Chapter Text
#
There were two separate handwritings.
Yelena judged them each likely masculine by the curves and the slopes that were more angular than evocative. The contents within it made her think it wasn’t a journal with the standard nonsense one usually found in a little notebook — passwords, diary scribblings, doodles, really bad creative poetry. Well, there were doodles to be sure. Few and far between, and demonstrating decent art skills with a pen or a pencil by the first set of handwriting. The old notebook had a faint crease down the middle, as if someone had folded it in half and stuck it in a back pocket only just the once. Red cover, majority of the pages still left blank despite its well weathered age. There was a tiny stain of spilled ink on one of the small pages and other signs of clear abundant use, but Yelena couldn’t help but think these demonstrated rare instances of carelessness, outliers in the otherwise very well cared for little red book.
It was important.
She knew how to find things that were important to her marks. It was amazing what people left lying around right out in the open in the comforts of their homes. She kept turning the pages, even as she sensed him before he walked through the bedroom door; it was in a way that made her think he purposefully made his arrival obvious for her sake, just like she’d left signs of her invasion obvious for his sake. One didn’t step uninvited into the home of a deadly assassin lightly, but this was old hat for Yelena.
Still, it was a heartening start to the night that the gun in his hand was pointed towards the floor rather than the back of her head when he said, “It’s rude to break into people’s apartments, y’know?”
She didn’t lift her head, still flipping through the pages of the notebook. The list in the first handwriting was clearly pop culture things, the type of stuff that spanned decades and across a variety of interests. American, mostly, going on for a few pages.
The second was a hit list.
Or very likely felt it like it because it had the majority of the names crossed off. It felt like something one wrote in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Considering it was the Winter Soldier’s notebook, Yelena highly doubted it was a list of people he needed to get Christmas presents for.
Bucky came up behind her and snatched the book right out of her hands.
“Rude,” she muttered.
“That’s private — most things are in a home when someone doesn't invite you inside.”
She shrugged. “You took longer than I thought. I had some free time.”
To snoop. To case the joint. To find out where he hid all his weapons.
He rolled his eyes and gestured with a nod to take this conversation to some other room. She followed him outside of his bedroom, where she noted the bed was carefully and neatly tucked in at four corners, military style. It didn’t look like he slept handcuffed to the headframe or in that hidden space underneath the bed like some of the other brain-washed assassins she’d known over the years. The hallway was short and empty, and the kitchen was clean and well-organized. She’d already made herself a peanut butter sandwich; like she said, she’d had time.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought I made it clear. I’m not interested.”
“Bucky — Buck, can I call you Buck?”
“No.” Flatly.
“James,” she pivoted, which somehow annoyed him more. “We need to come to an understanding, yeah. You’re needed in the group. You’re a vital role, even. I’m not looking for a co-captain, entirely, not really looking for a formal structure given the personalities involved and I really don’t want to deal with Walker’s griping if he thinks there’s another male alpha coming for the role of leadership. But I’m thinking we can work something out within—”
“No,” he said again. He made an annoyed face while he said it, subtle displeasure at only the eyes and the slight turn of his frown, but an annoyed face nonetheless that spoke volumes. “I’m not joining Valentina’s little band of misfits. Neither should you.”
“It’s not Valentina’s,” Yelena countered. “It’s ours.”
“It’s not, and you’re naive if you think she won’t have any control over it. You don’t strike me as the naive type.”
“You don’t strike me as shortsighted, either. This is an opportunity, James. I know how the optics of yesterday played out — we can play this to our advantage.”
He grimaced, slightly. “Call me Bucky.”
“Only if I can call you Buck,” she countered.
This was a negotiation, after all. A tête-a-tête with high stakes. She needed to start off strong.
He rolled his eyes and turned away, but it wasn’t another outright denial.
She was tempted to grin like a child. Progress.
#
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand his misgivings. She’d have to be not only naive but outright moronic to think Valentina wouldn’t press any advantage she had of her considerable power to get them all back under her thumb. But that wasn’t, she thought, Bucky’s main problem. She knew the man by reputation only — the newspapers, the old KGB talk bordering on legends, the stories about the Winter Soldier turning even more bewildering when he decided to take up politics — but she didn’t feel like she knew the man. Natasha even told her about him in passing once, but it was more of that Boogie Man bullshit, he shot clean through me to get at mark, yadda yadda yawn, more of that Ded Moroz type of nonsense that she didn’t find tangible. She couldn’t fully figure him out.
