpressed. 

“And?”

“Well, you don’t think that’s the least bit… I don’t know— odd? I mean, okay, once or twice, I get— but over and over that morning— what is that, a nervous habit?”  

“Maybe he was cold,” Ava offers. 

“Or maybe he’s hiding something.” Bob hears the edge in his voice: too urgent, too pleading.

Yelena sighs, finally looking up. “Bob. You worry too much. Walker’s… Walker. Broody. Stiff. Bad at mornings, bad at people... we know this. Nothing new.”

But Bob shakes his head, stubborn. “No, it is new. It’s been building. He’s— I don’t know, heavier. Like he’s carrying something worse every day. And no one talks about it, but it’s there. You can feel it. There’s no way you can tell me that you haven’t seen—“

“Bob, Bob, listen.” The ex-assassin interrupts, looking at him with dark eyes, flat and steady. “We have to trust Walker. If he has an issue, he can take it up with Val. It’s not your job.”

Bob swallows and nods, but the words stick like burrs. Not your job. Not your job.

When has anything ever been Bob’s job? He’d only mess it up again—the brunette winces, thinking of his shortest stint of employment— that damned chicken. 

Okay, maybe not Bob’s job. 

But somebody’s job, right?

Before he can open his mouth to protest, they’re already slipping away from him. Yelena shrugs. Ava goes back to whatever gadget she’s fiddling with. Bob bites his tongue, forces himself not to chase it further. He pulls his notebook into his lap instead, scribbles in a cramped hand:

Team doesn’t see it. I do. Must keep watching!!! 

He finds John on the balcony again. 

Not muttering to himself this time, thank God, but sitting cross-legged near the edge, staring at the skyline like it’s challenging him. The air smells like wet concrete, distant smoke.

I think I thought I saw you try.

Because he has. John leaping off rooftops during missions, barely tucking himself into a roll when landing. John perched on ledges, hesitating too long before stepping back. John waiting until the last possible second to open his parachute. 

Bob hesitates at the doorway; notebook clutched to his chest. His brain runs through a dozen opening lines — jokes, statistics, casual questions — before he just clears his throat.

“Hey. Uh. Couldn’t sleep either?” 

John doesn’t look at him. “Go back inside, Bob.”

Bob swallows, edges closer anyway. “You know, statistically, people who— uh— maintain consistent sleep routines live longer. Lower cortisol, better cognition, all that. So maybe if you—”

“Bob.” Just his name. Sharp. Enough to cut him off.

Bob’s mouth goes dry. He fumbles, words spilling anyway. “Don’t be mad, but I wanted to just— I notice things about you. Things maybe the others don’t? And I thought if I said them out loud, they’d… matter less. Or matter more. I don’t know.” His hands twist. 

“You er— I don’t mean to pry if it’s too personal, but you, like, keep pulling your sleeve down. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you eat, unless it’s a team dinner, or sleep. Not that I’m trying to watch you sleep, or anything, but y’know… And you look at rooftops like they’re—”

He cuts himself off, heart hammering. Too much. Too fast.

John finally turns his head, eyes shadowed. In this angle, they’re almost tilted downwards, pools of beautiful blue threatening to crack. 

“Like they’re what?”

Shit. Bob’s spleen feels like it’s combusting. Can it even do that? Do spleens —organs—do that? Whatever it was, those baby-blue eyes staring into Bob’s soul would be the death of him. 

The smart move is to lie or run away. Claim he was sleepwalking, maybe. Anything but compromise his standing with the team, his friendship with John. 

Instead, the brunette blurts, “Exits.”

The silence stretches, and Bob imagines it as a bowstring stretched past its safety. Then, John huffs out a sound that’s supposed to be a laugh, except it’s not because it’s the same as how it was at dinner, and Bob knows and—

“You think too much, Bob.”

Every whisper, of every waking hour. 

That remark should sting. But John’s voice is almost gentle.

Bob laughs, brittle. “That’s funny, I either get that a lot, or not at all.”

He sits down anyway, close enough that their shoulders almost touch. They sit like that, side by side, until the night blurs into city hum.

In the morning, the kitchen smells like eggs and burnt coffee. The team has gathered in their usual loose formation: Yelena with her legs tucked up in the chair, stabbing fruit with a fork; Ava stirring heaps of sugar into her coffee; Alexei buttering toast with the enthusiasm of a lumberjack preparing to chop a tree. Bucky watches in amusement as he pours cornflakes into a bowl. 

John sits opposite them, shoulders square, hands folded like he’s at parade rest even at breakfast. His plate is untouched. He has that mask on, the one Bob has been tracking for days: the neutral, tight-lipped not-quite-smile. The one that practically dares anyone to claim he’s not well-adjusted. 

Bob slides into the seat beside him, balancing his journal under the table where no one can see.

“Morning,” he says, too brightly. Then, fumbling, “Or technically noon. But morning-adjacent!”

John doesn’t answer. Just lifts his coffee, drinks, and sets it down again—no eye contact.

