Chapter 3
There were a million missions after that. The Black Widow executed them flawlessly, unquestioningly. A million kills, infiltrations and seductions. The Black Widow did them all.
Every order was followed without question, and Yelena watched from inside her mind. No thoughts, no feelings. All she could do was watch and the widow completed assignment after assignment.
Her body was controlled by the red room.
Her mind was not her own.
Her heart was buried and frozen and dried up.
Yelena Belova was a Black a widow and nothing more. A soldier, an assassin, and a spy. Useful, flawless, unquestioning, but replaceable as every other girl under Dreykov’s control.
But one day, and she didn’t know how long it had been, Yelena had control of her mind once again.
The Black Widow stood over the dying deserter.
The deserter crushed a vial in her hand before the widow could stop in, and everything froze.
Mama. “Get up, Mommy! Pain only makes you stronger, remember?”
Papa. “My girls are the toughest girls in the world.”
Natasha. “No! You can’t take her! I won’t let you take her!”
Bianca. ”We can change our stories.”
The man she killed along with his four children. “P-please! Spare them, I beg you! Anything you want, just please-“
The old woman. “Sister? Is it my time to go now?”
The congressman she’d whispered to until secrets were pouring from his lips. “Maybe we can go someplace a little quieter?”
The little boy with the potential to be a threat. “Mommy! I’m scared!”
The millions of other faces and missions and pains she’d caused - that the red room, that Dreykov made her cause - and all the feelings that had been gone came flooding in.
Yelena Belova tried to stop the bleeding of the woman beneath her as the emotions flooded and pounded her and that heart of hers ached back to life.
She wished she could tell herself she was free. That she could run away and live a normal life and never have to think of the red room again. But she was a killer. She was raised one and she would never not be. And the red room would never stop hunting her.
The woman died then.
The vials were Yelena’s responsibility now. Saving the rest of them was her responsibility.
She had no idea how to do it.
She was no different, no better than the rest of them. She could fight, she could infiltrate the facility and save who she could, but she couldn’t save them all. She could go out raging, but she would never be able to take the whole red room with her.
So she sent them to who she knew could do it.
Her sister, in all but blood. Natasha.
And in the meantime, Yelena would let herself go a little.
She’d get out of skin-hugging battle suits, uniforms, and ballet clothes. She’d get rid of tight, unforgiving buns and anything that brought her mind back to the red room.
She bought a vest with pockets that made her smile.
She got her ears pierced in multiple places, and she loved how they dangled.
She bought clothes, watched movies, and waited.
She never let her guard down, but she gave herself some freedom. She didn’t know how long she would have that.
She slept only to be woken by nightmares and drowned them in whiskey and hot cocoa and a soft blanket. She never would’ve had comforts like that in the red room.
When she heard soft, familiar footsteps, she knew her waiting was over.
“I know you’re out there.”
The voice that answered was so familiar and yet so different. “I know you know I’m out here.”
“Then why are you skulking about like it’s a minefield?”
“Because I don’t know if I can trust you.”
Yelena smiled a little bitterly, “Funny, I was going to say the same thing.”
The two sisters fall back into their banter and old ways, despite all that’s changed.
Yelena finds that she can still love. That she hasn’t let go of her love for her старшая сестра.
Her sister had come back, and, as always, she would help Yelena.
“I love you too much!” Her own voice, so full of a child’s carefree joy, echoed in her broken mind.
Natalia had smiled then, the twist of her lips quickly covering the shocked expression that Yelena swore had been on her face just moments before. And that soft smile… “I love you too, little sestra.”
Yelena remembered how she’d glowed at that.
Her sister’s hair was now long and red, not her earlier short almost-boyish blue cut. Yelena wondered when that had changed.
There is a fight, and the sisters escape not unscathed, but it’s ever so small in the grand scheme of things and Yelena can’t bring herself to honestly worry. It was fun, despite the pain in her arm, so who cared?
Yelena weaves a story of the life they could’ve had. And every part of her begs for something like that. It’s a dream, a myth, but she wants it anyway. Natasha’s smile makes her heart feel full, and she longs to make up for the time they’ve lost. They could buy an apartment, get jobs, go shopping and bake treats like normal girls would do. That heart in her wants it so bad it hurts.
(It could never happen. Yelena has known this since her mother was shot and her father let her be taken. She would never have a normal life. She was a spy and a killer. She didn’t know how to be anything else.)
It doesn’t matter. I don’t need that. I can save the other widows and that will be enough. Yelena tells herself this, over and over. It doesn’t change the twisting in her chest.
Natasha is helping her. So maybe it’ll actually work.
Her big sestra has a friend who lends her a helicopter, which is better than anything Yelena could’ve gotten, so she’s good with it.
The first thing they do is pick up their father.
Breaking your old man out of jail is more fun than it sounds.