Still, she felt like they’d shared something yesterday saving New York.
It bonded a group. It made them something special.
“Thunderbolts!” Alexie’s voice boomed in her mind, before she even remembered the rebrand to the New Avengers.
“You want coffee?” he asked, all civilized.
She shook her head. “The caffeine fucks with me this late at night.”
That didn’t stop him from quickly making himself a cup. “Look, you should save your breath. I’m out of the covert operations business and I’m not a superhero. A man with this much blood on his hands can’t be next on a Wheaties box, despite what your father may think.”
She shrugged. “You have blood on your hands. Who doesn’t? Not to toot my own horn or anything but I’m a child prodigy in assasination and spycraft — brainwashed, chemically and surgically altered before I even fully hit puberty. At least you had a childhood. I had three years in a suburban Ohio household with a fake family made up of Russian spies that meant more to me than the woman that gave birth to me. We all have our villain origin stories.”
He clearly didn’t care for the comparison. “I’m not changing my mind.”
“You can make a difference here, Buck. That’s why you’ve done everything you have in the last decade and a half? Why you’re best friends with Captain America — both versions I hear. It’s why you went into politics, isn’t it?”
“I know the difference I can make with a gun in my hand. I’m not signing up for that again.”
Incredulous, here. “We met on the open desert road two days ago when you took out a pair of O.X.E SUVs with explosives?”
“That was a rare exception, and I didn’t use a gun then either.”
“Then don’t use a gun. We can get you a knife, or something. A sword? Not a shield,” she lamented, rolling her eyes. “Walker would throw the most epic hissy fit.”
Her mind wandered without her permission, thinking of arrows, but that would probably trample on annoying trademark issues and she really didn’t like the idea of him becoming Hawkeye version 2.0 or anything. Besides, she already knew Kate Bishop wanted that spot and the girl had a better aim than even the Winter Soldier, Yelena imagined.
“This isn’t an argument you’re gonna win because you think you’re clever,” Bucky warned. “I’ve been dealing with people like Valentina for longer than you’ve been alive. They don’t change. They don’t fall unless they’re taken out. The impeachment hearing was the best way, the cleanest way, of getting someone like her out of the business. Now she thinks she’s got the Temu version of the Avengers to make her relevant again, and she’s going to squeeze that for all it’s worth.”
“Only if we let her,” she replied. “You’re overlooking the power of extortion.”
“I’m not interested in blackmailing anyone,” he only replied.
She lifted an eyebrow. “That’s very high-handed. I thought you wanted to make a difference?”
“I do, which is why I choose politics.”
“And somehow you have a problem with extortion? I’m not following.”
He sighed, poured some milk into his coffee, and took a long sip with the resigned attitude of the old man. Which, granted, he was. It was really rather impressive given how young and fresh he could look if he didn’t make aggrieved his entire personality.
She paused, indelicately. “Also, since we’re on the topic, I’m still not entirely sure about why you went into politics or how that happened. No offense, but you don’t have the charm or appeal of the normal politician. I’ve seen your interviews. Some people pop and sizzle on camera, a Tony Stark type of charm. Some people go for the bookish nerdy look, or a statesmen with poise. You? You kinda just—” she stopped, stilling her body, rigid, alien, “—stand there. Vacant eyes, flat expression, mouth opening and closing. It’s not charismatic. It’s like a dead fish.” She paused, a shrug, and added again, “No offense.”
“You just compared me to a dead animal. How am I not supposed to take offense to that?”
“Would it be better if it were a live animal?”
A pause. “Yeah, actually it would.”
“Alright, okay, you’re like a— what’s that one overly used cliché? A reindeer caught in headlights? Yes, that one. Better?”
“Sadly, if my options are that or a dead fish — yes.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” she pointed out.
“Jesus. I don’t even know what the question was.”
“Why did you go into politics?”
A longer pause, his eyes distant, not looking at her even when he kept his gaze in her general direction. “I got tired of the killings.”
Yeah. She couldn’t quite make a joke about that one.