Bob overcompensates. 

“You know, they did a study once — on soldiers, actually — about nutrition and combat readiness. Breakfast was the most important variable. Skipping it reduced performance by something like twenty-seven percent. Memory, reflexes, everything tanked. So technically, if you don’t eat those eggs, you’re endangering us all.”

Yelena snorts. “God forbid we lose twenty-seven percent.”

“I’m serious,” Bob insists, though he can feel his ears heating. “Food is like… pretty important.” He lowers his voice, aimed only at John. “You should eat.”

Finally, John looks at him. Just a flicker of eye contact, brief as a spark. Then he picks up his fork and takes a single bite.

Bob feels a strange rush of victory, even if it’s tiny, fragile, practically ridiculous. He scribbles under the table: ate one bite when prompted!! Compliance vs. choice? Must test again.

Ava catches him writing, eyebrows lifting. “Do you ever turn that brain off?”

“Not if I can help it,” Bob says automatically, then regrets it. The table laughs, but John doesn’t.

Bob notices that too.

I'm choosing my confessions

Trying to keep an eye on you

Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool

By nightfall, the sky is a wet black bowl. The city lights smear like oil under the clouds. Bob takes the stairwell two at a time because waiting seems worse than breathless movement. He brings two mugs, but the cocoa is stone-cold by the time he finds John.

The older man’s shoulders tensed and released not with breath but with some internal pressure valve, and his eyes flicked — not to Bob, not to the skyline — but to his right, over and over, sharp little darts like a man checking a shadow that wouldn’t leave him alone. His other hand rested heavily on the pistol at his side. 

“So—” Bob started, voice coming out too bright, too fast. He flipped open his notebook as if that could disguise the way his heart lurched at the sight of the gun. “I read this article. Well, more of a case study, really. Vietnam vet came back with a fixation. Kept polishing his service revolver every night like it was a ritual. Doctors said it was—” he faltered, eyes darting to John’s hand, “—a kind of grounding thing. Except not. Because, you know, it kept him in the loop. Made it worse.”

“I’m not polishing anything.”

Bob laughed nervously and ran a hand through his hair. 

“Right, yeah, no, I didn’t mean—uh—I just… I notice. Patterns. You, uh, keep… looking.” He gestured vaguely toward the empty stretch of rooftop where John’s eyes had been snagging. “Like you’re seeing something there.”

John’s jaw worked. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t confirm it either. 

“No one’s there.”

“Okay,” Bob said too quickly. Glancing right — auditory? Visual? “Someone” —> person? check for trigger points —“I just… I worry. That’s all.”

John finally turned toward him, his eyes bloodshot and narrowed.

“You talk too much.”

“Yeah, I know.” Bob grinned sheepishly. “It’s, uh, my thing. Can’t shut up. Like if I keep putting words into the air, maybe they’ll hold something together. Maybe they’ll—”

“—make sense of it.” John’s voice was flat, but there was an odd gentleness in it, like he was finishing Bob’s sentence not because he cared but because he recognized the compulsion.

Bob blinked at him. 

“Yeah. Exactly that.”

Silence stretched. John’s hand stayed on the pistol, fingers curled over the grip. His eyes flicked right again, sharp, unsettled.

Bob swallowed. “Walker… maybe you don’t have to hold it so tight? The gun.” He tried to smile. 

John didn’t answer. He didn’t need to; the tilt of his head told Bob everything. He had one foot half out over the void. His fingers were tight around the strap at his hip. His lips were thin and pale.

“Walker,” Bob tried again. “You don’t have to—”

“I killed him.”

Bob’s pen slips out of his ear and clatters on the concrete. He could have sworn he’d written about this possibility in the margins, but now the note would be a coward’s scrawl. “Who?” he asks, the wrong question maybe, but the only one his mouth can make.

“Lemar.” The name lands with the weight of mortar. John swallows, and the sound is animal. “I didn’t mean to. I—” He laughs then, a sound like a match flaring and dying. “I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t save him. It was—” He can’t make the rest into words.

Bob is an idiot for a second, and then he’s not: he recalls the way John moved in fights, the way rage can snap sharper than reflex. He shouldn’t guess. He shouldn’t narrate. But he has to get him away from that godforsaken gun.

“I thought I could pay for it,” John spits, voice tight, ragged. His hands curl around the edges of the gun, knuckles white. “I thought if I punished myself, if I made it hurt enough, maybe it would cancel out. But it won’t. It… it never does.” He swallows hard, throat bobbing, and the motion shakes something loose inside Bob. “I don’t know how else to pay back blood.”

Bob’s knees go weak. He can feel it in the hollow of his thighs, the way his body wants to crumble and yet stay upright. Reason — every line drilled into him over years of therapy, every coping skill he’s catalogued and memorized like scripture — slips like water through a sieve. Numbers, logic, breathing exercises, distraction, lists, mantra, counting, oxygen, grounding, safe places… none of it matters right now.

