eve
Yelena waits until that night when the rest of the house was asleep to slip away from her big sister and trudge downstairs.
Maria was on the couch and to anybody else, they would think she was sleeping but Yelena knew better. She moves toward the body laying under the blanket and stood there waiting to be acknowledged.
Maria twists, peering up at her with one eye before she sits up slightly, the blanket falling into her lap. “Hey.” Her voice was soft as she eyed Yelena. “Are you alright?”
Yelena nods her head, moving to sit in the space that opened up when Maria sat up. She tucked her knees to her chest, Maria watching her closely. “Can we talk?”
Maria twists her wrist to check her watch, frowning when she saw that it was nearly one in the morning. Still, she nods her head. “Yeah. Of course we can. What’s up?”
Yelena glances at Maria through the dark. “You kissed my sister.” She starts there. Maria tenses up but nods her head.
“I did… are you here to threaten me for it?” Maria questioned. Yelena frowns, shaking her head.
“No. I know it was an accident,” Yelena was mainly there because Natasha had been so distressed about it. “Are you okay?”
Maria lets out a breath of air. “Yeah. I’m okay.” She reaches her arms out and Yelena shuffles closer to wrap her arms around Maria’s neck. Maria pulls her close and hugs her for a few moments. “Thank you for checking in.”
“Do you… even like girls?” Yelena hesitantly questioned. She knew that Natasha liked girls and Carol liked girls.
Maria was quiet for a moment and Yelena worried she pushed too far.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” Yelena mumbles, ready to drop things and go back to bed. But Maria’s hold on her tightens and pulls her closer.
“Don’t be sorry. I’ve… always kinda knew I liked girls. I’m a lesbian,” Maria confirms, pausing for a few moments before continuing. “I think I knew in middle school. I had a crush on a girl and like a fool, I asked her to a dance because I thought she liked me too.”
Yelena rests her head against Maria’s shoulder as Maria talks.
“She told everybody she knew and they called me Homo-Hill. That name followed me through middle and high school until I dropped out,” Maria rests her head on Yelena’s. “Right now only a few people knew. Nick, Phil, Bobbi, Clint and Laura, and now you.”
After a few moments of debate, Yelena spoke up. “Girls liking girls was not acceptable in the Red Room,” She tells Maria quietly. Maria tilts her head down and looks at her. “We were taught how to seduce anyone but we would be shamed each time it was with a woman. That Widow that I hurt… that you brought in? She taught me how to seduce girls, how to touch them and make them come undone. And then I’d be shamed for letting her touch me. For touching her in return.”
“I’m sorry.” Maria says after a few moments. “That shouldn’t have happened.” Maria pulls away so that she can look Yelena in the face. “It’s okay to like girls.”
“I know that now… Carol told me about it,” Yelena picks at her pajama bottoms. “I don’t like boys like other people… I don’t like girls either. I am an aromantic asexual.” Yelena peers up at Maria to see her reaction. “I don’t like people like that and I don’t want a romantic or sexual relationship.”
She waits, a pit forming in her stomach the longer Maria was quiet. Maria’s opinion really mattered to her.
Maria pulls her closer again, wrapping Yelena up in her arms, and kisses the side of her head. “Thank you for telling me.” Yelena sags against her at her words.
“Girls in the Red Room couldn’t have normal relationships anyway. But this is my choice. I have a choice and I can choose to make it,” Yelena tells Maria. “And you can pick a girl to date if you wanna. You can make that choice.”
Maria stares at her, an odd look on her face. “But not Natasha.” She says after a few moments, her face smoothing out. It’s an odd statement.
“No. Not Natasha.” Yelena confirms. “But I know it was an accident.” Yelena didn’t think Natasha was ready for a relationship. She also had this fear in the back of her head that Natasha was going to leave her. If she got into a relationship then Yelena might not come first anymore. And it’s selfish but Yelena needs her big sister.
“It was,” Maria confirms before her grip on Yelena loosens some. “We should get some rest if we can.
Yelena goes back to bed feeling lighter.
“Tuck the corners in,” Laura encourages. Yelena frowns, staring down at the half-wrapped gift in front of her as she tries to mimic what Laura had shown her.
Laura was showing her how to wrap gifts, something that Yelena didn’t think could be so hard. But the gifts were nearly all different shapes and sizes so they were all wrapped differently.
“There you go!” Laura praised as Yelena folds the sides in and then flips the flap closed without prompting. “Here.” Laura holds out a piece of sticky tape and Yelena tapes the edge closed. “You’re getting the hang of this.”
Clint was showing Natasha how to wrap her gifts while Maria kept an eye on Cooper, having already wrapped hers and placed them under the tree.
Yelena was folding the other side in when the sharp corner of the box her gift was in had pierced the wrapping paper and torn a hole. She winced, holding her breath as she glanced up at Laura.
