Chapter Text
you tell your sadness,
“in a sharp set of knives, i looked for a hand to hold.
i could not stop myself from needing to belong somewhere,
even if that somewhere was a burial ground.”
she says,
“we were put on this earth desperate, hungry, and willing.
what made you think it would end differently?”
— fatima aamer bilal.
Yelena often resented her sister for reversing the Blip.
This was a horrible intrusive thought that she battled with constantly. She didn’t want to think about it, but that didn’t stop her from feeling the way she did. The bitterness clung to her like cigarette smoke from the Camels she favored, following her around everywhere she went no matter how often she showered or switched clothes, and it fucking reeked.
This was a thought that came from the worst parts of her being, truly.
You just had to do it, didn't you? You had to be the hero nobody asked you to be.
Every so often, once in a blue moon, she would feel proud of Natalia for being one of the most honorable people in the world and sacrificing herself for the sake of humanity. She might gaze up at the stars and wonder if she would ever be as good a person as her older sister was.
Just for a split second, right before Yelena remembered how easily she had left her. Again.
She was being selfish, she knew that, but her sister was dead and there was nobody else to think about. Sue her.
Natalia may have saved the world, but the most important person in Yelena’s life had thrown herself off a cliff with no hesitation. Had she even considered how Yelena would feel when she came back? How was she possibly supposed to carry on after that?
She couldn’t blame her, could she? Yelena hated herself more than she hated anybody else in the world, and she could never hate her sister for her heroism, but the pitiful, lonely baby sister deep down inside her just couldn’t help but feel more bitter than grateful.
She knew that it was entirely unfair to the other half of the Earth’s population. Whose lives had been erased like they were nothing. Whose bodies had been torn apart and deconstructed on a molecular level, souls floating in limbo. She was drowning in so much apathy at the moment that she could not find it in herself to care.
Perhaps she was even being hypocritical. Natalia would certainly say so, considering her penchant for getting herself shot or stabbed without a care in the world. Hell, one of the last times she'd seen her sister, she'd tried to blow herself up.
You’re one to talk, aren’t you? she’d say with a scoff, You tried to sacrifice yourself once before, remember?
But that was different. Call her a hypocrite, but Yelena was allowed to go. For one, she was destroying the Red Room and finally killing the man responsible for creating her. She did it for Oksana and Natalia and all the other little girls around the globe. Yelena wasn't anyone special; she wasn't an Avenger, she wasn't a hero. She wasn't a real friend or a partner or even a daughter. She didn't matter.
Natalia mattered.
She'd been the strongest of them all, super-soldiers, Norse Gods, and wizards be damned. Yelena had read the magazines and news articles, watched television segments and documentaries. She'd seen the inspiration that the Black Widow had become to so many young girls around the world, something that Yelena herself would never be. She put her all into everything she did, and Yelena remembered spending her most crucial years of her childhood in a pathetic attempt to be just like her.
Natalia had always hated when Yelena copied her, like when she tried to dye her hair with the cream that Mama kept in the bathroom cabinet. She'd gotten spanked so hard for that, she had to lie on her stomach that night, blue flashing behind burning eyelids.
At five years old, she'd just thought Natalia was so cool. She wanted to be just like her, and she'd been punished for it. She'd repented for it. She hadn't touched the dye again.
[In the Red Room, Yelena did not get punished for following in her sister's footsteps. Just like Natalia, she'd overcome and adapted. She'd endured and survived.
At twelve years old, Natalia was one of the best marksmen in her age-range, and Yelena was seven when the news spread through the corridors that she'd broken the record of a girl named Ava. She'd known without a doubt that meant Ava was dead.
There was no second place in the Red Room. Natalia was the best in her class, and that meant Yelena had to be, too.]
She shook herself out of it, forcing her train of thought to reroute itself before it tumbled off the tracks. Despite the destruction of the Red Room, thoughts of that place were all too prevalent now.
Since coming out of subjugation, memories that her chemically-induced brain had repressed began to come back in bits and pieces. Most of her life felt like a strange, unsettling dream when she looked back on it, and she often questioned if what she remembered had actually happened.
It had helped, having Natalia there to confirm or deny things. Even if she didn't know the answer, it helped Yelena to know that she wasn't crazy for wondering about it in the first place. The relief she felt was quickly dominated by an intense feeling of shame. Her sister hadn't needed to ask these kind of questions when she'd been freed, she'd figured it out on her own.
Here Yelena was, still trying to be like her and still failing.
