Work Text:
They stop by Rockefeller Center on their way out of town.
“I fought Clint Barton here,” Yelena says, as they stand in the plaza looking up at where the tree would be. “Valentina told me he was responsible for my sister dying. I was going to kill him.”
“How come you didn’t?” Bob asks, beside her and holding her hand.
“Because he held me off long enough for him to explain that he tried to stop her sacrificing herself,” Yelena says. “He was her best friend. I didn’t want to listen. But he knew the signal we had when we were kids together.”
She raises and lowers one shoulder. “Now we’re kinda friends. I send him memes. He texts me random stuff his kids do. He called after the New Avengers announcement to make sure I was okay.”
“I ran into him that one time in the middle of all the Fisk craziness,” Bob mentions. “He seemed like an okay guy.”
“He is.”
- - -
They make their way slowly down the East Coast, skipping over all the normal tourist spots, and stopping at places that probably look ordinary to anyone else. “I tried busking for a few days on that corner, I was really bad at it,” Bob says in Trenton, “I chipped in with three other guys for a motel room here to ride out a big snowstorm,” in Philadelphia, “I was having a good day and helped a little old lady carry up her groceries and she gave me twenty bucks. I went and bought the best meatball sub ever...and then, uh, spent the rest on drugs,” in Dover.
They take a detour out west to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where she spent the only part of her childhood that was a childhood. She drives him through the old neighborhood, past the newer house where hers used to be. They stop by Natasha’s grave. Yelena doesn’t really believe in the superstition of talking to a dead person’s grave or bringing someone there to introduce them, especially since Natasha isn’t even really buried there. So she doesn’t say anything, and neither does Bob.
Because Yelena is stubborn and doesn’t let things go, they track down Shane’s Tire Shop and Dmitri’s Elite Industrial Lighting and Electronics, looking through the photos of sponsored kid sports teams at each place. To her chagrin, they find a photo of the Thunderbolts at Dmitri’s. Bob laughs until he can’t breathe and insists on taking a picture of her with it, which Yelena allows on the condition that he never let Alexei know he was right all along.
Heading back to the coast, they skirt around DC - things have been better with Sam Wilson since they all teamed up to beat Doom, but it’s still best if everyone keeps to their own territory. They keep on moving south, retracing Bob’s slow progression north from more than a decade ago, and he points out places where he camped or crashed, places where he was strung out, places where he experienced moments of grace.
“Uh, maybe we shouldn’t go in there,” he says, pulling Yelena back as she’s about to head into a random convenience store near their hotel. “I...I got arrested for shoplifting from there. Mighta made a scene. They probably wouldn’t recognize me now, but...”
They find someplace else to get what they need.
When they make it to Tampa, Bob gives her directions to Sarasota Springs, to the street where he grew up. Somebody else lives in the house now, a nice-looking older couple with a chihuahua, from Yelena’s research. They already knew from when his parents got in touch shortly after the Incident - his dad quickly earned himself a restraining order, but Bob calls his mom every so often, trying to rebuild some kind of relationship. She’s in Colorado, though, not anywhere near their itinerary.
Bob has them get out and walk, and shows Yelena the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood, the places where he used to play and hide and run around.
They drive around through town, and Yelena recognizes the Corner of Chicken-Costumed Sign Waving without having it pointed out. They’ve taken a few accidental trips through each other’s shame rooms at this point, sleeping close together as they do, and also she’s had to dive in on purpose a couple of times during a Sentry/Void episode, so this isn’t the first time on their trip she’s recognized a place, and it probably won’t be the last. It’s a mark of how far they’ve come that Bob doesn’t withdraw in guilty embarrassment over just how they’ve come to know each other in this way.
They fly out of Tampa International Airport, where Yelena gets recognized by a stranger for the first time on the trip. She cultivates an anonymous, forgettable look, as does Bob, but everyone knows her name now, so when the woman at security checks her passport, she gasps and whispers, “Oh my stars, you’re the Yelena Belova! The White Widow!”
Yelena winces. “Can you keep it to yourself, please, we are just trying to have a quiet trip under the radar.”
“Oh, yes, of course!” says the starstruck woman, and then she notices Bob, and sort of squints. “Oh! You must be Sentry!” A glance at the way they’re holding hands, and she adds, “You two have always seemed so sweet - that footage from the Doom battle where you thought each other was dead --”
“Okay, we’re gonna be going now,” Yelena says, because of both her own twitchiness and the ever-so-slightly-darker creeping shadows - this woman doesn’t deserve either broken bones or trauma flashbacks today. “Thank you very much, have a good day --”
- - -
The plane ride and navigation of immigration on the other side is thankfully incident-free. Bob hadn’t dared to sleep on the plane, even though therapy, medication, and companionship have made the Void much less of a problem than it was, and so they crash in the first hotel they can find in Paris. Yelena, while slightly more functional, is still tired enough that she doesn’t realize until the next morning that the hotel is somewhere she once carried out a Red Room assignment. It rattles her a little, the memory of the honeytrap and the poison and the gunshots as she made a rather sloppy escape, contrasted with the present state of being tucked against Bob’s solid form, breathing his scent and hearing him snore.
