Chapter 1
One of the main things that Yelena remembered about Ohio was the heavy snowfall every winter. She had never been allowed to go out and play in it, her parents at the time didn’t want her to track muddy water inside or catch a cold, so she would press her face against the glass and watch as the boys next door played street hockey on the black ice, shoving each other into the snow whenever they got frustrated. She remembered wanting to go out and play with them, smacking a black hockey puck into the pristine white snow and watching the ice crunch beneath her feet.
The Red Room took the wonder and awe out of the snow. Yelena became very well acquainted with the cold. The rooms where the girls slept at night in the Red Room rarely had heating in the winter, and on nights when an unusually mild-mannered guard who turn a blind eye would watch them, girls would slip from their handcuffs and double up in the bed next to them to share body heat.
Hands would not wander. Lips would not touch. There was no need for sex or repayment. Those nights it was simply about the warmth of another person, sharing nothing more than body heat.
As Yelena rose ranks faster than any of the others, finding herself placed with Widows almost twice her age, she worried about sharing beds. She was too small to provide much warmth but desperately sought it out just as much as the others. The first night it had been done when she was placed with girls eight years older than her, Yelena hadn’t moved, staring at the ceiling as she listened to girls shifting beds.
A girl got into her bed without a word, reaching up to free Yelena’s wrist from the cuff. Yelena hadn’t been expecting the other girl to join and found herself pressed between two older girls, small enough for all of them to fit on the tiny bed. For the moment, none of them in the bed were vicious killers desperately trying to claw their way up to the top for their assured survival, they were just girls trying to keep each other alive for the night.
Just after Yelena escaped the Red Room, she spent her first winter holed up in an apartment where she got to set the thermostat. At first, she had cranked the heat up all the way in the excitement that she finally got to control how cold it was.
Her elation had quickly turned into confused frustration. Turning the heat on made her feel so hot that she had a hard time catching her breath, her skin breaking out in a sweat, feeling so dizzyingly overheated that she would open the window to let the icy cold air in. She didn’t understand why. She had desperately craved the warmth for years but now that she had it, it was simply too much.
The absence of the heater left Yelena feeling so cold that she would shiver, limbs stiff and joints aching. She bought the cheapest, thickest jacket that she could find in a burnt orange color and would swaddle herself in it, desperately wishing that she wasn’t so used to the cold. She just wanted to be warm but now that she had the option, it just made her feel sick.
As foolish as it was, she remembered the nights with the guards who couldn’t be bothered enough to care as girls slipped from their handcuffs to crawl into beds with each other. She remembered the feeling of being surrounded by warmth, snuggly sandwiched between two older Widows in her class because they knew that no matter how favored Yelena was, her smaller body simply couldn’t tolerate the cold as theirs could.
Now, in a large house where she can control the thermostat, she cranked the heat up. She didn’t want to turn it up but she saw Viktoria give a small shiver as she painted, her sleeves rolled up so as to not stain the fabric, and it only took seeing Irina rubbing at her ears as the cold affected the circulation there for Yelena to turn up the thermostat.
She didn’t want her girls to be uncomfortably cold. But she quickly saw that her girls had the same reaction that she did at the introduction of heat. Despite Varvara’s hatred of coats, she still wore half sleeves at times. With the heat turned on, she started walking around the house in a tank top, with even less sleeves than usual. Even Ksenia was too hot to be cocooned in her favorite blankie, preferring to bundle it up in her arms to hold or drag it alongside her rather than drape it over her shoulders.
Yelena doesn’t know what to do. She herself would be hot, beads of sweat rolling down her face as she worked at her desk, glasses of ice water leaving pools of water on the wood from the condensation. She started turning the heat down at night, finding herself waking up drenched in pools of sweat as the warmth and night terrors took hold of her. She didn’t know whether to keep it hot or cold.
Her girls settle much more quickly than she does. The realization that they were doing their best to cope slams into her when she went to go and check her girls after a night terror and finds them sharing beds. Viktoria had crawled into bed with Alice, both of them snuggled together as Viktoria curled around her older sister. Ksenia had crawled into bed with Irina, both of them tucked under Ksenia’s knitted blankie. Daria and Varvara continued to share their bed but ended up tangled together just a little closer than usual.
Her girls had started to raise their wrists, leather cuffs on display as they remembered times in the Red Room when they would share beds with no cuffs but wrists still raised.