Natalia had escaped the Red Room and hadn't looked back, not even to come for her. She'd met Clint Barton, joined the Avengers, and become someone that little girls called their hero. She spent her time with her own made-up family. She had been fine then, and she likely would've been fine if Yelena had died in the explosion that day. She would have been fine if Yelena hadn't come back from the snap.
Natalia didn't need her; she had reasons to stay that didn't include her baby sister.
For Yelena, her whole world was pulled apart and clashed back together in the matter of seconds. She'd emerged from a former Widow's bathroom to learn that five years had gone by. The Earth was still rotating on its axis, it was still revolving around the sun. It was difficult to fathom the gap, especially when she thought about how Natalia had been ten years older than her when she died.
She blinked and everything was different. She blinked and she was five years younger than she would've been, and her sister was dead at 39. Dead at 39. The engraving on her headstone in Ohio read October, meaning she was two months away from her 40th birthday.
That particular thought always sent Yelena spiraling down the rabbit hole, each time without fail, as she struggled to comprehend that she’d lost so much time with her sister in the blink of an eye. Five years had gone by, Natalia was pushing forty, and Yelena had come back thirty years old? That made no fucking sense!
[Was she even really thirty? Or was she still a terrified, helpless six year old that just had her innocence ripped away?]
She wanted to hate Natalia for doing it. Who the hell asked her to do that? Yelena certainly didn’t. She would have preferred to have stayed dead, as long as her sister was still alive.
But then, her sister had probably thought the same, which only made her current situation that much more pathetic. You didn’t deserve it, voices screamed at her from the depths of her mind. Your sister gave her life for you to come back, and you repay her like this?
Yelena let out a ragged scream into the otherwise silent room, hot tears streaming down her cheeks despite the duteous effort to keep them from falling. It was one of those nights where nothing felt real, when the edges of her vision went dark and fuzzy as she tried to stifle her sobs, when she couldn't get a full breath of air in her burning lungs without choking on it.
She was not quite sure how things had gotten to this point.
Sitting at the edge of her bed, staring down at the Widow Bites glowing red and warm and oh, so tempting. She turned her hands slowly, examining the weapons she’d used so many times on other people as if they were ticking time bombs wrapped around her wrist.
In a way, they were exactly that.
It would take less than a second. She wouldn't even feel it, she'd be gone before her brain could even catch up to the fact that she was dead, because it would be blown to bits. It wouldn't take much—
No. No, no, she couldn't do it. She had a mission now. She would be no good to Valentina with her head splattered on the wall behind her, would she? God forbid her own boss found her in a mess of blood and brain matter, she wouldn't allow herself to go through that kind of humiliation, even after death. Not happening.
Soon. She'd be able to do it soon, just... not yet. She had to get her things in order first, find an isolated spot away from the city. She'd have to tie up all her loose ends, get her documents together, not to mention her finances. She figured she might as well give the Barton kids the rest of her money, considering she’d tried to murder their father just this past Christmas. It wasn’t like she would be using it, after all.
She could not help but laugh. There was no amusement to be found in the hoarse croak that came from her throat, only pain. Pain seemed to be the only thing she felt these days.
She was trying valiantly to adjust to the world around her, but it was harder than she thought it would be. Being abruptly yanked out of chemical subjugation had been disorienting at best and dehumanizing at worst, as she tried and failed to learn how to be a person again. At least before the Blip, she’d had Natalia to guide her.
Now, Yelena had no one.
The other widows understood her better than anyone else, of course, but it did not take long for them at all to move on with their lives. Ana had a big house, a sweet, handsome husband and a precious little girl. Sonya now resided in Italy with her wife and three cats. A couple of them even went on to do motivational speaking and activism for human trafficking and child abuse. Most of them had slunk away into the shadows, living quiet lives away from the spotlight.
And what did Yelena have? Nothing.
She spoke to Alexei occasionally, but she had no real family. She’d checked in on Kate Bishop once or twice since letting Clint Barton live, but the other woman hadn’t even caught a glimpse of her through the window despite her being stupidly obvious. The other Widows were like members of the same fucked up club, but they weren’t exactly friends… Yelena had no real companion beyond her dog.
That dog was one of the only reasons she was still here, if she were being honest. Fanny was her biggest motivator in life at the moment. What little money she didn’t spend on clothes and jewelry, she spent on the best quality toys and treats for her dog, that was her baby.
Really, she was the only thing that mattered to her.
Yelena had found herself adrift after letting Barton go, and after a few weeks of wandering through the streets of New York with no purpose and no reason to live, going back to her roots seemed like the only thing that made sense at the time.
After all, it was what she'd been raised to do.