It’s as good a start as any to the European portion of their trip. Yelena carried out more assignments here, first for the Red Room and then for Valentina, than she could count, and a lot of them tend to blur together in her memory. She takes Bob through a highlights tour: here is the coffee shop where I worked for three weeks to get the chance to poison my target’s drink, here is the alley where I took cover as I set off a bomb, here is the bakery I loved when I spent a year posing as a man’s secretary to steal intel, here is where I ran and hid when I was hurt and bleeding and could trust no one but myself to take care of it.
Bob doesn’t have quite as many stories to share and places to take her around here, but there are still quite a few. Here is a hostel where I stayed for a few weeks and made some of the closest friends I’d ever had up till then; I don’t know where any of them are now. Here is where I holed up when I was real sick after I almost overdosed. Here is where I stood when I was ready to give up and I saw a random little kid trying to catch the pigeons and it made me laugh so hard I felt like I could make it through another day.
Yelena takes him to Morocco on a detour south, shows him where she was freed by the Widow she’d stabbed, Oksana who used to be her friend to the extent that she could have such a thing. She takes him through Budapest, where they’ve long since cleaned up the mess she and Natasha and Antonia made of it over a decade ago, but where she can still retrace their steps. The vent is still there where she and Natasha hid, where Natasha hid with Clint Barton even longer ago, but Bob is much too big to fit there, and the station is full of people, so she settles for pointing it out and telling the story.
In Switzerland, they stop in a village Bob leads them to, where he lived for a handful of months in 2018. It’s remote and peaceful, and Yelena understands why he’d stayed there longer than anywhere else. “I actually got clean here,” he tells her, up on a hill overlooking the place. “Did odd jobs, thought maybe I could just...stay. But then the Blip happened, and when I came back, you know, Europe was going crazy, displaced people everywhere, even here. I had to move on. And...”
He doesn’t have to spell out for her what he’d fallen back into after that. It’s the reason their paths crossed, after all.
They stay there a few days. A handful of people recognize Bob, tell him they’re glad he’s doing well and dropped by and found such a nice girl. When Bob mentions they’re touring around Europe, a few grandmothers end up assuming they’re on a honeymoon. It’s not the first time someone has made this assumption, and as before, Yelena more or less lets them, since the truth would be too complicated to explain.
(The truth being that it’s technically too late for a honeymoon, that they’d spent weeks separated while Yelena was stuck in medical after the Doom battle and only “official” next of kin was allowed to visit, and after that they’d had enough and married incognito at a courthouse, and that it hadn’t changed much of anything because they’d already been close in every way two people could be.)
They talk, before they leave, about heading over to Russia, but Yelena doesn’t actually know exactly where most of the events of her training took place, except that they’re likely to be more dangerous and illegal to access than they’re willing to engage in on this trip. So they head north to Poland instead, and rent a car and drive out to the site where the Red Room crashed. The US government people did an even better job with the cleanup here than the city of Budapest did. There’s hardly a trace left, just some patches of greener grass where it grew back after burning away.
“This wasn’t actually the last place I saw Natasha,” Yelena says as they pick their way through the field. “We met up a few times after that, just when we could, you know? The last time was just a few months before the Blip. We went to a cafe in Osaka, the kind where they have the cats. We didn’t know it was gonna be the last.”
“Maybe it was better that way,” Bob offers.
“Probably,” Yelena agrees. “Still leaves a lot of what-ifs, sometimes.”
He nods.
- - -
They hop through north Africa and the Middle East a little, to places Yelena had missions. These had mostly been basic theft or assassination ops, more than long-term infiltration missions - Dreykov had sent girls less likely to stand out for those - and so she doesn’t linger. There isn’t an emotional weight associated with these, besides the standard horror of not being fully in control of herself.
Bob doesn’t have much to tell about these regions, either - “couldn’t, um, get hold of the stuff I wanted, and it was not a good place to be right after the Blip, man” - but once they arrive in India, there are memories waiting in pretty much every major city.
“I was trying to find some kinda meaning,” he says as they wander through Varanasi. “With the world falling apart and all. I’d tried back in Europe, in some of the churches and stuff...but I guess what I was really looking for there was to get out of my had, and those didn’t really do that. Some of the stuff I got into here worked better, but it never stuck. The, the void always came back. Eventually, I just gave up on it.”
