Chapter Text
It takes Bob three weeks to figure out he can’t stay dead.
The medical study in Malaysia. It was supposed to make him better, stronger, less… broken. He remembers running out of money and being in a dark alley next to a club. Thought he could do something to get more, to sell his mom’s jewelry, or- but he had already done that months ago. The withdrawal symptoms had hit him like a truck. He was looking for some other way, hell, it wouldn’t have been the first time he did things he would never do sober just for his next fix. Usually, it’s easier when he’s still running on the trails of something, when he’s drunk or high, even if weed doesn’t do much for him.
His target had been this random, a guy he had spotted looking vaguely out of place at the club. Caucasian, like himself, so Bob had assumed he was a tourist. Older, greying, wearing the frumpiest outfit Bob sees in the entire place. He doesn’t remember much about the guy. Houston, or whatever.
It’s supposed to go down pretty quick. Bob offers to do a job, he doesn’t care what, the awkward, drunk tourist thinks of something they want, Bob does it because what the fuck are inhibitions? Bob gets the money, and then he jumps to the next place he can find until he slowly sobers up and regrets it all again. It’s a bad day, or maybe it’s a good one and Bob just feels bad about it after.
Instead, Houston hands him a flyer, tells him about this ground-breaking drug he’s developing.
“It can fix anything,” is what Houston tells him. “Make you better, smarter, stronger.”
Bob’s lip trembles. He can’t tell if it’s from the withdrawal, or from something else.
“It can fix anything?” he asks. Bob remembers the exhibit he saw, one time, when he was eleven. Before any of this, before his parents-
Steve Rogers. Five foot six and half deaf, colorblind, asthmatic. All miraculously fixed by the serum he got in the 1940s. It changed him, many would argue, for the better. Houston promises that it’s something like that, but supposed to be more for medical treatment and not the super-soldier making project the Americans are trying.
“I don’t think it can fix me,” Bob tries to say, but Houston shushes him and pushes him back down. Bob blacks out then, and wakes up with the flyer and a business card tucked into his shirt.
What else is he supposed to do? He goes in.
They take pictures. They ask him to change into scrubs, for the initial blood draw, and Bob obeys. It’s a big blurred mess in his memory. He vaguely remembers lying down on the cot, and a nurse hooking him up to something, and wondering- why’s the fluid coming in and not going out?
“Well, looks like this one’s also a fluke,” he hears someone say, over the rush in his eardrums. “Get Dr. Houston his coffee, will you?”
Then the pain overtakes everything.
At first, it’s the mild discomfort of being prodded and poked, and the small chill when you start to lose blood. It doesn’t go away. The cold grows, and grows, and grows, until it begins to feel more like fire. It burns through him. Digs through each and every one of his veins, all several thousand of them, running a scalpel and slicing through them. The ruptures bleed into his eyes. His vision goes first, and then his hearing, leaving behind the vast emptiness he’s tried so hard to run from.
Tiny little ants crawl down his spine. Not on his skin. On the bared, barren, bleached-white bone of his spine. But that can’t be right. Bob’s still alive, isn’t he? Death can’t be like this, because he’s been looking forward to it sometimes, and all he knows is that it’s not supposed to be like this.
The ants make it into his hips. They skim the surface of his guts, and burrows down to make a home inside him. All he can think about is that one scene in aliens. It’s all so wrong. And he can’t move a single muscle.
Seventeen generations of their children come and go. What’s his name? Where is he? He doesn’t know. Doesn’t know anything.
They rebuild their empire. Rebuild him, from a singular molecule back up to a man. Then they eat him inside out, leaving nothing but a cavern that collapses again, burning to ashes. Then again. And again. And-
He doesn’t wake up. There’s no more waking up for him.
But he opens his eyes.
It takes him an eternity to remember who he is. When he takes his first breath (again), Bob sputters and coughs. He’s… he’s sitting on a broken fridge. At the bottom of a pit of garbage.
He realizes it’s a landfill.
The stench is disgusting. Bob doesn’t know how, but he climbs out of there eventually. It must be days before he even gets far enough to see the sky properly. Or, he’s exaggerating. He’s getting lost in his head again, because there’s no way he could survive that long in a landfill, right?