She continued taking jobs from Valentina, throwing herself into her contract killing to avoid having to face her sad, pathetic excuse for a life. She rarely slept, but when she did, the horrors persisted even in her dreams. Images, memories—at least what felt like memories, nothing of her past ever truly felt completely real, like it happened to her—decades worth of violence that refused to be forgotten.
She was but an observer in her own life. Awake and asleep, in and out of mind control, it did not matter.
Most of the time, she woke up soaked in a disgusting, cold mixture of sweat and piss, flooded with fear and shame and a burning hatred for Dreykov, Thanos, but most of all, herself.
She’d started keeping a trash can on the side for when the dreams made her physically ill, but lately, she’d simply stopped eating before bed to avoid it. It only sent her into fits of dry-heaving instead.
She’d never had to deal with the constant barrage of human emotions before now. Fear, anger, sadness. Those weren’t things you were allowed to feel in the Red Room. With her consciousness taking a backseat to the horrible chemicals being pumped into the body—no, no, her body—she’d been somewhat of a robot for the past twenty five years.
As a Widow, it had been impossible to empathize with those whom she killed. Her targets were just that: targets, and hitting a bullseye was the sole purpose of her assignment and the deciding factor on whether or not she got executed that day.
As an ex-Widow that was still working as a trained assassin, it was harder to put away those feelings. She felt everything. The anxiety bubbling in her stomach before every mission, the shame trickling down her spine after each hit. She used to feel fear clotted in her veins if she almost got caught, but especially after each time her big sister was injured or almost killed.
Now that Natalia was dead, there was no one else left to care about, and Yelena herself had never been afraid of dying. So she channeled that fear into caution on each assignment, rather than her typical recklessness.
She was careful and precise not because she valued her life so much, but because she was desperately chasing anything that made her feel useful. Anything that would get her out of isolation and self-pity. She was no longer an unwitting participant to Dreykov’s games, she was not the victim many people made her out to be, simply because she was a Widow.
It did not take much to prove that she was still the enemy. Brainwashed or not, Yelena went back to doing what she did best.
After returning to Valentina without Barton’s head on a pike as she’d promised, she grew almost obsessive about finishing all of her assignments. It did not matter what her target did to deserve the hit, all that mattered was that she succeeded in carrying it out.
And she always succeeded.
She slipped back into the Widow mindset as easily as she slipped into being that scared little girl at night. Red Room training made her into who she was today, and the skills necessary for being a trained killer were forever entangled in the wiring of her brain.
A brain no longer trapped within the confines of chemical subjugation. A consciousness that had once been locked away and left to rot, watching helplessly as the body danced under Dreykov’s control. Now that the strings had been cut, the marionette was free to be anything she wanted… and she chose to remain a doll. Lifeless, unfeeling, useless until someone picked her up and moved her limbs for her.
The guilt followed Yelena around like a stray dog, whining and begging to be fed. She fed it, alright. Every kill was like a hearty meal for the starving animal inside of her, she did not even care about the money, despite her constant pestering of Val for a raise, which she still had yet to receive.
That was fine. Yelena would get it after this mission, she had a sneaking suspicion Val sought her out specifically, and for good reason. Yelena was simply a better option than everyone else.
After traveling all the way to Siberia just to talk to Alexei about what was hopefully her last mission, Yelena wanted to punch something. Preferably her idiot dad, but mostly, she wanted to hit herself for thinking it would go any differently.
“You feel fulfilled?”
“So full. So filled."
Alexei hadn’t given her the answer she’d been hoping for. She wanted him to tell her how he did it. How he remained so stupidly ignorant and apathetic to it all, choosing to be blind to how other people really felt about him.
She hadn’t seen the old man since they’d worked together to free the Widows. Before Natalia’s sacrifice. Before Yelena had even been snapped out of existence by a giant purple Titan. Fucking unbelievable! After everything she’d gone through—for every bullet she'd dodged, for every fire she'd outrun, for every Widow she'd subdued, that was what got her? What a stupid way to die, crumbling to dust in a stranger’s posh bathroom.
"But what brings you here?"
"I'm going on an assignment..."
Without thinking about it, she found her gaze drifting back down to her Widow Bites.
She was free. Free to do anything she wanted, be anyone she wanted. So why the hell was she still letting herself be controlled?
Now that she’d left Barton alive, she was consumed by a rage and bloodlust that had nowhere else to go. To deal with this, Yelena reverted back to being the best child assassin the world had ever known, only now she was the same puppet with a different puppeteer, guided not by Dreykov or Valentina, but by her own personal chains.