Back then, China had been nigh-impossible to get into for casual travel, so he’d gone meandering south, and very nearly gone to Mumbai. It was only happenstance, he tells Yelena, that he’d turned east and inland instead.
“Still wasn’t...great, when the giant statue island thing came out of the Indian Ocean,” Bob says, fidgeting with his hands as they sit in a train station. “There were still earthquakes and stuff. But nothing like the crazy flooding they had in Mumbai. Probably woulda died if I’d been there.”
Yelena shivers, even as she notes with relief and faint pride that there’s not a trace of wistfulness in his voice when he says it.
Where he had been at the time, in Hyderabad, Bob tells her, he’d fallen in with a group of American students who’d been in the middle of a we’re-no-longer-dead world tour, and were trying to do some disaster assistance. Helping them help the locals had given him a long string of good days, feeling on top of the world. Once they were ready to move on, he’d gone with them, up to Japan and back down to southeast Asia.
While the two of them are going through Japan, Yelena takes him to the cat cafe where she’d last met up with Natasha. The cats, for some reason, absolutely mob him, even though Yelena’s always had to coax them before and Natasha used to have to, too.
It’s bittersweet, and so are the memories Bob has for her in Japan and Taiwan and Vietnam. A girl called Lindy Lee, one of the students, gets mentioned a lot, but thanks to the Void, Yelena had seen how that ended before she even knew the girl’s name, which answers any questions she might’ve otherwise asked.
It’s also because of that that she recognizes the hotel they check into in Phnom Penh even though she’s never been before.
“The others, they didn’t know I’d been on drugs,” Bob tells her when they’re curled up together in their room. It’s a story she knows, but he’s never said, and that’s really what this trip is for, so all the unspoken stories can be said. “I wasn’t on anything when I first ran into them, and after that, I snuck off by myself a few times when I needed a hit. But this time, I dunno, I got stupid and went back where we were staying to do it. They came back while I was still...anyway. Lind - uh, they weren’t super happy. I got kicked out.”
Going on from there, they retrace the path he’d taken as he meandered through southeast Asia on his own. Yelena has a few mission stories here, mostly from the Valentina days, but mostly it’s Bob’s memories here, a mix of “cool things to see” and “horrible stuff that he dismisses much too lightly even now”. Yelena’s pretty sure they get some weird looks from tourists and locals alike, for how they linger at seemingly random doorways and alleys and overpasses as much as at the more normal sights.
Nobody recognizes them as Avengers, and nobody recognizes Bob from his previous pass through, either. He probably looks a lot different, he tells her, he wasn’t exactly in great shape healthwise before, and Yelena hugs him and holds on for a long time.
- - -
And now they’re here in Kuala Lumpur, staring up at the world’s second tallest building (which is currently surrounded by construction scaffolding as people work on rebuilding the bombed-out portion).
“You jumped off the top of that?” Bob asks, craning his neck. “You just...went for it?”
“You signed up to let sketchy scientists inject weird stuff in you that they didn’t explain fully?” Yelena counters. “Neither of us was doing great when we came here, okay.”
Their hands find each other, and squeeze.
“We’re doing better now, though, right?” Bob says.
Yelena considers this. “I mean, I would probably still parachute off that building, but more because it seems fun than because I’m desperate to feel something.”
Bob nods. “That’s fair, I guess. I’d have to wait for you down here ‘cause, you know, heights.”
“Also fair.”
They both stand in silence for a while, until it’s broken by a loud buzz from Yelena’s phone.
“Ugh, if that is John asking again if we’re done with our ‘Eat Pray Love therapy walkabout’ yet, I’m gonna let him have it,” Yelena says, rolling her eyes.
“Are we, though?” Bob asks as she reaches for her phone. “I think we had this set up as the last stop.”
“I guess we could be,” Yelena says idly. “Or we could maybe stay out a little longer. Find someplace fun to go that doesn’t have any emotionally significant memories...” She trails off.
“I’ve never been to Australia,” Bob says helpfully. “And you didn’t mention anything there, so...”
Yelena curses as she taps through her phone. “Well, we’ll have to do it later, because Bucky just texted that there’s a situation going on in Djibouti. Vacation is over, I guess.”
Bob looks disappointed, but shrugs, kisses her head. “Guess we’ll take a rain check for after you guys save the world.”
“It better not be the whole world that needs saving this time,” Yelena mutters, even as she texts Bucky a location to pick them up. “We’re only supposed to have one of those, what, every three years? We should still be okay for another couple of years almost.”
She wants the world to still be there, Yelena realizes as they walk, still hand in hand. She wants the places they’ve been to keep existing, wants them to be able to leave new memories in new places. It’s a startling thing to realize when two years ago she couldn’t see a future for herself.
Maybe it’s the same with Bob. She’ll have to ask him, once they get back from this.