#bobwalker au

Warnings: Homophobia, Explicit smut scenes, Public Sex, Voyeurism, Brief Violence, Mentions of blood and bruise

Warnings: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Not Canon Compliant with Movie: Thunderbolts (2025), Reincarnation, Soulmates. Tragic Romance. Angst and Tragedy, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Historical References, Slow Burn, Doomed Timelines, Doomed Relationship, Eventual Romance, Temporary Character Death

Word Count: 9,507

Miss Ian's Masterlist | AO3

The first time they meet, it is not in peace.

The air tastes of ash and iron. The sky is bruised with smoke, the sun bleeding through in pale, spiteful slashes. The battlefield is littered with bodies—some whole, most not—and the only sound left is the low hum of dying prayers, whispered by men who don't believe in gods anymore.

And yet, the gods still believe in them. Still use them.

No one remembered the name of the land—not truly.

Not outside the bloodied hymns and the crumbling stone. Not beneath the echo of banners torn by wind, nor in the voices of those who survived only to forget. It had been ruled for so long by the divine that memory bowed beneath myth, and myth fossilized into law.

They called it balance.

The Celestials watched from above—distant, vast, unfeeling. Always present. Never merciful. Their silence was worshiped. Their violence, divine. And when the stars trembled and the earth split in mourning, it was not called cruelty.

It was called fate.

And fate, it turned out, was maintained through war.

War—and sacrifice.

Bob had been born into that order. A seer-scholar, marked before he could speak. The glow of it stirred beneath his skin like a buried flame—golden and soft and quiet, like something holy trying to survive. When his small hands first touched the sacred tablets, the priests gasped. When he recited star-language in sleep, they wept.

He was chosen, they said.

A vessel. A bridge. A child made to serve the will of the Celestials, shaped not for life but for obedience.

So he bowed. He studied. He wrote prophecies with trembling hands, translating the dreams of gods into decrees that sent mortals to war. He believed—he had to—that it meant something. That the light in him was for more than punishment.

But the cracks came slowly, like frost beneath marble. A fracture in faith. A splinter in scripture.

The visions started contradicting each other. Symbols looped endlessly. Messages blurred. The gods began asking for more, always more. Blood for answers. Blood for balance. Blood for peace.

He began to question. Quietly, at first—like heresy whispered in the dark. Then louder. Then sharper. Then afraid.

The war was not divine, he realized.

It was designed.

And then came him.

General John Walker.

Steel-eyed. Unflinching. Loyal like breath, like pain. A weapon forged for victory and left to cool in blood. There were stories about him long before Bob ever saw his face—of cities flattened, of soldiers who followed him into death without hesitation. He marched like a blade. He didn’t lose.

He had never heard of Bob before the war. Only that heretics had corrupted the temple. That rebellion had rooted itself in sacred soil. He was told to purge. To burn. To restore what had been ordained.

And yet—

On the battlefield, the first time they met, something stilled.

Bob stood alone, robes stained with ash, eyes ringed with exhaustion. He looked like nothing and everything. Thin shoulders set with quiet defiance. Fingers twitching with unreadable magic. He didn’t run. He didn’t kneel.

John didn’t strike.

He should have. Everything in him screamed kill. But he froze.

And Bob didn’t flinch.

They stared.

Seconds passed. Then more. An order was shouted from behind—John didn’t move.

Neither did Bob.

The moment broke first in the wind. But the damage was done. Their blades stayed sheathed.

From then on, their paths braided like fate itself was watching.

A skirmish near the sacred river. A stolen moment during a siege. A shattered library, where they reached—unthinking—for the same scorched map. Dust between them. Ash in their mouths. The echo of prophecy burning between fingertips.

Enemies, always. Fated to destroy each other.

But they never did.

Bob began dreaming of fire. Of endings. Of hands he didn’t recognize holding his heart together. John, without understanding why, began drawing strange sigils into the dirt with the tip of his blade—symbols he couldn’t read, but his bones remembered.

And they started to speak.

Not in full sentences. Not at first. Just glances. Just questions. Doubt exchanged like contraband. Secrets passed like breath between sleeping camps. Under the shadow of banners soaked in blood, they unlearned the names they'd been given.

They weren’t fighting for peace.

They were being used to destroy.

All of them were pawns on a divine board—their gods, their rulers, the Celestials above—who fed off the war like leeches fattening on prayers. The violence wasn’t punishment.

It was sustenance.

When Bob and John realized the truth, it didn’t feel like freedom.

It felt like grief.

But they turned anyway.

They didn’t call it rebellion. There was no rally, no banner, no victory song. Just small, sharp defiance. A scroll smuggled from the archives. A prisoner set loose under moonlight. A temple fire that burned from the inside out.

They were caught.

Of course they were caught.

Dragged in chains through the streets that once revered them. Bob’s glow flickered weakly under cracked skin. John’s back had been broken in places no healer dared touch. The people they’d saved looked away.

The Celestials did not tolerate dissent.

They were sentenced before the divine court. The Sacred Hall. A place mortals didn’t return from.

The Celestials were not shaped like anything. They were—vast, formless, voices layered like storms cracking across mountains.

“You seek to sever what we have bound,” one thundered.

“You deny the gift of order,” spat another.

“Then you shall never know peace.”

Bob could barely stand. His body ached with hunger and pain and something worse—something final. But when he faltered, John caught him. Held him upright like it was instinct. Like even here, in the belly of their gods, he would not let Bob fall.

The gods were not finished.

“You will live,” they said. “Again and again. You will forget. You will suffer. You will love, and always lose. You will rot in the ache of recognition. And you will never be free.”

They didn’t scream.

Not when the chains melted into fire.

Not when their bodies began to unravel—skin blistering, blood singing, light bursting through the cracks of who they were.

They didn’t scream.

But just before the flames reached his throat, Bob turned.

His vision was gone. His mouth tasted of smoke. But he found John’s eyes—blue, and wrecked, and sure.

“In the next life…” Bob whispered, choking on smoke. “Find me.”

John’s face was bloodied, raw. But his hand tightened in Bob’s. He didn’t hesitate.

“I will,” he said hoarsely. “Even if I don’t remember why.”

The fire took them.

The world turned.

The curse began.