“Look,” she said. “Just give it a test run. A trial basis. What you’re doing right now, I think it isn’t working. Maybe you disagree with that but I doubt it. Maybe the New Avengers will be the way you make a real difference? You won’t know until you try. You don’t like it? You stop. It’s that simple.”
It really wasn’t.
“It’s really not,” he told her.
“You won’t know if you don’t try,” she told him.
“I think it’s time you left,” he said.
She didn’t argue this time. He needed to marinate. She could tell that. She lifted to her feet, made more inane small chit chat as she shrugged on her coat, and he was polite enough to listen even as he rushed her out the door.
“Think about it, yeah?”
He didn’t nod. He didn’t reply. He just closed the door in her face, but she took comfort in the fact that he hadn’t slammed it.
#
The damage control had taken root just within 24 hours —leaked emails meant to show Valentina’s corrupt dealings with various governments around the world, threatening all manners of extrajudicial authority and punishment, part of a packet compiled by Congressman Gary’s office — was now rendered a mere footnote in the volley of press coverage. Another attack on New York, another save by superheros. It brought Valentina her fifteen minutes of distraction. Her original press conference, hastily organized in the aftermath of the Void’s attack, meant to introduce Sentry and instead had unveiled the Avengers in a slapjob of a presentation — somehow, it had worked like a charm.
Well, maybe not a charm.
The impeachment trial unraveled at the seams, overshadowed by Valentina’s showy showmanship, but the actual Avengers themselves, or the New Avengers? That was a hit and a miss with PR. People gave them some benefit of the doubt given they’d saved New York and all, but then the stories started coming out about them. Their past, redacted, the holes more damning than almost everything else except perhaps the actual unvarnished truth.
Walker, most everyone already knew. He was also the one that had the most support from certain fringes of conspiracy nutjobs, conservative men and women that loved a man in uniform no matter his crimes, or even the incels, general losers as Yelena liked to call them — but it all came with a legion of faithful supporters and all of Faux News.
The rest of the team? It was partially reminiscent of a bloodbath, and Yelena had been in the midst of those a time or two.
They hated Ghost and supremely sexualized her, both simultaneously. Even from the first photos of her standing amidst the wreckage of Manhattan, it started. The headlines weren’t about her strength, her fighting, her ability to manipulate and phase through solid objects. They weren’t about her suit, which oddly earned the criticism of“trying too hard” to be woke, as if the amount of skin she covered up was inversely proportional to her competence, nevermind the fact that the suit existed exclusively to keep her alive. She had a pretty face and a frankly slamming figure, and that was all that was necessary for the internet to do its thing.
She remembered Natasha handling all that like a pro when it had come for her. Her sister had weaponized the sexism as well as she could anything else, using the glamor and appeal of her looks as just another layer of armor. Her ridiculous hero poses; her flawless makeup and endless supply of skin tight suits; her mysterious allure, all the more seductive with a half-smirk. She had played the part of a femme fatale well enough to hang with the rest of the big boys in their Avenger tower; after a decade of it, no one questioned why Natasha was part of the team anymore, no one asked why she was there. She just was — until she was killed.
Then people forgot about her sister like she was yesterday’s trash, like she hadn’t saved the entire world.
Yelena knew that same dismissal was coming for her, too. Probably twice as hard because she didn’t have the same level of familiarity or comfort with being sexualized half as much.
Ava, on the other hand — Yelena almost winced. Experimented, sheltered, generally unused to even basic social interaction throughout her childhood and beyond. Ava was a sitting duck of a target, of not only sexism but that special American brand of racism too, because anyone with her skin color automatically got it three times as bad.
Yelena got the sexism, but she knew it was coming.
Ava had no idea what was coming her way, hadn’t been prepared for it in the least.
But for Yelena, it was expected because she had boobs — and the accent. Alexie, too, earned the disdain of American vitriol. (Because of the accent, obviously, not the boobs.) It was a bit cliché. The brooding ex-KGB assassin who spoke in a thick accent. That was the sort usually typecast as the big villain in all those summer blockbuster movies. Both father and daughter were used to this type of thinking. They expected the distrust, and even embodied more than a few stereotypes. Although she had never quoted Dostoevsky while staring out a window into an unblemished sheet of falling virgin snow, she could drink vodka like water. She wasn’t a thing the American public needed to excessively worry about, though. Not anymore. It was probably for the best. She probably wouldn’t have known what to do with outright acceptance from the public, if she had gotten it.
