Yelena
When Yelena got to the crew’s workspace Maria was waiting, a grim look on her face. She walked carefully between the techs and back to her office, Yelena following silently. As soon as the door closed behind them, Yelena crumbled. “Maria, she’s gone- She went after Kingpin by herself. It is because I am too controlling- too harsh- too broken for her. And now she is gone-”
Maria put a hand on Yelena’s shoulder. “Yelena, take a breath. We will get her back-”
“You cannot promise that! You know this! Natasha said Kate is on the edge of having nothing to lose and now that is true-”
Leaning down, Maria tried to meet Yelena’s eyes. “What do you mean she has nothing to lose?”
Yelena jerked away from Maria’s comforting presence, knowing she didn’t deserve any relief. “We fought-”
“About what?” asked Maria sharply.
“She does not like that I am- that I- she wants to go after Kingpin-”
“Has she said that?”
“Yes. She said that last night!”
“So is that what you fought about?” Yelena turned back to face the wall, trying to keep herself from crying.
“She called me controlling. She said- she said she was tired of me following her. She said she couldn’t- she asked me to leave.”
“Were you being controlling?” asked Maria, her voice much closer than Yelena expected.
“I just don’t want her to die,” whispered Yelena. “It is like my heart is outside of my body, and Kate Bishop carries it on her sleeve. Maria, I love her so much-”
Yelena turned back into Maria’s waiting hug, finally crying. Maria held her tightly, letting Yelena shake apart in her arms.
A soft knock came at the door and someone came in, handing something to Maria, then leaving in silence. Maria pulled Yelena tighter, letting her sob, but Yelena could tell she was also trying to work, too. Maria didn’t comment and it was nice to have someone carry the weight of her anxieties with her, so Yelena didn’t move. When Natasha got there she immediately walked over and wrapped both women in a hug. Yelena couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped her at the thought of the Black Widow giving out bear hugs. Natasha pulled back with a questioning look on her face, but Yelena just shook her head.
Maria finally stepped back, bringing around the tablet she’d been working on. “Alright, here’s every sighting I’ve got of Kate on security cameras in the last 18 hours.” They leaned in closer to see footage of Kate at an ATM, watching the camera boldly. As soon as she’d withdrawn money, she let a crowd swallow her up. After that there were several places the AI had tagged someone that could have been Kate, but they needed to sift through them. It took them a few minutes to realize that when Kate stepped away from the ATM she’d put on her Yankees cap - Yelena let out a gasp at the sight of it, remembering buying it on their first date - but once they did, they found her again easily. She was back and forth across Manhattan for another half an hour, before ending up in the lobby of the building they were currently in.
“What the fuck?” asked Natasha.
Security cameras on the crew’s floor showed Kate getting off the elevator and making her way to their office. She was inside for about 15 minutes before leaving the way she came in.
Maria turned to the office door and pulled it open. “Someone get Lopez on the phone, yesterday!”
She turned back as they got glimpses of Kate in security cameras for a few blocks, although nothing concrete. Then, she vanished, the footage stopping.
One of Maria’s employees opened the door and held out a phone. “Lopez, ma’am.” Yelena tried not to fidget as she listened to Maria’s side of the conversation. It wasn’t very informative, and she hoped Lopez was sharing a lot more information than Maria was letting on.
Ending the call, Maria shook her head. “Lopez said she came back to finish up her report from the mission.”
The tablet beeped. New footage started streaming. Kate walked into a bank just eight blocks from their current location, heading straight to a teller. Yelena glanced at the time stamp. There must have been a slight lag, but it was almost happening in real time. She ran from the office and down the hall. Pushing the button for the elevator, she debated whether it would be faster to run down the 11 floors or to wait. The doors opened just as she’d made up her mind to head for the stairs. Dashing on, she hit the button for the ground floor and crossed her fingers that no one else would get on.
Everyone else must’ve been going up, because when the doors opened again on the ground floor she had to fight through a crowd. She raced out onto the sidewalk and started running. There were still people everywhere, and it took forever to get the eight long blocks. She was almost to the bank when her phone started ringing.