Once he’s at the top, at least, Bob can see where the edge of the landfill is. Half of the trash dump seems to have already started to be buried under a fresh layer of sand and dirt, but thankfully not the side Bob’s stuck in. He wades his way through probably half a mile of garbage and sewage until he reaches the flimsy fence wrapping around it.
He escapes. Follows the road.
The first sign of human life he finds, there’s nobody who speaks English. Bob breaks into a motel (which isn’t hard, by the way, people should definitely be more careful staying at hotels) to wash. His clothes stink, and after two or three washes, he gives up. He doesn’t like stealing, so it sucks when he has to do it. At the mall, he finally finds a TV playing the news in English.
Bob has no idea what’s happened to him, or how he ended up in Vietnam.
He can’t stop his hands from shaking.
So he does what he does best. Sneaks into some tourist trap gambling district, finds his way to some sketchy job. So what if it's illegal? Bob’s not hurting anybody, and nobody cares about him anyways. It’s fine. At least in the moment it makes him feel something. Sometimes.
One of the guys offer him MDMA. Cheapskate. Bob’s head is pounding by this point, and he’s pretty sure someone’s already slipped something in his drink. It’s not really doing anything, which is weird. He takes it. Anything to kill IT.
Something must’ve been wrong with it. His headache immediately goes away, which would be great, except Bob then also fucking passes out.
He wakes up on top of another pile of trash. What the fuck is happening? At least this time it’s just in some alleyway and not a damn landfill he has to crawl out of.
The next time he tries to get drunk, Bob realizes it doesn’t work anymore. There’s no high he can chase, no drunken stupor that will just knock the spiraling thoughts out of his head.
Since there’s nothing that can keep him from being sober, Bob’s left floundering. It takes him a week of trying before he gives up and heads to the US Embassy. They’re obviously suspicious of him, but Bob’s long been in the system for his questionable choices back in Florida, and it takes very little time before they’re handing him a passport and shipping his ass back to America.
He’s so disoriented. Did the medical trial do something to him? But why did he wake up three countries away?
A nice old lady sits in the window seat next to him. She tries to chat with him.
“Are you excited to be going home?” she asks at one point. Bob tries to smile back at her, gives a half-hearted shrug.
“It feels weird,” he says. Isn’t sure how to elaborate.
She shakes her head. “Going home after a dream always does. But it’s good to be back with your people.”
Bob swallows down the urge to say he doesn’t have anybody like that. It hits him, again, how goddamn lonely he still is. Seven months wandering and he has no idea what he’s supposed to do. Some days, he does a little better, meets someone who doesn’t know how much of a fuckup he is, has fun, goes on a date. He always messes it up. Then the bad days come crashing down on him.
The plane drops him off in L.A.
He’s got no money. No house. None of his stuff that he had on him. Can’t even do any drugs, since they don’t work on him anymore.
Being homeless isn’t exactly unfamiliar, but last time he didn’t have to be sober through it. He tries getting to Florida or- at least out of L.A.- by hitchhiking. It’s maybe the dumbest idea he’s had.
Hours of waiting between each ride. People don’t like strangers, and there’s nothing about Bob that screams “well adjusted normal person”.
The first car drops him off in San Diego. The second promises to get him into New Mexico, but the guy tries to fucking kill him.
What the fuck, Bob thinks.
They scuffle in the car, ending up with Bob fighting to breathe as the driver pulls the car seatbelt tighter and tighter around his neck. It’s just as painful in real life as it is in the void, when he’s buried deep under the weight of emptiness.
This is it, right? Useless fucking Bob dies like this, right? With a stranger’s grip on his mouth and a noose around his neck, choking him slowly?
And he does. Die, that is. The last thing he sees is the driver’s reddened face twisting in grotesque satisfaction. Maybe he shouldn’t have chosen a car with a shit ton of Nazi memorabilia to hitchhike in. But the driver had been so nice up until-
It’s over.
He wakes up again.
This time, Bob gasps back to life on the side of a dusty Texan road.
“Wh, what,” he asks to himself. His hands fly to his neck. It should hurt. He remembers it purpling under his fingers, his breath stuttering to a stop. His fingers meet smooth, unblemished skin, nothing to show for what happened, except for the panic gripping his heart.
