Chapter Text
In Bob’s defense, he doesn’t exactly have the best control of his powers. And he’s got a lot of them. He actually does everything he can to not use his powers as much as possible considering the whole Void that consumes humanity and traps them and him in their nightmares. He doesn’t even remember doing that!
So, it’s really not his fault that he didn’t know he could time travel, right?
Right?
Yelena has been helping Bob with his negative self talk and his habit of blaming himself for every problem that he is tangentially connected to.
But, in this case, it’s definitely on him, yeah.
At first he doesn’t realize he’s time traveled. He’s just doing the dishes as he does because none of the other Thunderbolts ever do the dishes and, well, while they’re out saving the world and stuff, Bob has a lot of free time.
He’s listening to his music, jamming with his hands in the sink, scrubbing out a mug that Yelena ate ice cream out of because she eats ice cream out of mugs “like a heathen” as Ava would say. It’s only when he realizes that the second mug that he just grabbed isn’t one that they own that he pauses to look around.
“Uhm,” Bob says unintelligibly.
Alarms start to blare and Bob realizes he should probably get out of here.
Elevator is probably a bad idea but he is on one of the utmost top floors. So… how to get out of here?
Shadows seep from his skin and if he were not panicking he would probably succumb to the dread that void is returning and instead taps into the training that his teammates have given him and disappears into the shadows, metaphorically and quite literally physically.
It’s a form of teleportation that he doesn’t like to tap into in fear that he become It again but something that Ava insisted he master.
However, he’s never been good at locations. More… people. His team are his tethers, both emotionally and with his powers. When he starts to lose himself to them, he reaches out to them to ground himself.
So, when the shadows take him to a sterile torture room he’s never been in, Bob is understandably concerned (he’s fucking terrified, who is he kidding) but he knows that someone he loves is somewhere near so that means everything will be okay.
What he’s not expecting is Bucky with even longer hair and a different arm he definitely didn’t have earlier running in and freezing at the sight of—
“Bob?”
“Bucky! Where… are we? Are you on a mission?” He lowers his voice. “Are there… bad guys here?”
“There are so many bad guys here,” Bucky mutters, his voice hoarser than it usually is. He takes Bob’s hand, flinching slightly as terror and petrification floods him as it always does when someone touches Bob, and pulls him behind him. “How did you get here?”
“Shadow teleportation.”
“How has my life come to this?” Bucky mutters. “How did we get here?”
“Uhm. Well, I got here by shadow teleportation. I don’t know how you got here.”
“Not here ,” Bucky motions around them with exasperated gesticulation. “I mean in the past.”
“We’re in the past?”
Bucky pinches his nose, muttering curses under his breath. “Okay. Bob. We are currently in a HYDRA base sometime before 2015.”
“Oh. I don’t wanna be here.”
“Neither do I. Which is why we need to get out of here.”
“How?”
Apparently it involves a lot of Bucky punching and shooting people while Bob stays behind him. Eventually, they break free and make their rushed escape, switching out their stolen cars every 20-30 minutes.
They tried to teleport again but it seems that Bob’s out of juice (which he’s silently thankful for. Everytime he uses his powers, it makes him feel icky, like he just drank a gulp of olive oil and then doused himself in a bath of olive oil and he doesn’t know why he compares the feeling of becoming an apathetic killing machine to olive oil but apparently he doesn’t like olive oil that much.) So they have to go the old fashioned way.
Which is by stolen car.
Bob feels kinda bad about stealing all these cars but HYDRA stole Bucky and want to steal him back so he gets why they have to do it. Still feels bad.
“If we’re back, that must mean the others are too, right?” Bucky says.
“Considering my powers are tied to you all, then most likely.”
“Right, Great. Fucking— alright. So where would they be in…” Bucky grabs a newspaper that sits near his feet, “2012? Jesus fucking Christ. In 2012.”
“Well,” Bob says. “Yelena is still with the Red Room. Alexei is still in prison. Ava is still with SHIELD—”
“Which is currently infiltrated by HYDRA.”
“Yikes. And Walker… where would Walker be in 2012?”
“Probably in the military,” Bucky says. “He graduated from the USMA in 2009.”
“Aw crap,” Bob groans.
“What?” Bucky asks, straightening with alarm.
“I’m addicted to meth again.”
As much as he can joke about this time of his life, his addiction ruined his life in more ways that he can count. It was all-consuming, the hunger, the craving, the need. He burnt every feeble bridge he had as he exhausted every revenue of money he had to get one more high. It deteriorated his body and mind and though his powers were able to push through the fog of withdrawal, the clarity is beginning to fade and his body is not equipped to go cold turkey.
