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There’s a week long stretch of time in between the two most mortifying moments of John’s miserable life.
The first one is Bob pulling him into an ill-timed hug, which wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that he still hasn’t entirely learned how to manage his assets, and sometimes touching Bob means being thrown into a vast mental fortitude of shame. It’s a risk John doesn’t usually take, given the heaps of it he’s got in the archives to choose from.
The second problem is what Bob saw; what they were both forced to be voyeurs to inside of John’s memories from not even a full month prior.
A grainy rendering of the bathroom in John’s apartment where he’s been staying lately, the door locked and the shower going as if it could drown out the guilt of what he was doing. The whole memory was foggy like condensation coating the edges of it, but he knows Bob had seen the most incriminating part crystal clear: the video pulled up on John’s phone propped on the bathroom counter at the end of another long, hard day, his face hard as stone, body taut like a string as he watched.
On the screen, Bob’s face, some random interview he’d given a while back, when they were all still running the headlines. His voice, cutting through the fog in the room. John’s teeth digging into his lower lip so sharp he tasted iron, hand gripping the corner of the cabinet hard enough to break it off.
Real-life him had grabbed Bob and crashed them straight through the bathroom door into the hallway, the facade of the memory shattering around them before it could unfold any further. But the damage had already been done—obviously, because Bob, who’s always puttering somewhere around the common areas of the tower, hasn’t shown his face in a week. Not to John, at least.
John already knows that the third worst thing is going to be talking to him about it.
+
It’s a slow day when he finally gets his chance.
The rest of the team is out of the tower, and John, theoretically, could be too. He almost gives in to the avoidance, but the same shame that got him into this mess in the first place is what drives him to stay behind and wait until Bob thinks he’s alone, then ambush him while he’s doing the dishes.
John never claimed to have good ideas.
“We need to talk about what you saw,” he announces to the kitchen at large, holding his ground as Bob flails cartoonishly at being snuck up on.
With a muttered curse and a hand through his hair, Bob glances helplessly toward the exit that John’s currently blocking, then turns back to the dishwasher.
“Do we?” he asks, suddenly fascinated with the washing pods. He huffs a little at John’s silence. “I’m not gonna say anything, Walker.”
“Why did you hug me in the first place,” John presses, stepping forward.
Bob grabs two of the pods and shoves them into the tray, shutting it harshly. “Because I wanted to.”
“Why?”
With the machine starting up, Bob tosses the hand towel he’d been holding onto the counter with a scoff and makes a move for the door anyway.
“Forget it.”
“No,” John insists, shifting in front of him. “You’re going to tell me, and you’re gonna tell me now.”
“It—it gets fucking lonely, okay, Walker?”
“Lonely?” John echoes, brows drawn together. “We’re literally always around each other. I can’t remember any time I’ve walked into a room lately and one of you wasn’t in it. You were just out with Yelena yesterday.”
“Yeah, okay, but I can’t touch them,” Bob exhales heavily. “I can’t touch anyone without—without making everything all—sad.”
It gives John pause, watching Bob shuffle on his feet.
“Thought all that was getting better now,” he grunts quietly.
“It was,” Bob says. “The therapy is—it’s good. It’s helping. But it’s not like it’s linear. I still have bad days. Or—or weeks, I guess.” He leans a hip against the counter, pulling his sleeves down over his hands. “I’m not gonna go all dark on everybody again, but it’s been easier just…not to touch anybody lately. Just in case. Just until I can do it without bringing out the worst in them, too.”
Now that he thinks about it, Bob pulling away lately might not have only been about the John thing. Although it probably didn’t help it much.
It makes him feel worse. He’s taken to looking out for everybody in the group in his own ways, picking up on little things that the army and fatherhood have taught him to be on alert for. But Bob is more confusing. John just can’t seem to get a handle on him no matter what he tries, and his own frustration at not being able to usually translates, well—to shit like this. He clears his throat.
“How long’s it been?”
Bob shrugs. “Few weeks, or so. Lost count.”
“Fucking hell, Bobby.” John’s shoulders collapse, some of the tension finally easing into concern. “You shoulda said something.”
“S’fine. I shouldnt’ve touched you without any warning or anything.”
“I just—wasn’t expecting it, is all,” John manages tightly.
“It’s okay, Walker. I know you’ve never been my biggest fan.” Bob flashes him a wry smile. “I just didn’t know it was that bad. Thought we were getting a little better.”
A little better? Had Bob even seen what was happening in that bathroom?
John blinks. “What?”
“You,” Bob waves a hand in his direction, but doesn’t lift his eyes, “bein’ ashamed of me.”
Fuck. Bob has no idea what he saw.
John’s angry face in the mirror, labored breaths as if he were furious—with himself, yes, but not with Bob. The interview he’d been watching; Bob must have assumed that, what? That John was just sitting there, stewing in his hatred for him? Picking out the things he’d done or said wrong?
Of course Bob’s brain would go there. He’s just as fucked up as Walker is, different, but ultimately the same.
A part of him wants to leave it at that. It’s much less mortifying than the truth. But he looks at Bob again, the sad lines in his face, the way he’s curled in on himself, trying to be smaller, and sighs.
