Soup™️

Like he definitely has a public twitter and instagram for pr, but he would have private accounts on other social media to follow his kids.

He and Dick have a 1000+ day streak on snapchat and he follows Jason on ao3 and leaves kudos on all the niche fanfiction he writes, even when they’re fighting. He follows Tim and Babs on their conspiracy theory tumblrs and somehow tracked down Damian’s secret Art Fight account.

Duke and Steph compete to see who has the better Pinterest boards, Bruce follows them both and they make him judge whose boards are more “aesthetic” but he never actually picks a side.

He and Cass are friends on Pokémon go even though the app has basically been dead for years. They send each other gifts when on missions.

The humble Grover Underwood:

1. Human-like robots that can both move around on their own programming or be powered by dead souls/demons that serve as antagonists of the series (the automatons and the animatronics)

2. Said robots being used at some point to entertain children (John and Anne using the automatons to entertain Mortmain as a child and the animatronics being made for the pizzeria)

3. The method/reason the robots trap souls being highly sought after (Mortmain seeking the rest of his father’s spell and William looking for remnant)

4. Main villain looking to create a new life/race (Mortmain wanting Tessa’s power to create a superior race and William (supposedly) wanting to create immortality/new bodies for himself and potentially his children) this one is a bit of a stretch.

5. The uses of actual human bodies to help the robots “blend in” (Mortmain using human skin and body parts ie Mrs Black’s head to disguise the automatons and Ennard using Mike’s body as a flesh jumpsuit)

6. A main male character who begins with an arsehole personality is revealed to blame themselves/be directly responsible for the death of a sibling(s) a fact which is later used by the villain to manipulate them (Will with his sister and Mike with his siblings)

7. An inventor named Henry who spends most of the story being considered useless/outright not being there but provides a means to defeat the villain and robots in the end (Henry Branwell and Henry Emily)

8. Main male character exists beyond what should have been their death (Jem becoming a silent brother and Mike basically becoming a zombie)

So, we know that in the time before they met, Bob and Yelena both ended up travelling. Yelena while she was under chemical subjugation in the Red Room, carrying out missions, and Bob was drifting, looking for drugs and ended up in Kuala Lumpur. They’ve both probably been all over the world. Which leads into my headcanon:

For Yelena, what she remembers about the places she’s been to is broad brushstrokes. Views of cityscapes, tourist attractions and important buildings she’s infiltrated, a lot of vast and bustling crowds, all things she’s seen from a distance. She spent so much time focused on the details of the missions she was given that she didn’t think about the details of anything else. Especially with the chemicals muddling her brain, what she remembers are the large, distinctive things she’s seen.

Bob, on the other hand, remembers a lot of small details about the places he’s been. He had a lot of gaps in his memory due to his mental illness and how much time he spent on drugs, but what he remembers is small interactions- the faces of the people who were kind to him, sold him drugs, animals he met on the street, places he stayed. He didn’t pay much mind to anything beyond that, and if he ever did, it’s lost to the holes in his memory.

And one night, in the newly remodelled Avenger’s tower, likely after one or both of them has a nightmare and they’re talking together, they realise that they’ve visited a lot of the same places. But, when they compare notes, they realise they have two very different pictures of these places.

So what do they do? Keep talking. It’s therapeutic, to them at least, takes their minds off of the horrors lurking in the corners of their vision.

So it becomes a routine, when one has a nightmare and finds themselves in the company of the other, they pick a place, and discuss. Sometimes they bounce their memories off each other to complete a picture of what that place is like fully. But sometimes…

Sometimes it’s Yelena who talks. She makes Bob box mac ‘n cheese after a nightmare, the kind of cheap meal they’re both used to. And she tells him about city skylines. About flickering lights and back alleys. Tells him about crowds moving like swarms of bees across roads, how she used to count the number of seconds in between them stopping and moving. How she used to press her stomach to the top of a building at look straight down at the markets below, noting what colours the awning were each day. And he’ll press his chin into the palm of his hand, leaning against the counter as he eats, and lets her voice wash away the sound of the Void’s whispers.

Other times, Bob talks. On nights when his hands aren’t shaking, he’ll make her hot chocolate, like his mother did for him on her good days. He tells her about what it was like on the ground in these places, the faces he saw there. The people who sold him drugs, the people who gave him shelter for a night. He tells her about the animals, too, because he knows she likes them. About the orange tabby who sat on a corner by a harbour and only accepted fresh fish. About the fat old bird who hopped between the legs of patrons at a cafe, looking for scraps. And she’ll lean back in her chair, letting the heat from the mug in her hands warm her. Letting the drink overpower the taste of blood in her mouth as he talks. She never looks away from his face.