And somewhere far away from the ashes, far from the hunger of gods and the silence of broken temples—

—a child took his first breath.

Soft light flickered beneath his skin.

Elsewhere, a different child screamed as he was born into battle, fists curled tight, jaw clenched like defiance carved into flesh.

They wouldn’t know each other.

Not yet.

But across time, across lifetimes—

They were already searching.

And one day—tomorrow, a century from now, on a battlefield or beneath the quiet sky—

They would find each other again. And this time, they would remember.

The world had turned again.

﹏

Gone was the endless desert and burning skies of gods who demanded blood. Instead, the air hung heavy with sweat, dust, and the distant roar of a crowd thirsty for spectacle.

John knew this place well. The arena was his cage and his battleground, a sun-baked pit of sand stained dark with the blood of those who fought for their lives—and sometimes, for freedom.

His muscles ached from a lifetime of chains and lashes, his hands scarred from gripping sword hilts slick with death. The crowd’s chants crashed over him, a tidal wave of voices calling for carnage, for victory, for survival.

He was no longer a general, no longer a commander of legions. Here, he was simply John—the gladiator. Fierce, rebellious, and burning with a rage that refused to be quenched.

Bob was a shadow in this harsh world—a captured healer forced to tend to broken bodies. His touch was gentle but hurried, his hands stained with the coppery scent of blood and sweat.

He moved through the barracks and the makeshift infirmary, the flicker of candlelight casting trembling shadows across his face. His eyes, haunted and tired, caught glimpses of John among the warriors—always distant, always fierce.

There was something in those eyes.

Something familiar.

Neither could place it.

But every time their gazes met, the world seemed to shudder—time fracturing in a silent, electric pulse.

John would catch Bob watching him from the edge of the infirmary, eyes wide as if trying to remember a face from a dream.

Bob would flinch whenever John approached, his breath hitching like a secret tether had been pulled taut.

Underneath the roar of the crowd and the clang of swords, a quiet rebellion brewed.

They shared stolen words beneath moonlight, voices hushed and raw with hope and fear.

Together, they plotted freedom—not just from their chains, but from a fate neither fully understood.

But fate was cruel.

One night, beneath a sky smeared with smoke and fire, Bob’s breath faltered.

A jagged spear had found its mark.

He collapsed into the bloodied sand, pain washing over him in waves.

John dropped to his knees beside him, hands trembling as he pressed his fingers against Bob’s chest, feeling the uneven beat of a fading heart.

Bob’s eyes fluttered open, filled with confusion and something achingly tender.

His lips parted in a weak smile.

“You remind me of someone,” he whispered, voice fragile and strange—as if trying to grasp a ghost.

John’s throat tightened.

“I… I don’t know,” he breathed, hand tightening around Bob’s.

But deep down, a flicker of something unspoken, unremembered, glowed between them.

They both knew. Just not how.

Bob’s breath slowed, and then stilled.

The arena was silent for a heartbeat.

John sat there in the dust, heart splintering, haunted by a name he couldn’t quite recall.

The world turned once more.

And somewhere, across time and memory, two souls searched again.

Waiting. Searching.

Yearning to find the other in the endless dance of fate and flame.

﹏

Ice and fire. Blood and steel.

The howl of the wind through towering pines. The scent of salt and smoke heavy on the air.

They were no longer gladiator and healer—no longer scholar and general.

They were warriors, born of different clans, hardened by frozen winters and endless wars.

John was a shield-brother from the north—muscles knotted beneath furs, eyes sharp and relentless like a hawk’s. His axe was an extension of his fury, his loyalty carved into every scar and battle cry.

Bob came from the south, a warrior of quiet strength. He was the steady hand in chaos, the one who patched wounds with rough cloth and stronger will. His gaze held a calm certainty beneath the storm of battle.

They met on the edge of the world, where clans clashed and legends were born in the spray of the sea and the flash of iron.

At first, they fought as strangers—opposite sides in a war that had lasted generations. But when a new enemy appeared—far darker and more merciless than any clan—they found themselves fighting shoulder to shoulder, blades intertwined in desperate dance.

There were no words between them, only glances and shared breaths, the silent language of warriors bound by survival and trust.

John’s shield covered Bob’s flank. Bob’s axe cleared the path.

They moved as one, fierce and unyielding.

The fire of battle lit their faces, sweat mixing with blood, eyes fierce with something beyond hatred or fear.

In the chaos, fierce loyalty blossomed—unspoken, undeniable.

They didn’t say it. They didn’t have to.

On the final day, the battlefield was a frozen hellscape.

The ground was churned to mud beneath their feet, red with the blood of countless fallen.

The enemy pressed in like a tide that could not be turned.

John and Bob fought back to back, every slash and parry a promise.

No words, no fear—just the pulse of shared purpose.

When the last spear struck, it found them both.

John’s breath hitched as he felt the cold burn in his side.

Bob’s eyes met his one last time—a look filled with sorrow, with something fierce and tender.

“You’re the one I fought for,” Bob whispered, voice thin but clear against the dying storm.

John’s grip faltered, a broken smile curling on his lips.

“And you, my partner,” he replied, voice raw.

Their bodies slumped together in the mud, the cold creeping in as the world darkened around them.

They died as they lived—side by side.

And as the frozen winds howled through the pines, the cycle spun on.

Time folded, lives erased and rewritten.

But beneath the endless sky, two souls stirred—waiting.

Searching.

Yearning to find each other again.

﹏

Dust clung to everything out here.

To boots and brimmed hats, to the backs of tired horses and the blood-cracked edges of knuckles. It caked along throats dry from the sun and silence. It hung in the air, golden and thick, catching the last rays of light before dusk bled the sky red.

John Walker was a man shaped by the desert—sharp lines, steady hands, eyes the color of sky before a storm. His aim was legend. A sharpshooter, they said. Dead-on. Dead-fast. Dead-serious.

Bob Reynolds had been a bounty hunter once. Clean coat, clean conscience, clean lines crossed only when he had to. Then something snapped. Some line was drawn one too many times. He stopped following rules. Started following his gut. Now he was wanted in four counties with a price on his head and a weight in his chest he didn’t know how to name.

They met in a place called Devil’s Hollow, drawn into the same crew by bad luck and worse timing. At first, they barely spoke. John didn’t trust anyone. Bob didn’t try.