Alexie handled it the way he usually did — with extra bravado. “They will rue the day they mocked the accent. This is accent of a fighter! A great hero. It will ring across the globe with might!”
As for Bob — the public genuinely didn’t know what to make of Bob, other than that he seemed harmless.
That left Bucky Barnes.
Bucky Barnes — the former Winter Soldier, Hydra’s elite of the elite, responsible for high-profile assassinations, a litany of covert operations and sabotage; hell, he was probably responsible for a few regime changes across the world, too. Yelena had her hands bloody, but she had the feeling she was small change in comparison to the type of wreckage the Winter Soldier had laid down. It was the type of blood one never washed clean, but somehow — the American public loved him for it.
A tragic figure caught between duty and trauma, elected a congressman representing Brooklyn only half a term ago. Valued not because of his politics, but because his bloody past as a mass murderer was overshadowed by a successful rebranding. Yelena had to hand it to him. She wasn’t sure how he’d done it, and to be frank she doubted he did either. But it was something about the lore and the rising. Everyone loved a fallen hero rising from the ashes, at least when it was a man. To the American public, Bucky Barnes was a hero. They adored him.
Yelena didn’t understand that.
She knew Bucky didn’t, either.
It was Valentina’s assistant, Mel, that brought it home with a succinct briefing. “He polls three times better than the rest of you, many of you even combined. If you want this to work, you have to bring him onboard.”
“We know,” Yelena said, in the same breath she could have sworn Valentina muttered no shit under her breath. Valentina covered it up by taking a hefty liberal sip of her coffee, also courtesy of her assistant, while Yelena continued, “He isn’t willing to join. Not unless someone—” here, a pointed look towards Valentina, “—is willing to make a lot more assurances about being hands off. He won’t join unless someone else drops out.”
“I already had that conversation with him, and it’s not going to happen,” Valentina says, unfazed. “I’m the only reason the New Avengers exist. I appreciate the pretty face and the optics of him, but you think someone with his background would be more realistic about how the world operates.”
“He’s aware,” Yelena supplied. “It’s why he decided to change the system from within.”
“Dear lord,” Valentina said, in the same tone one would expect her to describe a smelly piece of shit stuck to her shoe. “I don’t know how to cure someone from that type of nonsense. He’s got more kills than the rest of you combined, but that quixotic mannerism of his is more appealing on Bambi than it is on a politician or an assassin.”
“Former assassin,” Yelena felt compelled to add.
Valentina made a noise suspiciously close to a snort of disdain. “Let me tell you something, Ms. Belova. It’s in both of our best interests if you bring him onboard. He can get more of his do-gooder nonsense done as an Avenger than he can as a freshman congressman. I don’t care how well he polls. If he can’t pass a single piece of legislation, he’s as useful as a screen door on a sinking ship. Get him onboard, or this entire Avengers initiative falls apart faster than his political career does.”
“Funny, that sounded suspiciously like an order — and I don’t take orders from you, Valentina.”
She smiled. “Consider it a benevolent piece of advice, then.”
“So generous,” Yelena intoned, dryly. “So selfless.”
Valentina nodded, unabashed. “I do try, for the American people.”
#
A dream:
She was in the frozen forest again, but she was alone. There was no voice calling her to lunch, there were no footsteps stepping against the snow. She waited, alone. Miles and miles of trees, an absolute serenity.
It was the loneliest she’d ever felt in her life.
#
Another dream:
The fireplace lit, the stage set for a fake Christmas holiday at home. She turned a page in her coloring book, looking up to smile at her mother and father as they snapped a photo of her and Natasha scribbling side by side. Nothing more than a picture meant for a fake album for a fake family.
Mom’s hand felt like the warmth of a comforting hug. “Alright, that’s enough Christmas photos. Set the pieces for Halloween, Alexie. Girls, go change your clothes.”
It was always fake, but Yelena’s smile was real.
#
“No,” he told her.
“Relax, Buck,” she said, brushing past him. “This’ll be fun.”
This time, she brought backup. The entire group came in after her, right on her heels. It was a mark of his surprise that he hadn’t stopped them at the door. It would either be her shining victory or an unmitigated disaster, but she figured she needed to use the entire arsenal at her disposal. Her teammates ranged from the antisocial to the undomesticated, but there was something endearing about them altogether, like a group of feral mongrel puppies. Who could resist puppies? Well, she supposed cat people could, but she hoped Bucky liked dogs. He seemed like a dog person.
