death sentence
Getting sick in the Red Room was practically a death sentence. Unless you had proved your worth then they just let you wither and die. You’d slowly either get better or worse. They’d watch as your lips turned blue and you choked for air.
That’s why when Yelena wakes up with a scratchy throat and chills, she doesn't mention it. She sits at the table for breakfast and pokes at her food, her stomach churning dangerously.
“Are you okay?” Maria questioned and Yelena immediately shoves a forkful of eggs into her mouth.
“Fine.” She said, shoving down the nausea and hopes that she doesn’t lose the very little she’s eaten. She’s just tired and sore and nauseous.
Maria reaches toward her and Yelena leans away from the hand. “I just want to feel your forehead.” Maria says.
“I’m fine.” Yelena repeats, shoving her tray of food away from her. Maria’s hand jerks from moving toward Yelena’s face to catch it before it topples off the table. “Don’t touch me.”
Maria frowns. “What’s gotten into you?” She questioned as Yelena wraps her arms around herself to ward off the chill that creeps up her back.
“Nothing.” Yelena murmurs, ducking her head down. “I’m just not hungry!”
“Okay… okay,” Maria nods her head. “Why don’t you go find Clint and see what he’s doing?”
Yelena stands, taking a moment to swallow down the wave of nausea that hits her before she shuffles off to go find Clint.
He’s shooting his bow in the shooting range. He perks up when he sees her. “Hey! Want a try? I just got these new arrows in.”
Yelena shakes her head. “No… I’ll just watch today.” She says, hoisting herself up onto the crates to settle back. Clint blinks in surprise because he knew how much she liked to shoot.
“If you’re sure…” Clint says, slowly pulling his bow back up to continue shooting.
Yelena pulls her knees to her chest to try and get warmer, resting her cheek onto her knee as she watches. She doesn’t mean to fall asleep but she’s just so tired.
Clint glances over at her to see her sleeping and sets his bow down. He had known that she wasn’t feeling well when she denied the chance to shoot. Now she was napping in a public space.
Clint moves toward Yelena, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She doesn’t even stir when he pressed a hand to her forehead.
She was burning up, beads of sweat on her skin as she gives slow raspy breaths in her sleep. Clint wonders if Maria knew just how unwell she was.
“Yelena?” Clint slowly unfolds her from her position. Yelena barely even acknowledges him. Clint picks her up, trying not to feel unsettled by how she just slumps against him. He can feel her feverish face pressed against his shoulder.
Clint leaves the shooting range and moves toward Maria’s office.
Maria was on the phone when he entered, pausing at the sight of Yelena in his arms. Maria stands, tucking the phone between her cheek and shoulder as she approached him and reached out for the limp child in his grip.
With Yelena in her arms, Clint starts to sign out what had happened. Maria watches him, talking on the phone as her hand cups Yelena’s face.
Maria retakes a seat in her chair, pulling Yelena close in her lap as she rifles through the drawers of her desk. By the time she’s finished with her phone call, she’s looking over the label of the NSAIDs she had for when she got headaches.
“Do you know if we stock any child-friendly fever reducers in medical?” Maria questioned Clint, glancing up at him.
“I can look,” Clint offers, giving Yelena another glance. “Look, I can take her to medical so they can look her over if you’re busy--”
“It’s fine,” Maria interrupts him. She can feel the warmth of Yelena’s flushed cheek squished against her shoulder. “She’s only napping. I can do this.”
Clint gives her a weird look before a grin crosses his face. “You can totally do this.” He agrees with her, as if sensing her underlying hesitation. “She’s just sick with a cold or something. I bet that other place didn’t vaccinate her or anything like that. Probably was punishments for being sick too.”
Maria hadn’t thought of that. When Clint carried Yelena in and said she was sick, Maria’s first thought was why Yelena hadn’t told her. Did she not trust Maria?
The fear of being punished for something as simple as a cold made a lot more sense, if not making Maria’s blood boil. What child was terrified of seeking help when ill?
