a kick in the right direction
Yelena Belova is a Black Widow.
Yelena Belova is also somehow a breath of fresh air in a freshly falling apart world and constant laughter and quips and conditional unconditional love.
She wants to help and it drives her to almost die as she’s falling out of the sky, but miraculously she lives and she’s still willing to stand proud and make everyone around her laugh as she does. She moves on with grace and continues to fight and Natasha doesn’t understand a single thing of it.
But one day in the fall of 2016, when Natasha’s still on the run for something she deems isn’t her all her doing but probably deserved, Yelena sits her down and to play a game called Monopoly, claiming that she wants to know more about Natasha’s American culture.
They’re halfway through when Yelena asks, “Are all of you Avengers this moody?”
Natasha rolls her eyes, “I’m not moody.”
“And I’m American,” Yelena mocks in a heavy southern accent (that’s actually pretty good, but Natasha would rather be dead than admit that), “C’mon, sestra. What’s got you so sad? You know I could kick their ass.”
“I don’t need you to do that,” Natasha replies softly, “life’s just… a lot sometimes.”
“Obviously,” Yelena grins at her, “You have no eyebrows.”
“I have eyebrows!” Natasha throws an unused game piece in her sister’s direction, unsurprised when the blonde just catches it, “Whatever. You’re an ass.”
Yelena laughs lightly, making her next move before speaking again, “Seriously, Nat, you can talk to me. I won’t judge, promise.”
Natasha bites her lip, “I need a couple more shots before we… spill our guts and everything.”
“I can do that,” Yelena makes another move before getting up, “I’ll be back.”
She walks off to get some and Natasha’s left alone, brain swimming with thoughts of Wanda. She rescued Wanda from the Raft with Steve almost two months ago and hasn’t seen her since. The last memory Natasha has of her is Wanda flinching away, mumbling that she wanted Pietro and that Natasha’s a traitor.
It’s somehow worse than she could’ve imagined. She thought she was on the right side. She wanted to, selfishly, keep her friends and her life exactly as it was. She’s defied the government before, she could’ve manipulated her way into giving them more leeway and fixing the accords to their liking, but she never got the opportunity.
It’s so irrevocably stupid and all she wants to do is right her wrongs.
She hasn’t deserved to pretend that she can be a part of Wanda’s life again. But that doens’t help the fleeting thought that when they one day come into contact again (which Natasha knows they will), she wouldn’t mind keeping Wanda in arms’ length. Even if it means that she has to watch the woman in love with someone else because somehow, that possibility is better than one without her altogether.
She doesn’t want to dwell on it, though, and she hopes that maybe getting drunk and venting about it to her sister will make it all somehow more manageable. She doubts it, but these days she finds herself grasping at anything.
Yelena comes back with an expensive bottle of vodka and nice-looking shot glasses and a bag of some kind of snack that Natasha doesn’t recognize.
Her sister opens the bottle, letting out a satisfied ha! when it pops open easily and pours two shots. She hands one to Natasha and they clink glasses before throwing the drinks down their throats.
The burning is somehow therapeutic.
“One more and you’ll talk?” Yelena asks, pushing her rainbow money to the side and seemingly no longer giving a shit about their game.
Natasha shrugs, “Maybe two,” and watches as Yelena fills the glass up. They clink again, meet eyes, and then down the drinks.
“Дерьмо, that’s good,” Yelena mutters before leaning back in her chair, “Still need that second one?”
Natasha shakes her head, putting the empty glass back on the table and trying to calm the dancing behind her eyes.
It takes her a minute to focus on the task at hand. She has a full rant about Wanda and everything that the woman stands for and simultaneously doesn’t in her life but what comes tumbling out of her mouth first is, “Did you know girls can like girls? Like… like them like them? Like wanna kiss and…”
Natasha doesn’t meet her sister’s eyes, not wanting to say the l-word too loud. She knows how much people don’t like the idea of women loving women and she thinks her heart would shatter if she heard her sister was one of those homophobes.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Yelena says, popping a chip in her mouth and chewing it for a good five seconds, “Men are just so… ugh. I’d much rather kiss a woman than kiss a man.”
Natasha doesn’t move a muscle. She didn’t expect at all for that response and between her shock and the vodka, she’s pretty sure she might’ve just started hallucinating. She stares at Yelena for what feels like a long time and Yelena stares back at her, waiting for some kind of response. Natasha finally nods, and a stupid grin falls on Yelena’s face.
“So this is about a girl?” Yelena prods, “Oh my god, Tasha, are you in love?”
“I’m not-” Natasha feels her face heating up and this time wholly blames it on the alcohol, “Shut up!”
Yelena laughs, “I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s cute. You like someone! Tell me about her, is she one of the Avengers? I mean, she must be, you haven’t told me that you hang out with anyone else.”
Natasha can’t even pay attention to the backhanded statement and instead looks down at her lap, fiddling uselessly with her fingers as she tries to muster some kind of response.
“She’s… unattainable,” she finally explains, “she’s with someone else and far too… good to be with someone like me. And I think she hates me after everything that happened with the accords and I’m 90% sure she’s a dog person and I want a cat so it would probably never work.”
