Chapter Text
Breath (Reprise)
It’s never a good sign, getting a call in the middle of the night.
Especially when the call is from a Widow as independent and capable as Lerato.
Especially when she’s just down the road, in the house the Widows stay in at the other end of Melina’s property.
“What’s wrong?” Melina asks, forgoing pleasantries — there’s no need, and there’s no time. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Yelena.”
Her blood runs cold, every unthinkable possibility flooding her mind as her hand grips the phone more tightly. Had she gotten hurt? Had she left? Had she somehow failed her again, lost her for good?
“What about Yelena?” she forces herself to ask.
“She started screaming in sleep — woke up house. We got her some water, are trying to help, but…”
“But?” she prompts, voice coming out more harshly than she intends.
“She was screaming for you,” Lerato says quietly.
“Okay,” Melina says, softening at that. “Is okay. You did right thing calling me,” she assures her, already halfway to the car.
The vehicle’s barely stopped before she hops out, jogging up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom. She forces herself to open the door slowly, not risk distressing her further, but even with the extra care to ease into the room, Melina spots the mound of blankets flinch.
“Is only me, Lenochka,” Melina greets softly.
“Mama?” a small voice asks.
“That’s right, baby,” she confirms, walking over to sit next to her on the bed. “Mama’s here now.”
Yelena’s lip quivers as she takes a shallow inhale followed by a cough — a wet, violent thing that makes her whole body jolt. “Can’t…breathe.”
“Yes, you can, Lenochka. Come on,” she says, patting her thigh. “Sit up for me, hm? Up, up.”
She does as she’s told, wincing as she pushes herself upright.
“Shh, I know,” Melina soothes, brushing some hair — tangled and sweaty — off her daughter’s forehead. “I know. You’re okay. Look at me,” she orders, taking her chin in one hand and moving the other to rub her chest. “You feel my hand, yes?”
Yelena nods. “Yes,” she forces out.
“Good. Focus on that. Just focus on me,” she says, lightly squeezing her chin to keep her attention. “You can do that, yes?”
“Yes,” she croaks.
“Good,” she praises again. “See how I breathe in?” She takes a deep inhale. “And out.” She exhales slowly. “In.” She demonstrates again. “And out. Now you try.”
Yelena tries — Melina can tell she tries — but her breath gets caught halfway in her throat, the frustration making them even more rapid and uneven. “Can’t,” she sobs, pulling from her grasp and dropping her head in shame.
The pain in her voice pierces her — just like her scream on the swingset all those years ago.
“Yes, Lenochka, you can,” Melina encourages, immediately tipping her chin back up. She presses on her sternum more firmly. “Come on, baby,” she says, a small hint of desperation creeping into her tone. This should be working — the science supports it. “Have to keep trying. Have to keep trying for me. In and out.”
Yelena’s nails dig into her palm as she hyperventilates, eyes glassy and panicked. “Scared,” she confesses.
Yelena doesn’t say that. She never says that. What she must be going through, must be feeling, to admit that? It worries her.
She takes a deep breath and decides to try a different approach. One she learned not from a textbook but from a five-year-old in the backyard of an Ohio suburb.
“Come here,” she whispers, wrapping her arms around her tightly, cradling her head against her shoulder. “Don’t have to be scared. Mama’s got you. Is all going to be okay. You understand?”
Yelena nods, a bit of tension seeming to leave her body, but still, her breath hitches.
“Can feel me breathing, can’t you, Lenochka?” she asks, rubbing her back as she keeps her own breaths slow and even.
Another nod.
“Need you to try and match it, okay? Is very important,” she says, tone soft but serious, like when she told her not to play with matches or run into the street as a child. “Think you can do that for Mama?”
Yelena lets out a little cry but obeys. It takes a few more tries, a little more coaxing and cooing, but eventually, her breaths even out into a steady rhythm.
It’s still strange, Melina thinks, to be helping someone get their breath back when all she’s been trained to do is take it away.
“That’s better, yes?” she asks once Yelena has sufficiently calmed down. “You feel little better now?"
“Yes,” she says softly.
“Good girl.” Melina pulls back in order to look at her face — tear-stained but not as flushed as before. “You want to talk about it?” she asks gently. “Tell Mama what had you so upset?”
Yelena looks down at her lap, a few moments passing before she speaks. “I had bad dream. About Cuba.”
“About going back.” Melina nods in understanding.
“No.” Yelena shakes her head, raising it to meet her gaze. “About losing you.”
It’s then Melina realizes she’s been wrong all along. She must still have a heart because she feels it now — so broken it might carve out her insides, so full it might burst from her chest.
