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They’re splayed on John’s bed naked and exchanging lazy kisses when Bob asks the question. John has his face buried in Bob’s neck, sucking a hickey against his pale skin, his teeth pressing in with enough force to do worse than break skin on any normal person. To Bob he can’t even do that—still Bob squirms happily on top of him. He rests his hand on John’s chest, fingers curling into the blond hair there, and murmurs, “Walker, mmm… hey…”
Pulling away, John brushes his nose against the mark he left on Bob’s throat and says, “Yeah? What is it, baby?”
“What were you… What were you like before the serum?”
“The serum,” John repeats blankly. Feels like the blood takes a minute to come back to his head. “Why’re you—? You’re on my dick, why’re you asking me about the serum?”
Bob’s brows furrow. He looks down as if he can’t feel John’s cock right underneath him, then looks back up and says, “Well, uh, I don’t know. Because your body’s right in front of me? So I was thinking about it?”
John drops his head back against the pillow and tells himself in desperation that if Bob’s saying weird shit, it means he’s feeling comfortable enough to speak his mind. He reminds himself that that’s good. Shy, withdrawn, cagey Bob is worse than outspoken Bob could ever be. But, God, he just wishes outspoken Bob wouldn’t ask about the serum when he’s trying to get his dick wet. He spends enough time each day thinking about the serum and even more time than that trying not to think about the serum, a task that, given that it changed almost everything about the way he had worked for thirty-six years, is boneheaded and nearly impossible, and a task that John takes up over and over again anyway.
“I was, before the serum, I was really skinny,” Bob is saying, swirling circles in John’s chest hair, a favorite habit of his. “I mean, not, like, Steve Rogers skinny.” Captain America talk, now, too. Even the touching can’t save his boner from that. “But skinny. And then, the earliest I can remember after the serum—in the Vault, you know, I was—I was like this.”
Bob takes one of John’s hands in his and slips them between their bodies so that John can touch his abdomen. John’s felt it a million times. Admittedly, the high of it never goes away. “Like what,” says John, running his fingers down Bob’s stomach, “shredded? Yeah, I know.”
“But what were you like? Before? I was just wondering if you were always so big.”
John bites down on his lip at the thrum of delight that rushes through him at that word, big, way too easily. It helps that it comes with no coy grins or eyelash-fluttering. Bob just says it like he means it, his eyes fixed on John’s chest.
“Well, uh.” John clears his throat. “I had three Medals of Honor, Bobby, I wasn’t skinny.”
“Oh, right. How could I forget…”
“Shut it,” John grumbles affectionately, jabbing Bob in the stomach hard enough that it would’ve made his wife squeal. Bob just keeps smiling. He probably doesn’t even feel it. “Serum wasn’t like yours, or Rogers’, or whoever’s. It kept you looking the same after you took it. Scrawny little nineteen-year-old kicked my ass because she had it. I was lean, I took it, I stayed lean.”
Bob’s hand slips down. “Huh.” He circles his index finger around John’s nipple, leaving a chill in its wake. “But you’re not lean now. So you got big way after you took it,” he notes.
“Not way—whatever. Yeah. That’s what the gym’s for.”
“Where’d you find a gym that could handle a super-soldier before this…?”
“…Around.” You could say a lot of things about Val (and John’s said a lot of them), but you could never say she was completely useless. “I don’t know why you’re so surprised,” he adds as Bob leans in and starts mouthing at his neck. “You’re in there too. Have you never even looked at the weights? Or heard all the times I got yelled at for leaving weights out that someone can’t move, because nobody can go around anything anymore—ow.”
Quickly, Bob pulls away. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I got distracted,” he says. “I don’t think you’re bleeding…”
The spot on Bob’s neck where John had sunk his teeth in is, of course, completely healed. John looks at the ceiling and works his jaw.
“Yeah, no. But still, sorry,” Bob continues. “And, uh, not really, I don’t really look… I only go when you guys ask me to practice fighting, and I don’t like to… stay…”
“You never tried working out?”
Bob smiles nervously. “What’s the point? Y’know, thirty pounds, three hundred, three thousand, three hundred thousand. What’s the difference to me?”
