Yelena was probably spending more money than she was really making but she could tell herself she was being smart about it. Also she wouldn’t really end up homeless in this town, whether it was all one big hallucination or not. There was always someone to help her no matter how tight of a situation she was in -- and also she didn’t need it. Vallo was starting to make her comfortable and she felt like giving herself a new challenge.
So when she found an absolutely run-down motorcycle at a junkyard, she jumped at the chance to pay for it and haul it out.
Spending a lot, yes, she was, but she was still being smart about it.
Perusing through the network, she found the appropriate place as a resource for it and pulled the beaten-up clunker to the garage. Spotting someone working there was easy because of all the noise the thing was making. Anyone would have looked up from what they were doing.
“Hi. Could use some help fixing up something I just decided to find.”
Jake heard the bike before he saw it, glancing up as Yelena brought it in. "Okay, that might be in worse shape than the one I got from here," he said, letting out a low whistle. "Give me a minute to finish this up and I'll come take a look at it?"
He did just that, then walked over to Yelena and the bike. "No way that starts right now, right?" It looked like it had all the right parts to run, but they didn't look like they could run under any circumstances. "On a scale of 1 to 10 how high is your level of patience?"
“A hundred. I’m a spy, remember?” Or at least she thought he would. She wasn’t entirely sure how well people knew people. It threw her off at first to know that there were more people who knew about her in this world than not, not from her time as a Black Widow but a whole movie and comic book franchise.
And she’d only ever seen this guy around Fight Club. She knew people’s names well enough but nothing past that. She did know he liked to work on robots. Maybe this might be a walk in the park. “Not asking you to drop everything to work on it now. I just happened to find it and thought I’d make a project out of it. Keep myself busy when I’m not pouring drinks at a bar.”
"Well, you came to the right place," he said. "Because that's my latest hobby. Fixed up my own bike over there," he said, nodding toward it. "But it's guaranteed to make you cuss at least a dozen times, and want to throw things. Well, maybe not someone who has a patience level of 100," he added, looking slightly amused.
"If you're wanting to work on this too, I'd suggest storing it elsewhere so you can access it when Boyd's is closed. Got access to a garage? Otherwise I have a bay at the base that I've turned into my own personal workspace."
Yelena wrinkled her nose. “I got access to my room?” She wondered if Eadwulf had a shed she could use or something and if she’d have to pay him extra for it. Then again, if this guy was offering…
“Deal,” she said, taking a glance over to the bike that he’d been gesturing at before. “You seem to have done a pretty good job so I’ll take your hand and your base. What’s the cost?”
"You buy any parts you need here to appease my boss, and don't yell at me if I swear at your bike," Jake said, looking it over more critically as he made a list of parts that were either missing or in need of replacing. "But at the moment I no longer have a kid here to work on bikes with me, so I have the time."
He looked back over at Yelena and flashed her a grin. "Oh. And oreos. You need to provide the oreos."
“A kid from the future I’m guessing. I’m sorry to hear they’re all gone.” Some of them included her own nieces and nephews. Great nieces and nephews? She already had a nephew here and he himself had a kid. It was almost nice knowing that they’d live their days out in this place happily. Even if she still had doubts on Vallo being real.
As he inspected her supposed bike, she found a spot in the garage to sit in and plopped down, looking around the area. “Well I suppose I could do Oreos. This place doesn’t look like it really needs the money. Then again, many places in Vallo do not. Is everything just magically very shiny here?”
"A lot of places were dropped in from people's home worlds and I don't know how it works, exactly. Above my paygrade. But the base we're going to work at? That's from my own life. It's the base I served at when we had to save the world. Not that I wanted to be a hero, it was just that or prison."
He started looking more closely at the bike, not ignoring her sympathies about the kids disappearing but instead using her bike as a distraction, listing off a few parts he thought could be repaired and others she was going to have to replace completely, giving costs. For now, it wasn't looking too bad, but he also didn't know where she stood financially since she hadn't been there too long.
And had also been convinced that Vallo wasn't real.
“I heard that happens,” Yelena said, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. “I doubt it would happen to me. There was no recent place I had in my possession that I could call a home. No apartment to live in, no house of my own. I was just always traveling. Except for the five years that I had been turned to dust in my world and had returned to find out my sister was dead.”
She was rambling, she knew, but she was also saying it so matter-of-factly, like it hadn’t felt like her heart was ripping into pieces right inside her chest.
“Do you know where I could go to get any of these parts or will you be ordering them directly here?”
"You can get them here, or I know where to get them, or I can get Toph to bend something to fit what we need," Jake said, answering Yelena's question first, before looking at her for a moment.
"I lost my sister, too," he offered. "Except she's here now, benefit of this place." He paused briefly. "You wanna talk about it?"
Yelena didn’t speak right away, just stared at the bike in front of him before she got up and moved closer, positioning herself down right next to him, like members of an audience next to each other watching a show. The show being the bike. Which was currently a shitshow but had the potential to turn into something beautiful.
“My sister was here too. She was here just when I arrived which did not help me with the whole ‘this place is fake and it’s all in my head’ theory. And then she disappeared, and people want to say that she’s in a universe where she’s alive and well. But she’s not in my universe and also not in this universe so what do I give a shit about anywhere else? You can tell me where to get everything and I will try to get them myself. I’ll ask for more help if I get stuck.”