“Shit,” Bucky says. “What… what can I do?”
“Besides give me supersoldier serum? I don’t know.”
“You’ve still retained some of your powers though, right?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like they’ve ever been the most consistent.” Bob shakes his head. “This is a problem for later. Right now, we gotta find everyone else.”
“The question is, though,” Bucky says, “if they’re going to find each other first.”
.-~*~-.
Oh fuck no.
Yelena comes to at the ballet barre surrounded by women who had become ghosts of her past.
Oh Bob, what did you do?
Because this has to be Bob. What else could it possibly be?
It takes a grueling few days of playing the role that she had fought so ardently to distance and recover from and she hates how the mindset is still so easy to fall into, how the numbness takes over again and she follows her orders like a good little soldier.
Walker’s probably in a war zone right now, Yelena muses to herself. Serves the bastard right.
It’s only when she’s sent out on assignment that she is able to slip away and vanish. She’s done it before and it’s definitely easier the second time around.
Her first order of business is breaking Alexei out of prison. As much as she can get sick of the old man, if he’s come back with her, there’s no way he’s getting out on his own without getting himself killed.
Thankfully, it is her Alexei. She doesn’t know what she’d do if she went there and it was the Alexei of this time.
It’s surprisingly easy. The security in 2012 is laughable compared to how much technology had advanced in the past decade and the biggest trouble she has is keeping Alexei’s big mouth shut so they don’t get caught on the way out.
Alexei is talking her ear off about how it feels to be in his younger body, how spry he feels, how rejuvenated, how young, but all Yelena can think about is her floundering plans on what to do next.
Finding Bob is easier said than done, and that’s assuming he’s where he’s supposed to be and not with the others.
She needs to find a way to contact them but that’s easier said than done.
She steals a smartphone off someone and uses it to search for any relevant information that can help them. Her heart stutters at the date, at the realization that she’s really in the past, in 2012 where Natasha is alive and okay and about to have her life irrevocably changed.
She’s almost tempted to stop Nat from joining the Avengers but Yelena knows that in their lines of work that danger is inevitable and that Nat chose to die a hero.
But none of that matters now. Not when Nat is somewhere in the US alive.
What would she think of Yelena now? This Yelena who is not her Yelena and not the Yelena of this time.
Yelena tries not to think about it too much.
No.
She’s got a Bob to find.
.-~*~-.
Ava didn’t recall this, but her and Walker had crossed paths once.
And apparently, it’s now, in a shitty bar in Jordan.
She remembers vaguely, being here on an assignment and getting flirted with by a grating man that she punched in the crotch before making her way to her mark.
And apparently that was John Walker himself, cocky military man here with the US military to help contain the Syrian civil war within Syria’s borders.
Ava wonders what the consequences will be if she doesn’t take out her mark now.
Eh.
Whatever.
She’s already planning to change a lot more than just one kill she barely remembers.
It was something political she guesses, considering when and where she is. But, looking back with hindsight, was definitely not one of the bad guys.
Damn HYDRA.
Bucky’s in HYDRA now, she realizes. Yelena in the Red Room. Alexei… wherever he was before they became a team.
Their lives so close to weaving together and yet so far away.
She spots Walker across the room and she recognizes that this is the Walker she knows. Despite his bravado, he has mellowed over the months they’ve been a team. He’s still an ignorant, arrogant asswipe but he’s not as bad as he used to be. Low bar, she knows, but she’d say she tolerates the man now, something she definitely couldn’t say when they first met.
His eyes meet hers and he stiffens, relaxing slightly at the familiar face, but tense in the unknowing.
She approaches him and she can see the way he tracks every one of her steps.
“Hey, JV,” she says. “Looks like we’re both not where we’re supposed to be.”
He lets out a sigh of relief. “Did you do this?”
“Do you think I did this?” she snaps.
They both pause.
“Bob.”
“What can that man not do?” Ava says.
“A lot,” Walker says flatly and Ava punches his arm. He doesn’t wince in pain like she expects his past body to do. “Wait,” Walker says. “I still have the serum.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Just like I don’t know how we time traveled.”
“God, I can’t believe out of everyone, I’m stuck with you.”
“Well, believe it. Because right now, we’ve gotta work together to find—”
“Bob?”
Bob, standing hand in hand with Bucky, stares at Ava with wide eyes.
“Huh. I guess I still have a little juice left,” Bob says before promptly passing out.