But something unspoken twisted between them, like smoke from a lit match.

It wasn’t kindness, not exactly. They weren’t built for kindness. But Bob would pass John the flask without being asked. John would keep his eye on Bob’s blind side in a shootout. They moved together without meaning to—covering each other like they’d done it before.

They never talked about it.

Not the sense of knowing. Not the flickers of déjà vu that danced behind their eyes when the fire crackled too loud, or when a dusty sunset cast long shadows and something inside them whispered again, again.

But they felt it. In the quiet. In the echo.

The final stand came on a blistering day with no wind.

The outlaw crew was cornered near the Mescalero ridge—nowhere to run but down into the gulch, open and hot as hell itself.

The law came fast. Too many badges. Too many bullets.

John reloaded in rhythm with his breathing, sighting targets through the shimmer of heat. Bob stood beside him, shotgun primed, teeth gritted behind sun-chapped lips.

“They’re closing in,” Bob growled, backing into cover.

John gave him a crooked half-grin. “Ain’t they always?”

They fought like ghosts. Like men who knew how to die and weren’t afraid to do it again.

But the odds were wrong this time. They’d always been wrong.

A bullet caught Bob in the ribs. His knees buckled, hands slick with blood, the ground rushing up to meet him.

John yelled—raw and wordless—but didn’t hesitate. He dropped to cover him, gun blazing, until his own body jerked with a final shot to the gut.

They collapsed together in the dust, the world narrowing to heat and smoke and the taste of copper.

John coughed, vision blurring, sand clinging to his lashes.

Bob’s hand found his.

He didn’t know why he reached. He just… did.

John gave the smallest squeeze back, breath ragged.

“Feels like we’ve done this before,” he muttered, voice thick and distant, like it came from someone else's mouth.

Bob looked at him then, brow furrowed like he was trying to remember something just out of reach. Like his soul was pacing behind locked doors.

“Yeah,” he rasped. “Feels like… you always find me.”

The sun burned overhead. The desert swallowed them whole.

And time—merciless, eternal—shifted again.

Their story did not end in the dust.

It was only sleeping beneath it.

Waiting for the next sky. The next lifetime. The next chance to get it right.

﹏

The first snowfall came quiet and early, draping the mountain temple in a hush so complete it made the world feel paused.

Wind whispered through pine needles. Lanterns swayed on rusted hooks. In the stillness, the world held its breath.

Bob Reynolds swept the temple steps each morning before the sun rose. It was a ritual he never missed. There was comfort in the motion, in the way the broom bristled over stone, how the mist clung to his robes, how the cold grounded him.

But lately, something in him had shifted.

He dreamed strange dreams.

Golden deserts and silver swords. Warm blood. War cries. A name in his mouth when he woke, syllables lost to dawn.

He would sit up in the dark, breath fogging in the cold, hands trembling. Sometimes, he’d find he’d already lit the incense, though he didn’t remember doing it.

Sometimes, he woke with his heart breaking over someone he had not met.

Until him.

Until the man arrived—wounded, ragged, half-frozen at the temple gates.

John had once worn armor with pride. Now, the plates were gone, stripped away like honor. His swords were dulled with blood, and shame clung to his skin thicker than the frostbite.

He did not give a name at first.

He only bowed once, stiff and slow, and accepted the monk’s silent gesture toward the fire.

Bob did not ask who he had killed or why he carried himself like a man already buried. He only cleaned the wounds, left warm rice beside the futon, and watched John with the quiet weight of someone who knew things he could not explain.

The days stretched long and wordless.

John did not pray. He sat on the steps during sunrise, the same time Bob swept, saying nothing.

But the stillness between them grew familiar. Almost easy.

One morning, John found a scrap of parchment and a stick of ink. He knelt on the temple floor, brow furrowed, fingers moving as if guided by muscle memory older than this life.

The sigil came before he knew what he was drawing.

A loop, jagged at the base. A broken sun. A shape that had no name—but carried the taste of sand, of salt, of firelight and loyalty and loss.

Bob walked in mid-stroke. His breath caught.

“I’ve seen that,” he said before he could stop himself.

John looked up.

Bob’s eyes were wide, color drained from his face. “In my dreams,” he whispered. “In the desert. On a sword. On—on a body.”

He sank to his knees, dazed.

Something thrummed between them. Something so old, it didn’t have language anymore.

John swallowed hard. “Me too.”

That winter, they spoke more.

About the dreams. About places they’d never been and yet remembered like old scars. About fighting shoulder to shoulder. About dying back to back. About names that never made it past their lips—but burned on their tongues like forgotten vows.

“I think we were something once,” Bob murmured, kneeling beside the altar one night, voice lost in the flicker of candles. “Not just in this life.”

John didn’t answer, but his hand hovered over Bob’s for a moment before pulling away.

It was not yet time.

The raid came without warning.

Bandits seeking shelter and blood. The temple stood no chance.

John fought like a demon reborn—no armor, no clan, only fury and a blade that remembered how to kill.

But even he couldn’t stop the arrow.

Bob had run to drag a child behind the altar when it struck him clean through the ribs.

He gasped once, fell to his knees, and the world blurred in red.

John caught him before he hit the ground fully. “No,” he choked, “No.”

Bob blinked up at him, face slack with pain, but oddly calm. “We do this a lot, don’t we?” he rasped, a faint smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Dying.”

“Stop talking,” John ordered, pressing his hand against the wound, voice breaking. “Just stay—stay here. Stay.”

Bob lifted a trembling hand to John’s face, fingers smearing blood across his cheek.

“You always find me,” he whispered.

And then he went still.

The snow kept falling.

But the sigil remained on the temple floor, etched deeper now in blood than ink.

John didn’t leave for a long, long time.

He sat with the body.

With the silence.

With the ache of knowing and the helplessness of memory not yet whole.

But in the stillness, he made a vow.

Next time, he would remember sooner.

Next time, he would save him.

﹏

Paris, 1794. The Reign of Terror.

Smoke coils over the cobblestone streets as musket fire cracks in the distance. The city is alive with fury—red banners, angry chants, blood spilled in the name of liberty. Paris has become a fever dream of broken monarchs and broken promises, and through it all, the revolution marches on.