In answer John rubs his thumb along the bite Bob left. The pain flares in an odd way—it reminds him of the slowed-down footage of bombs the military kept where the explosion looks like a living gelatinous thing, crawling outwards. “You could figure it out,” he mutters.
Bob’s smile fades. He says again, “Sorry.”
The satisfaction John feels is a slow-motion thing too: in reality it lasts for a second and then it’s gone. He doesn’t apologize. He reaches up and pulls Bob down into another kiss. Bob sighs into his mouth and rocks his hips down, the bulge of his half-hard cock grinding against Walker’s own.
Fucking Bob feels nothing like sleeping with Olivia did. John never slept with anyone but her before they started dating in high school and didn’t fuck anyone after until him, so he’s got no frame of reference for how much of that is Bob himself and how much of it is him adjusting to someone new, but it’s distinctly different. It’s all his musculature that he doesn’t work for, all his fucking strength that he refuses to use, the pleasure of their cocks grinding together always tied to the reminder that Bob’s dick is bigger than his. It’s him pressing kisses to John’s jaw and cheek, sensual-sweet, and definitely not thinking about any of that shit at all.
One of these days he’s gonna use those Void hands on John again and he’s gonna see it all, all of the stupid, humiliating, envious thoughts John has about him, and he’ll realize how pitiful John is.
“Walker,” Bob says into his ear, “I want you—I want you to—”
John cants his hips, sliding their cocks together again. Over Bob’s mewl he says into his ear, “Yeah, baby, I’ve got you,” and then he’s lubing his fingers up and pressing one into his waiting hole.
“Oh, fuck…”
“Losing it at one finger? How’re you gonna take me with that attitude, huh, Bobby?”
It earns him a laugh and a swat to the chest that stings just enough for him to notice. “Stop it, you dick,” Bob says, giggling. “It’s the lube. The lube’s cold!”
John grins despite himself. “Excuses.”
“Stop,” he says again, still laughing. “No, don’t actually—I mean stop being an asshole, not stop with the fingers.”
“Should’ve clarified,” murmurs John, and he presses another finger into Bob.
Sometimes he’s thought about what it would be like the other way around. There’s something too embarrassing about it all. He probably wouldn’t even like it, but he doubts he’ll ever find out, what with where his mind and body have been lately. He imagines Bob bending his legs back and his knees cracking something awful like they did on that mission the other day. Christ, he thinks as he pushes a third finger in, thirty-nine. Forty soon. He’s getting old. Rogers was physically the same age John is now when whatever happened that ended up in him giving the shield to Wilson happened—he hit this age and vanished, and John’s here on their play-pretend Avengers. Not to mention Wilson has more grace and agility than John could ever have. Sometimes he wonders what he’s doing.
“More,” Bob gasps out. “Please, please more…”
John kisses where he thinks he bit Bob’s neck, not that he can tell. “Yeah? Getting desperate, huh? You want this cock?”
“Fuck, I want it.”
“Yeah, but you gotta tell me, baby,” John says, hoping none of his own desperation comes through. “I wanna hear it.”
Though his thick cock jerks hard against John’s stomach, Bob makes a pitiful noise at being forced to talk. Even when he’s not tapping into Sentry, he practically glows, a beacon of beauty, warmth, light, all the things John will never say aloud. “I want your cock so bad,” he whispers, clenching around John’s fingers. “I’m, I’m so empty without it. I need it, I need your cock, I—fuck, Walker—I need you.”
It’s a nice thing to believe for a little bit. One day, John reminds himself, despite the warmth that runs through him at the words like his blood’s been turned to light, one day Bob’s going to come to him with shadow-tipped fingers and he’ll see John for what he really is. But it’s not like John is going to rush it. Jesus, he remembers what it was like losing Lemar, losing the title, losing Olivia, remembers it all because he can’t ever forget it, not like Bob, who can cut things from his mind wholecloth. (There he fucking goes again.) Just let him put off the next crash for a little while longer.
John spreads his knees, takes his cock in hand, and presses the tip of it, oozing pre-cum, to Bob’s stretched hole. “Come on, pretty boy, take it for me,” he says, and he lays back to let Bob do the work. He lets Bob prove how much he wants him.
