For Lucky
Kate is pacing around her apartment, one hand in her mouth where she's biting every nail down to the bed until it threatens to bleed, the other hand clutching her phone like a lifeline. It rings, and rings, and rings. When it goes to voice-mail for the 5th time she slams the end call without leaving a message and tries Clint instead. He picks up on the second ring and it makes Kate want to throw her phone, annoyed he has the audacity to accept her call when Yelena won’t. “Hey kid, what's up?”
Kate pauses, she hadn't really thought through what she was going to tell Clint and she didn’t want him to worry. “Kate, you there?” Clint prodded.
“yeah, yes, how are the kids?” Kate asks, mentally high fiving herself when she keeps her voice somewhat even pitched.
Clint sees right through it though, “What's wrong? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I just-” she groans, “-Yelena was in my apartment and maybe had a panic attack talking about Natasha and then things were okay until it seemed like some switch flipped and then she was pulling a gun on me and leaving. She's not answering her phone and I didn't know what to do and figured since Natasha maybe you'd have some idea.” Kate takes a huge gulp of air having not stopped to breath while explaining the situation.
“Are you hurt?”
“What? Of course. I'm fine. It's Yelena I'm worried about, Clint” Kate wishes he was there in person so she could shake him and tell him to keep up.
“How much has she told you about the red room?”
“Not a ton, she doesn't really like to talk about it, but I know a little.”
“When Natasha first came to shield, she had nightmares and flashbacks sometimes. I've yet to meet a widow without some level of PTSD and Yelena had it harder than many of the widows. Just be open and she'll find her way back when she's ready”
“Clint, you can't possibly expect me to do nothing?”
“She's a black widow assassin, if she doesn't want to be found, she won't be. Better to show her you want her to come back and when she's ready she will. Just because she doesn't contact you, doesn't mean she isn't keeping tabs on you. If she's anything like Natasha, she'll know”
Kate groans, “okay, I can do that-” her voice trails off as she talks more to herself than to Clint, “-I can be patient.” Clint laughs on the end of the phone.
It seems like Clint is holding his hand over the receiver as all Kate hears for a minute is muffled sounds, “Nathaniel wants to say hi, you have a minute?”
“Of course!” In the last few years of Barton Christmases, Kate had grown fond of the Barton kids. Kate had worked on Lila’s shooting with her, to Clint’s disapproval. The snuck around the farm with Clint’s old bows wreaking havoc on Clint’s ‘favorite trees’. Lila had even started to text Kate about dating and boys in the last year to which Kate dutifully tried her best to give good advice and keep her teasing to a bearably annoying level, like she imagined an older sister might. Cooper largely thought he was too cool to want anything to do with Kate, but when she destroyed him at Fortnite they’d come to a mutual understanding that revolved around a lot of trash talk and mindless video games. Nathaniel, at 5 years old, brought out Kate’s childlike playfulness more than the other Bartons. When Kate was at the farm, the pair played with Legos, came up with silly pranks to play on Clint and the other Barton kids, and occasionally they made an absolute disaster of the kitchen when Kate tried to help the boy make cookies. No one had told Kate in as many words, but the Bartons had communally decided she was part of their family.
“Kate!” Nate screams into the phone
“Hi! That’s a little loud buddy, can you lower your voice?”
“Sorry”
“It’s okay, that volume was better, thank you Nate.”
“I got a new set of purple Legos, you have to come see them!”
“I will, soon”
“When?”
“Uh- I’m not sure. I have a few big work things going on, but when they wrap up I’ll be there”
Nate’s voice falls, “okay,” Kate’s heart drops. She tries not to go too long without seeing the boy. She knows that was hard for all of the Barton kids with Clint before he retired, and though she knows she’s not Nate’s family she also knows he’s at least a little attached to her. And if she’s not lying to herself, she’s also a little attached to the kid.
“What if you get Lila to take a picture of you playing with them and send it to me later? Then I promise after work calms down, I’ll visit and you can show them to me in person.”
Nate seems to cheer up at the idea, “okay!”
Kate hears a loud thud and Clint’s voice in the background before the man is back on the phone, Nate presumably having run off, “he’s gone to find Lila” Kate laughs, “sorry, didn’t think he’d put you on the spot.”