The answer lay curled up in her lap, a sweating shivering mess.
Yelena lied to her. The signs were there but Maria had just assumed that Yelena was having an off day. Getting snippy at breakfast, refusing to eat, raising her voice…
If Yelena had a fever all day not to mention an upset stomach and the congestion Maria could clearly hear with each raspy breath the girl took, she’d be pissy too.
Clint disappears to hunt down child-friendly medication, an oversight that Maria should have thought of but didn’t.
Maria feels like she’s flying blind when it comes to Yelena.
She met the girl as Alyssa and never once thought that the tiny girl with neatly plaited braids would be a double-agent and murder a soldier before disappearing with sensitive information.
Maria had given the girl her phone number, had opened up to her, and had become fond of her. When Alyssa disappeared into the night, some part of Maria hoped that it was a mistake. That the past day was one big nightmare that she could wake up from.
Maria was kept awake at night, vivid flashes of the bruising on Alyssa’s collar and peeking out from under the sleeves of her school uniform. She kept wondering how many more bruises the girl was covering.
Maria tossed and turned for months after that, wondering if there was something she could have done to change the outcome. She saw Alyssa and she saw abuse. She saw the little girl that she had once been, hiding from her father’s wrath.
Human trafficked child soldier didn’t even cross her mind.
Maria had assumed that Alyssa had died or simply continued whatever training she was under. Two years and not a word until Maria gets a call in the middle of the night from a payphone.
Being the deputy director of an intelligence agency, Maria nearly denied the call and rolled over to go back to bed. But something in her told her that she had to answer, a gut feeling urging her into answering.
There’s a child on the other end, a little more mature but definitely the little girl that Maria knew.
There’s a quick flash of ‘what am I doing?’ that flickers through Maria’s mind when Yelena quietly reminds her of the words she said to her.
Maria had promised sanctuary when she thought the little girl was Alyssa Daniel, a child being abused by her soldier father.
But Maria pauses and remembers the girl before she killed a man and before she stole sensitive information. She asks the girl where she is.
It’s pouring rain outside but that doesn’t deter Maria as she changes out of her pajamas. She grabs her gun because she doesn’t know that she’s not walking into an ambush. She’s pretty sure that if she called Fury that he would have told her to ignore it and sent soldiers to apprehend her instead.
Maria shows up and is greeted with the sight of the girl she knew as Alyssa hunched in on herself inside a phone booth. The child is soaking wet, her lips a violent shade of blue as she held the phone cradled between her cheek and shoulder, listening to the dial tone. There’s blood on her clothes, her hands and face, her hair, the keypad… Maria doesn’t know if it’s hers or someone else’s. The rain had washed most of it away but a lot still lingered.
The child is wearing a uniform. Some sort of suit akin to a SHIELD uniform but it’s so tiny and looks wrong on a child. The uniform is tattered and sliced in some places, something dark that is not water seeping through the black uniform.
Maria had only ever seen Alyssa wearing her hair back. It was always in braids, neat and precise. Now her hair is a mess, starting to frizz in the back and limp strands hanging around her face and plastered to her skin. The light, almost platinum blonde color draws attention to the red blood crusting into the strands.
Maria crouches in the doorway of the phone booth, an instinct from when the girl was much smaller and unsteady on her feet. The child in front of her looks down at Maria and the commander finally sees why she called.
The person in front of her was a shell of a child, her eyes empty and dull. She had nowhere else to turn and Maria had no doubt that she wanted to get out.
The child finally opened her mouth and introduced herself. Yelena suited her much more than Alyssa ever did. There’s a Russian accent there that wasn’t there before.
Maria takes her in. She has to fight Fury about what to do with her. He wants her thrown in a cell. Maria wants her to get help.
Yelena didn’t have to call her. She didn’t have to reach out knowing what she would be walking into. Maria raised her voice at him. Reminded him of Yelena’s age. Gestured to the bruised and beaten child beside her who was wearing nothing more than a large shirt that hung around her knobby knees.