What the fuck?
Bob can’t die.
Or, well. He does die, sometimes. But then his brain comes crawling back, his body knits itself back together. He tries getting hit by a car on the highway, but it just leaves a dent in the poor car's hood as it clips him. The gulf of Mexico welcomes him with a salty breeze and terrible weight in his lungs. Then he coughs it out six days later when he washes up in Miami.
He’s immortal. It’s the worst thing to happen to him.
Bob walks up to New York. What else is he going to do? He wonders if anybody has the answers on how to… undo it. That’s his initial goal.
But then he wonders if this is his chance. His opportunity to be something more than he’s ever been. He can save people, be useful to them, since he can’t stay dead. Maybe he doesn’t have any other special power but if he’s unkillable… Bob feels like there’s something more to him now.
Of course, because he’s Bob Reynolds and not Steve Rogers, he manages to save one dog, gets hit by a truck and ends up knocking the driver out (thankfully not dead, at least until the paramedics arrive), and decides to just get a job.
It works pretty well for about one month.
“... and in a shocking twist of events, Congressman Gary has filed an impeachment call against CIA director Valentina Fontaine…”
Bob watches the news out of the corner of his eye, half-heartedly trying to wipe down the sticky bar counter in front of him.
“Bobby, you gotta put more of your back into it,” his boss grumbles. “You’re never gonna get the grime off like that.”
The grime’s not coming out because they’re in a backwater bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and the grime itself probably predates the Statue of Liberty. Bob sighs and gets back to it, adjusting the glasses on his face.
Recently, he’s started to feel like someone’s following him. He can’t tell if it's his paranoia acting up again or not, but everytime he turns he feels eyes on the back of his head. It’s honestly getting really creepy. If not for his newfound inability to die, Bob thinks he might have seriously freaked out already.
His boss leaves the bar, whistling as he wanders down the street. It’s only Bob at closing today, so he decides to take his time. He’s in no hurry to get back to the tiny closet he’s managed to break into to sleep in.
The mop falls to the ground when he leans over the bar to grab the cleaning spray. Bob sighs again and bends over to pick it up.
Something cold presses into his temple. He freezes.
“I wouldn’t move if I was you,” a stranger says. His voice is low and steady, threatening. The gun- for Bob is fairly certain that’s what it is- digs sharply into his skin as the man grabs Bob’s arm, pulling him to a stand.
Bob’s so tired.
“Look man,” he starts. “I don’t know what you’re after-”
“What did you steal from O.X.E.?” the man interrupts. “I need you to hand it over to me, and I’ll consider just taking you in instead of blowing a hole in you. What do you think?”
O.X.E.? Bob has no idea what this crazy man’s on about. He frowns.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says slowly. The man’s grip tenses.
“Drop the act, Bobby. She told me everything. Black ops turncoat, huh? Bit of a mess you got yourself in.”
Bob turns, ignoring the man’s warning grunt. He glares at the stranger- tall, bulky, military outfit, weird shield on his arm.
“I’m just a bartender, and I’m closing my store. I have zero interest in whatever Fisk or Daredevil’s up to now, and I don’t know what the hell you’re babbling about. You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Really? So you’re not Robert Reynolds, Florida man? I’ve seen your file, buddy. Just fess up and I promise I’ll put in a good word for you at whatever prison she puts you in.”
Bob squints. The man is looking more and more familiar by the second. Also, how does he know Bob’s name?
“Wait,” he says, realizing, “aren’t you that guy who was Captain America for one day?”
Someone giggles from the rafters, and it’s neither Bob or Mister Dollar Store Cap. They both look up quickly, only to have a blonde woman drop on them. She kicks Fake Cap in the head, body twisting like a cat. The other man stumbles but quickly finds his footing. The woman’s already got her gun at Bob’s throat though, and she smirks.
“Sorry, Walker,” the woman says. “This target’s mine.”
She cocks her head and eyes Bob. “Where did you put the O.X.E. files, kiddo?”
Walter (Walker?) snarls and throws his shield at the woman. She ducks smoothly, letting go of Bob in the process. A gunshot rings out and Walker dives behind the bar. The bullet shatters a particularly expensive bottle of liquor. Bob winces.