The Widow Bites glowed and zapped, electricity sparking as she idly switched the settings between stun and kill. It called to her, and before she knew it, she heard the whirring of the capacitors as they charged up. Just one quick zap to the brain, and she could end it all in a second—
Heat burst behind her eyelids. She forced her arm back down, left hand dropping limply in her lap. Stop thinking about that, she scolded herself. Focus on the mission.
The mission…
The mission was a bust. What she thought was a plot to kill Ghost was just a ploy to get her in the same room as John Walker’s poor excuse of a Captain America- no, he was a U.S. agent now, he’d corrected her haughtily, as if that would alleviate some of the tension. It did not. At first, Yelena did not understand how the same man who’d been stripped of his mantle and dishonorably discharged from the military for being too violent with the Cap’s shield was hired to work for the United States government agency.
Then she realized that it was all thanks to Valentina.
She’d tricked them all. They had been lured here under false pretenses, even Ghost, the black-ops agent she’d supposedly been sent to take out. They'd all been sent to kill each other.
Even Antonia was there! Yelena could not believe what she was seeing with her own eyes. Seeing her again was a treat, for sure, but Taskmaster wasn’t about to tilt the scales for her. Yelena Belova was a one-woman team, she did not ‘do’ partnerships or teamwork.
Maybe once upon a time, when Natalia was still alive, but there was no one in the world Yelena trusted enough. She did not need these so-called ‘team of bad guys' that Val spoke of to fight the 'worse guys', and she certainly did not need to be tricked into joining the new wave of Avengers. What the hell did that word even mean?
‘Not Avengers,’ Val reminded her when she made the shady comment, continuing to smirk like she knew something Yelena did not. ‘You people are nothing like the superheroes this world looks up to. You think your face will be up there, painted on buildings like Tony Stark? Don’t make me laugh.’
Yelena did not think that. She knew she could never be half as influential and heroic as Natalia and Tony were. They’d given their lives to save the world, and here Yelena was, picking off the population they’d brought back one by one and slowly drinking herself to death.
Before the Red Room, back when Yelena’s rationality and morals hadn’t yet started to devour themselves, she was just a girl. She could still feel the ache in her bones for that old, rickety house in Ohio that she once called home. She felt a longing in her chest to settle down somewhere comfortable and safe after wandering aimlessly about for so long.
But comfort and safety were far in the opposite direction from which she’d traveled.
Despite giving her something to do, the Thunderbolts team did nothing to keep her from wanting to end it all. It didn’t give her the motivation she hoped it would when she agreed to the mission instead of slitting Val’s throat right then and there. She despised John Walker more than anybody else on the team. She could not stand her father, but she could tolerate him in small amounts. She got along just fine with Barnes, Antonia, and Ava, but they were coworkers more than anything else.
All it really did was show her that even when she was surrounded by people who could probably understand her better than the average Joe, she was somehow still an outlier.
Val’s initial plan hadn’t worked. Instead of killing each other, Bucky Barnes—the Congressman, for fuck's sake, she really was in an alternate timeline—chased them down, tied them up, and forced them to work together. In the end, Valentina had still managed to pull the rug out from under them all. They’d given the government exactly what they'd wanted, assembled their dumb little team of "heroes," and that was it.
There was no reason for Yelena to stay around any longer than that. She wasn’t like her sister. She couldn’t just throw herself into the center of a group of unstable, super-powered strangers and call them as her team, much less consider them to be her friends, her family.
Her sister’s affiliation with the Avengers was something Yelena had never understood, up until it split in half like the severing of tectonic plates after the Accords. Then she understood completely: they had never been family, and only a few of them were true friends. Their team had been just as fragile as the family Natalia had to leave behind the first time.
Yelena scoffed at the idea of getting close enough to anyone in the Thunderbolts to feel despaired about its inevitable break. They were no-good criminals, foreign spies, trained assassins, and now the most evil of all, politicians. They weren’t about to have weekly game nights or go out at the bar, throw birthday parties for each other, or babysit each other's kids. They weren’t all going to live in Stark’s Avengers Tower as one big happy family, beating up the real bad guys together and saying goodnight one at a time like they were the Brady Bunch.
She wouldn’t fall into the same trap that Natalia had. She wasn’t going to let herself be blindsided by the organization she was supposed to be working for.
Bucky Barnes had said it himself: this wasn't HYDRA, they knew who they were working with. Half of the agents at SHIELD had been just as shocked as the Avengers to find out about the infiltration, while the other half were the very same terrorists they’d been trying to take down. If those were the supposed ‘good guys’ then Yelena didn’t trust a word that came out of Val’s mouth, not one bit.