“I’m not ashamed of you, Bobby. That’s not—that’s not what you saw.”
Bob’s jaw locks to one side. “Look. I know you don’t like me. Can you just stop lying about it?”
“It wasn’t that.”
“What was it, then?” Bob looks at him finally, his voice raised but cracking near the end.
Scuffing a boot on the ground, John hooks in a deep, steadying breath and extends a hand in his direction.
“Come here.”
Bob’s shoulders lose any of their previous bravado, falling limp toward the ground, and he blinks.
“Huh?”
“We can make an agreement,” John says carefully, opening his palm. “You get a hug, and I get to prove that what you thought you saw wasn’t what it was. But then after that, we drop the whole thing. And whatever you see—it stays between us. Not Yelena, not anyone else. Okay?”
Bob doesn’t appear to hear anything after you get a hug, the curls on his head bouncing as he nods. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
Within seconds he’s blazing forward to accept John’s offer, tossing his arms around John’s middle in a tight embrace. Swallowing tightly, John wraps an arm around his shoulders and lets his eyes fall shut, and the rest of the word falls away with it as they descend into darkness.
+
The bathroom is hot.
Steam covers every reflective surface in the room, the shower walls, the mirror—intentional, so that John can’t see his own reflection for this.
The line of his shoulders is tense as he strips himself down to nothing, punctual and clinical about it from start to finish. The noise of the shower running drowns out the ringing in his ears enough to take a breath, exhaustion dragging him toward the floor.
The last mission was terrible, thoughts swirling in his head about everything he could have done differently, clues he’d missed, calls that should have been made and weren’t. The ever present nagging in the back of his head that always seems to be saying they would be just fine whether you were there or not, so it doesn’t matter anyway.
And then there was Olivia, who he’s been making a trip to see as much as possible lately in between work. And his son, who can walk and is starting to talk now, is probably more likely to know him by the name the television anchors use than dad. Everything’s up in the air, and it feels like no matter how hard he tries to fix them he just ends up making it all worse. He’d thought joining the group would make him seem more capable, more worthy. But he’s not sure if he deserves to have all of it, even if he manages to sell the veneer.
Point is, his vices have become few and far between. He hardly gets a moment of privacy nowadays, and he can’t drink as much because the serum makes it impossible to feel much of anything save for a slight buzz that fades too quick and leaves him miserable again too soon.
That’s the mindset he’d been in the first time he pulled up a picture of Bob and shoved a hand around his dick.
He’s not proud of it. Pretty clearly the opposite of that. Bob’s a teammate, and he’s younger than John, and John is supposed to be playing dutiful husband before Olivia decides to cut ties with him completely. Not locking himself into a bathroom of shame to jerk off to the sound of Bob’s voice, or the picture Yelena sent of him in the group chat last week, or the old interview clips where he looks so fucking beautiful that John has to close his eyes every few seconds for a reprieve.
But he does it anyway, because it’s one of the only things he looks forward to now, even if he feels like shit afterward.
So he pulls up the most recent video saved to a private folder and tilts his phone, propping it on the counter by the sink. And then he presses play and wraps a hand around his cock.
It’s odd, watching himself like this. It feels like he’s actually in the room with this version of himself, humidity clinging to his skin, harsh breaths coming quicker by the minute, even if all of this is only mirage. If it were real, John would be able to change the ending.
If it were real, Bob wouldn’t be standing beside him right now in the thick of the fog, shocked frozen as he watches John-from-a-few-weeks-ago jerk off to a video of him like he’s being fucking timed.
Because that’s the way he always does it, when it’s like this—sharp, hard, rough enough to hurt a little. To be a reminder that he shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. With gritted teeth and calculated control and a snarl when he finally works himself over the edge, anger and shame and relief all fusing into one terrible catharsis.
Next to him, Bob’s fingers twitch down by his side. John watches him drag his eyes over the scene a final time—past-him exhaling shakily through his nose while gripping the sink, fist painted white with the mess he’d made of it, allowing himself a final few seconds of release—before Bob turns to face him, and then he’s walking forwards until his palms can press to current-John’s shoulders and shove him backward.
They both go flying over the side of the bathtub, but the crash of impact never comes, and everything fades into blackness once more.
+
When John’s eyes open again, he’s in a memory he doesn’t recognize.
They’re in the tower, because the windows spanning the left wall are the same ones on every floor, half covered by blackout curtains and leaving some of the room covered in shadow. Even still, there’s a warm glow from the lamp on the nightstand, an unmade double bed in the center of the room. A pile of laundry sits relegated to the armchair in the corner, a shelving unit with a variation of books, art, and various knick-knacks from missions the others have brought back as souvenirs.
They’re in Bob’s head this time, then.
The room’s empty, him and John standing in the closet off to the side, peeking through the slatted double doors. John glances at him with a raised brow, and Bob holds up a finger, his face turning suspiciously red.
Not a minute later, John hears frantic footsteps coming down the hallway, and the soft mechanic beep of the automated locks being undone in preparation for the upcoming arrival. John is already eyeing the bedroom door when it flies open and bangs against the wall, past-Bob flying through the threshold like his ass is on fire.