Yelena wondered if Mischa was fairing well with Phoebe. Phoebe grew up normally, she probably knew better coping skills and could help Mischa more than Yelena could. Yelena wondered what their thermostat was set to and if they were able to settle on a temperature.
Yelena tried to adjust the best that she could, taking the interests of her girls to heart but as the snow started to stick to the ground and the rescue of Widows sharply declined, Yelena had no choice but to finally reach out for help.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Yelena admits quietly into the phone, her head cradled in her hand as she sat hunched over at her desk, her girls elsewhere in the house.
“Have you asked them?” Natasha’s voice on the other end was a comfort to hear, even if she didn’t have anything she could do to help Yelena. Yelena needed her big sister at the moment, just her support and comfort if anything.
“No…” Yelena murmured in response before she let out a huff, closing her eyes. “Do you remember sleeping with the other girls in the Red Room?” Yelena thought about it often with the cold weather. But as the quiet stretched on for a longer period of time, Yelena suddenly worried that she had said something wrong. “Natasha?”
“No,” Natasha eventually replied, her tone slightly wary and worried. Yelena frowned at it, trying to think of what she had said that would discern such a reaction. “What are you talking about?” Natasha probed.
“You know…” Yelena took a moment to try and remember at what age she first crawled into the bed of the girl next to her, trying to see if perhaps Natasha had already defected and the colder temperatures at night had simply been a way to try to punish them. “At night. When the guards who wouldn’t snitch were on rotation then we would slip out of the handcuffs and move to the bed next to us or wait for someone to move into ours.”
Natasha was quiet in thought. “You didn’t try to kill each other?” She finally asked, confusion in her tone which only solidified the fact that it must have happened after Natasha was gone. Yelena would have been around sixteen at the time although she had felt much younger in her memories.
“No. It was like a truce. Just for the night. We were all just trying to survive,” Yelena shook her head as she recalled the memory. “Because I rose in the ranks, the best child assassin, I was small compared to them. I could share with two girls. The temperatures at night were cold enough to make our lips blue and our fingers numb but with a girl on either side of me, I was warm. I knew that they weren’t going to stab me in the back,” Yelena pulled herself out of the memory as she glanced toward her closed door to where she could hear one of her girls laughing down the hall. “My girls did the same thing. I can tell. They’re starting to share beds now.”
“Don’t they always share beds?” Natasha questioned in confusion. “You had one of your daughters in bed every night when we were at the beach. I know for a fact that Daria and Varvara share.”
“They share with me sometimes but never have they all shared at the same time,” just the thought of it made Yelena feel as though she was failing as a mother. She didn’t know how to handle the situation. The memories and trauma were still just too fresh to her and she hadn’t had time to work through it in a way that didn’t make her uncomfortable or hurt. “I don’t know what to do, Nattie,” she admitted in a tiny voice.
Natasha let out a soft hum, the noise instantly soothing some part of Yelena. “Everything is going to be alright, Yelena,” Natasha promised, her voice gentle. “I can already hear your mind working and trying to convince you that you’re fucking everything up.”
“My girls are uncomfortable and they can’t even tell me,” Yelena moaned, digging her fingers into her head in frustration.
“You’re uncomfortable and you can’t tell your girls,” Natasha countered and Yelena paused because she never considered the fact that since they didn’t know, they didn’t think they could go to her. “I don’t know what it was like to be so cold in the Red Room that I had to share a bed but I do know all about the snow. That bothers you, right?”
Yelena let out a long sigh. “Yeah…” the snow was already starting to build up, an inch deep so far, or at least she guessed since she hadn’t actually been outside since it stuck. “My girls too. They’re not leaving the house to rescue Widows anymore. I think they’re afraid.”
“When I first defected from the Red Room, I had a similar problem with the snow. During my time at SHIELD, I kept that fact close to me until I couldn’t. My first mission in the snow was during a storm of thick snowflakes and I got injured. I had what I now recognize to be a panic attack and I forgot where I was,” Natasha recalled, pulling the memory from where she had tucked it away. Yelena could tell that she had buried the memory and was dusting it off just for her. “Clint was there and he had to reassure me, show me that it was okay. I thought that I might die of hypothermia and that SHIELD was going to leave me out there in the snow. But they didn’t. Clint took me back, carried me most of the way actually, and he wrapped me up in this thick purple sherpa blanket as he ripped open a packet of hand warmers.”