Not to mention, she’d seen the hurt that Steve Rogers had left behind in Bucky Barnes’ eyes, and she’d vowed never to let someone like that in. Not if it were that easy to leave—a century of fighting tooth and nail to save your best friend’s life, just to abandon him in the present for a fling in the past? No fucking thanks.
And the worst part of it all?
She still didn’t get her raise.
___
She was drunk again. What a fucking surprise.
Who would have guessed it? Everyone, probably. Even Barnes had given her a look when she'd announced to the team that she was off, had more important matters to attend to than whatever the government wanted from them next. She hadn't even anticipated being at the meeting, but in an ironic twist of fate it seemed that the tables had turned, as Alexei showed up at the bar, of all places, to drag her off the barstool and shove her back into the middle of things.
Shocking everybody at the table but most of all herself, Yelena managed to make it through the entire meeting without bashing John Walker's face in, and she only threatened him twice! That didn't stop agitation from bubbling in her chest like a lingering case of heartburn after gorging herself on buffalo wings, Takis, or mac n' cheese with hot sauce. By the time all her 'teammates' had left the table, everyone but Barnes, she was practically vibrating with unleashed anger. She needed to get it out somehow, and fast.
"Are you alright?" Barnes asked her in Romanian, staring at her from across the table. His eyes were narrowed and crinkled at the edges, hardened from decades of war and mind control. If anyone were to understand how lost and out of place in the world she felt, it would be the Winter Soldier. "You know, for someone so short, you look ready to blow this whole place to bits."
"I've thought about it," Yelena laughed without amusement, scooting her chair back and wincing at the screech of the metal legs against the linoleum floor. Just the brief, little noise was enough to set her off completely, and she grabbed the back of the chair, lifted it up, and threw it across the room. It landed on the other side with a loud crash against the window, sending a crack splitting up the middle. She and Barnes both cursed at the same time.
He let out a low whistle. "Is this about Walker?" he questioned, leaning back in his chair and bringing his metal arm to rest against his knee. When Yelena said nothing, he said, "Look, I'm not a fan of the guy either, but-“
"You know nothing," Yelena hissed, lying right through her teeth. In fact, he knew much more than she'd like to admit. "It has nothing to do with him."
"Oh, yeah?" he challenged her, his thick eyebrows shooting up to his hairline, "'Cause every time the man spoke, you looked like you wanted to cut out his tongue with that knife in your hand."
Yelena just blinked owlishly at him before glancing down at the dagger she'd been idly messing with this entire time, her mouth slightly agape. She actually hadn't even considered that, but now that he mentioned it...
Upon seeing the realization dawn on her face, he crossed his arms and glared at her, looking more like a disappointed father than Alexei ever had. "Wait a minute, I didn't mean to give you an idea- alright, listen here," he gruffed, "You're angry, I get it. Trust me, I know what that's like... But you think taking it out on them is going to help? It's not. What you need is-"
Yelena barked out a laugh, smirking as he jabbed a vibranium index finger at her. "Oh, I'm listening, Congressman Barnes," she mocked him, her upper lip twitching up into a sneer, "Why don't you tell me how you're going to represent the district with your silly policies and bills that will never get passed?" Her smirk grew as his eyes widened a fraction, "Matter of fact, Winter Soldier, why don't you give me all your tips and tricks on how to be a component adult, huh? I am sure your list is endless."
Barnes's jaw clenched, the wrinkles around his eyes tightening as he glowered down at her. For just a small, ever so brief moment, she swore she saw a flicker of the dead man he used to be. She knew, whether he would admit it or not, that the Winter Soldier would always be a part of him, just as the Red Room would always be a part of her.
"Right, you can't," Yelena scoffed as he simply stared at her, deathly silent, his jaw twitching. Somewhere deep inside the confines of her mind, she could practically hear Natalia's voice rattling around in her head, bouncing off the walls of her skull. He knows what it's like. He was there, he understands. Why won't you let him help you? "Think about that the next time you try to tell me how to manage my anger."
She turned around and stalked out of the conference room before the former HYDRA assassin could respond. The regret came on in record time, washing over her like ice water and leaving her gasping for breath. She paused in the middle of the hallway and leaned against the wall, hands clenched into fists so tightly that they shook with barely concealed rage. No longer was it rage aimed towards Walker, or Alexei, or Valentina.
It wasn't rage towards Barnes for trying to help, either, and she knew she'd have to apologize for snapping at him later if they were to continue being on good terms. Even if they weren't exactly friends, he was one of the better ones, and she couldn't afford to lose his camaraderie this early on.
The truth was, she had no one to be mad at but herself.
