yelena- freedom
Yelena is fifteen when she finally breaks free from the hellhole that had been her home for the past nine years. She’s poised over the body of a Widow, a black case in her hand and a fuzzy head.
The Widow tells her to take the case and run. So she does. Yelena stumbles away from the scene, blood on her hands and a pounding headache that makes the streets sway with each step.
Yelena has had years of training on survival but never before had she been on her own. She was always under someone’s eye and the feeling of complete freedom overwhelmed her.
The next few hours are a hazy memory and she’s left standing in a motel bathroom, her fingers clutching the sides of the sink and leaving bloody smears as she stares at her face in the mirror.
She doesn’t recognize who stares back. She can’t remember if she always had these dark hazel eyes or if the Red Room had changed that part of her too. She doesn’t remember the scar behind her ear or when her hair had grown out.
The person staring at her in the mirror is a stranger. This is Yelena’s body but she feels like she’s in a costume, dressed up as someone she doesn’t know.
Yelena opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue. She focuses on her reflection and moves her head around to observe the way her eyes move. She inhales deeply through her nose and blows it out through her mouth. She wiggles her fingers and her toes. She shrugs her shoulders and leans forward.
Her reflection follows her as it should but it leaves Yelena feeling nothing but confusion and fear because she can’t recognize her own face. Her body isn’t hers and that frightens her.
The motel room smells like cigarette smoke and mildew, the bed caved in from use over the years. Yelena takes the first hot shower she’s had in years, discovering new scars on her body that she can’t remember receiving. She has no other clothes so she scrubs her bloodied uniform and hangs it up to dry.
The first thing she ends up eating is a burrito from the gas station down the street. Her first night alone ended with her curled in the corner of the room, the black case clutched to her chest in an attempt to protect it.
This thing was the only reason she was alive. She had to keep moving forward and protect it with her life. She just… she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t know who she could trust to deliver it to. Yelena takes one of the vials of red dust from the case and holds it up to the light to inspect it.
Her first task was to establish a way to earn money. The only problem was that she was perceived as a child by every person she came across. While it was helpful to slip under the radar, no sane person would employ a child for work.
So she utilizes the skills that she had been given and strays to the dark parts of the streets. She smuggles drugs, runs hits, and roughs a few people up. Nobody questions where she came from or her age and in turn, she doesn’t ask where the money she gets comes from.
The first piece of clothing she bought for herself was a tactical vest from an army surplus store. There were many pockets that could hold the vials of antidotes and weapons in them. The snug vest had a lot of straps and zippers on it that made her feel safer and more secure.
The haze eventually fades away and the headaches vanish too. Yelena has done things she is not proud of in order to survive on the streets.
Then she catches a glimpse of the woman she had once called big sister. Not in person but on television as part of a team called the avengers. What they were avenging, Yelena didn’t know.
It shouldn’t hurt so much that Natasha went and found a new family all on her own. It shouldn’t hurt that Natasha had gotten out and had left her behind. It shouldn’t hurt to stare up at the only person who gave Yelena the safety and security she had needed as a child.
It shouldn’t hurt to be reminded that the only people that ever gave some sort of shit about her were only pretending.
But it does. Yelena wakes up at night someplace other than the Red Room and for a few moments, she would sometimes think she’s back in Ohio. She clamped her mouth shut before she could call out for her mama or Nattie.
As the days slowly pass by, it becomes easier to breathe. Yelena learns how to handle her triggers and deal with intense emotions. They’re not healthy by any means but they work and that is all they have to do.
Yelena gets hurt, she gets fucked over, and she gets kicked while she’s down, but she keeps getting back up and dusting herself off. She refuses to give in just yet. She had a mission to complete. Oksana had trusted that she would be the one to free them. She couldn’t let the woman down.
On nights when everything is just too much, Yelena sits in the bathtub of whatever motel she’s in and turns the water onto an icy spray. It reminds her of the Red Room and it thrusts her back into the mindset of survival. It keeps her on her toes and stops her from slacking off.
It takes nearly a year of careful tracking before Yelena decides to reach out to the one person she had ever fully trusted in her life in the hopes that they might help her. Yelena carefully bundles the vials up with a hair tie and sets them into the package to ship them off. She had only sealed the box when she realizes that she needed to make it more personal. A widow would think this was a trap.
So Yelena pulls out the only treasured possession she had, staring down at the picture of herself and the girl she called Nattie when they were young before she slips it into the bundle.
Yelena sends it off, disappointed when she continues to follow the news and hears nothing about the fall of the Red Room.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe that disgruntled teenager that Yelena remembers never really cared for her after all.
Still, Yelena lays low and continues to wait.
There’s nothing else she can do.