All he can reach for is confession. All he can offer is himself.

“When I was young…” Bob whispers, “I used to think that if I made myself numb enough, people would stop hurting me. So I…” His throat catches, hands shaking over the notebook he forgot to put away. He hesitates — too much to say, too fast, too messy — then pushes forward. “I tried to hurt myself. Not always, not in one way. But I thought if I could be in pain on my terms, it might stop other pain, stop the screaming, stop the loneliness.” He breathes through the tremor in his ribs. “I thought it helped me figure out who I was. It didn’t. It just… made everything louder. Everything that I wanted to hide, everything that I thought I could control — I thought I was fixing it. I wasn’t. I was just scared, and lonely, and screaming inside.”

He swallows, voice breaking. “But… people came. People who didn’t lecture me. Didn’t tell me I was stupid or weak. They just… sat with me. Hugged me. Told me I wasn’t alone. I thought nothing could save me but dying — and they sat. Just… sat. And slowly, slowly, the need to hurt myself… got quieter.”

Bob’s chest heaves as he says it, eyes fixed on the floor, trying to measure the tremble in his hands as he thinks of the team. His gaze flickers up, over the edge of the rooftop, past the city lights, and he notices it now: John doesn’t stop glancing to his right, toward something invisible, something that lingers like smoke or shadow. Every so often, his eyes flicker wide, teeth clenched, and the gun shifts slightly in his grip.

“I’m not you,” the man croaks. 

“I know,” Bob says. “But you’re a good man.” 

He steps closer until the back of his knee grazes the other’s, then closer still, until his chest nearly touches John’s back

"I don’t want you to be me. I don’t care if it makes sense, if it’s fair, or if you don’t believe it, but… I’m here. I can sit on the floor with you. I can hold your hand. I can talk until your ears hurt, or I can sit in silence with you. Whatever it takes.” 

The wind shrieks through the metal railings; Bob’s jacket flaps. Rain dots their faces like cold wool. John inhales, a sound that could be the beginning of a sob.

“You don’t have to be the ledger, Walker,” Bob says, breath fogging in the night. He tries to mirror names he thinks might anchor John — Yelena’s laugh, Bucky’s soft scolding, Ava’s video-game nights. He flings them into the air like a rope. “You were chosen for this team for a reason. Not because you deserved medals or headlines or that shield, but because you were someone who could be there. Who was there. Let me be here now.”

John’s fingers flexed on the strap. For a terrifying, suspended second, the pistol’s metal caught the sodium light and winked: a small bright light that meant finality. It might be the moment he drops the gun. It might be the moment he aims it. The city below roars like a hungry thing, but Bob’s world has narrowed to the metallic flash and John’s face — handsome, wrecked, so tired it hurt.

Then John moves. He lifts the gun to his chin with both hands, an automatic, awful motion. His fingers twitch. His gaze finds the horizon, empty and cruel.

Bob loses himself in motion: he lunges at wrists, at coat, at whatever part of John he could find. He didn’t think about leverage or form; he thought about volume, about force, about not letting this idiotic man have his way. His fingers closed on cold skin and fabric, and he hauled with a grip that says no in every language known to fear. 

John’s body swung, a wild, brutal counterweight. The world narrows to the strain of muscle, the electric snap of adrenaline in his veins, the high keening of sirens in some far, unconnected universe. For a second, the Agent was an impossible, airborne thing, then he slumped, a heavy, broken weight against Bob’s chest. The gun skittered across the gravel and came to rest a few feet away, clattering like a dull bell.

John’s boots skid as the two hit the rooftop hard; his foot scrapes rubber against concrete. For a pulse — one wild, infinite heartbeat — John’s face is inches from Bob’s. Rain stabs them, hot and cold. John’s eyes are liquid and enormous, broken open.

“Get off me,” John tries to say, but the sound is lost in a keening breath.

“No,” Bob says, and it’s small and terrible and true. “No. No, no, no.” It’s a child’s litany, ragged and useless, but it lands. He clamps his arm around John’s shoulders, wraps him in the only thing he has — his own steady existence. He drags him backward, presses him flat against the rooftop wall, and pins him by force and by pleading both. He keeps talking because silence is a sliver that splits him in two. 

“I’m here. John. You’re not alone.”

John trembles. For a beat, Bob thinks he’ll lunge again, but then John’s body goes slack against him, a hard, sobbing weight.

The tears begin quietly, as if shy, then flood. John’s head drops into Bob’s shoulder; the sound he makes is something like breaking.

Somewhere in the dark, a door bangs — someone heard a shout. Footsteps. Heavy boots thudding up the stairwell: Bucky first, then Yelena, then Ava and Alexei, breathless.

They arrive in a scatter of light and movement and then are suddenly still, like a tide stilled by rock. Bucky’s hand is on Bob’s back, solid and needing. Yelena’s voice is sharp and bright, “What the hell—” cut off at the sight of John, collapsed, his face contorted.