Bob fights not for vengeance but for something softer. Hope, maybe. A future he’s only seen in dreams. His hands shake as he reloads his pistol, crouched behind the barricade, soot smudged across his cheek. He’s not a soldier. He’s a pamphlet-writer, a printer’s apprentice turned rebel. But his chest burns with a purpose he can’t name. Like he’s lived this before. Like he’s died for it.

Across the smoke, a figure darts into view—tall, broad, wrapped in the tattered red-white-blue of the rebellion, moving like the battlefield bends around him. Bob doesn’t know why, but his pulse stutters. His body remembers something before his mind can.

A musket shot rips through the barricade.

Bob scrambles up, half-mad with instinct, and leaps across the debris to grab the man’s arm. “You,” he pants, “you feel—”

The man—John—stares at him. Sweat beads on his brow. His jaw is set, eyes storm-dark. He’s a revolutionary soldier, a man forged by battle. He should shove Bob away, should demand answers, should pull his blade.

He doesn’t.

Instead, his grip tightens like he knows him too.

“…familiar,” Bob finishes, breath hitching.

John blinks like he’s been hit. “I thought it was just me.”

Then there’s no time. The National Guard charges, orders barking down the street. Revolutionaries scatter. The sky cracks open with gunfire and screaming.

They fight together that day, shoulder to shoulder, as if they always have.

But revolution devours its children.

Captured. Tried. Condemned.

The prison is cold, stone walls weeping. Bob sits in a dark cell, chained, but not alone. John’s beside him, their wrists bound but pressed close. The guards mock them—two more martyrs for the guillotine. Two more names to be crossed off.

“I remember… fire,” Bob whispers into the stillness. “Ash. A temple. But it doesn’t make sense.”

John looks at him, quiet. “There was a symbol in my dreams. A sun. Always burning. And your face.”

Bob leans against him. “Maybe next time, we’ll meet sooner.”

John’s voice is steady, resolute: “Next time, I’ll find you.”

They die within moments of each other, heads held high beneath a sky that forgets them once more.

But the story does not end.

The sigil burns in the ashes again. The cycle continues.

﹏

France, 1917. The Western Front.

Mud. That’s what the world has become.

A swallowing, suffocating, soul-deep kind of mud that clings to boots and bones and breaks down whatever’s left of a man’s spirit. The trenches run like infected veins across the battlefield—dugouts, dug graves, it’s all the same now. The smell of rot, metal, and fear never leaves your throat.

Bob breathes through it anyway.

He’s a medic. Young, quiet, steady. The kind of man who never yells but always shows up, hands already moving, bandages already unraveling. His coat is damp with blood that isn’t always his. His eyes are tired—like he’s lived a thousand lives and remembers pieces of each one, but only when he dreams. Only when he wakes up with a name stuck in his throat and tears on his cheeks.

The name is always John.

“Jesus, Doc,” someone says behind him, low and southern. “You ever sleep?”

Bob startles. Spins.

John Walker. Private. Rifleman. Trouble.

He grins like he belongs to a different war—a warmer one, a sunnier one. But his eyes are shadowed. Like he knows he’s never really belonged to any place that wasn’t soaked in violence.

“I—I was just patching up Mick,” Bob says, voice caught.

John crouches beside him, boot squelching in the muck. “You’ve got this look sometimes. Like you’ve seen all this before.”

Bob’s hands freeze.

“I have dreams,” he says before he can stop himself. “Of battles. Not this war. Older ones. Swords. Deserts. Fire. Your face.”

John doesn’t laugh.

Instead, he whispers, “Do I die in them?”

Bob swallows. Nods.

John leans in, warm even in the cold. “Then maybe you remember the part where I’d do it again.”

They aren’t supposed to bond. Medics keep distance. Soldiers disappear too fast to hold onto.

But John keeps coming back with injuries Bob patches himself. A bullet graze. A bayonet nick. A cracked rib from diving over a trench wall to save a comrade. Every time, Bob scolds and John just smirks and says, “Missed me again, Sunshine.”

Bob hates that nickname. He also aches when he doesn’t hear it.

Some nights, they huddle under the same tarp during rain so hard it sounds like gunfire. Bob wraps his coat tighter and John leans just close enough to warm his side.

“I had the dream again,” Bob says once, voice hoarse. “You had a sword. I wore red. We burned.”

John’s voice is soft, as if in prayer. “I think I loved you in it.”

Bob closes his eyes. “I think I always do.”

The assault is sudden. Orders come down. Over the top.

Bob’s not supposed to go. But someone’s wounded. The line’s breaking. And John—John is already halfway to no man’s land, his rifle strapped tight, shouting for his squad to follow.

Gunfire. Smoke. Screams.

Bob runs after them.

He doesn’t see the shell until it’s too late. Doesn’t register the blood until he’s kneeling in it.

John is lying in the mud, chest torn open, eyes wide. The tags around his neck catch the dull gray light.

John Walker.

Bob collapses beside him.

“No, no—come back, come back—” His hands are trembling, covered in blood. “You weren’t supposed to—this wasn’t—”

John coughs, a wet sound. His lips twitch faintly. “Told you I’d do it again.”

Bob presses their foreheads together. “You idiot. You absolute—god, I remember all of you. Every one. And it’s always you.”

John breathes his last with a whisper: “Then find me next time.”

Bob screams as the shells keep falling.

And somewhere in the mud, stained with centuries of love and loss, the sigil reappears—drawn in blood, fading into the earth.

The cycle continues.

﹏

Cold War is colder than ever.

But the city of Vienna breathes like it’s holding a secret.

The streets are lined with narrow shadows and diplomats. Coffee houses hum with whispered suspicions and jazz. Men smoke behind newspapers, women vanish into taxis, and somewhere between East and West—between the iron teeth of two worlds grinding against each other—two men meet in silence.

Bob wears a trench coat and gloves, collar turned up. His hands don’t shake, but only because he’s trained them not to. Soviet defector. Asset-in-limbo. A ghost on every list.

He waits inside a hotel bar with dark wood paneling and crystal ashtrays, untouched vodka sweating on the table. He doesn’t look up when the American sits beside him.

“You’re early,” Bob says, English soft and precise, but distant.