Fury then asks her what she thinks they should do with her sarcastically. He mentions that she can’t go into foster care because that would be a liability. No SHIELD agent was going to look after her after knowing what she’s done. She was dangerous.
Maria thinks of the way Yelena looked in the phone booth, standing on her last legs as she gathers all the courage she can to reach out.
Maria says she’ll take her. Fury laughs at her but Maria insists and he tells her that the Deputy Director cannot raise a child. He tells her that if she does this then she will not have his support or his help.
Maria weighs her options before she tells him to fuck off.
Yelena Belova becomes her ward.
Maria has no fucking clue what she’s doing. She doesn’t know how to raise a child nevertheless a severely traumatized child soldier.
Yelena sleeps with handcuffs and Maria does her best not to break down and regret her choices. When Yelena sleeps at night, Maria scours the internet.
She looks at parenting websites. She looks at stories of girls who had been kidnapped and trafficked. She looks at fostering books. She researches trauma responses and abuse presenting in children. She researches signs and symptoms and support. She researches milestones a child Yelena’s age should be hitting.
Maria spends night after night hunched over her laptop to try and find some semblance of understanding of what the fuck she was doing.
Fury keeps reminding her that she can undo her choice any time she wants. That she can say the word and they’ll cart Yelena off.
Maria doesn’t understand his hatred. She knows he still keeps blue raspberry jolly ranches in his pocket because Alyssa had liked them. She understands his feeling of betrayal but Yelena absolutely refuses to go near him unless Maria is holding her because she was raised to read body language and she knows just how much he hates her.
SHIELD isn’t the ideal place to raise a child but Maria tries.
And when Yelena peers up at her after Maria has tucked her in at night and says ‘I love you’, Maria is reminded of why she did it all in the first place.
The door to her office opens and Clint holds up a bottle of medication with a grin, giving it a shake. “Bingo.”
It’s not too long after Maria has coaxed Yelena to take the medication that she’s called for an all-hands-on-deck situation.
Maria carries Yelena up to the command deck because she’s still the Deputy Director and her agents are relying on her.
Maria stands on the command deck, a sick sleepy child propped on her hip as she gives orders and dares anybody to mention it. She can feel Fury’s glare at the girl in her arms but she ignores him.
Yelena barely makes a peep throughout the whole thing. Maria can feel her watching, tucking her head against the crook of Maria’s neck to peer out behind a curtain of sweaty hair.
When the whole ordeal is over with, Maria doesn’t stay to do the casualty reports or after-mission logs. It’s not her job, even if she usually did it anyway. The child in her arms took precedence.
That night, Maria tucks Yelena into bed after giving her a bath and changing her into pajamas. Yelena’s a little more coherent, her fever has gone down but not yet broken. Yelena nuzzles into the sheets with a soft sigh as Maria sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her back.
“‘m sorry I lied,” Yelena murmurs to Maria.
“It’s alright. I’m not upset,” Maria reassures her.
Yelena inhales a raspy breath, letting it out with a small cough. Her eyes flutter shut as she settles down.
When Maria is almost sure that Yelena is asleep, she drops a kiss to the top of her head and stands. “Goodnight, Yelena. I love you.” Maria turns to grab her laptop on her desk to do some research on sick children when Yelena speaks up again.
“I love you too, mama,” She murmurs so softly that Maria almost missed it.
Maria froze, her hand still outstretched toward her laptop as her head snaps to peer at the child that had finally succumbed to sleep.
Maria doesn’t know how long she stands in the middle of her quarters for, staring at the child sleeping in the cot in the corner.
She’s not mother material. She never had a mom, she doesn’t know how to be one. She never wanted to be one.
That night, Maria lay in bed and listened to Yelena’s breathing as she thinks things over.
My name is Maria Hill and I have a daughter.
She doesn’t hate the thought.