Bob didn’t think she walked — he thought she glided. Like light. Like something born from a softer plane of existence, not made, but woven. She was the single untouchable constant in a life otherwise shattered into jagged pieces. And she didn’t even know it.

She couldn’t know. Not what she meant to him.

Her name — her real name, the one he never said out loud — was a miracle. Just syllables to everyone else, sure, but to him it was sacred. It was how he remembered that beauty could exist in the same world where monsters like him did. Where someone like her could share the same air.

She was so far above him it hurt to look directly at her sometimes. A divinity cloaked in human skin. Grace laced with tragedy. He knew her past — everyone did — but he didn’t see her as the former Black Widow. He saw her as freedom. As the answer to something in him that was always trembling, always unraveling.

He didn’t want to touch her. That would ruin it. He just wanted to exist near her.

To believe, just for a moment, that something perfect could choose not to run from something broken.

The Sentry didn’t romanticize her.

He didn’t need to.

He assessed her with cool, calculating clarity. Former Black Widow. Exfiltration specialist. Covert ops. Assassin. A living ledger of tactical efficiency. That’s what her name triggered in him — readiness. Precision.

The Sentry didn’t see the softness Bob worshiped. He saw only muscle memory, the calibrated mind, the lethal reflexes wrapped in deceptive allure. There was respect there, yes — profound and clinical. She was an asset by his standards, a soldier with a past carved into her bone, someone forged in control and fire.

If Bob adored her like a distant moon, the Sentry viewed her like a target moving across a battlefield—never out of sight, never out of scope.

She had been programmed to survive. That made her trustworthy. Predictable.

And dangerous.

But the Void—

The Void breathed her name like poison wrapped in silk.

He lingered on it. Dragged it out like a tongue over teeth. There was something intimate in the way he whispered it inside Bob’s skull. Something foul. Something hungry.

“She’s soft now,” the Void would whisper, a smirk curling in the dark, “but she remembers how to bleed.”

He wanted to peel her apart. To see how much of the Widow was still underneath that calm smile. He didn’t love her. Not like Bob did. He hungered. For the tension behind her eyes. For the way her shoulders flinched a second too slow. For the idea of dragging her back into the red room she thought she’d escaped.

There was lust in it — brutal, twisted, territorial. But it wasn’t about desire. It was about ownership. Corruption. The slow thrill of destroying something Bob couldn’t bear to lose.

“You keep calling her perfect,” he would hiss. “But I’ve seen her fracture.”

He didn’t want her dead.

He wanted her shattered.

Because he knew that would break Bob more than anything.

So when Bob heard her name—

He felt worship. The Sentry felt readiness. And the Void felt teeth.