“Yes?” she answered, breathing heavily.
“She left. Headed west,” said Natasha.
Yelena kept her sister on the phone, trying to keep up with a constantly-moving Kate. She would disappear from the cameras for minutes at time, reappearing six blocks later in a slightly different outfit. Whatever she was doing was enough to throw the AI off, sometimes sending it to a completely different individual while Yelena waited, wanting to scream. By the time footage of Kate showed up in one of the outer boroughs it was too late. It would take Yelena at least 30 minutes to get to Kate’s last known location, and by then she would probably be long gone. The density of security cameras in Manhattan was the only thing that had given them as much of a shot as they’d had.
When Yelena got back to the office Maria was going through Kate’s laptop, Natasha her phone. “Anything I shouldn’t see here?” joked Natasha.
“Yes,” said Yelena, holding out her hand for Kate’s phone.
“There’s nothing there. No flags in her internet history and I already went through all of the texts not from you. Clint’s been texting her every day,” she added offhandedly.
“Do you think Clint knows anything?” Yelena tried not to pounce on that detail.
“Probably not, but I can call him. Seems like all of her texts to him have been vague. She doesn’t really mention anything except the weather.” Yelena made a face. The day Kate Bishop only talked about the weather would be… a day she was trying to hide something.
Yelena walked over to Maria, who shook her head. “Nothing.”
Stumbling into a chair, she let her head fall into the desk, rattling her teeth. Natasha was speaking quietly on the phone. She walked over and nudged Yelena, forcing her up and then shoving the phone in her face. “Clint wants to talk to you.”
Yelena gulped and held out her hand for the phone, imagining all the things that Clint would say to her; ‘You’re not good enough,’ ‘You should have kept her safe,’ ‘It’s all your fault,’ ‘I knew-’
“Hello?” The line was silent for a moment, then Yelena caught the sound of a sniffle. “Clint, I-”
“She’s gonna be okay, kid.”
Yelena was incensed - how dare everyone keep insisting Kate would be okay?! - “How can you know that, how can you promise that?”
“Because she has you, Yelena.”
Yelena started to cry again. It would have been easier if he had been mad. Natasha took the phone and pulled her into another hug.
They didn’t find anything else. When they finally left, Yelena started to head towards her apartment to gear up, hoping that Kate would be patrolling as Hawkeye, and she could somehow catch her then.
“Uh-uh,” said Natasha, grabbing her arm. “When was the last time you slept?”
Yelena blinked slowly and tried to do the math. She’d been up the night before, wandering through Central Park and thinking about Kate. The night before that she’d been trying to free a widow in Houston. She hadn’t even napped on the flight back, instead opting to pilot the quinjet. “Two days.”
“You aren’t going to do Kate any good-”
Yelena could guess where her sister was going and didn’t want to hear it. “Fine, shut up. If I tell you I will go home and sleep you will believe me, no?”
“No,” said Maria. “Come on.”
----
When Yelena got to the crew’s office the next afternoon the techs all seemed extra-nervous. When she walked in they all looked up, then quickly found something else to be working on. Maria was hunched over her computer, Natasha nowhere in sight, probably training one of the new recruits.
“Kate took a computer,” said Maria without looking up.
“Is it traceable?” Maria shook her head. “But that means she has access to the whole database now, no?”
“I already locked down the Eleanor Bishop files, but she could’ve already seen them.”
Images of Eleanor Bishop’s battered body came to the forefront of Yelena’s mind. She hoped Kate hadn’t seen those. “The list of guards?”
“Was there.”
“Alright, I go.”
Yelena turned back around, pulling up the list of guards on her phone. She needed to get some of her gear and the penthouse was closer than her apartment. She waved to the doorman on the way in, secretly hoping that when the doors opened Kate would be there waiting for her. But the penthouse was still empty. Nothing had changed since the day before.