It slams behind him and he kicks off his shoes somewhere to the side, one of them landing with a thud a few inches from where John is standing, laces sprawling and undone.
This version of Bob is familiar. Recent. John tilts his head as he thinks back to place it; the color of his sweatshirt, the cling of his jeans to his thighs, the subtle pomade in his hair. It’d been a briefing day, John thinks, all of them crowded around a long table covered in documents and scans, drawings of maps and dossiers.
John remembers being frustrated. None of them could seem to make sense of the web of clues they’d tracked down, no matter which way they tried to piece together the information. Sinking so many hours into a presumed dead end had made him preemptively pissed, the group tense and snapping at each other in the conference room.
And then Bob, from the back of the room, had pointed out something the rest of them had somehow missed. Tentative at first, like maybe he thought it was stupid or wrong, but it hadn’t been. It’d been spot on.
John remembers relief. Remembers heaving a tired exhale as he’d gathered his things to leave with everybody else, but stopping by the doorway in front of Bob to squeeze his shoulder, right up there by his neck, and tell him you did great today, Bobby.
This must have been right after that.
Where that Bob is currently tripping over his own legs trying to get out of his jeans, shoving them halfway down his thighs before giving up and falling sideways onto the mattress anyway. He shimmies onto his back with his knees up, and when he turns, his hand has already wrapped around his dick, stroking furiously over it with his fist.
Almost absently, his eyes flutter as he lifts his free hand to ghost it over the spot near his neck where John had touched him, and he moans, low and desperate.
Bob clears his throat beside him, and John startles when he realizes how close they are in the cramped, dark space of the closet.
“We’re even, I guess,” he whispers. “We can probably get out through the window or something, if we—”
Before he can finish his sentence, John clamps a hand around his wrist to hold him still. Bob’s swallow is audible.
“Showed you mine,” John rasps.
Sucking in a steep breath, Bob take a minute to run wide, contemplative eyes over his face, but eventually nods.
Looking back to the Bob on the bed, John lets out his own measured exhale, a little of his shame eased by Bob’s similar predicament. There’s nothing but the sound of fabric on hangers and Bob shifting in the closet, but on the bed, past-Bob has shoved the collar of his sweatshirt into his own mouth to muffle the noise.
His brow is twisted in expressive want, long lashes brushing the tops of his flushed cheeks, his entire body angled up toward the heat of a spit-slick palm around himself like it’s a center of gravity. He’s shuddering with it, mumbling something the fabric in his mouth doesn’t allow them to hear, his legs tangled all up in the mess of sheets as he bucks up into the pressure.
Where John’s vision was all tightly wound, fraying control, Bob’s is just helpless disinhibition. Aside from the cotton in his mouth, he’s not making any efforts to stifle the way he’s obviously affected, and the contrast between them—and the fact that they’re watching it from the closet like a couple of filthy voyeurs—is proving to stoke the arousal in John’s gut instead of put it out the way he’d hoped that all of this would.
On the bed, Bob’s eyes snap open to look up the slope of his taut abdomen where his sweatshirt’s ridden up, his stomach rippling with tension as he works himself over. His hand flies over his cock, tugging and twisting and desperate, and when his mouth drops open around a choked moan, it makes the cotton fall out of his mouth, stained with spit and the indention of his teeth against his chin.
And then, just before he starts coming in thick ropes over his own hand—
“Fuck, Walker.”
It’s quiet, deliberately so, but with John’s elevated hearing it’s like it echoes in his bones.
His head splits to the side to look at Bob’s guilty expression beside him in the closet, heavy breaths hardly contained in his chest. John’s hard below his belt from the show, too dark to see if Bob is too.
But he hardly protests when John grabs his wrist again and pulls him from the closet altogether, dragging him across the bedroom and other-Bob’s afterglow so they can crash through the window and into the dark abyss.
+
Both of them come back to themselves in the kitchen at the tower with a gasp, Bob’s arms still locked around John’s middle, John’s hand at the back of his neck. It’s impossible to know how much time has passed, but it’s darker now outside the windows, and the dishwasher is quiet.
The others should be back soon. They don’t have a lot of time.
John receives the answer to his earlier question when a shift of their bodies puts the bulge of Bob’s dick right up against his, and he tightens his grip on the back of Bob’s neck when he whimpers a little about it.
“Tonight,” John says gruffly, “after everyone’s asleep—”
“Anything,” Bob mumbles into his neck. “God. Whatever you want. As long as…”
Tugging him back enough to see his bitten lips and pink skin, John frowns.
“What is it?”
Bob falters, fingers twitching in the fabric of John’s shirt. “I don’t—I don’t want this to be something else you’re ashamed of.”
Inhaling through his nose, John leans in close enough to just barely brush their mouths together. Bob might be better at letting go, but maybe John can wield his control, for once, in a way that’s more productive that destructive.
“It won’t be.”
They separate at the sound of voices in the common room, Bob’s lips twitching with the first smile in weeks.
Maybe, John thinks, this isn’t so miserable after all.