John Walker doesn't answer immediately. He lights a cigarette, exhales slowly.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Neither of them has slept in months.

Their first real conversation happens in a coded letter, tucked into the hollow of a dead drop in a cemetery outside Prague. Bob reads it on a train at midnight.

You remind me of someone I’ve never met.

I don’t dream often. But when I do, you’re always walking away.

He folds it carefully. Doesn’t cry. Not yet.

They meet again in Berlin. Then Zurich. Then Florence. Always in the same bland hotel rooms with matching curtains and bleeding wallpaper. Always under fake names, in bodies that are never fully relaxed.

They eat dinner in silence. Share black coffee in rooms with bugs in the lamps. Bob presses his forehead to John’s just once, when the walls are thick enough and the windows covered.

“I don’t believe in fate,” Bob whispers. “But you feel like something I never had a choice in.”

John touches his cheek like he’s memorizing him. Like he’s waiting for him to disappear.

“I’d burn countries down to keep you,” he says.

Bob believes him.

They fall in love by accident. And on purpose. Over time. And in moments too small to record.

John teaches Bob how to cook American bacon in a hotel kitchenette. Bob corrects John’s Russian grammar with a smirk and two fingers pressed to his wrist.

One night, Bob finds a photo in John’s wallet—blurred, half-torn. They’re both in it. Not now, not this life. Older clothing. Different time. Bob, in a red military coat. John, in a dirty white shirt. Arms around each other. Dying light.

John catches him staring.

“I’ve carried it for years,” he says. “Didn’t know why. Until I met you.”

Bob doesn’t speak for a long time. Then, in a breath:

“I think I’ve been waiting.”

The kill order comes from D.C.

Someone’s sniffed too close. Bob’s name is rising again. Not as defector. But traitor.

John finds the man first. Ends it in a quiet alley. Two bullets. No witnesses.

When he returns to the flat, Bob’s already waiting, barefoot, shaking.

“You killed for me.”

John looks tired, wild with it. “You think I wouldn’t?”

Bob steps closer. Presses their foreheads together. “You always do.”

They leave Vienna that night, blending into the foot traffic. They’re steps from freedom—crossing into the crowd near a checkpoint—when it happens.

A gunshot. Then another.

John stumbles.

It takes Bob a moment to understand. One, two seconds of wrong silence.

And then, “John!”

The crowd panics. People scream. Bob drops to his knees, catching John before he hits the pavement. Blood on his chest. Too much.

“No, no, look at me—”

John’s eyes flutter. His hand lifts weakly to Bob’s face.

“Still—still yours,” he whispers.

Then nothing.

Bob screams his name—again, for the fifth, tenth, hundredth time across lifetimes. This one doesn’t echo. It just vanishes in the Vienna wind.

By the time the police arrive, Bob is gone.

So is the man he loved.

So is the version of him that believed they had time.

Later, they’ll call it a diplomatic incident.

A rogue agent. A stray bullet. An accident.

But deep in the archives, someone will find the letter John never got to send:

If we have to do this again in the next life—

If there is one—

Please find me sooner.

﹏

The first time John sees him, Bob’s standing on top of a milk crate in the middle of Washington Square Park, yelling about truth and imperialism like his lungs don’t know fear.

He’s small and wild-looking, curls half-tamed under a knit cap, paint under his nails and a sign slung on his back that reads BOMBS CAN’T FIX WHAT YOU BROKE. His voice shakes a little when he gets riled up, not with nerves but with fury. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a few days—maybe longer—but his eyes are burning. Bright. Alive.

John doesn’t mean to stop. Doesn’t mean to watch him. But something about the way Bob holds the space, all electric rage and aching tenderness, pins him in place like a memory he hasn’t made yet.

Bob locks eyes with him mid-sentence.

John forgets what day it is.

They meet again two days later at a protest outside City Hall. Tear gas clouds the air like ghosts. Cops shove people to the ground. And Bob, idiot that he is, runs straight toward the chaos with nothing but a bandana over his face and a canvas messenger bag full of pamphlets.

John’s instincts kick in faster than thought. He grabs Bob by the collar and yanks him back into a side alley, both of them coughing and blinking through the chemical sting.

“You have a death wish, or are you just stupid?” John snaps, voice low, angry in the way fear makes you.

Bob rips off his bandana, panting. “That depends. Are you one of them?”

John scoffs. “I was a soldier. Not a fucking bootlicker.”

Something flickers in Bob’s face—relief, maybe. Recognition.

“Then why’d you pull me out?” he asks.

John shrugs. “I don’t know. You looked like someone who’s got more to paint.”

Bob grins. “What gave me away?”

“You smell like turpentine.”

That’s the first time Bob kisses him. Right there in the alley, between the echo of sirens and the hiss of gas. It tastes like ash and adrenaline and something tender he doesn’t know how to name.

John doesn’t stop him.

They fall fast.

Fast enough that it’s terrifying. Fast enough that neither of them says the word love out loud for a long time, because naming it might make it real, and real things break.

Bob paints John in every light he can find: with shadows under his eyes and war in his smile, with one hand curled like he’s still holding a rifle. John hates how accurate it is. Loves him anyway.

They argue about everything—Bob thinks John’s too cautious, too quiet. John thinks Bob’s going to get himself killed running around like every cause is his to carry. But Bob always comes home. And John always waits up. Even when he says he won’t.

They eat bad Chinese takeouts on rooftops. Dance to bootleg Dylan tapes. Share one cigarette between them like it's sacred. Make love on paint-stained floors, slow and quiet, like it’s the only thing holding the world together.

At night, John curls around Bob like a shield. Bob traces the scars on his chest and whispers about revolutions in colors.

“You ever think we’ve done this before?” Bob asks one night, voice thick with smoke and sleep. “You and me. In other lives.”

John kisses his shoulder and doesn’t say yes.

But he doesn’t say no either.

The fire starts in the old church turned shelter on 3rd and Avenue B.

Bob was supposed to be there for a mural. Something hopeful for the walls—hands reaching, children laughing, a future that didn’t feel so far away. John had kissed him goodbye that morning, teased him about getting more paint in his hair.

The fire was electrical. Fast. Angry.