Yelena dressed and armed herself, making sure her weapons were hidden under her jacket for her ride on the subway. At the last second she grabbed one of the masks that matched her uniform, slipping it into a pocket.
What would a Kate Bishop with nothing to lose do? The question guided Yelena for over a week, with no results. She snuck onto Rikers Island not once, but twice. She followed guards, getting nowhere. She pulled up the police scanner and went to the biggest calls. Every night she kept her eyes out for the archer, but found nothing.
Finally she had to concede that she wasn’t going to find anything if she didn’t sit down and go about things the way she would on a job. Maria couldn’t dedicate all of her time to just finding a wayward employee. Natasha still tried to help as much as she could when she wasn’t training the new Avengers, but it wasn’t a lot. Since Yelena was mostly working alone she needed to be smart about the search. Commandeering some tech, she set up camp in the penthouse dining room. She’d considered doing it at home, but the dining room at the Bishops’ was almost as big as her whole apartment, and no one else was using it.
Every once in a while after that the AI would pick up security footage in Manhattan that seemed like it could be Kate, but the sightings happened less and less, giving her little to add to her data. Her days and nights became a blur. Every time she saw either Maria or Natasha they shook their heads; no new leads.
“How is she doing this?” asked Natasha. “I mean, I know it’s not hard to get lost in a city of nine million people, but still…”
“She’s good,” admitted Yelena.
“Not the way you describe it,” said Natasha. Yelena glanced at her sister, who shrugged. “What? You’re always talking about how reckless she is. These are not the skills of a reckless person. If she was reckless we would’ve already caught up with her.”
“Fine, maybe I do not give her enough credit. Or… maybe she is already dead.” Natasha grimaced. “You cannot deny it is possible.”
“No, I can’t,” conceded Natasha. “But don’t discount her training. She did learn from the best.”
“Thank you.”
“I was talking about me.”
----
Yelena widened the circles she was sending herself in, not only tracking the guards again, but trying to find out more about Kingpin. She found the remnants of the Tracksuit Mafia and started following their members, unsure who was in charge, hoping someone would lead them to a contact higher in Kingpin’s organization.
She’d just gotten off the train in Brooklyn one night when her phone vibrated. Natasha. “Hel-”
“Kate just bought a ticket to Madrid, leaving in less than an hour.”
“Airport?”
“JFK. I can’t get there - you?”
“No.”
“Meet me at the hangar. She’s got a layover in Paris, maybe we can catch her there.”
The quinjet beat the flight to Paris. They both bought tickets to get through security at Charles de Gaulle and waited at the end of the jetway for everyone to deplane. After the crew had walked past, they had to admit they’d either missed her or she’d tricked them. Natasha decided to wait in case Kate was hiding in the plane while Yelena took off for the gate for the flight to Madrid. That flight didn’t even leave for two and a half hours, though, and when Yelena got to the gate the plane sitting there was going somewhere else. Which meant that if Kate was in Paris and continuing to Madrid, she would have to go past Yelena. Which was a small comfort. If she got past Natasha she could leave the airport and get on a train to anywhere in Europe. But her passport would trigger their network again. That, at least, was some relief, and Yelena sat back to wait.
Natasha joined her an hour later, the plane from New York boarding for its next flight. If Kate was on it, they weren’t going to catch her. They waited the remaining hour and a half until the flight to Madrid boarded and left before conceding defeat.
Yelena rubbed her face, trying not to show her frustration; they were still in an airport, and she didn’t want to attract attention. “At least we know she’s alive,” said Natasha. That seemed like such a small comfort when Yelena still couldn’t see her- would she still say girlfriend? When Kate told her to leave, had she meant forever? Were they even still partners? Was Hawkeye and the Widow a thing of the past? Yelena was embarrassed to realize she was crying again. Natasha wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close.
They decided to split up, Natasha taking the quinjet to Madrid to head Kate off at that airport on the off-chance they’d missed her in de Gaulle. Yelena stayed in Paris, wandering around the airport, getting food, trying to figure out what to do next. She called Maria, sure that Natasha had already filled her in, but wanting to see if Kate had shown up on any security feeds in Paris anywhere. It all came to nothing.