Though he looked appropriately uncharmed, she thought she could still bring him around because he hadn’t stopped any of them from trudging through the door, one by one. He could’ve, if he’d wanted.
As he brought up the rear, Alexie handed over a bottle of cheap wine that smelled of a gas station bouquet variety.
“You have very nice home,” Alexie offered, which was honestly more civility than she thought her father was capable of.
“Thanks,” Bucky said, bewildered, as he closed the door.
#
They ordered pizza, only after a debate about the toppings that lasted twice as long as it took to place the order. Walker wanted the classics (pepperoni); Yelena actually liked the taste of pineapples on pizza; Alexie took the opportunity to tell everyone that Russians had the best pizza in the world with, ugh, reindeer sausage, which only made Yelena make a retching noise. Bucky, surprisingly, resigned to his fate for the evening and not fighting it, offered only one opinion about a single pizza topping preference — anchovies, apparently a leftover classic from his old, olden days; Ava had vetoed that immediately. She didn’t eat like the rest of them. Couldn’t, not without a special box that allowed her to remove the suit without complications, but she sat next to the others and made her opinions on the topic just as clear as the rest of them, telling Yelena that she would leave if there was even a hint of anchovy smell in the air. It took forever to sort out the order.
“These are the people you want under a single command?” Bucky asked her, pointedly. “They can’t even agree on pizza.”
“Hush,” Yelena said. “We won’t rule by committee in the field.”
“So you agreed to a leader? Because someone has to be in charge.”
They had, actually. Surprisingly even Walker had agreed without much fuss. “I will lead,” she told him. “For now.”
Bucky nodded like he agreed, and that meant something to her even though she knew he wasn’t yet willing to agree to much of anything else. “What about him?” he said, pointedly, nodding towards the shadow sitting in the corner. “He didn’t make any of his pizza preferences known.”
No, Bob wasn’t one to offer many opinions freely. During the great pizza debate, he never said a thing. He wasn’t much for going out these days, but she’d dragged him along because some socialization was good. He sat at the side, corner chair set by the window, looking out as if he’d already tuned out the noise from the rest of the group. From the rest of the world. She couldn’t shake the thought from her mind that he always kept to the corners.
Despite their harrowing introduction, the reunion after averting disaster in Manhattan, the constant thrum of motion and preparation in the days that followed — of press junkets at the Avengers Tower, the fittings for the new suits, the daily debriefs, the insanity of social media — she found herself remembering the same picture over and over again when she closed her eyes. Bob, in that attic, hunched over himself as his parents fought in the room below. In her quiet moments, she would pick up the memory and study it, like it’d be another way for her to figure out how to help him.
It wasn’t, though.
He had a shitty childhood. That wasn’t the answer anymore than she could find closure by relieving her worst memories over and over again. It wasn’t about living with the reminders, it was about moving on. She hadn’t much managed it lately, too busy or preoccupied with trying to tie together this group of people that no one in their right mind thought would make a good team, but every once in a while, she’d get a moment to herself, a moment to breathe. Instead of peace she’d find that darkness slipping back in almost immediately. The aching bitter emptiness that somehow sat like a crushing weight on her throat. It was a paradox. How could something so void, so full of nothing, feel so heavy? It snuck up on her in a blink of an eye, and she doubted it was any different with Bob. He just sat in the quiet with it more often than she did.
Bucky followed her line of sight. “How’s he doing these days?”
“Better, I suppose. It’s a good thing he doesn’t remember the details of what happened, but he put two and two together from the press coverage. He knows— well, he knows enough now.”
“How’d he manage with that?” Bucky asked, concerned.
It was a concerning thing. Bob had the ability to grind cities to a halt, wipe people off the face of the planet. Right now, he was staring at a bird’s nest across the street, watching as if enraptured with a pair of new hatchlings cheeping. He looked the farthest thing from it, but he was the most dangerous man she’d ever known in her life, one already filled to the brim with considerably dangerous people.
“He’s managing, more or less,” she told him, a shrug. “Don’t really know if I’m helping most days, but it helps to have company if nothing else.”
Bucky said nothing.