Yelena’s face twists like she smelled something bad, “Why would you think she hates you?”
Natasha doesn’t meet Yelena’s eyes and picks uselessly at the fraying thread on her jeans, “I’m the reason she was in the Raft. She got caught because… I chose the wrong side. And, like I said earlier, I think she has a boyfriend so it’s really all just wishful thinking.”
“Wishes can come true,” Yelena offers, filling their glasses once again, “I’m sure at one point leaving the Red Room was your wish and look at you now! You left the Red Room, you freed the widows-”
“You freed the widows. You’ve been freeing the widows,” Natasha interjects, picking up her full-again glass and waiting to drink it, “It’s your project, not mine. My projects have all… quite literally blown up in my face.”
“I’ve been doing it with your help,” Yelena responds, disregarding the last part of her statement, “and Melina’s and Sonya’s… it’s a team effort. That’s not my point,” she holds the glass out to Natasha and they clink once again, “My point is, you know firsthand that even if it takes time, wishes can come true.”
They take the shots and there’s a warm buzz now seeping through Natasha’s veins that she welcomes as if it were a warm blanket.
“My life fell apart, Lena,” Natasha retorts, “I don’t have anyone to report to, I don’t have a home, I don’t even have a country where I’m safe. My best friend is on house arrest, my other best friend is out fighting crimes that barely exist, my old boss is fuck knows where and I’m not… I’m definitely not an Avenger, Yelena. I’m not something to look up to and I never was.”
“I looked up to you,” Yelena responds sincerely. “We all did. You were the one that escaped and made a life for herself. We were jealous but you were also our hero.”
“You said it yourself, Yelena, I’m a killer!” Natasha says, unable to help the fresh tears clouding her vision, “I can have every label in the world, but at the end of the day, I have spent most of my life as an assassin. And no amount of good words will take that away.”
“You’re right,” Yelena nods, “we are defined by what we do, not by nice words. And since leaving the Red Room, you have done good. You are good, Natasha. If not, you would’ve proven that many years ago. And you would probably also be dead by now. But you’re still here, that has to mean something. You must have something more to give this world.”
Natasha shakes her head, “Not anymore. Now I’m just… a criminal. I always have been but now I really am and... I have nothing to my name. And I sure as fuck won’t have her, either. I shouldn’t have even brought it up.”
“She’s on the run, too, Natasha. And it sounds like she might not even have a boyfriend,” Yelena responds, “Why not take a chance?”
“She’s too good to just take a chance on, Yelena,” Natasha says, “She somehow came out of everything that happened to her and is a good person. She loves with everything she has and trusts and I broke that. She said that I’m a traitor and she’s not wrong!”
Natasha breathes out shakily, “I have messed up every single good thing in my life. I’m not adding her to that list.”
“You haven’t messed up everything,” Yelena tells her, and even though Natasha’s trying hard to find them, she finds none of Yelena’s tells. “I could give you a list of things that you haven’t messed up, but you don’t need a list. I’m proof that you’ve done good things in this life, Tasha. I’m free and able to help all of the women that Dreykov ruined because of you.”
Natasha doesn’t know how to respond to that and Yelena seems to catch on to that fact, standing and collecting the bottle of vodka in one hand and the shotglasses in the other, “You need sleep, go head to bed. I’ll clean this up.”
Hours later, Natasha lays awake in the bed that she and Yelena have been sharing in Melina’s house, mind still muddled from the vodka but restless nonetheless.
She and Wanda have barely had a relationship in the last year that they’ve known each other. From Pietro sticking to Wanda’s side to Wanda sticking with him and Vision and Natasha’s inability to stop working, they just haven’t gotten a lot of time to spend with one another.
Sure, there were movie nights and bonfire nights at the compound, but now that those are over and she hasn’t seen either of the twins in two months (mainly because they’re mad at her, they really are a unit), she doesn’t know where to go from here.
It’s not like any of this is her place, either. Despite Yelena’s insistence earlier that thinking isn’t the same as knowing, Natasha’s operating with the assumption that Wanda has something going on with Vision. And even if she didn’t, Pietro probably hates her and wouldn’t ever let her within a mile of Wanda again. She wouldn’t blame him.
She buries her face in her pillow, really wishing she could just fall asleep and stop thinking about Wanda. God, she’s so tired of thinking about Wanda.
“Твои мысли такие громкие,” Yelena mumbles, poking Natasha’s stomach with one of her fingers. (Your thoughts are so loud.)
It takes Natasha bit longer than she’d like to admit to decipher Yelena’s sleepy mumblings, but she does eventually and murmurs a quiet “sorry” in response.
“Спи, сестра,” Yelena mutters, rolling over on to her other side before falling still again. (Sleep, sestra)
Natasha takes a deep breath, closing her eyes and willing any stupid thoughts out of her head. She needs sleep. She’s going over a mission tomorrow to rescue widows with Yelena and she needs to be functioning properly for that.
She hopes to hell that she doesn’t dream tonight because she’s 100% certain that she can’t take it.