Chapter 7
Yelena gets into her worst scuffle since she was resurrected. She has to listen to Khonshu nag at her about wearing the suit as she’s bleeding out in a gas station bathroom, her hands shaking too hard to thread a needle to give herself stitches.
“Put the suit on or I will make you!” Khonshu finally growls at her. Yelena freezes, her shoulders hunching as she eyes him.
“You w-wouldn’t d-dare,” She manages to get out, her teeth chattering as blood loss holds her hostage. Khonshu had agreed never to force his control over her unless it was a dire situation. That was a firm rule Yelena had put into place, especially after how much the Red Room messed with her head.
“You dare to challenge me?” He argues but it’s hard to look intimidating in a gas station bathroom.
“Y-yeah,” Yelena grins up at him, blood staining her teeth as she ties a strip of fabric around her thigh hard to cut off the bleeding wound. “Shit!”
Khonshu grabs her hand and stops her, his other hand grabbing her face to make her look at him. “Summon the suit.” He growls at her.
Khonshu doesn’t touch her. Not really. Yelena will joke about cooties but she understood that he never had a real reason to. His touch is firm but it doesn’t hurt. Still, Yelena flinches away from the initial grab, unused to people touching her. “No!”
“I order you to summon the suit!” He tries, his grip tightening as Yelena slowly slumps forward at the blood loss.
Yelena could already tell that this was a losing battle. She wouldn’t be able to patch herself up in time. So Yelena squeezed her eyes shut and summons the suit.
It’s like her tac suits with a white hood and mask. There are plenty of pockets on her uniform and the cape shields her from bullets.
Yelena feels the tingling sensation across her body where she’s wounded, letting out a soft groan as her skin starts to knit back together. She clenched her jaw, digging her fingers into her knees as muscle and nerves regrow and heal over like new, leaving nothing but a small white line behind. Yelena liked the reminders the scars gave her.
She hated the suit. She didn’t want to grow reliant on it. She was a Widow. If she grew reliant on the suit and it was taken away from her then she could easily be killed. It was better to have it and not use it than need it and not have it.
Khonshu lets her go and she slumps back against the wall of the dingy bathroom, grimacing at the red that stained the white suit that would ultimately not be there the next time she summoned it. Behind the mask, tears pool in Yelena’s eyes but not from the pain. She thinks of how many times she’d called the suit to her and how many times she should have died.
Each time she is in the suit she feels infinitely stronger but at the same time so much younger. She rarely summoned the suit in the company of others, preferring to wear it to heal herself among the carnage that she had caused. She watches her body heal with morbid fascination as she remembers her mom and big sister pressing band-aids to her skinned knees and kissing them to make them better. She longs for that now.
Twenty years old and still wanting someone to fix her up after she’s been hurt, craving for a kind touch that she cannot earn.
But she is not alone. She has Khonshu here and while he cannot give her the touch she is looking for, he fixes her up in a way and for now, that is enough.
It’s selfish of her to want more.
She was a killer. A murderer. Ruthless and wild. Wanted.
She was White Knight.
Still, she misses the days she was just Yelena, little sister to Natasha.