Yelena tried to imagine her sister being so terrified of the snow that she had a panic attack. “How did you stop being so afraid of it?” Yelena questioned quietly. She would take any piece of advice that she could get. She had to stop fearing it herself if she was going to help her girls through it.
“Her name was Maria Hill. She was the second in command at SHIELD and the moment she heard about my reaction in my mission report, she told me to get my coat and boots on. She took me off base and we took a hike in the snow. Each time I started to second guess myself or thought about trying to bolt, she would grab my jacket collar because we both knew that I wouldn’t abandon it to get away. Eventually, she paused in the snow, unraveled a paracord keychain on her bag, and she looped it through the belt loops on our pants to keep us together,” Natasha let out a soft sigh. “Each time I hesitated, she would tell me that we had to hurry up because if we took too long then SHIELD would come looking since she was the Deputy Director. It was a reminder that people would come looking if we were in trouble, that if something happened to us then we would be rescued. It was a promise that everything was going to be okay.”
“So she took you out into the snow once and you got over it? To get over my fear I just had to… go outside?” Yelena swallowed hard, leaning back in her chair to peer out the window that overlooked the yard to see the blanket of untouched white snow.
“Oh no,” Natasha let out a soft laugh, drawing Yelena’s attention back to the conversation. “Maria kept dragging me onto hikes in the snow. I remember asking her if I was being punished once and she looked at me with a frown on her face and told me that while the cold could be unpleasant, snow was not, and should not, be a punishment.”
Yelena was content to listen to her sister share more about her past.
“One time, she took me off base while it was snowing and I thought for sure that we were going on a hike. But she took me to the grocery store and she bought this big thing of pure maple syrup and popsicle sticks. She refused to tell me what it was for. We went to Clint’s home where Maria made me help her boil the maple syrup on the stove and then she carried the pan outside and she poured it onto the untouched snow,” Natasha let out a small laugh. “And she pulled the popsicle sticks out of her pocket and held one out toward me and told me to get my ass over there. ‘This is called maple taffy’ she said, ‘I used to make this all the time as a kid’. She then showed me how to roll the strip of syrup around my stick and she made me eat it.”
Yelena raised an eyebrow. “Maple syrup and snow?”
“Apparently it was a big thing in Canada where Maria grew up,” Natasha hummed. “I liked it. So Maria took me on hikes in the snow and she taught me to make maple taffy. Clint and Laura helped in different ways. When Maria would drag me back from our hikes, she would deliver me to them and they would show me how I could warm up. They introduced me to hot chocolate, electric heating blankets, and fuzzy socks. Perhaps I didn’t share a bed in the Red Room for warmth but I never minded sitting between them as we watched a movie.”
“Your friends helped you,” Yelena surmised and Natasha hummed in agreement. “I don’t have anyone that will help.” She didn’t have the kind of ties that Natasha did. She didn’t have friends or partners that she could rely on and she certainly wasn’t going to rely on her daughters to support her when they were just as, if not more, afraid of the snow. She wasn’t going to put that on them.
“Oh? What am I then, chopped liver?” Natasha’s voice was laced with fondness, a teasing undertone. Yelena was pretty sure that it was some saying that she was unfamiliar with because she doesn’t understand what chopped liver has to do with anything. Upon her silence, Natasha clarified, the fondness still evident. “It means that you’re overlooking me.”
“You’ll help?” Yelena asked in a quiet voice. She had yet to ask something of this nature from her sister. Anger over Melina and having fun at the beach were two very different things from showing something so vulnerable and personal.
Natasha was her big sister but they haven’t been back together for very long. Yelena so desperately wanted to trust her big sister but it hurt to know that no matter how hard she may try, she might not be able to let herself.
“Of course I will,” Natasha’s voice softened and Yelena took a deep breath, letting it out slowly to keep the tears stinging her eyes at bay. “I want to be there for you if you need me,” after a moment she continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “I love you.”
“Shit, Nattie,” Yelena swiped a sleeve over her face to get rid of the tears that start to fall. “You know how to make a girl cry.” She sniffled. “I love you too.”
“I’m coming, okay?” Natasha said as Yelena continued to try and wipe away every tear just as it fell. “We’ll work through this.”