“It’s okay. These things happen,” Laura’s voice doesn’t waver from the patient calm that she had been using. She shows Yelena how to cut out a small piece of wrapping paper and fix it.
Yelena still had to take a moment as she fixes her gift because she had made a mistake and hadn’t been punished for it. She knew that she wasn’t going to always be punished for things like that anymore but this was the Barton house, not SHIELD or the Red Room.
“Yelena, honey, are you alright?” Laura interrupts her thoughts and Yelena peers up at her.
“I’m okay,” Yelena promised as she patches the hole.
It was mostly the truth.
Someone was knocking on the front door.
They weren’t expecting anyone and Clint had been the one to answer it, a weapon hidden in his hand.
“Yelena!” He calls out a few moments later and Yelena perks up from where she was sitting with Maria and Natasha. “It’s for you!”
Yelena stands and moves toward the door, confused delight filling her at the sight of her favorite captain. “Carol!”
Carol Danvers in all her glory stood there. She had a canvas sack in one hand while she had a baby sling hooked over her chest, one hand protectively cradling whatever was in it to her chest. “My favorite baby agent!” Carol replies with a grin.
Yelena eyed the sling with a raised eyebrow before Carol pulls the sling open.
“Goose!” Yelena lights up at the sight of the orange cat nestled in the baby sling. Goose lets out a chirp and lets Yelena pull her from the sling. Carol grins as Yelena nestles Goose against her.
“Merry early Christmas,” Carol tells Yelena. “I’ve brought gifts.” She gestures to the sack. “And a visit from Goose who needed to make sure the human she adopted was okay.”
Goose kept butting her head against Yelena’s chin and chirping. Yelena knew that Goose could tell that she had been hiding the pain and wanted to comfort her.
Carol can’t stay long and unfortunately, Goose has to go with her when it’s time to go. But until then, Yelena holds the alien cat close and absorbs the comforting purring that she was given. Maria sits a little further away from her when she has Goose in her lap.
Carol was still her loud self with Cooper and Lila, causing them to shriek with giggles as she holds them up in the air.
The day before Christmas Eve was spent with Carol. Yelena looks forward to whatever Carol gave her in the package that had been placed under the tree. Carol was a great gift-giver.
When it was time to leave, Carol hugs Yelena so hard that she lifts Yelena off her feet. These hugs that feel stifling surprisingly feel safe coming from Carol. Natasha was subject to the same thing as Carol grins down at them.
While Yelena was a little sad letting Goose go, watching the orange bundle of fur be placed back into the baby sling was admittedly a little funny.
Yelena wasn’t sure she would ever get used to watching a human being flying without strings. Watching Carol fly off to go back home left Yelena with this sense of oddness about her.
If human beings could fly without any strings with just a little help, what else could they do?
Yelena wakes up on Christmas Eve to a panicked phone call from Skye.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!” Skye tells her as Yelena hunkers down in the bathroom to talk to her. “I can hear Phil making waffles downstairs and May is here!”
Yelena listens to Skye ramble on panicked until she paused to take a gasp of air in. “Skynet?” Yelena interrupts and Skye goes quiet. “Everything is gonna be okay.”
Skye lets out a long sigh. “Christmas is always iffy to me. I don’t know how to tell Phil that I’m really overwhelmed right now. I mean, it’s Christmas Eve, but I think I genuinely might throw up if Phil makes me wear a Santa hat to eat waffles.”
“Well, don’t you usually write letters to him?” Yelena asked. It was Skye’s idea for Yelena to write a letter to Natasha to tell her about Melina.
“It’ll be really awkward to give it to him with May here,” Skye mumbles, pausing before letting out a sigh. “God, I dunno why I’m calling you. You can’t do anything from there.”
“You called because you needed an ear,” Yelena explains, frowning slightly. “And… that’s not true.”
When Yelena gets off the phone nearly half an hour later, she immediately gets on a phone call with Coulson.
It not so many words, Yelena tells Coulson that Skye is having a hard time with Christmas and that he needs to lighten up on the apparent Christmas cheer. Coulson had apparently gone all out to try and give Skye a great Christmas but Skye had gotten burnt out quickly and was too anxious to say anything.
It’s the last thing that she thought she’d be doing to start her Christmas Eve but she does it for Skye.
Coulson is surprisingly sincere when he thanks her for calling him. He admits that he didn’t know how he should have gone about Christmas and Yelena ends up telling him something along the lines of how he should have just asked.
Coulson thanks her for calling him and tells her that he’s still learning about being a guardian. While he and Yelena are not quite being on favorable terms, they’re amicable toward each other and the phone call ends with Coulson wishing her a very nice Merry Christmas.
By the time that Yelena and Natasha finally make it downstairs, Laura had made french toast, swaying in the kitchen as she hums Christmas tunes. There’s a change in the atmosphere that is palpable. Everyone seems a little brighter and while Yelena wishes to enjoy it, it also unsettles her. She figures that it’s just her instincts yelling at her because all her previous Christmases were awful.
