Chapter 1
It starts with a girl named Mischa stationed in Budapest. She’s the first Widow that Yelena successfully hunted down and freed.
Mischa is nineteen with short dark hair that sticks up and manages to stab Yelena in the thigh before the antidote is sprinkled into the air.
Yelena kneels next to her and explains what happened. Mischa looks up at her, a lost and confused look on her face. Yelena offers out a safe place to stay along with her hand. For a few moments, Yelena is so sure that Mischa will bolt.
But Mischa’s hand moves and grips Yelena’s. Yelena takes Mischa to the safehouse and gives her a warm meal, a hot shower, and clean clothes. Yelena pretends that she doesn’t hear Mischa break down in the shower as she sobs at the loss of control for so many years.
Mischa stays with Yelena for six days before she reluctantly leaves to go and join Melina’s farm.
“There’s just not room right now and I need to help others like you. Like me.” Yelena had explained. “But you’ll never be turned away should you come back.”
Mischa huffs before nodding her head and she takes off.
Viktoria is next. She’s twenty-four and had bright red hair that was so curly that it made regular hair ties snap.
Viktoria, like Mischa, is angry. Only, Viktoria has a harder time dealing with her emotions. She’s so angry all the time and has violent outbursts over seemingly nothing.
Yelena learned to lock up the sharp objects and put away anything she didn’t want to be broken. She wants to help Viktoria.
Yelena uses her phone late one night and looks up ways to cope with anger. She shares what she learned with Viktoria. Viktoria sticks her nose up at them until Yelena manages to get Viktoria to try and mediate.
Viktoria slinks into Yelena’s room the next night like a shy child as she quietly asks Yelena to mediate with her once again.
Yelena never mentions how it helps herself. How she can deal with the pain and anger she holds just a little better each night.
Viktoria leaves two weeks later but still calls Yelena each night to meditate, even if there is nothing but silence between the phones.
Daria was the youngest Widow so far. She was sixteen and so very tiny with mousy brown hair that hung around her shoulders. She’s skittish and nearly bolted as soon as Yelena freed her.
Daria walks around on her tiptoes and doesn’t breathe a word. So Yelena buys her a notebook and some gel pens and Daria suddenly gains a way to communicate.
Yelena treads carefully around her because any loud noise or sudden movement will spook Daria. But then Daria starts to seek Yelena out simply to be in her presence. Yelena hated the way that Daria loomed over her at times.
“You’re like that one spooky little girl in the ghost films,” Yelena had muttered and would pull Daria into the chair next to her or into her lap. Daria never minded. She liked being close to Yelena.
Daria stays longer than Mischa and Viktoria. She’s content to just be while Yelena works on preparing an extraction for the next Widow.
Yelena brings home eighteen-year-old Varvara, a freckled girl with deep red hair and a whole lot of spunk. She was worried that Varvara would frighten Daria but the two become thick as thieves and Varvara manages to get Daria to laugh for the first time.
Yelena watches them sometimes and smiles.
When the time comes, the girls leave as a pair and head to Melina’s farm. It isn’t until Daria leaves that Yelena realizes the girl had left sticky notes hidden about the safehouse for her to find. She wakes up and shuffles to the bathroom the next morning only to be met with a lime green sticky note on the mirror.
TODAY IS ANOTHER DAY
SMILE <3
Yelena had grinned and saved the note. Whenever she has a bad night, waking up dazed and coated in sweat with visions of blood and screams echoing in her head, she pulls out the stack of sticky notes and she looks at them.
Yelena has purpose. This is what she was meant to do.
Mischa comes storming back into Yelena’s life three months later, angry tears in her eyes as she hits at Yelena in frustration.
Yelena wraps Mischa up in her arms, preventing her from hurting anyone or herself. Yelena holds Mischa until she dissolves into sobs and falls into Yelena’s embrace.
“Why would you send us there?” She demanded and Yelena doesn’t understand what’s wrong until Mischa tells her that she found Melina’s old logs on the chemical subjugation and her part in it.
Yelena holds her close and whispers apologies. She doesn’t make excuses. She doesn’t say that Melina is sorry or regrets it or has changed.
That would just invalidate the woman’s feelings. Yelena knows exactly how that would feel. So she apologizes and offers comfort.
Mischa doesn’t mind sleeping on the couch until one night she barges into Yelena’s room, nearly inconsolable, begging for a pair of handcuffs and a bed frame to lock them to.
Yelena shuffles over and lets Mischa climb into bed with her as she digs out her own pair of handcuffs. Mischa’s wrist is heavily scarred from years of using handcuffs and night terrors that leave her hand slick with blood in the morning.
Yelena lets Mischa sleep in the same bed with her and encourages her to take part in the meditation she did with Viktoria each night.
The meditation helps and Mischa settles down some but she still has nightmares.
“You know…” Mischa whispers to her after a particularly bad night. “The first time I saw you, I thought you were an angel. I thought my time had come. You saved me. I never even thanked you for it.”
Yelena was just doing what she thought was right. The next morning, under the rays of the sun, she looks down at her own scarred wrist and thinks.
There’s an odd little shop where a leatherworker sits and Yelena sees their display in the window and pauses to admire their work.
She enters the shop and asks about custom leather bracelets. She returns to the shop a week later and picks up her purchase. A leather bracelet with a strip of silver wrapped around the center, a feather stamped into the metal.
It sits on her wrist and the pressure can fool Yelena into thinking she’s wearing the handcuffs at night. The feather reminds her of Mischa.