“It’s okay Clint. Maybe when I know Yelena is okay, the two of us could come visit together,” a lump forms in Kate’s throat, “I think we could use a break from work”
Kate can feel Clint’s frown through the phone, “are you sure things are okay?”
“Yea, we just got into an argument. I’m fine though, just worried and work is busy”
“well if that’s really it,” Clint prods
“It is. Look, thanks for calming me down, Clint, but I should go”
“Yeah, okay, well you can always call or come visit”
“Thanks, Clint.” Kate throws her phone on the couch once she hangs up and gets changed into her purple tac suit. She throws a pair of sweatpants over and tosses her bow into a gym bag before heading out the door.
--
Kate spends the next week throwing herself into work, alternating between Bishop security and her role as Hawkeye. Kate brings Kamala to her gym, converted office space, which makes the other hero light up like a kid in a candy store. The pair spend the better part of a day using every piece of workout equipment, practicing with every type of weapon, and sparring. After, Kate runs to a Chinese restaurant down the street and comes back with enough food for double the number of people. They spread the food out over Kate’s desk there and start drawing up plans to expand the space for their new team, The Young Avengers. They map out adding more office space, a briefing room, a communal kitchen, and even a few bedrooms. Though Kate never says it out loud, she tries to imagine the space as their own Avengers compound. Kamala has apparently recruited a few others and they reach out to each of them, asking them to come meet the two of them here in 3 weeks.
Shortly before, their new team members arrive, Kate upgrades the floor’s security with retinal scanners and imbeds her own AI system into the building. However, she is not great at construction, so they end up paying an exorbitant amount of money, even by Kate’s standards, to a firm that’s worked with Stark Industries to finish their build. When it’s finally done, a few nights before their new team members are set to arrive, Kate gives Clint and Yelena building and floor access. She doesn’t actually tell Yelena this but she sends a selfie of her in her room, she’s sitting on the bed in her Yelena pajamas and a small open closet behind her shows enough sweats for two weeks of clothes spilling out onto the floor. Kate’s planning to still live at her apartment, but she stocked the wardrobe in her room at the training facility nonetheless and even moved some of Yelena’s own clothes from her apartment over there. The selfie is her 57th text to the widow in the past month and all of them have gone unanswered by the widow. Kate scrolls through her last 10 texts or so to the widow before getting out of bed, changing back into workout clothes and heading to the archery range.
Kate fills her largest training quiver with arrows and sets up a 100 meters away from the target. Every arrow she fires hits its mark and when she empties her quiver, she retrieves the arrows and starts again from a new angle. After five different positions in the range, she starts to build an obstacle course, and does some running target practice. Then Kate activates the moving targets she had built and empties a quiver into those, spinning and running around the room as targets pop out of the floors and walls all around her. After another two hours of that, Kate retrieves the mess of arrows she’s created and makes to leave the room, arms hanging tiredly at her sides. There’s a sleek, black arrow rack where Kate can line all her training arrows up side by side and multiple different sized quivers hang at the end of the rack. Kate drops her current quiver on its hook and starts to place all the arrows back on the rack one by one. Each arrow echoes with a clang as Kate harshly shoves them into their place on the metal rack. Finally, Kate places the last arrow and the effect is almost beautiful. So much elegance and destruction contained in neatly aligned rows back lit with a soft purple light. The silence is deafening; it's 3am and Kate can only hear her own breathing and her eyes are stuck on the neat, contained rows of arrows. She can’t tear her eyes away. The rack has been there since the beginning of the office space conversion, but the neatness has never pissed Kate off as much as it does at this moment. Kate lets out a guttural scream and swipes her hand across the top rack knocking close to thirty arrows onto the floor then she sinks down to her knees and lets her head fall into her hands taking gasping breaths trying to hold back the emotions that are threatening to break over her. The same emotions she’s been holding back for the past month. Every time she’s close to breaking, she just tells herself Yelena will be back tomorrow, but she can’t do it now. Now, she feels like she did when her mom shut her out and refused to talk to her after the arrest. She feels like she did when her dad died and the most important person in her life retreated into herself and handed her a bow. The bow and arrows, the martial arts, all of it, kept her from falling apart as a kid, but they’re not enough now. Kate picks a handful of arrows up off the ground and flings them across the room as all the unshed tears slide silently down her face. Once there aren’t any more arrows at her feet, Kate shifts her focus to those remaining on the rack and systematically removes everything from its place and chucks it into some unknown corner of the room. When nothing is remaining in its rightful place and Kate’s tears have dried on her face she goes back to her room and collapses on top of the covers. Without Lucky to hold on to, without Yelena to talk to, she just stares blankly at the wall until finally her body has had enough and she drifts into a fitful sleep.