He’s so fired.
“Hey,” he tries to say, while the two strangers begin fighting in earnest, knives flying and that weird shield ricocheting everywhere. Jesus.
The blonde wrenches a barstool and strikes Walker directly in the head. It breaks on him, and Walker barely even hesitates before lunging at her. Something blue crackles on the woman’s wrists. She flips over Walker and hooks a leg around his neck, twirling until she’s got her arms wrapped around it.
Walker reaches up and grabs her wrist just as it starts to taser him. He grunts.
“Can you both stop!” Bob yells. He tries to back away. The hair on his arms rises, and before he understands why, he’s stumbling backwards.
Something buzzes into existence right in front of him. A white mask stares at him blankly behind a smoking gun.
Oh, he’s been shot. Bob is fine, of course, but he trips over his own feet and falls down.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Walker yells. He’s freed himself from the blonde, who’s smashed into a table. He aims his own weapon at the masked person.
“I’m supposed to find out what he stole!” he snarls. “You just ruined my mission.”
Mask face scoffs, and the mask melts away to reveal a scowling woman.
“Well, I was told to eliminate on sight, since he’s dangerous,” she drawls. “And it looked like you were quite busy with Miss Red Room over there.”
The blond groans and dusts herself off. “It’s Yelena, actually. Also, O.X.E. knows he’s a corporate spy who stole their files, so I have no idea what you’re rambling about, Walker. You didn’t even need to kill him, he’s a regular criminal.”
“What?” the other woman says, sounding confused. “That’s not what Valentina-”
She pauses. The three of them seem to come to some shared conclusion, because they all start trying to talk over each other. Bob’s not sure if he’s supposed to be playing dead here. He watches them through half-closed eyes.
“Shut up, both of you!” Walker demands. “Okay, so we’re all here on Valentina’s mission?”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” the masked woman says sarcastically. “What other brilliant conclusions do you have?”
Yelena hesitates, before she lets her weapon drop to her side. “We all got conflicting information about the target. What exactly were everyone’s missions? Mine was to neutralize him if needed, and to recover the files he stole as a corporate spy.”
“She said he’s a former black ops mercenary to bring him in for interrogation,” Walker says after a moment. “And you, Ghost-”
“It’s Ava, actually,” mask-girl cuts in. “She said he’s a dangerous terrorist, who will be contacted by his handlers tonight. Neutralize all immediately. Which…”
“She wanted us to kill each other,” Yelena says after a moment.
Walker frowns. “There’s no way. I’m a public figure, remember? A veteran? Now, maybe you two-”
“Oh spare me the lecture,” Yelena groans. “Take your two seconds of glory and try to impress someone else. Valentina betrayed us, dumbass.”
Ava pauses.
“That explains the other merc I met outside,” she mutters. “Now what? We’re all still alive and I’ve offed the guy. Jesus, if he’s just a civilian…”
She looks nauseous for a moment.
Okay, maybe Bob should get up.
“Hey,” he starts, carefully.
Three guns are immediately drawn on him. Bob smiles awkwardly and holds up his hands.
“Surprise?”
“What the fuck?” Walker says. “I saw Ghost shoot you through the heart.”
Bob slowly sits up. All three of them stare at him in horror.
“Um. I don’t know why, but I’m fine?”
Yelena glances at the other two. She lowers her gun again and steps forward.
“Robert Reynolds?” she questions. “Since Valentina’s lied to all of us, I don’t even know if that’s your real name.”
She offers him a hand, which Bob takes.
“I just go by Bob,” he answers. He takes a nervous glance at the other two. “I swear though, I haven’t done anything. Well, I’ve never hurt anybody, I mean.”
Ava opens her mouth, only to be stopped by a loud beep.
Walker looks around, sniffing the air. “Did any of you bring explosives?”
“No,” Yelena says with a frown. “This is in the middle of New York, why would I-”
The beep comes again.
“Because I definitely smell RDX burning, and if it’s not any of us…”
“Shit,” Yelena curses. She reaches out to grab Bob, pulling him close. “Leaving first, talking later. C’mere Bob, let’s get you-”
And then the building explodes.