They say Bob ran back inside three times. Once for the night manager. Twice for a sleeping mother and her kid.

The third time, he didn’t come back out.

John gets the call and doesn’t breathe for thirty-seven minutes.

When he sees the wreckage, the mural is half gone—smoke-eaten, the hands reaching into nothing.

He doesn’t smile again. Doesn’t protest. Doesn’t sleep.

He punches a wall and breaks his hand. Smashes Bob’s last canvas in a fit of something between grief and rage. Can’t bring himself to throw it away.

The world keeps moving. John doesn’t.

Sometimes, he swears he hears Bob in the crowd. A laugh. A lyric. A whisper in the hiss of a passing train.

He keeps the lighter Bob always carried, the one shaped like a matchbox with chipped enamel on the side. It stopped working long ago. But John still flicks it open when the nights feel too quiet.

Just to remember the warmth.

And somewhere, across the fold of time and sky, a soul waits.

Watching.

Burning.

Saying:

Come back to me.

Please. Just one more life.

Let me find you again.

﹏

Somewhere between sunrise and goodbye.

It begins on the subway.

Bob stands near the back of the Line 2 car, one hand braced against the metal rail, the other clutching a sketchbook worn soft with use.

He’s dressed in a faded army jacket layered over a turtleneck, collar turned up against the cold. His thumb is smudged with charcoal, black streaks against pale skin. 

He’s trying to sketch the ahjumma with bags of greens stacked at her feet, but the lines won’t behave. They keep bending into the shape of a face he doesn’t know—sharp jaw, bent nose, the kind of eyes that carry both gravity and light.

Across the car, John leans against the opposite door, one headphone dangling from his left ear. A cassette player clipped to his belt hums a grainy version of Queen’s “Somebody to Love.” He doesn’t even hear it. His eyes are fixed on the artist with the quiet hands and the restless eyes. He doesn’t know why, but his chest aches with something familiar.

They glance up at the same time.

It’s not cinematic. The subway jolts. Someone coughs.

But in the blur of motion and neon flickering through the windows, their eyes catch.

Something pauses.

And then—smiles. Awkward. Hesitant. Like they’ve just spotted someone they dreamed about years ago and never expected to meet.

The second time is three days later.

It’s raining—late spring rain, warm and sudden. The streets of Myeongdong glisten, neon signs shimmering in every puddle. Bob is soaked, his sketchbook clutched tight to his chest, eyes squinted under dripping hair. John, standing beneath the green awning of a pojangmacha, holds up a cheap umbrella with a flick of his wrist and grins.

“You always get caught in the rain?” he asks in accented Korean.

Bob shivers, but it’s not from the cold.

“Only when I forget my past lives,” he says.

And for a second, everything is still.

Neither of them laughs. Not right away.

Then—soft, disbelieving chuckles bubble up, like air surfacing after holding their breath too long.

They fall in love fast this time.

Too fast.

This love is all cassette mixtapes and convenience store ramen. Midnight movies and cramped rooftops. Holding hands in Gwanghwamun Square when no one’s looking. Shouting their lungs out at protest rallies, then fleeing when the riot police come charging.

John is a former conscript turned activist. He reads banned books and tapes political flyers to telephone poles.

Bob is a painter who sells portraits by the Han River and paints government critique in secret on abandoned buildings. His fingers are always stained, always moving.

Their love is messy and loud and sacred.

They kiss behind old bookstores. They press their foreheads together at 3 a.m., whispering things like “I swear I know you,” and “If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.”

They fight for causes. They fight for each other.

And for once, fate lets them be soft.

Until it doesn’t.

The car crash happens in July, after a night spent drinking cheap soju and dancing barefoot on a friend’s rooftop. Bob’s head is resting on John’s shoulder. The radio plays a scratchy version of "Time After Time.”

The streets are slick with rain again.

It’s late. Too late.

The lights blur. The brakes fail. The world shudders.

The windshield cracks like paper tearing.

John’s hand is still in Bob’s.

They don’t scream.

There’s no time for last words. No goodbyes.

Only the look—their look—between them.

That silent, aching recognition: Oh. It’s us again.

And then—

Everything stops.

There’s no funeral. No newspaper headline.

Just twisted metal, and the sound of rain, and the undeniable truth that they were here.

That they found each other.

That even now, they’re not letting go.

And somewhere, behind another waiting lifetime, something ancient whispers,

Try again. You’re so close. Try again.

﹏

The road into town is gravel and dust, lined with rice fields and peach trees, and in spring the air smells like new rain and tilled earth.

Bob arrives in a hand-me-down truck with a broken cassette player and a folder of lesson plans tucked under his arm. The town is quiet—two stop signs, a single convenience store, and the same old man selling sweet potatoes at the market every Sunday. Bob's never lived anywhere this small, or this still.

He teaches literature at the middle school—a small building with cracked windows and chalkboards that squeak no matter how softly he writes. The students are loud and kind. The nights are silent. His days stretch like long threads of silk, thin and peaceful. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t feel like he’s waiting for something.

Until he meets John.

John is a farmer with strong shoulders, worn jeans, and hands that know the rhythm of soil and sun. He sells vegetables at the town co-op and lives in a modest house at the edge of a hill, where you can see the stars without trying. He’s quiet, polite, and strangely familiar in the way that makes Bob pause too long the first time they shake hands.

“You’re the new teacher,” John says, not a question.

“And you’re the guy who sells carrots like they’re national treasures,” Bob replies, and that makes John laugh—a deep, surprised thing, like a well filling after a drought.

Their friendship builds the way most things do in towns like this: slow, sturdy, with unspoken routines. Mornings become shared coffee. Saturdays are spent mending fences or painting the school library. Bob reads poetry out loud while John tends to seedlings, and neither of them says it aloud, but they both know they’re building something.

It’s quiet.

It’s enough.

One evening, midsummer, with fireflies blinking like signals in the dusk and the smell of grilled corn in the air, John says it.

“I think I’ve loved you before,” he says, voice quiet, eyes on the stars overhead.

Bob, startled, turns—but John’s not looking at him. He’s staring up like the sky holds an answer they’ve both been chasing.

“I mean—now too,” John adds quickly. “But I feel like I’ve said this before. Somewhere. Some time. And I don’t want to wait again.”