Yelena orders more. Mischa’s wrists no longer bleed from the metal cutting into them when she twists at night. The bracelet becomes a permanent fixture on Mischa’s wrist, just like it was on Yelena’s.
Yelena sends three more bracelets to Viktoria, Daria, and Varvara.
Mischa stays with Yelena. The couch becomes hers.
She wants to be helpful to Yelena. She tells Yelena how Melina didn’t like the Widows to help her.
Yelena understands the burning need to do something. To try and wipe out the red in their ledger. Mischa starts to watch Yelena’s back and helps her gather intel on their next Widow.
The next Widow is twenty-five. Her name is Alice and she is the first Widow Yelena looked after that takes self-mutilation to a whole new step.
Late at night, Alice will rake her nails down her arms and yank at her platinum blonde hair as she pleads for forgiveness to the air.
On these nights, Yelena stays up and sits with Alice, gently gripping her wrists and whispering about places she wanted to go and things she wanted to do.
They were free now. They could do whatever they very well liked.
Yelena shows up at the leathermaker’s and asks for something different this time. The leather bracelets are much more arm braces, climbing up Alice’s forearms and protecting her from when she claws at herself at night.
When the time comes for Alice to move on, Mischa goes with her to keep her company on the journey.
Yelena arrives home from scoping out the next Widow to see her door unlocked. She clutches her gun in her hand, her heart in her stomach as she enters.
It’s only Daria and Varvara, the duo helping themselves to the fruit roll-ups that she had in the pantry.
They’re terse and buzzing with anxious energy. Yelena sets down her gun and asks her if they want to talk about it.
Varvara is all too happy, after she’s mashed up her fruit roll-up into a ball and shoved it into her mouth, to rant on about how Melina wants to school her and Daria. “We don’t want that.” She tells Yelena.
Yelena listens, leaning forward and props her chin up on her fist as she cocks her head to the side. “Have you told her that?”
Varvara stops her rant and her face goes pink and then she quietly asks Yelena if she thinks Melina would listen to what they want.
Yelena immediately understands the issue. She pulls out some sleeping bags she bought exactly for this kind of situation and lets the girls make a nest on the living room floor and stay as long as they want.
They’re teenagers so Yelena can’t dedicate days to tracking the next Widow. She can only be gone a day at a time before she returns with the hopes that the two hadn’t blown up the safehouse.
Then on a chilly day, Yelena tells Varvara to “put a fucking jacket on, Jesus you little heathen.” before Varvara tries to slip out into the frosty day in only a tanktop.
Varvara rolls her eyes and lets out a groan but grabs her jack as she says. “Sure, Ma.”
Yelena didn’t even realize the name until she glances at Varvara who had frozen. Varvara sends a lazy grin Yelena’s way as she busies herself with shrugging her jacket on. But Yelena sees the insecurity swimming in her gaze. So Yelena swats Varvara’s shoulder fondly. “You’re such a brat. I saw you roll your eyes at me, missy.” She teased and Varvara surges forward to wrap her arms around Yelena’s waist.
Yelena had never wanted kids of her own. Never thought it was possible after having her choice taken away. She doesn’t even think she’d make a good mom.
But Varvara, the little shit, doesn’t stop calling her Ma and there’s really nothing she can do about that, is there?
Daria hides more sticky notes right before she and Varvara leave to finally have a talk with Melina.
Yelena opens the pantry that night after a violent nightmare only to discover a baby blue sticky note on the box of fruit roll-ups.
MAKE SURE TO EAT SOME ACTUAL FOOD MAMA :-)
Yelena had told the girls that exact same thing over and over during their stay.
But this note is her favorite and she keeps it by her bed where she can see it.
The next Widow is twenty-two and doesn’t remember her name. She has a hard time hearing Yelena when she speaks and it takes five days before she admits that she’s relying on reading Yelena’s lips.
Yelena brings her books on baby names and sign language. The woman asks Yelena to pick out a name for her.
Yelena chooses the name Irina. It means peace.
With the work of a doctor paid for her silence, they figure out that Irina had gone deaf due to one of her handlers hitting her just a little too hard on the head and Irina quickly scrambled to learn to read lips to survive.
Yelena and Irina learn sign language together.
Irina leaves with a leather bracelet on her wrist and books on sign language in her bag, and Yelena with a new way of using her senses.
Mischa drops by to surprise Yelena. The safehouse is empty so Mischa waits, scones from Yelena’s favorite cafe ready as an apology gift for Mischa breaking the locks on her door. Mischa waits.
And waits.
Viktoria calls Mischa because she knows that Mischa had left to go pester Yelena. She tells Mischa that Yelena missed meditation with her for the past three days.
Mischa’s heart drops and she knows that something is wrong. She tries to tell the others.
“Maybe she just needed some space,” Melina suggests, far too busy in her work to listen to Mischa’s actual concerns, unlike Yelena who would set down whatever she was doing and give Mischa her full attention.
Then Yelena misses her check-in with Melina.
Melina finally seems concerned and tries to track down Yelena without causing any concern.
Yelena’s Widows catch on quickly.
Yelena Belova is missing and nobody knows where she is.
Varvara screams and yells when they won’t go looking for her right away. Melina called it a waste of time.
“We need to be strategic about it.” Melina tells her. “We can’t just run off at the drop of a hat.
Daria is the first one to remember the number Yelena gave them for extreme emergencies only.
The name and number of an Avenger.