Her body worked on autopilot, her feet heavy as lead as she dragged herself out of the building and onto the chaotic streets of New York. Civilians pushed past her with no care in the world. They had no idea of what she was capable of, of what she'd done. They didn't care if she lived or died, not like Natalia had cared about their own fate. They surely wouldn't have sacrificed their own lives for the rest of the world's population, Yelena knew that with certainty.
It was no surprise that she ended up at the bar. The assassin found herself there a lot recently, as it was somehow easier to down heavy liquor than it was to stomach food and water, at this point. She'd knock back three shots of vodka, force some cheesy pretzel bites down her throat, and knock back four more. She'd fix her eyes on the hockey game playing on the big screen when the bar started to spin and her stomach flipped, barely conscious of the other patrons as she willed herself not to be sick, because getting sick right now meant sobering up much too soon.
She was so drunk that she hardly had any awareness of what was going on around her, which was uncharacteristic for someone as observant and conscientiousness as she was. Yelena prided herself on her hyper-vigilance even if Natalia used to say it was borne from an extreme case of paranoia, to which Yelena would tell her sister to shut up and mind her business.
The bar was too loud, too bright. She breathed in through her nostrils and out of her mouth to keep from spewing everywhere. She clutched at the edge of the sticky bar top with a white-knuckled grip, the floor tilting beneath her. As she slipped off the bar stool and made her way through the dance floor towards the restrooms, a man's voice rang out loud and obnoxious behind her, only getting unnecessarily closer as she ignored him.
Then, all of a sudden, the harsh smell of black pepper and cigar smoke invaded her nose and tore a violent gag from her throat, at the same time as a heavy hand came down to smack her ass and squeeze, making her startle so hard she nearly toppled over into the group of women dancing to her left.
The dizziness and nausea subsided as quickly as it arrived, replaced by an odd sense of calmness that flowed through Yelena's veins like she'd received an opioid injection, just before the adrenaline hit her full-force. She whirled around to find him already beginning to book it in the other direction. She grabbed at the back of his shirt, yanking him so that he stumbled back and tripped over his own feet in an attempt to correct his footing.
He reeled back with a curse, and every head nearby turned towards them. Yelena could still feel the vodka burning hot in her chest, but it was nothing compared to the tidal wave of anger that washed over her like a tsunami. She'd had a shitty day—no, week—no, year—and the meeting with Thunderbolts and having to listen to John Walker talk for two excruciating hours was already cutting it close, and her ensuing one-sided argument with Bucky Barnes certainly did not help to lift her spirits at all.
This was just the icing on the cake, right here. If they weren't surrounded by dozens of witnesses, Yelena would have already fired a bullet through his skull.
For now, punching would have to do.
"You like touching random women, huh?" she growled out, letting go of the back of his shirt to grab at the front of his collar with both hands, bringing his face down to hers. "Do it again."
"Wha-" The man did not have a chance to answer. One moment, she was manhandling a guy on the dance floor, and the next, they were outside in the bitter cold, bodies entangled and staggering off the loading dock, slamming onto the concrete below. His body caught her fall, softened it enough that she sat up and dusted herself off, feeling the rumble of his pained groans under the palms of her hands.
The repeated, sick crack of the man’s skull against the ground was music to her ears. Teeth crunched, blood spurting out from between his split and swollen lips as he unwittingly bit into his tongue, bending back the fingers on the hand that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. Yelena tightened her grip on his oily hair as she yanked him up from the ground, his feet slipping from under him as her knee came into contact with the back of his legs.
He moaned and gurgled, blood streaming down his chin and soaking the front of his polo. “‘M sorry-“ he slurred through chipped teeth, blood seeping from the puncture wounds on the tip of his tongue. “Please, ‘m sorry, s-”
Yelena did not care much for his apologies. “Fuck you,” she spat. She slammed his head back against the concrete and forced his face down, leaving streaks of red across gravel as she dragged his cheek along the ground. When she let go of his hair, he did not bother to lift his head, letting it fall face-first into the concrete with a groan.
She pushed herself off of him, backed away, and dusted herself off. As the drunken fog finally cleared, she whipped her head around to see that people surrounded them outside the bar. When had a crowd formed? How long had they been watching this all go down?
The alleyway was bathed in red and blue and before she knew it, Yelena’s arms were wrenched back and she was thrown onto the ground, face colliding with the gravel much like she'd just done to the man writhing in pain just feet away. Cold metal clicked around her wrists, her arms bent unnaturally and uncomfortably behind her back, shoulders straining from the awkward position.
She made eye contact with the man who'd assaulted her, taking in his beaten and bloody state, and sent a smirk his way just before the officer roughly yanked her to her feet by her cuffed hands.