The topic change from her sister to the bike was sudden but only because by the end of that question, she suddenly felt uncomfortable. Yelena was not a talk-about-feelings kind of person and she’d honestly only just met the guy in a Fight Club session a short while ago. This was the first real conversation she was having with him.
Yeah, that would do it, Jake thought. He watched Yelena for a moment as she looked at the bike and then nodded. "I'll do that, but first, let's get what I know we have here. And there's a couple more parts that might be here."
He offered her his hand and then asked, "So do you believe all this is real, now?" He wasn't going to push, and he didn't know her that well, but that didn't stop him from being empathetic. He knew what it was like to lose his sister and then bury that loss within, especially when his attention was needed elsewhere and then he'd found himself here, in an entirely different sort of situation.
Yelena turned her head to look at him, blinking at the offered hand. The honest answer was that she wasn’t sure. There was too much craziness that happened in this world to actually be real but did her world not see that already? They had an alien attack, they had a robot attack. Most of the weirdest shit that had happened had centered around her sister and the Avengers but it still affected the rest of the world, and Yelena had always kept close track where Natasha was concerned.
And while it was true that the mind can make up the most outrageous shit possible if you had a big enough imagination, Yelena was pretty sure none of this could have been extracted from her brain. She still hadn’t ruled out, though, that someone might have grabbed her and downloaded the whole world in her head, while keeping her prisoner.
“Still taking it one day at a time,” she said, putting her hand into Jake’s. “Besides, there’s nothing I can do about it, might as well enjoy the ride.”
Jake lifted Yelena from where she was sitting before letting go of her hand and said, "Right. That's fair. And you can literally enjoy the ride once you get this bike working. Let me show you what we have here?"
He took her around to gather up the various parts she'd need and then added, "If you want to hang around another half hour or leave and come back, we can take this to the base?"
Yelena followed around, making note of everything. Rebuilding a bike was not in her forte although she wasn’t opposed to learning about it. Before she would have done so in a strictly clinical manner, probably to build an undercover story or something. It was possible that she would get entirely too comfortable in this world.
Then again, that didn’t sound too bad of an idea. “I’ll hang around,” she said with a small smirk at Jake. “Turns out your company is not too bad.”
"Excuse me, my company is amazing," Jake corrected Yelena with a grin. "I gotta make sure this car will start, and then clean up," he added, leading her over to the car he'd been tending to before she came in. He climbed in and turned the engine over, and it roared to life.
Good. He was getting the hang of it.
He climbed out and then surveyed his mess, before glancing back at Yelena. "So aside from hanging out in my amazing company, how else are you spending your time in what may or may not be a simulation?"
Yelena leaned up against the car, listening to the hum as Jake turned it on. She didn’t know too much about cars but she knew well enough how one sounded when it was on its last breath. This sounded like the opposite. Guess she really had found the right person to help her. “I have a bird, a small parakeet named Mango. You must have seen her photos. I post them all the time. I also work at Galahd as a bartender. A family connection of some sorts, I guess. Bucky’s husband being the found family, of course.”
"Oh, I am a huge Mango fan," Jake admitted. "And I'll have to drop in at Galahd's more often maybe. Especially for karaoke. If Toph, who also works here and who can bend metal for us, ever complains about my singing? Don't listen. I'm a fantastic singer."
Yeah that made sense with the connections. Jake had a loose sense of some of the groups of people who knew each other or of each other or at least came from the same world, sort of. It was hard to really keep track of, so he mostly focused on who was connected in Vallo.
When he was paying attention at least.
Yelena smirked at him. “Looks like someone is starting to enjoy my company in this short time.”
"Of course I am," Jake replied easily. "Why wouldn't I?"
“As you should.” Yelena stepped back slightly to just oh so casually walk around the garage. “I’m a pretty good singer myself but nobody will ever know because I always work karaoke nights.” Purposely, even. She did not like singing in front of an audience. Was her singing actually good? Well, it wasn’t terrible but she wasn’t about to get very far in American Idol anytime soon. Or Vallo Idol if that existed.
“But I wouldn’t say no to stopping long enough to hear you perform.”
"I'm pretty sure Nyx would let you step away and sing," Jake pointed out with a sneaky grin. "So there goes that excuse."
He looked at her innocently then looked around the garage. "Wanna take your bike over to the base? I'll get you situated with everything you need and then maybe we can go find something to eat? I mean, we could eat there, there's leftover pizza and oreos, but maybe actual food? I'll buy. If you're hungry."
“Nyx would not let me step away and if he does, he’s getting a bed full of cracked eggs,” Yelena said with a slight smirk.
She tilted her head at him, slightly, unsure if he was just being genuinely friendly or if that sounded like a date. Well, hell, he was good-looking, and he seemed like good company enough. “Let’s get actual food,” she said, straightening up. “I don’t mind Oreos right now, so I would hate to start getting sick of them after seeing how many boxes you must own.”
"You realize that's yet another reason to get you up there to sing," Jake pointed out with an easy grin. And good on actual dinner because he was hungry and ready to learn more about Yelena, which he could do over a meal with less swearing than when they were working on that junker bike of hers they had to take over to the base.
He was excited to see that take shape, but it could wait. Food was more important.