The sun had set while Yelena reminded herself that the best thing she could do was wait for more information. Her phone vibrating pulled her from her musing. It was Maria.
“Yeah,” Yelena sighed out.
“She just bought three train tickets from Penn Station leaving in the next 40 minutes.”
“Can you get there?”
“Yes.” Through the phone Yelena could hear Maria scrambling, then the call ended.
Yelena was waiting for Natasha to get back to Paris when her phone rang again. “Tell me you have her,” she breathed into the phone.
“I can’t.”
“Сука.”
“She was right there, Yelena, I just picked the wrong track.”
“You saw her?” Yelena asked, voice cracking.
“Yes. She’s alive. She’s okay. She got on the train to Burlington.”
“Vermont?”
“Yes.”
----
“Are you nuts?! We can’t just wander around Burlington and hope we run into her.” Even though Natasha was annoyed, she handled the quinjet with ease as they approached the eastern seaboard. “And for all you know she could’ve gotten off in Poughkeepsie.”
“What would she do in Poughkeepsie?”
“I don’t know, what the hell would she do in Burlington?! For all you know she could’ve gotten off to go scavenge through the old Avengers compound.”
“So what is your great plan, then?”
“Wait for her. It’s not like she got on a plane to Paris. There’s only so many ways out of Burlington-” Yelena opened her mouth to comment but Natasha cut her off “-or Poughkeepsie or Albany or any other town between New York City and Montreal. If she wants to cross the border she’ll have limited options and it will flag her passport. If she buys a plane ticket it will flag her credit card. She can’t drive. And I doubt you can hire a car to drive you back to New York from Burlington. So we wait.”
Natasha was right. A few days later Kate bought another two tickets, both from Vermont to New York City, arriving 40 minutes apart. An exhausted Yelena walked over to Maria and Natasha’s apartment to figure out what they were going to do. They had six hours to make a plan.
First they had to weigh the probability of Kate being on either train. Yelena was leaning towards her being on the first, the one coming out of Burlington. If Kate knew she was heading into a trap it was the only safe bet - anyone waiting for the two trains would know she was on the second if she didn’t get off the first. Unless… unless she got off outside of the city. The two stops before Penn Station were Yonkers for the first train and Stamford, CT for the second. Yonkers was a hell of a lot closer to the city, and probably an easier train station to find transportation from. Another point in favor of the first train.
By late afternoon Yelena was in Yonkers, waiting for the train. It was only scheduled to stop for one minute. If Kate got off there, it would be obvious. The station was small. There were no bolt holes, unless you counted the frigid river.
The train pulled in one minute ahead of schedule. Yelena moved down the platform, scanning the inside of the train, illuminated compared to the fading daylight. She couldn’t see Kate. When she got to the end the conductor had just stepped down.
“Ticket?” they asked.
Yelena shook her head. “I was just looking for someone.”
“Well,” they sniffed, “I suggest you look elsewhere.”
“I am not hurting anything,” said Yelena, her voice rising.
“You seem suspicious.”
“And you seem like идиот,” she snapped back, frustrated to realize she was letting the person distract her. The whistle sounded. She turned and ran back along the train, looking carefully. The train started to move. She pulled out her phone and called Maria who was waiting in Penn Station for the train that had just passed her. “I didn’t see her, but I could not get a good look. Do not rule this train out.”
“Understood.”
Yelena had just parked the car near Penn Station when the phone rang. “Да?”
“She’s gone, Yelena, I’m sorry.”
Slowly tilting forward, she rested her head on the steering wheel, fighting back tears. “What happened?”
“She just moved too fast for me. I was almost there, but she escaped onto a train.”
“Was she okay?”
“She… Yes, she was okay.”
“What are you not saying?”
Maria sighed. “She looked consumed. Dog-tired. You were right. We have to get her out.”