Gratefully, Bob sinks down on him, and when he bottoms out his head tips back, his eyes squeeze shut, his mouth falls open in the shape of an O. Too enraptured by him to do anything else, John slides his hands up to rest on Bob’s waist and guides him gently as he rocks his hips back and forth making little pained noises. He looks too perfect with strands of his wavy hair falling in his face. He looks too perfect in general: his body, chiseled by an artist’s hand, bears no marks, no scars, no blemishes or rashes or bumps, the kind of physique you could put on a poster, not like John’s beneath him. John’s a map of battle scars and bruises from their latest mission.
And John knows who that artist is. He knows firsthand how fucking evil Val and her cronies can be, knows from the documents Yelena showed him and the memories they went through how much suffering Bob endured to end up this way, knows that the cost of this is the shadow of the Void always looming. None of that’s enough to stop him from wishing he were that perfect man.
“You’re so good, Walker,” Bob murmurs, starting to rise and sink back down on his cock. “You fill me so well… you’re so good to me…”
John swears, tightening his hold on Bob’s hips. Every word of praise that falls from his mouth pushes John closer to the edge and unsettles him at once.
It takes no time at all for Bob to find his rhythm. He bounces on John’s dick like he was born to do it, and when John plants his feet and thrusts up to match him, the noise that rips out of him could fuel John’s wet dreams for a fucking century. He’s tight and he’s warm and he’s perfect, and he wants John, even though with his literal made-in-a-lab-to-perfection thirty-year-old body he could pick up anybody off the street that he liked. It doesn’t make sense. None of it fucking makes sense.
“That’s good, baby, huh?” he says instead of anything about that. “Listen to you fucking whining for it. You love it.”
Bob nods frantically, and lets out a, “Yeah,” a pitchy, broken thing.
“Tell me—tell me how much you love it.”
“So fucking much,” Bob hisses. “I love it, I love your cock, Walker, I…” He breathes in deep and the next thrust punches it back out of him in a keen. “I…”
John tightens his hold on his hips. “Yeah. Nobody else gets to touch you like this, isn’t that right?”
“Nobody, nobody else, never again,” comes the babbled answer. “I don’t—don’t want anyone else, Walker, want you, so good to me… so good…”
Even though Bob has admitted to having a number of previous sexual partners that more than dwarfs John’s grand total of one. Even though John, washed up middle-aged trainwreck that he is, can't really fathom what he’s done to convince Bob that he’s so good.
He’s not good. He’s a fuckup in every sense of the word. Bob is good, a good person who’s done bad things, and John is his exact opposite. So why—why in God’s name—
He pulls Bob down to him and presses their lips together, and Bob moans into his mouth as John keeps fucking into him.
“Fuck, Walker, I’m gonna—gonna…”
“You close, baby?” he gets out. “You gonna cum just from my cock?”
Bob nods again with an “uh-huh” so slurred that it’s nearly incomprehensible.
“You’re so fucking perfect,” John hisses, and he didn’t even mean to let it out, let alone so sharply. Bob sinks his nails into John’s back, so fucked out that all he can do is whine to himself, so maybe he didn’t even hear it. “Cum for me,” John says anyway, louder and stronger. “Cum for me, baby.”
Bob does, tightening around John and spilling in the space between them with a cry that makes the lights flicker and nails that dig into John’s back hard enough to draw blood. He slumps on top of John, but John keeps moving, chasing his own close release. The pain in his back is gone as soon as he notices it—and the pain from the bite, John realizes, has long vanished too. Healed too quickly for the serum. Healed because Bob wanted them to heal.
Jesus Christ. He’s perfect. He can do anything. Sometimes John forgets that on top of all the strength, he’s a reality warper of the highest order.
John buries his own sense of inadequacy when he buries his face into Bob’s neck and sinks his teeth into the skin, fucking him harder and faster, so close now. Like some part of him hopes that by getting close enough, he can absorb some of that perfection, take in some of the light and make it his own. No friend or lover or mantle could ever draw it out of him. He just didn’t have it to begin with. But he drinks Bob in anyway, dreaming that maybe some of that golden brightness could make him into the John Walker Bob thinks he is—purer, kinder, younger, stronger, sexier, more heroic. The John Walker you could put on a poster.
He spills inside and his vision turns to pure light.