The sharp lines of tension settled firmly on his face, and Bucky looked — old. Bucky was old, a fact so solid it didn’t even merit a joke, so old even if he didn’t look it. He felt it. He’d adapted to modern times, more or less; she’d seen enough of him by now to know that. Even if it made little sense to her, he was older than even Alexie in lived experience. More than twice as old as Alexie if you allotted for all the time Bucky had spent under ice.
Still, the slant of sunlight through the window made Bucky look aged like an old photo. The stillness of him helped, leant itself to the idea of comparing him to one of those old timey pictures, all withered and yellow. He was a handsome man, no doubt, but Yelena watched him with none of the interest like that. She liked women, mostly, just like she assumed he liked men, mostly. Still, he was interesting. Fascinating to her on a level she couldn’t yet define.
The furrow of his brow, the crows feet at his eyes, the soft stubble of his five o’clock shadow.
Bucky was appealing in the same way she found the architecture of an old church appealing. A soaring cathedral ceiling had often inspired peace in her, the same way the light filtering through the prism of a glass-stained window had changed her entire perspective of time and place. Don’t get her wrong, she was the furthest thing from religious. Still, every other curve evoked serenity in a church, every catch of light felt deliberate. She didn’t pray, but she saw the appeal. Bucky was much the same way.
If he was aware of her scrutiny, and she was sure he was, he said nothing. “Why do you keep asking me to join when I’ve given you my answer already?”
“Because you’ll change your mind. I know it.”
He looked away, tiredly. “You remind me of Sam.”
“Captain America? Can’t say anyone has ever compared me to the red, white, and blue before.”
“You both don’t know how to take no for an answer.”
She tipped her eyebrow up, curious. “And what did you refuse to him?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “You know he doesn’t like the New Avengers? He’s not happy with Valentina’s power play, and he has good reason.”
“I told you, this isn’t about her. It isn’t about Captain America, either.”
“Yeah, and what is it about? Me doing some good as a member of your team?”
She paused. She’d intended to give the old speech again, the same one she’d rehearsed and rehearsed in front of a mirror a dozen times now. It was a good speech. She’d worked out a lot of the kinks in it. It talked about all the stuff he could help with as an Avenger. The power it held to sway people, to help people. It played upon civic duty but not to a nauseating degree. She mostly had planned to appeal to his demons and the need he felt to atone, which was something she could empathize with to a degree that was outright depressing.
But she knew it now. That wasn’t the way to convince him.
She wasn’t above admitting to herself that Bucky was a bit of a question mark, and she hadn’t known before how to convince him. She knew in her soul that this was the right move, but you couldn’t convince anyone else of something like that. The pieces fit, or they didn’t. They made sense, or they didn’t. Nothing about this team should have made sense.
Bucky didn’t know it yet, and she couldn’t figure out where the conviction was coming from — but Bucky fit with the pieces of this new team. How, why – she couldn’t say. It was instinct. Yelena trusted her instincts more than logic. Logic didn’t make sense in a universe where magicians stopped time and rodents flew spaceships. It didn’t make sense in a universe where people disappeared with a snap. Logic was mercurial, and evasive.
“It’s the right move, Bucky,” she told him, with conviction.
He looked at her — and she could see it in his eyes. The waver, the edge of a precipice he so wanted to avoid. She had known that feeling many times before, the plummet into a sickly descent, the desperate reach to try and catch purchase on anything that could keep you from falling. The waiting, the wanting, the lure of darkness below. She hadn’t expected to see it in him the same way she saw it in Bob, in her father, in Walker, in Ava. The same way she saw it in her own reflection.
“You’re alone,” she told him, knowingly. “You don’t have anything anymore. All you do is sit and look at your little red notebook and think of all the terrible things that you've done. You go to work, and then maybe you drink, and then you come home to no one. Tell me I’m wrong.”
He didn’t.
“So don’t be alone anymore,” she said, a simple shrug, looking back at the others. He waited, watching her. “Join the team. Try it. Worst case scenario, we'll all be alone together in the dark.”
He said nothing to that — didn’t give her an answer, a response, not for the rest of the night, not even the day after that, but two days later he showed up at the Avengers Tower with a bag in hand.
“Alright,” he said, reluctantly. “Trial basis, or probation period. Whatever you wanna call it. I’m in, for now.”
#