When more bullets than the helicopter can handle are raining down on it, Yelena let’s some of her training kick in and finds the best way to stop it. Her blasts do more than bring a smirk to her lips.
They start an avalanche of snow.
It should’ve been a cause to worry, but, whether it be an after effect of all her conditioning or just her personality, Yelena didn’t worry much anymore.
All she could think of was the cold snow rolling over the ground and sending up clouds of ice. All she could think of was the destruction and it’s raging, rolling, roaring life. Her heart reached for it, for a reason she couldn’t explain.
“This would be a cool way to die.”
When Alexei was safely inside the helicopter, Yelena was glad.
The minute he opened his mouth, she regretted it.
Exasperation and anger and-
“Why the aggression, eh? Is it your time of the month?”
Yelena’s rage burst through. He was acting like everything was okay. Like she was still the same little girl she was once. Like he was really trying to be a good father.
“I don’t get my period, dipsh*t. I don’t have a uterus.”
“Or ovaries.” Apparently Natasha felt the same way.
They were soldiers, and they weren’t going to break apart over it. They needed Alexei, but that didn’t mean they couldn't be angry.
He was treating them like it wasn’t him who let them go, who incited all this pain in their lives.
“You are going to be alright. Do you know why it’s going to be alright?” Alexei had looked at each of his little girls in turn. “Because my girls are the toughest girls in the world. You’re going to take care of each other, okay? And everything, everything’s going to be fine.”
It was so f*cking far from fine.
“Yeah.” Yelena wasn’t holding back her spitfire anger anymore. “That’s what happens when the Red Room gives you an involuntary hysterectomy. They kinda just go in, and they rip out all of your reproductive organs.” She gestured furiously with her hands. “They just get right in there, and they chop it all away. Everything out, so you can’t have babies.”
Her father was disgusted by that, though not remorseful. “Okay, okay, okay! You don’t have to get all clinical and nasty!”
And Yelena, despite the flames in her heart, slowed. She had been trained not to let feelings get in the way, and she wouldn’t. “Oh, well. I was about to talk about Fallopian tubes, but, okay.”
When he hugs the girls, Natasha shoves away. But Yelena is frozen in place by the screaming in her heart. He is proud of her kills. He doesn’t compliment her vest, her earrings, her makeup, her humor, or anything that’s really her own. He sees her as the soldier, the assassin, the strategist, the spy, the seductress, and the things that the red room made her to be. He heard of her involuntary surgery. He could see her scars and how much she had been changed. And he was f*cling proud of it?
Mama, what do I do with a heart filled with so much rage?
When Melina (her mother, who’s alive, thank whatever god is out there) let’s them in, they sit together at the table in the same arrangement they’d done since she was three, it was like they were before.
Yelena let’s herself believe it.
She tries to hold onto it when she learns Melina was behind the mind control she went through.
She’s still trying to believe it until Natasha - her sestra who had always used to be there for her - says that they were never really a family. That it never really meant anything.
Now, Yelena knew they weren’t related by blood. But the three of them were all she knew. Her mother was the one who picked her up when she scraped a knee, her father was the one who swung her around and sang with her. Her sister was the one who played with her and taught her adventure. That was her life.
“-there’s nothing to hold on to.” Natasha’s voice is bitter and pained as she leans forward with the force of her words.
There’s nothing Yelena can do to stop herself as her broken f*cking heart floods and sends her tumbling into rage and pain and tears and words she never meant to let out.
“Please don’t say that! It was real. It was real to me. You are my mother. You were my real mother! The closest thing I ever had to one. The best part of my life was fake and noneof you told me.”
The widow in Yelena would’ve been shocked at the pain, the truth, in Yelena’s voice. But all Yelena could do was fight to stop her tears.
“And those agents you chemically subjugated around the globe?” Yelena shoved out of her chair as she said it.
“That was me.”
She was gone and out of the dining room before she really knew what she was doing.
When Alexei comes in, she’s still trying to shove that heart of hers back together. Trying to figure out which pieces that were broken over the years and utterly shatter in that moment go where. Trying to build back up the walls with the brick and iron and glass in her mind and bind up her bleeding.
He talks to her, self-centered as always, and she can’t help but be fondly exasperated. Even as she feels like she’s about to explode.
“You know…”
The feeling builds.
She tells him how she had idolized him. How it’s far from that now.
And builds.
“Get out!” She commands, though her heart hears the plea.
And-
“Bye, bye, Miss American pie.”
It breaks.
Tears slip down Yelena’s cheeks as she watches her father sing to her.
“Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.”
A smile tugs helplessly at her lips and she ducks her head.
“Them good ol’ boys were drinking whiskey and rye.”
“Turn on my song!” She had ordered so long ago.
“Saying ‘this’ll be the day that I die.”
Yelena let’s herself join in. It’s quiet, hesitant, but still she sings.
“This’ll be the day that I die.”