Bob doesn’t speak for a long moment. He just watches the way John breathes—steady, scared, sure.

Then he says, “I think I’ve been waiting for you.”

This time, they fall in love the way the land changes seasons: gently, without apology. Love becomes shared chores and evening walks. Kisses over dishwater. Mornings tangled in each other and the sound of sparrows outside the window.

It’s not passion like wildfires. It’s warm like sunrise.

Bob tells his students to write stories about home. John brings lunch to the school on Thursdays, always pretending it’s too much so Bob will take the leftovers. They argue about which tomatoes are sweeter, about whether Keats is better than Yeats, about who snores more (it’s Bob).

They don’t say “I love you” every day.

But when they do, they mean it.

They grow older. Together.

They wrinkle at the corners. Bob gets forgetful; John starts walking slower. They buy a second rocking chair. They lose people, plant trees in their memory, and hold each other tighter each year the peach trees bloom again.

They die the same way they lived—softly, side by side. John first, with Bob’s hand in his. Bob soon after, with John’s name still warm on his lips.

It’s peaceful. It’s complete. It feels like an ending that should last.

But the thread tugs again.

The world pulls. The wheel turns.

And though this life was the first where love did not end in fire or war or broken glass—it still ends. It still sends them back.

The curse is quiet now, not cruel. But it lingers.

In the space between one breath and the next, something stirs.

And somewhere new, far from farmland and silence—

They begin again.

﹏

Robert “Bob” Reynolds was born in Sarasota Springs, Florida.

Not to a life of ease, or love, or anything soft. The world greeted him not with lullabies but with yelling, shattered plates, and the heavy-footed thunder of an angry man who called himself father. Bob learned early how to duck. How to lie. How to disappear into the corners of his own home.

He survived an abusive father. Lost his mother to addiction—though if he was honest, she’d been lost long before she died. By middle school, Bob was already chasing silence the only way he knew how. Morphine, first. Then anything stronger, anything that could dull the sharp edge of his own existence. The spiral was ugly—meth, back-alley deals, bar fights, a string of charges he couldn’t remember collecting.

At one point, there’d been a chicken mascot job. Fast food. Kids throwing ketchup packets. Parents laughing like he wasn’t a seventeen-year-old trying not to pass out in a $9 suit that reeked of sweat and failure. That job ended when he attacked a civilian while under the influence of methamphetamine.

So he ran.

From the cops. From the courts. From himself.

All the way to Malaysia.

And for a while, the silence tasted like freedom.

Until someone from O.X.E. found him.

They didn’t look like a savior. Just a clean suit, a too-smooth smile, and a dossier too thick for comfort. But they knew his name. His real one. Knew what he’d done, what he’d been through. Said they’d been watching. Said they could help.

They told him he was special.

That he didn’t have to be a tragedy.

That inside him, there was something remarkable—something powerful.

They offered him a miracle drug. Promised he’d become the best version of himself. No more running. No more pain. No more wasting what they called “potential.”

And he believed them.

He took it.

And for a moment—a brief, golden second that he would come to relive in his dreams—he was. The weight lifted. The pain dulled. His body felt stronger, lighter, sharper. He could see things he’d never seen. Be someone he never thought he could be.

But power without healing is just a loaded gun. And in the silence of his mind, from the depths of his loneliness, his pain, his fury—

Void was born.

A shadow he never meant to create. A dark mirror, twisted from everything he tried to bury. A wound with a heartbeat. And when it emerged—slipping through the cracks of Bob’s psyche with teeth and terror—it didn’t ask permission.

It killed before Bob even realized what was happening. His hands. His body. His voice. But not his choice.

By the time he understood what he’d become, it was too late. The blood had dried. The screaming had stopped. The bodies were still.

And Bob collapsed, consciousness splintering under the weight of what he couldn’t undo. A coma. His last words slurred with shame—just a whisper of remorse on his lips.

The scientists called him a failure. A broken prototype. A miscalculation not worth fixing.

So they sealed him away. Labeled. Catalogued. Forgotten.

A body behind glass. A name scratched out of history.

Until now.

The desert didn’t care who you were. It swallowed secrets whole.

Which made Utah the perfect place for a vault.

The O.X.E. facility lay buried deep beneath sand and scorched stone, sun-bleached rock disguising what festered below—chambers lined in lead and silence, each room a tomb built to house the unholy.

When Yelena Belova breached it, it wasn’t with stealth.

It was with fury.

Her boots hit the grated floors of Sublevel 6 like thunderclaps, a fluid ripple of black and vengeance. Sirens wailed overhead, red strobes blinking like arterial warnings through the sterile gray of the hallways. Metal, concrete, and cordite filled her nostrils. Somewhere ahead: Ava Starr known as Ava Starr. Rogue asset. Betrayer. The mission was clear— eliminate.

She hadn’t expected U.S. Agent.

John Walker emerged from the far corridor like a loaded gun—shoulders squared, blood already slicking one brow. No pretense, no pause. His shield was airborne before the lights caught up.

It struck her in the shoulder, blunt and brutal, slamming her against a support column. Pain burst down her collarbone. She gritted her teeth and shoved off, smirking even as blood smeared her mouth.

The second strike came faster.

Yelena ducked it, twisting low, her knife flicking out and grazing the edge of his thigh. Walker hissed, breath punching out of him in a growl as he staggered back.

Their missions were clear. He was here to kill her. She was here to kill Ghost.

Neither expected a fourth operative.

The vault lights flickered.

Then—Taskmaster dropped from the ceiling like silence made flesh. A blur of motion, twin blades gleaming. The target was Walker.

But something phased through the wall behind them—like smoke with bones.

Ava Starr. Ghost. Flickering between solid and spectral like a bad memory you never quite forget. But she wasn’t after weapons or data or escape. Her eyes locked on Taskmaster like a trigger pulled. Her mission was clear also:

Kill Taskmaster.

She didn’t hesitate. A gun in one hand. Rage curling off her like heat.

Walker twisted around just in time to meet Taskmaster’s first strike, shield up, steel-on-steel with a shriek of sparks. Behind them, Yelena intercepted Ava, catching her mid-phase with a snap kick to the ribs that sent her sprawling.

It was chaos.