Almost immediately after breakfast, Laura passes Lila to Clint and then kicks them all out of the kitchen so that she could cook.
They gather in the living room where Clint immediately sets up a stack of Christmas movies for them to watch.
Yelena curls up in her big sister's lap as they watch movies. It reminds Yelena of when she was young and would do the same thing to watch television. Natasha idly traces random shapes onto Yelena’s back, something that Yelena adores.
Yelena recognizes one of the movies that was playing. She had watched it on the television when she was about five or so back in Ohio. Only watching it this time was nothing like Ohio.
Sure, she’s sitting in her big sister’s lap and watching television. But Lila is babbling wildly to no one while Cooper barely sits longer than increments of ten minutes. Clint is trying to distract the kids with the movies while Maria, who probably had never seen Christmas cartoons, watches the television with unusual interest.
By the time lunchtime rolls around, Clint passes Lila to Natasha briefly while he disappears into the kitchen. He returns twenty minutes later with popcorn and hot cocoa.
All these treats are not part of Yelena’s usual diet. Once again she has that creeping feeling of suspicion in the back of her head that she tries to shove away. She can’t remember the last time she had been so content and relaxed enough to fall asleep in the afternoon. But she does just that, warm and full as she melts against her big sister.
She wakes up to the smell of something very good wafting from the kitchen. Laura seemed to be a god in the kitchen and Yelena had yet to eat one thing that wasn’t good.
Yelena will admit that she and Natasha paused and stared when they saw the spread of food that Laura had prepared and set out on the table. Yelena doesn’t think she’d ever seen so much food for so few people anywhere other than on television.
Natasha and Yelena did take a little while to eat. Laura had to keep pushing food onto their plate to get them to eat because it was just so overwhelming. Clint seemed giddy throughout the whole meal and as soon as they finished eating and they were cleaning dishes up, Clint disappears from the table, returning as they were washing the dishes with a large cardboard box.
Clint sets it onto the table with a thud and he waits there with a wide grin until the table had been cleared. Yelena had let Cooper out of his high chair when he squirmed uncomfortably and tried his best to escape on his own. Yelena didn’t mind holding the toddler anymore, he seemed to settle down in her arms. Yelena had discovered that bouncing the toddler on her hip could cause him to giggle and she loved the way that it sounded.
“Okay,” Clint runs a hand over the closed box. “We managed to get another set for Maria too.” He sends a smirk the commander's way.
“Clint, just open the box,” Laura chuckles and Clint obeys, opening the box to reveal fabric with patterns of white, bright green, and cherry red. “Matching pajamas.”
Yelena watches as Clint pulls out set after set of identical pajamas in Christmas colors, checking the tags and passing them to the correct person.
Even Cooper and Lila had a pair, albeit much smaller and they were sleepers with zippers instead of two pieces.
Yelena does think it’s funny when she emerges from the bathroom in her pajamas, seeing the others dressed in theirs. It’s like the matching sweater thing all over again.
They watch more Christmas movies, going over what Clint declared were the best ones that he had saved for when Laura could be there too.
Yelena shifts in Natasha’s lap. The pain was back again and she was ignoring it once more. The movie did a pretty good job of distracting her.
Around nine at night, when it was dark out, Clint tells them to get jackets and shoes. Yelena was embarrassed to step out of the house in the pajamas, something that Maria and Natasha shared with her, but she still pulled her coat on and followed Clint and Laura.
They manage to squish everyone into one car and Clint drives them to a neighborhood twenty minutes down the road.
Yelena gets to witness how each how decorated for Christmas. Lights, blow-up characters, projectors, tinsel, window clings, each house seemed to try and outdo its neighbor.
Yelena leans against her big sister, taking in the sights of the lights and decorations. Clint drives slowly through the neighborhood as they admire the decorations.
They were all quiet as they take in the sights, even Maria peering through the window was silent in awe.
Just before bed, Clint has everyone stack their wrapped gifts under the tree. Yelena watches anxiously as more gifts are piled under the tree. It made her think of what she had wished for as a child. This was the kind of Christmas that she bragged about to her friends when she was trying to fit in.
When Yelena goes to bed that night, she stares up at the ceiling deep in thought. Natasha asked her what she thought of her first proper Christmas Eve.
“It was the best one I’ve ever had,” Yelena says quietly, turning to glance at her sister. “I felt like I was going to be attacked because it was so nice and I’m not used to that.”
Natasha’s smile wavers slightly. “I felt paranoid too.” She admits, wrapping her arms around Yelena and pulling her closer. Yelena rolls over to lay on top of her sister and takes a moment to admire their matching pajamas.
“I love you,” Yelena says, smiling up at her sister.
“I adore you,” Natasha replies, grinning down at her.
Despite the pain and paranoia, Yelena thinks this is easily one of her favorite memories that she will remember forever.
She’s excited for Christmas day.