“I-- I need to find Natasha…” Yelena looks up at the Widow standing before her. “Can you help me find Natasha?”
Natasha must be so worried.
There’s a look on Ana’s face… pity? Why was it there? Yelena’s heart drops into her stomach and sits there like a pile of lead. “... Ana?”
Ana slowly shakes her head. “I’m sorry--”
Yelena can’t breathe. Her chest hurts and her eyes water as her knees go weak. “Don’t lie to me!” She snaps out, trying to drag a breath into her lungs. Ana takes a step toward her.
“She saved us all…” Ana’s voice is soft and she continues to speak but all Yelena hears is white noise. Her knees give out and she slumps to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.
Natasha can’t be gone. She can’t die. It was impossible. Time and time again has Natasha escaped death.
Yelena needs a body. She has to see the body. She’s learned from Dreykov that you have to see the body and confirm the kill.
Ana kneels in front of her, her hands gently reaching out to grasp Yelena’s shoulders. Her lips are moving but Yelena can’t decipher the words. She stares at her lips and like her mind was trudging through molasses, it takes a few moments for the dots to connect in her head.
“You need to breathe.” Ana tells her.
She’s suddenly aware that she’s holding her breath, her lungs screaming for air that she’d denying them. She inhales sharply and then the air comes crashing back out in the form of a sob.
She tries to climb to her feet, stumbling as she furiously wipes at her face and at the tears that won’t stop falling. Ana’s calling to her but Yelena ignores her, brushing her touch off as she makes her way toward the door.
She needs more information.
The news hail Tony Stark a hero but it takes a few Google searches before Yelena finds one that mentions her sister in those lost. Her phone is getting new messages like crazy and they’re all from Natasha, coming in one by one as her phone struggles to keep up with the sudden influx of messages sent from years ago. Yelena escapes back to her safe house where she tries to calm down and think rationally.
A body. Yelena needs to see a body. She refuses to believe it until she sees proof. She paces in her room, her hands shaking as she tries to remember how to breathe.
She doesn’t sleep that night.
There’s no body but there’s no funeral either. Tony Stark had a grand one where he was sent off by his friends and family.
And Natasha Romanoff, Yelena’s big sister? There was no body so there was no funeral.
Where was Yelena supposed to pay her respects? Where was Yelena supposed to go to mourn?
Yelena doesn’t even know how to mourn in the first place.
Everything feels the same but different at the same time.
Yelena immediately sets upon leaving to head to Ohio
Yelena holds her own funeral with the headstone she purchased and settled under the cherry blossom trees near where she and Natasha had spent three long years as children.
She stares at the name on the gravestone before everything seems to hit her at once.
She falls to her knees in the dirt, tilts her head back, and wails.
Yelena doesn’t know how to grieve. The Red Room never taught her how and she’d never had to learn before.
Upon further research on how to make the gaping hole ripped in her chest go away, Yelena discovers that there are five stages to grief.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Yelena doesn’t know how to accept death. How is she supposed to accept the fact that the most important person to her is dead?
How is that fair? Yelena just got her back.
Why did the world take her away again?
DENIAL
Yelena settles between tipping from trying to come to terms that Natasha is dead and refusing to believe so.
Natasha can’t be dead. She wouldn’t have died. She would have fought to get back to Yelena, the blonde-haired woman knows it. Natasha promised that they would be back together again. She promised that they wouldn’t be separated again.
There’s still no body and Yelena still has no proof that she’s dead.
That doesn’t mean the ache fades when she calls Natasha’s phone and it goes to voicemail.
Just because Yelena refuses to believe that Natasha is dead means that the loneliness hurts any less.
ANGER
It’s easy to be angry at dead people because they can’t defend themselves. You can blame and blame and blame and they can’t argue back.
Yelena’s angry at Natasha.
How dare she come back into Yelena’s life, make these promises, and then die. How dare she be so selfish to leave Yelena all alone. How dare she become Yelena’s rock and person of comfort and then die.
How dare she leave her.
Natasha deserved a happy ending. She deserved to fall in love and have kids and do whatever she wanted with her life. Natasha deserved all that and so much more.
Natasha tried to convince Yelena of that too but there is no happy ending for Yelena.
How can she be happy when her sister is dead?
BARGAINING
They say it was a self-sacrifice. Yelena doesn’t know who started those rumors but she wishes that they’d just shut up.
There’s no way Natasha would do that.
Some part of Yelena whispers into her ear that it is exactly something Natasha would do.
Well, if Yelena was there then she could have convinced Natasha not to do it. She could have convinced Natasha that there was another way. That she needed to come home. That Yelena needed her more than the world needed her sacrifice.
Yelena could have made things go differently if she was there.
But she wasn’t. She wasn’t there and Natasha is still dead.
DEPRESSION
There’s no body in the ground but Yelena leans against the headstone because it makes her feel closer to Natasha. She’d sit there until her butt goes numb and the bitter chill sets in as the sun set and stars poke out in the sky.
Yelena falls asleep curled up against the headstone more times than she can count. She presses her forehead against the cold marble and pretends that it’s her sister’s forehead. She aches for warm arms to wrap around her and her sister’s voice to reassure her that everything would be okay.
Yelena spends so much time at the grave that there’s an imprint in the dirt where she sits and the headstone is starting to wear down at the same spot where she presses her forehead and cries.
Melina and Alexei attempt to reach out to her but she shuts them down. While she had accepted them into her life she still wasn’t on good terms with them. Her father trafficked her and her mother headed the chemical subjugation experiments.
Natasha was the only one to apologize to Yelena and ask for her forgiveness.
Yelena only trusted Natasha and now she’s gone.
Natasha’s gone and she left Yelena behind.
Yelena wonders if it would be easier to join her sister as a rotting corpse and finally gain the freedom and peace she hadn’t experienced since she was six.
She whistles and the wind answers her, caressing her face gently and wiping away her tears because it knows that she’ll never get a reply.
ACCEPTANCE
It’s nearing the first anniversary of Natasha’s death when Yelena is approached at her headstone by a woman who tells her all about the person who killed Natasha.
Clint Barton, also known as Hawkeye.
The anger at the world is channeled toward this man and for the first time in a year, Yelena sets upon a mission.
Natasha is dead and she’s not coming back. She’s dead and she left Yelena behind but perhaps it wasn’t her choice.
Yelena suits up and finds a strip of paper in the pocket of one of her vests as she’s loading up. She pulls it out curiously and turns it over in her hands only to see the smiling faces of six-year-old Yelena and eleven-year-old Natasha.
A fresh wave of grief washes over Yelena and steals her breath away and it’s like she just found out Natasha died again.
Yelena pressed her forehead to the photograph, tears filling her eyes when she realizes that she doesn’t have any of her and Natasha as adults and that she was holding the most recent photo of them.
She pressed her lips to the photograph before tucking it securely into the vest pocket closest to her heart and continues to suit up.
She was going to kill Clint Barton for her sister. For herself.
She still lets out a whistle that she knows nobody will answer before she leaves Ohio for the first time in a while to head to New York where Clint would be if she did her research correctly.
Natasha’s dead and Yelena’s going to avenge her.