The next morning, Kate won’t look Kamala in the eyes, but she picks up every arrow in the shooting range and returns them to their place. Then she smashes the purple back light of the arrow rack, so at least some part of it doesn’t feel so painfully put together. In the afternoon, Eli arrives and Kate puts concealer under her eyes, plasters a smile on her face, and shows him their space. She leaves the tour early, excusing herself to her office, and leaving Kamala to walk Eli through the shooting range. After a dinner spent getting to know Eli and laughing with both him and Kamala, Kate opens her phone and deletes her entire text thread with Yelena.
--
The next month passes in a blur of training, learning to work with Kamala, Eli, Cassie, and America. The other 4 are living in their training space full time at this point and though Kate sometimes feels like she's missing out the nights when she goes back to her apartment or goes out on her own missions without them, she mostly enjoys the peace and quiet it affords her. She never thought she'd be the one complaining about someone talking to much, but then again she didn't think she'd be de facto leader of the young avengers or friends with a black widow assassin either. It's one such night, where she's been tracking a known former acquaintance of king pen alone and is headed back to her apartment with pizza when she thinks she sees Yelena for the first time in 2 months. It's nothing definitive, just a flash of blonde hair at the end of her block, gone so fast she's not sure if she made it up, but her heart beat picks up anyway. When Kate gets up to her apartment there's a distinct lack of stillness in the air. Everything is where she's left it, seemingly untouched, but the hairs stand up on the back of her neck alerting her something is off even when she can't see anything out of place. It takes her a minute of walking through the apartment, bow drawn, to realize what's off. Lucky hasn't made a sound at her return. She quickly runs into her room, immediately looking to the dog bed at the foot of her bed and there he is, bone between his paws, contentedly chewing on it and not giving a crap that Kate had just gotten home after being out almost 8 hours. Kate ducks her head into the closet but nothing is out of place. No one is in the bathroom. All the windows are locked. Only when Kate checks every room for the third time does she relax her drawn bow, roll out her shoulders, and sit down to eat her pizza. Kate logs into Bishop security and pulls up her building cameras. She watches the last hour of footage on four different cameras before she notices anything. It's not even her building where she notices anything, but a camera from the one next door. A single flash of blonde hair and then seemingly unmoving footage for almost twenty minutes worth of frames.
It has to be Yelena, Kate thinks. Someone came, gave Lucky a bone and left. No way anyone else would do that. Or maybe more accurately, no one else could do it unnoticed. Is this Yelena reaching out? Or is this some sort of test from the widow? Kate spends a few minutes contemplating Yelena's intentions before realizing she doesn't care. Well that's largely a lie, but she doesn’t care enough to dissect it and figure out whatever Yelena is wanting her to do next. The woman has disappeared for 2 months, the longest she's not heard from her since they became friends 2 years ago. If Yelena is doing well enough to break in and leave some bread crumbs so Kate knows Yelena was there, then she's good enough to have stayed and said hi. Kate doesn't even care anymore about their argument, she just wants her presence back in her life. She's done her part reaching out and she can't keep spending every day hoping to hear from the widow and worried about Yelena's having panic attacks and generally being unwell from not dealing with her shit. So no, Kate doesn't care, can’t care, what Yelena wants. If Yelena wants to play some tip-toeing around each other's game or if she wants Kate to acknowledge her, that’s Yelena’s problem now. Knowing she was so close to being back and she chose to leave again, Kate can't deal with that, so she opens her phone and sends the text, “you should have stayed for dinner. Either come back or don’t reach out.” It’s not precisely following Clint’s advice, but she'd made it 2 months which is in fact a record time for following Clint’s advice. Kate doesn't wait to see if Yelena responds, she just goes to bed and in the morning she packs a bag and brings Lucky to the training space, no longer enjoying the silence of the apartment.