She could barely hear the cop as he read her her rights from a square piece of paper, her focus zeroed in on the cut of the cold metal into the already scarred skin of her wrists. How familiar , she thought dimly, wriggling her fingers to ensure she could still feel them.
Her ears were ringing so loud she almost missed the voice calling out to her from the back entrance of the bar she was at. “Yelena?” She knew that voice. “Oh, my God, Yelena!”
Yelena lifted her head up, eyebrows pulling together as she tried to pinpoint who the voice belonged to. She looked around, catching the eyes of everyone but the person she was looking for. As green eyes locked onto blue, she had hardly any time to appreciate the beauty of the woman running towards her before everything went fuzzy and black.
___
It was hours later that Yelena awoke suddenly, violently, with just enough time to roll over onto her side and heave a sparse, watery mess of vodka and bile onto the carpet rather than vomiting all over herself. That was how she knew she wasn’t in the bedroom, where she had conveniently placed a handy little trash can beside the bed, but on the couch in the living room.
In her groggy, hungover state, it took her a moment to remember that she did not have a couch, nor did she have a living room.
“Oh, shit! Hey, easy, easy.”
Kate Bishop? Yelena struggled to sit up, How the hell…
“Wait, don’t- let me get-“ it was Kate Bishop, Yelena would know that voice anywhere, “Here, sorry, I didn’t expect-fuck.”
Yelena just groaned in response, the sound garbled and wet as another mouthful of bitter, burning acid rushed up her throat, but luckily, there was a trash can hastily shoved under her chin just before she retched again. She blinked hard against the harsh overhead lights, a pounding headache blossoming right behind her eyes and radiating through her cranium.
She wasn’t in her motel room, she wasn’t at her place at all. She was in Kate Bishop’s apartment, invading her space just to dirty up her couch and stain her carpet. How the hell did she end up here? She needed to get home.
Home. Ha! How foolish was she? There was no home. She’d been staying in a dingy motel on the outskirts of Manhattan for the better part of a month, not unlike the rundown safe houses she’d jump between on random assignments; questionable brown stains on the walls and ceiling, the grey static of the broken television in the corner, with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.
Just that morning, she woke up on a stained mattress to the dim buzz of the TV, staring at the whirling ceiling fan until she made herself dizzy. She dragged herself up and out of bed with all the energy of her lazy ass of a dad, every inch of her body sore. She was thirty one years old now—should’ve been thirty six—and her joints crackled and popped as she stretched, overworked tendons connecting stiff muscles to aching bones. She could feel her pulse thundering in her ears, her heartbeat quick and unsteady.
The full length mirror hanging from the wall in the bathroom had been shattered, jagged shards of glass littering the carpet, splattered with crimson that was smeared across her hand, the obvious perpetrator. Her knuckles were gashed open, crusted with dried blood and imbedded with the tiny crystals.
She ignored the stinging pain of her wounds as she picked the glass out of her skin with her nails, dropping the stained fragments into the bathroom sink with a clatter. She thrust her hands under the scalding hot water, wincing at the burn as she scrubbed at her split knuckles. The dried blood had flaked off to reveal jagged, star-shaped gashes in all four knuckles, shallow slices scattered across the back of her hand.
She didn’t even remember how she got there. Had she checked in? Had someone else secured her a safe place to lay low while federal agents roamed the country looking for her? Everything from before she woke up in the motel room was a dark fog, too thick to move through without choking. Every time she tried to think about the night before, pins shot through her skull and she was left out of breath, her chest burning as though she’d taken in lungfuls of smoke.
She could feel it in the air, pricking at her skin. There was something violent and dark lurking deep down in her subconscious, just waiting to latch onto the perfect opportunity to break through the surface and derail everything.
The impending doom was overwhelming. Something was wrong with her, she knew it. Why else would she be so on edge every second of every day, so tightly wound that her muscles constantly ached with the sheer amount of tension in her body at all times? What else would send her nerves into overdrive at every unknown sound or sudden movement besides her own fucked perception of the world around her?
“-lena? Yelena?” Snap, snap! Fingers were in front of her face, a sharp sound piercing through her racing thoughts and breaking her out of her catatonic state. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were going to be stuck like that forever.”
“Where am-“ she cut herself off abruptly. Right, she was in Kate Bishop’s apartment… With Kate Bishop. “What happened?” she asked instead.
"Bar fight with some guy," Kate was staring at her with narrowed eyes, like she knew something Yelena didn't. "Well, you got into a fight. He... didn't really fight back at all."
