The Red Room is gone and yet Yelena still feels empty.
She’s pretty sure that she’s supposed to feel something. Relief? Happiness? Joy? But she still feels as empty as she did when she was under their control.
Yelena can’t stand the farm. She flees back to her safe house after the fight to lick her wounds and wallow in her misery. She then changes to a safe house in the middle of nowhere for safety and security.
She doesn’t understand why she’s numb. She’s not under the mind control, not anymore. She hadn’t been for a year. Why is she just now feeling lost?
Melina reaches out to her a week afterward. Yelena gets excited when she receives the text and sees the first few words
Yelena, it’s Melina
But then she reads on and the excitement fades when it’s nothing but coordinates of Widows nearby that Yelena could free.
I’ve mailed some antidotes to you already. They’re easy to administer.
Yelena doesn’t exactly mind helping to free the other Widows. It gives her something to do. But Melina never asked for her opinion. She gave her a mission like she was Yelena’s handler and just expected it to be done.
Yelena frees Widows and sends them to Melina. Some part of her hopes to hear her mama praise her. A ‘good job’ or ‘well done’ or even a ‘thank you’.
All she gets are more coordinates.
It’s almost like nothing had changed. Yelena kills people and retrieves her mission objective and completes the task.
Rinse and repeat.
She still feels empty and hollow inside. She feels numb. She just wants to feel something.
She doesn’t want to die but she doesn’t want to live like this.
Yelena drinks to feel something other than the nothingness threatening to consume her.
She feels like a person and it scares her because she hadn’t been a person in a long time. She bleeds and bruises and she wakes up at night with sobs crawling out of her throat and visions of blood as empty screams echo in her ear.
Yelena drinks more and more. She starts waking up hungover and she welcomes the pain because it reminds her that she’s alive.
She starts rescuing fewer and fewer Widows. Melina finally sends her a text.
Your rate of rescue is going down. I won’t ship more antidotes yet.
There is no ‘hi’ or ‘are you okay’ or any concern.
Yelena drinks a whole bottle of vodka and promptly throws it up an hour later.
She tightens the handcuffs just a little more each night, as if she could tether herself to the frame and her mind wouldn’t wander.
Her wrist bleeds each time she twists so hard that her skin breaks. It scabs over but the skin keeps breaking each night. Yelena likes the way it hurts.
She stares in the mirror in the morning. She will stand there and stare for hours because she feels like an imposter in her body. Like if she stares hard enough then she’ll find the Red Room still in her mind and still in control of her actions.
Yelena started spontaneously smacking her hand onto objects just to feel the sting and prove that she’s still in control of her body.
Then Natasha finally texts her.
Your vest is pretty useful. The pockets come in handy.
Yelena doesn’t know how to reply to that. She doesn’t know if Natasha actually cares enough. Yelena doesn’t know if Natasha will give a damn if she reaches out for help.
I don’t feel like a person
I feel like I’m drowning
I can’t sleep
I need you
Yelena deletes her replies and instead sends a thumbs-up emoji.
Yelena spends more on bandages to wrap her wrist than ammo for her weapons. She watches blood wash away down the drain in the shower and picks at the scabs on her wrist until she can watch red blood well to the surface.
A reassurance that she’s still alive.
She stops rescuing Widows. She can’t handle it.
The emotions in their eyes as they latch onto a fellow Widow and beg for answers that Yelena doesn’t have. Yelena sends each of them away to Melina because they remind her so much of herself.
The pain. The guilt. The oh god what did I do? as they wonder why their hands are soiled with blood of men they don’t remember killing.
Yelena finds a firefly for the first time since she was six and she delicately cups it in her hands and watches it glow before she burst into tears for the first time in a long, long time. She sobs in the backyard of her safehouse, wailing for someone to notice that she’s just so fucking tired of being a person.
She finally receives a text from Melina.
What’s wrong?
Yelena moves to finally relieve the burdens she had carried by herself for so long when Melina sends a follow-up text.
You haven’t sent any new Widows. Did you get sloppy and get caught?
Yelena squeezed the phone in her hand and drinks until her vision is fuzzy before sending a text back.
I hate you.
Alexei texts her to ask if she was still keeping up with her training.
You’ll get soft if you’re not careful.
Yelena slams an empty beer bottle against the wall and screams because sometimes she feels like all she is destined to do is destroy. She sends him only one text.
I will never forgive you.
Alexei sends one back days later.
For what?
Yelena curls up on the floor of her bathroom after consuming a whole bottle of vodka.
Yelena then starts getting nosebleeds. She’d thought nothing of it at first but they become more and more frequent.
A side effect of the mind control. Yelena just starts carrying tissues with her so she can jam them up her nostrils and feel her nose become stuffed as she remembers being suffocated.
Natasha sends her another text a month after the first one.
Things here have finally settled down. How are things with you?
Yelena stares at the text amidst the shattered remains of what was once a vodka bottle as she shakily types and deletes and retypes her answer.
Was it real to you?
The reply came quickly.
Of course.
Yelena feels tears blur her vision as she types out her reply.
I wish you were here.
Natasha takes a few hours and Yelena watches the three little dots disappear and reappear as Natasha tries to figure out what to text before she receives the bubble as she finally replies.
Are you okay?
Yelena stares at the question before she bursts into tears because she can’t remember ever being asked that.
I’m tired.
She finally manages to type out.
Natasha doesn’t reply and during another drinking binge, Yelena tries to search google for something but accidently sends a text to Natasha instead.
How to process emotional pain
Someone breaks into Yelena’s safehouse a few days later and Yelena is sitting under the cold spray of the shower, feeling the stinging of her wrist as she bleeds down the drain.
She doesn’t care anymore. Let whoever broke in come to kill her. She doesn’t care anymore.
The door to the bathroom opens and Yelena squeezed her eyes shut as the person approached.
“Oh little sister, what did you do?” The soft Russian makes Yelena blink blearily up at the figure of her older sister.
Tears well up in Yelena’s eyes as a sob breaks out of her mouth. “I’m so tired, Nattie.” She cries as Natasha turns the shower off and grabs a towel to put pressure on Yelena’s wrist. Yelena smacks her hand against the black boots Natasha wore just to ensure that she wasn’t a hallucination.
Natasha kneels on the wet floor of the shower and pulls Yelena against her. “I’m sorry. It’s okay.”
Yelena shakes her head. “I can’t do it anymore. I just want to feel something.”
Natasha’s hold is secure and she wraps her arm tightly around Yelena. “It’s alright. I’ve got you, little sister. I’m here now.”
Yelena breaks apart into tiny pieces in her sister’s arms on the floor of the shower in her safe house.