Chapter 24
Layla takes the kid home. To her home, more specifically, but at this point she was going to carve out a space for Yelena to have. Avatar or not, Yelena obviously needed someone to look after her and Khonshu didn’t appear to be doing a good job before he was gone.
“Right.” Layla sets Yelena onto the edge of the tub in the bathroom. The wound in Yelena’s abdomen had healed but Yelena was still incredibly exhausted and her head was bobbing as she tries to keep herself awake. “Think you can shower off and not drown?”
Yelena peers up at her, blinking a few times as she processes the words before she slowly nods. Layla isn’t quite sure how much she actually believes her.
“Okay. Put the suit away,” Layla says, turning the shower on and sticking her hand under the water to ensure it was warm enough. When she turns back around, the suit had dematerialized and Yelena looks even smaller without all the armor on her. She’s sitting in a bloody tank top and leggings, staring at her lap with a glazed expression. “Think you can strip and wash off? I’ll get you some clothes and a towel.”
Yelena scowls slightly. “I can do it.” She mumbles, reaching for the hem of her tank top. Layla ducks out quickly to find something clean. She dematerializes her own suit so that she doesn’t get congealed blood on anything.
Layla grabs a towel and heads back to the bathroom, knocking on the door to warn Yelena before entering to leave the clothes on the sink. “You still alive in there, kid?”
It takes a moment before there’s a hum from behind the fogged up glass.
Layla exits the bathroom with the confirmation that Yelena was alive. Layla works on starting to heat up something warm for them to eat after the day that they’ve had.
Yelena eventually shuffles out of the bathroom, rubbing her face sleepily. She looked ready to curl up and sleep for the next year but Layla intercepts her, steering the kid toward the kitchen where Layla made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.
She has to prompt Yelena to eat every few bites, the teenager staring down at her plate, absolutely exhausted. Yelena only manages to finish half and Layla finally gives in because she’s pretty sure that Yelena is moments away from face-planting right into her food.
“Come on. You should get some rest,” Layla has no idea how much it takes out of you to die and then be ressurected. It isn’t Yelena’s first time doing so but Layla wonders if she was this tired after each time. If she was, then Layla did have to begrudgingly commend Yelena’s patron, Khonshu kept her safe enough after getting her killed. Yelena doesn’t make a peep as Layla guides her up and steers her from the kitchen.
Layla thought that Yelena deserved to sleep in an actual bed rather than the couch so she takes the kid to her room. Layla has to gently push her shoulder to get Yelena to sit on the bed. Yelena’s eyes flicker around the room, her fingers absentmindedly running along the sheets before she peers up at Layla.
“I don’t wanna fuck you,” Yelena states, startling Layla. “I can sleep on the couch.”
Layla isn’t even sure if she wants to go over all of that so instead she replies, “You’re a sweet kid but I’m not sleeping in the same bed as you. I have some work to do. You rest up, I’m sure dying takes a lot out of you.”
Yelena eyes her but she finally either decides that Layla is telling the truth or resigns herself to the fact that Layla may do whatever she wanted while she slept.
Layla kinda wants to kill some people now.
Yelena lays down with a little more prompting and almost immediately falls asleep before Layla can even pull the covers over her.
Layla was always a bit of a loner and didn’t have many friends but she wasn’t completely isolated nor did she have a rough childhood.
So while she had been very unhappy with Tawaret giving out her address to someone without her consent, she’s glad that Yelena had someplace to crash and burn safely.
Yelena is older than she looks, Layla knows that, but each time she sees the face of a fifteen-year-old looking up at her, it just makes her wanna give the poor kid a hug.
Layla watches the girl sleep for a few moments before she leaves her bedroom, taking a quick shower before moving toward where she had been studying the copy of the artifact that Yelena had told her was a fake. Try as she might, Layla cannot get back into the swing of things. She stares down at her notes but her mind keeps drifting.
She thinks of the snippets of information that Yelena had given her regarding her past. Yelena didn’t have parents, but apparently had a sister. She learned from the age of six that she had only herself to rely on, not to mention the rampant abandonment issues. Yelena had been Khonshu’s avatar for five years. The kid said it was longer than anybody bothered to stick around.
Tawaret mentioned that Yelena had been part of a human trafficking ring as a child and that was part of what led her to die. Layla wonders if she was in the foster system and ran away, leading to her being trafficked. Layla took down a ring of human traffickers and most of them were young women in high school and college.
Layla thinks to how Yelena reacted in the bedroom. Overall, Layla’s heart hurts for the kid. She can’t fault Khonshu for picking her. Tawaret said that some Gods liked to pick their avatar’s young and would get ‘parental’ over them. Layla was nearly thirty but sometimes Tawaret fussed over her like she was ten. Looking back on it, Tawaret would show up to remind Layla to eat or sleep whenever she got too invested in her work. Tawaret protected her and guided her, and Layla tries to think of Khonshu doing the same for Yelena.
Khonshu was known as an unruly and disobedient God and Layla remembers Tawaret saying that he was on thin ice with the other Gods and Goddesses. Layla thinks of how the avatars had been so convinced that he had hurt Yelena when she showed up to talk about him.
Funny how the avatars were concerned about a God hurting her when their own Gods would proceed to kill her to prove a point.
Layla finally moves to collect the laundry from the bathroom to put it in the wash, grimacing at the blood. She gets what she can out before dumping it into the washing machine and then moves back to collect the pair of boots from the bathroom that Yelena left behind.
Yelena had refused to take her shoes off for a little while there and Layla did understand the need to be able to run at a moment’s notice but the kid had been so exhausted that she either forgot or didn’t care enough to bother with putting them back on this time.
Layla moves to set the shoes by the front door with her own when her hand slipped as she bumps into the corner of her table. The boots drop to the floor and two small pieces of paper flutter out from inside the left shoe.
Layla frowns, rubbing the spot on her hip that she bumped against the table as she crouches down to pick the papers up. They’re in a clear bag to keep them preserved.
The first is not actually paper but a photo strip from a photo booth that Layla would see at shopping malls. The strip was torn in half at the bottom. There were two grinning kids depicted in the photos and Layla easily recognized the little blonde one as Yelena.
Layla then picks up the other piece of paper, frowning when she sees that it’s a cut-out from a magazine of one of the Avengers. Layla glances between the two photos with a frown, wondering why Yelena kept an obviously personal photo along with an image of Natasha Romanoff.
Oh…
Oh.