Yelena's tongue darted out to wet her chapped lips, but her mouth was too dry. She cleared her throat, cringing at the feeling of mucus lining the walls of her esophagus, and her eyes strayed towards the kitchen.
"Open," Kate was already two steps ahead of her, as she produced a glass of water and deposited a couple of white pills into the palm of Yelena's open hand. "You were pretty fucked up. I called Clint, rambling about alcohol poisoning and Black Widow assassins... yeah, I know, okay?" She rolled her eyes and waved away the admonishing look Yelena shot her, "but can you blame me? I mean, Jesus Christ, Yelena."
Yelena remained silent. She'd heard every word that came out of Kate Bishop's mouth just now—not that there was any possible way she could miss it, considering her eyes had already been fixated on the movement of lush pink lips—but her brain was lagging miles behind, struggling to comprehend what was happening.
She remembered red and blue lights, being tackled and placed in handcuffs, hearing her Miranda rights. She passed out while in custody; she should still be in custody, sitting and rotting in a jail cell, waiting on assault and battery charges that would only be dropped after Yelena's boss, the Director of the CIA, sauntered up to the jailhouse with her bail and a bribe. She wouldn't be lying on a couch in Kate Bishop's apartment, being tended to by Hawkeye herself.
What the hell happened? Why would they just let her go?
Kate seemed to be able to read her mind, or at least know all the questions written across her face without Yelena even asking them aloud. As soon as the thought popped into her head, she realized that Kate Bishop must have had something to do with it.
To confirm her suspicions, Kate rubbed at the back of her neck and confessed, "I know a lot of the cops here personally, ya know? Told them you were my girlfriend," She cleared her throat, seeming uncomfortable with the topic but forced to explain herself, "It wasn't hard. Guy is a total creep, I just told them you were defending me."
Yelena stared at her, not knowing what to say. Kate shifted her weight from one foot to the other, a red tint blooming in her cheeks as she tried and failed to avoid what Yelena knew was an extremely intense gaze. She couldn't help it, she just could not quite believe what she was hearing.
"Kate Bishop, you told them I was your girlfriend?!”
Kate shifted awkwardly, suddenly avoiding Yelena's eyes as she answered, “Yes?”
"To bail the assassin out of jail?"
"Um… yes?”
"And then you brought said assassin back to your home?"
"Well… yes, but-“ Kate cocked her head, eyes squinting at her. "I mean, you kinda already knew where I lived anyway, you know, so I didn't think it would be that big a deal."
Yelena blinked at her, perplexed at this woman in front of her. Was Kate even a real person, or was Yelena sitting in a cold jail cell right now, drunk, concussed, and hallucinating? But no, when Yelena thrust her hand out almost panicked, she made contact with the soft, solid flesh of Kate's arm. She was real.
"...Kate Bishop?"
Kate was rocking back and forth on her heels above her, tongue in her cheek. "...Yes, Yelena?”
Leaning back into the plush leather cushions as the room began to spin around her again, Yelena let out something between a cough and a laugh, incredulous. Should she really be surprised, considering she and Kate had spent last Christmas Eve trading punches and compliments?
A click of her tongue, a slow once-over, and a raised eyebrow from Yelena had Kate blushing like she'd gotten caught red-handed doing something she was not supposed to. Yelena asked, "You have little to no survival instinct, do you know that?"
Kate let out a surprisingly genuine laugh at that, like she hadn't taken in a trained Black Widow assassin after a violent fight outside of the bar that had almost landed her in a jail cell.
"Yeah, I'm well-aware," she joked. "It gets me into trouble a lot. But, you know, it also brings me some good things, too."
Her eyes flickered over to the empty dog bed next to the coffee table, Lucky slumbering somewhere Yelena couldn't spot from her position hunched over on the couch. Recalling the one-eyed golden retriever Kate had rescued from the middle of the street last year, Yelena dimly wondered how often Kate Bishop brought strange, wild, and wounded animals into her home.
Why? she wanted to ask, Why do you care so much?
"I can't help myself, I guess." Somehow, as if reading the very thoughts running through her mind, the archer answered Yelena's unasked question with a loose shrug and a toothy grin that made her insides feel like they were melting into a big, gooey mess. "I have a thing for taking in strays."
The words ignited something inside her. Something hot and bright swelled up in her chest like the vodka she'd drank the night before. Well, fuck, that was a mistake. Kate should not have done that. Why did she do that? She wanted to scream at the young Hawkeye for being so ignorant and naive, for trusting someone who was no good. For taking in someone who wanted so badly to leave.
Most of all, Yelena thought to herself, 'What the hell are you supposed to do now?'