chaos
Yelena was very upset by the crying. That was what Maria said when she spoke over the cries of the young children as she asked Clint for the remote to Yelena’s tracker so she could take them outside. Maria glanced at Natasha, tilting her head to the side as a silent invitation but Natasha shakes her head. She was having a discussion with Clint before the kids got disturbed and she wanted to continue it as soon as she could.
Natasha hears the backdoor close after Maria and Yelena. She watches as Clint and Laura quickly soothe the sobbing children. Cooper is easily distracted but Lila continues to wail until Laura steps aside to feed her.
Clint turns to Natasha with a sheepish smile. “Where were we talking about before we were so rudely interrupted?” He questioned.
“Yelena.” Natasha replies and Clint nods his head.
“Right. Like I said, you should talk with Maria about it. She’d ensure that Yelena could be on your team,” Clint tells her with a soft grin, bumping his shoulder against hers.
“Isn’t pairing family up a conflict of interest or compromised?” Natasha inquired with a small frown.
“We’re all family anyway,” Clint shrugs his shoulders. “When Yelena is an agent, her team will become her family. She needs to trust that they’ll have her back and in turn that they’ll trust she has theirs.”
Natasha was unsettled at the thought of Yelena becoming an agent. Yelena was promised that she could become one at eighteen but Natasha didn’t want that kind of life for Yelena. She did so much to try and save Yelena from this type of life.
But talking things out with Clint helps. He points out how Yelena might feel about the situation and compares her to Natasha. Natasha didn’t even think about the guilt Yelena must be carrying around with her just like Natasha did. She didn’t think about how Yelena might have a burning need to try and make up for what she had done.
Clint is talking about how Natasha could speak with Yelena about it when a single gunshot goes off in the distance. Both of them are immediately on guard because nobody came out this way. The closest neighbor was miles away, the town even further. This gunshot wasn’t that far.
Cooper starts to wail again at the loud noise. Laura immediately enters the room with Lila.
Natasha’s immediate thoughts are how Maria and Yelena are outside and her heart drops. She moves to dart outside after them but Clint grabs her arm. “You don’t have a weapon.” He points out.
“I don’t need one!” Natasha says sharply. “Let me go!”
“I need your help protecting my children,” Clint tells her, and Natasha’s eyes fall onto the two young children in the room.
“I--” Natasha needed to get to her sister. But she knew that if trouble was out there then the farm was probably their target and she refuses to have the blood of any more dead children on her hands. “Fine.” She manages to get out through grit teeth.
The sound of a second gunshot has nausea churning in Natasha’s stomach because something is wrong. She can only pray that Yelena and Maria were safe and hiding. Maria was the commander of an intelligence agency and Yelena was the best child assassin. Surely they were fine, right?
Clint gets weapons and reveals that the master bedroom closet could be rigged into a temporary safe room in a pinch. The walls were lined with bulletproof material and the doors could lock from the inside. Laura is settled with the children, a cellphone, and a weapon before Clint and Natasha head outside.
Natasha has a gun in her hand as they listen for sounds of people moving. She strains but she can’t hear anything. They move further toward the direction the shots came from.
There’s nobody there. Not even Maria and Yelena. Natasha swallows down the panic that threatened to burst from her chest. She lets out a whistle, straining to try and hear the reply that always came.
She tries again. Find me .
She listens but there is no sound. No reply. No I’m here .
“Natasha!” Clint calls out and Natasha immediately moves toward him, her heart dropping into her stomach at the sight of the patch of fresh blood spread out over a patch of dead leaves. “Search the area.” Clint orders, his voice giving a barely noticeable shake.
Natasha finds the tracker kicked under a pile of leaves. It’s still in one piece and she tries to ignore the thought that it couldn’t be taken off without Yelena’s thumb being dislocated. She finds the remote that pairs to it nearby which meant that Maria had either ditched it or it was taken from her.
There’s a pager that Clint finds, bloodied fingerprints left on the grey case. Natasha knows that it’s Yelena’s. She had seen Yelena carry it everywhere with her like it was important. He also finds Maria’s phone, a dropped call with SHIELD still showing on the cracked screen. It looked like Maria and Yelena’s pockets had been emptied judging by the pile of items found next to the phone.
She finds the pile of vomit next to the drying pool of blood. It was nothing but bile and saliva.
Natasha can’t help it. She falls to her knees next to the spill of blood that had seeped into dying leaves and dirt, dragging a ragged breath into her lungs that don’t seem to remember how to hold air.
Yelena is gone.
She’s gone and Natasha can’t breathe. She can’t think. She’s supposed to be a Widow for fucks sake, she is supposed to be able to turn off her emotions.
This is why they teach Widows to not form attachments. This is the part of that attachment that makes them weak.
“Come on, Nat,” Clint reaches down to set a hand on her shoulder but she jerks away from his touch. “We need to get back and call for extraction and reinforcements.”
Natasha lets Clint pull her to her feet. She’s quiet the entire walk back, hoping that somehow she’d hear a response to the whistles from earlier.
She doesn’t.
Natasha packed their things after Clint told her to grab whatever was important, that they could go back for the rest later on.
Yelena’s not wearing her vest. It’s sitting on the bed along with the blanket Carol had gifted her. Natasha packs their things into the duffel bag that they brought. She doesn’t have enough space for all of their gifts so she leaves most of them behind.
She finds Maria’s bag next to the couch downstairs where she had been sleeping. Natasha pushes everything inside the bag and zips it up.
Six hours later finds her back at SHIELD headquarters, staring down at a conference table next to Clint and Laura who had their children in their laps. Coulson had shown up which meant that he had brought May and Skye as well. Bobbi and Hunter get there quickly.