Concrete trembled under their boots. The steel beams above groaned. The sharp tang of ozone hung in the air—gunmetal, sweat, static.

Ava rose again. Blood at the corner of her mouth. She didn’t wipe it away. She smiled.

Then vanished.

Yelena spun—

Too late.

Ava reappeared behind her in a flash, slamming a boot into Yelena’s spine. The blonde crumpled forward with a strangled grunt. But before Ava could follow through, Taskmaster intercepted with a punishing right hook that cracked across her jaw.

They fought like revenants. Half-glimpsed shapes through smoke and blinking alarms. Steel met spectral. Blade against blade. Phase against mimic.

And in the middle of it, John—furious, barely breathing—grabbed a heavy equipment table, shoving it aside with a grunt to get space between himself and Taskmaster’s relentless assault.

The table crashed into the side wall.

Metal cracked.

A sealed containment module behind it hissed, shuddered—then released a final, guttural snap.

None of them noticed.

Not yet.

Inside: a man.

No. A boy, maybe. Or something in between. Pale. Curled tight like a question the world refused to answer. His eyes fluttered.

He stirred.

Robert Reynolds blinked awake to a nightmare.

Alarms howled. Shadows danced in time with muzzle flashes and blade strikes. The air reeked of cordite, sweat, and the ozone-sting of energy discharge. His ribs screamed with every breath. His skin felt like it didn’t belong to him.

Where was he?

His mind was a storm of nothing and static. No bearings. No answers.

He crawled from the pod, barefoot and shivering, slipping into the narrow gap between shipping crates. He crouched in the dark—watching, breathing through his mouth to keep from gagging on the iron tang in the air.

He watched.

Ava’s blade sliced open Yelena’s arm. Walker slammed his shield into Taskmaster’s helmet with enough force to dent steel. No one noticed him. No one noticed the fifth life suddenly blinking in their warpath.

Until Ava turned—eyes cold—and fired a bullet straight into Taskmaster’s face.

The thud of the body hitting the ground echoed like a door slamming shut.

Bob’s stomach lurched.

He vomited. Hard. Loud.

All three assassins froze.

Three sets of eyes turned, scanning the dark.

Ava turned first, sidearm already raised. “There’s someone else here.”

Bob scrambled to his feet—slipping in his own sick, heartbeat hammering. He darted toward the vault door—sealed. Of course it was sealed. He slammed his fists against the door once, twice, but the lockdown was total.

He turned.

And they were there.

Yelena. Ava. Walker.

Guns. Knives. Cold eyes.

“Don’t—please—” His voice cracked like glass. He lifted his hands slowly, trembling fingers stretched to the flickering overhead light. “I don’t—I’m not—”

Ava spoke, voice clinical, sharp enough to cut steel. “Who are you?”

His lips barely moved. “I—I’m Bob. I told you—I’m—uh—yeah—Bob.”

John narrowed his eyes. “Jesus Christ, stop saying Bob.”

Yelena took a cautious step forward, blood still trickling down her arm. “Who sent you, Bob?”

“Nobody!” he said, voice high and broken. “Why would I be sent? W-we’re you all sent?”

The question hit like a pin dropped in silence.

The red emergency lights blinked across their faces. Shadows moved over blood and bodies and the cracked casing of Bob’s broken containment pod.

None of them spoke.

But something changed.

Because the truth was crawling into their minds now, too.

They had all been sent.

No backup. No evac. Just three orders on a collision course—and now, a fourth variable.

Bob stood before them. Gaunt. Shivering. Sweat plastered to his forehead, hospital clothing soaked with panic. He looked like someone who had died already—but somehow hadn’t stayed dead.

There was something wrong in him.

A pressure. A presence. Ava’s hand tightened on her trigger without meaning to. Yelena’s stance subtly shifted.

And John—

John didn’t lower his gun.

But he didn’t move either.

He couldn’t.

Because Bob looked at him.

And something—something—clicked.

Their eyes met.

And in the middle of the carnage, the sealed vault, the still-set trigger under John’s finger—something shifted.

Not outwardly. Not in any way the others would notice. No dramatic gesture. No sudden tears. No name whispered across the smoke.

But somewhere deep, in the marrow of time and memory, something split.

Something pulled.

A thread, ancient and frayed, tugged taut between them. Irrefutable. Unnamed. It stretched through dust and blood and air that tasted like metal—but it held.

A current neither of them understood. But both of them felt.

And not for the first time.

Not in this life, and not in the last.

In the din of blaring alarms, under the red haze of lockdown sirens, with vented steam curling around the room like a noose—there was a pause.

Just one.

A beat.

A breath.

And in it—recognition.

Flickering. Shimmering. Gone before it could be touched.

But real.

Somewhere deep within them, something stirred.

Not memories—no, not yet. But echoes. Reverberations. A tremor in the soul where no language dares to reach. It is not something they can name. It is something they feel.

Like breath caught in the lungs before a kiss. Like the pull of gravity when two stars fall toward each other, destined to burn.

There are fragments, impossible to forget:

A hand, calloused and trembling, held beneath the blaze of a foreign sun. A promise, spit between blood and laughter, because they already knew—somehow—they would never live long enough to keep it. Ruined stone underfoot. Ghosts in the dust. Footsteps chasing after shadows that refused to stay dead.

A kiss—raw, unpretty, all teeth and desperation—broken by the scream of steel and the snap of history folding in on itself.

A name. Written in blood. Whispered like prayer. A vow, scrawled across lifetimes and carved into the aching hollow of the chest. A life—quiet and golden—where they dared to dream, just once, that the curse might forget them. A goodbye that wasn’t a goodbye, but a surrender. A plea to time itself: please, not this time. Not again.

A thousand endings.

And now—this.

This moment.

A beginning.

Bob didn’t speak.

Neither did John.

But they didn’t have to.

Their eyes said everything—words that hadn’t been spoken in decades or centuries or timelines. Words that hadn’t been spoken yet.

They do not remember—not with the mind. But their souls remember. Their bones remember.

And somewhere deep inside—quiet and raw and certain—they both knew.

Even if it didn’t make sense.

Even if it was impossible.

They knew each other.

They always had.

“In the next life… find me.”

And maybe—just maybe—he finally had.

End.

────୨ৎ────