Carol Danvers also shows up quickly, a grim look on her face as she enters the quickly filling conference room. She asks where Yelena is, that she got an emergency message and that she knew Yelena knew better than to leave one without a good reason.
Fury finally enters the room and everyone goes silent as he approached the head of the table. He clears his throat, his eyes scanning the agents in front of him before he spoke. “Nearly seven hours ago, rookie agent Yelena Belova and deputy director Maria Hill disappeared just behind the Barton household.”
The house was compromised anyway. Clint and his family would have to move. That’s the only reason Fury projects the location onto the wall behind him.
“DNA found on a pile of blood near the scene is a positive match for Maria Hill,” He pulls up an image of the blood that had been spilled on the dead leaves. “Along with her cell phone and the remote to the tracker that Yelena Belova had been made to wear to leave the premises.”
Another image is pulled up. “The tracker that Yelena Belova was wearing was also found at the scene along with a pager, a Game Boy, and some candy wrappers.” He eyes the group in front of him. “There were signs of a struggle for one of them. Bullet casings for the gunshots heard were not found.”
Natasha can barely focus on the Director’s words. She knew everything already. She was there. She smelled the copper tinge of what she now knew to be Maria’s blood. She saw the evidence.
Fury paused and Natasha tensed up when she saw him choosing his words carefully. “Because of the circumstances surrounding this abduction along with the rank of two important individuals disappearing, the world council has been briefed on the situation.” He holds his hand up to quiet the protests starting. “We are missing a Russian assassin and the deputy director of an intelligence agency. The decision was out of my hands.”
“So when do they arrive to tell us that it’s all our fault?” Hunter pipes up, his arms folded with a scowl on his face.
“Within the hour,” Fury replies. “I expect you to cooperate fully in order to aid them in what they need to bring our agents home.”
Even though they’re dismissed until the world council arrives there, nobody leaves the conference room. Carol and Bobbi take a turn with Cooper and Lila to give Clint and Laura a small break.
Natasha can’t help but think that if she hadn’t lingered back to ensure the safety of the children that she could have made it to them in time. She could have stopped it.
“We’re going to find them, Natasha,” Bobbi spoke up and Natasha looks up at her. “Alive.”
But Natasha knew that gunshot wounds were messy. The lack of bullets or shells indicated that two shots were still inside of Maria or Yelena. Judging by the amount of blood, it hit somewhere nasty. Without the required medical care, they’d bleed out or die from an infection.
It takes forty minutes before two members representing the world council show up. They ask a few clarifying questions as they start the case before they nod.
“Did rookie agent Belova seem like the type to snap?” The first one questions and Natasha’s head jerks toward him.
“No.” Hunter narrows his eyes at him.
“Her file states that she was raised to be an assassin for eleven years of her life,” The second says, a frown on his face. “Agent Romanov, you were also part of the program that trained her, is that correct?”
The attention was now on her. Natasha inclines her head, watching him carefully.
“Would you say that it was taught to not make attachments?” He asked and Natasha can tell where the line of questioning is leading.
She would do anything if they could get her sister back and Fury ordered them to cooperate. “Yes.”
“And rookie agent Belova was close with deputy director Hill?” He continues. Natasha clenched her fist under the table, feeling Clint rest a hand over it.
“Yes.” Natasha says in a neutral tone. The man turns to his colleague.
“Evidence points to rookie agent Belova snapping and taking deputy director Hill as a hostage,” He states aloud. “We are now opening an investigation against supposed ex-KGB assassin Yelena Belova.”
Chaos erupts.
“That’s utter bullshit!” Bobbi snaps at them.
“What evidence!” Carol demands with a glare.
“Quiet!” The first man snaps and Cooper lets out a whimper at the raised voice. He nods to his colleague who had hooked up his tablet to the projector. “How many of you were aware of Belova attacking a civilian in broad daylight?”
“She was not a civilian, she was a Widow,” Clint tells the man.
“There is no evidence of that,” The man retorts. He had the file of the incident pulled up along, pointing out the part where Yelena had stated she wasn’t sorry for doing what she did.
They pull up the psychological evaluation that Yelena took upon entering SHIELD, pointing out her delayed emotional development and how she could be prone to acting on impulse.
They pull up the mission report where Yelena had snuck aboard the plane.
They pull up the incident where Yelena snapped and knocked a few rookie agents out after they were bullying her.
They pull up the time where she stayed with Maria and the tracker she was made to wear had been turned off by an outside source for a few hours.
Evidence after evidence was piling up in front of their eyes to fit the psychological profile of a KGB assassin holding the deputy director of an intelligence agency hostage.
Natasha can deny it all she wants but they won’t believe her.
“What if the Red Room took her?” Bobbi suggests. “They were raised like she was. They--”
“It was our understanding that the Red Room was dismantled by agent Romanov as part of her defection to SHIELD,” The first man interrupts Bobbi.
“Will you have shoot on sight orders?” Laura finally spoke up for the first time and the room goes deathly silent.
“At the moment, Yelena Belova is considered armed and dangerous,” The second man says.
Natasha cannot take this. She abruptly stands, her chair screeching against the floor. She hears Clint call her name but she turns toward the door and moves toward it quickly.
The first man calls out to her, telling her to come back and sit down.
Natasha ignores him.
If they weren’t going to help her sister then she was. If it took her getting kicked out of SHIELD for doing so then…
It was good while it lasted. But just as Yelena swore to follow Natasha to the ends of the earth, Natasha would do just the same for her.