"I’m right here, Lenochka,” she whispers, smoothing down her daughter’s hair. “I’m right here.”
“Will you stay?” Yelena asks — so quietly Melina almost doesn’t hear her. “Will you stay until I fall asleep? Like you used to?”
Melina pulls her close again, kissing her temple as she settles them against the pillows. Holding her as if she’s a child.
And she is. Her child. Always.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Leap
Melina made it very clear they were not to get a trampoline. They were dangerous, they were an eyesore, and they were not allowed on her property.
Even still, she can’t find it in herself to be too mad for too long when she and Alexei arrive home from the market one day to see Yelena has set one up.
Not when she can see the excited twinkle in Alexei’s eye even as he’s admonishing her for disobeying her mother’s orders. Not when Yelena’s laugh — loud and carefree and so much like the one of that child she knew in Ohio — echoes for miles as she leaps. Not when Natasha lies, badly, about having had absolutely nothing to do with this insane plan before grabbing her hand and encouraging her to join in.
“No, no — I have no interest in silly jumping game.” Melina sighs, though she reluctantly allows Natasha to pull her up onto the springy surface.
“Good thing you don’t have to do any jumping, then. Just sit in the middle,” she quips, nudging her toward the center.
“Have things to do. Am very busy,” she asserts, arms crossed.
“Come on, Mama! Five minutes. It’ll be fun,” Yelena pleads.
“My idea of fun not making brain rattle in skull on deathtrap children’s toy.”
“Ugh.” Yelena rolls her eyes before doing an effortless backflip.
“We won’t let your freakishly smart brain rattle around too much,” Natasha promises, briefly lacing their fingers together and giving her hand a squeeze. Melina instinctively squeezes back and is struck with the thought that, for the first time, there is no longer anyone who will make her let go.
“You can trust us,” Natasha assures her, voice soft and sincere. “Trust me.”
Melina knows the trampoline is the last thing she’s really talking about, and it makes her throat feel tight and sore.
“Oh, all right,” she says, clearing it under the guise of ambivalence as she goes to take her seat in the middle. “Five minutes.”
The Red Room clipped their wings, and yet her girls help her fly — help her feel like the child she never got to be.
They jump, and for a moment, she is weightless. For a moment, she lets herself be lifted up. For a moment, she thinks that — despite everything — maybe they could all eventually be something close to okay.
Melina may have taught them how to survive, but it’s they who teach her something much more important: how to live.
“Can trust me, too, Natka,” Melina says softly that night as she helps her with the dishes. “You know this, yes? Am not going to let anything happen to you again.” It’s an empty promise, but she doesn’t know it yet.
She wonders if Natasha does. If there’s still some part of her that never left that dinner table in 1995, resigned to the fact Melina would always fail her.
If she does, she doesn’t show it. “Yeah, I know. Did you have fun on the trampoline?” she asks, lightly elbowing her arm, mouth curving into that crooked grin.
Melina gives her a noncommittal shrug, not about to vindicate the purchase with a positive review. “It was fine.”
“Fine,” Natasha repeats with a scoff. “Do you have any idea how much I sweat trying, and succeeding, to jump higher than Yelena—”
“Liar!” Yelena calls from the living room. “You so did not get higher than me!”
Natasha promptly ignores her. “—so you could catch some serious air, and all you’re going to give me is a fine?”
Melina ducks her head, biting back a smile. “I appreciate you including me and doing the hard work of jumping,” she says diplomatically.
Natasha smirks, toweling off the last dish. “I’ll always jump for you,” she vows.
Melina doesn’t know it yet, but it’s a promise she’ll die keeping.
Gone
It only takes two years. Two years of starting to feel like maybe she can be something before the universe puts her in her place. Reminds her that she is still nothing. That she is still air.
She disappears for five years and returns without her eldest daughter.
Wind
For a while, it happens like this.
Yelena spends most of her days lying in bed or staring at the wall, maybe trying to become nothing like her sister.
Alexei spends most of his working on one home improvement project or another, maybe just to prove to himself that things can be built and not just destroyed.
Melina spends most of hers either in the pig pens or the gardens, maybe just to prove to herself that there are things she can still keep alive. When she kneels in the dirt in silence, the gentle wind — Natasha's absence — has never felt so loud.
It doesn’t happen overnight, the change. It doesn’t even happen in a row. One good day before a bad week. One decent week before a whole impossible month, the scab ripped open and the wound bleeding all over again.
But eventually, Yelena gets out of bed and pledges to become a hero like her sister.
Eventually, Alexei uses the last of the nails to build a memorial to his daughter in the garden.
Eventually, Melina plants flowers next to it: the iris sibirica. Its colorful petals persisting through below-freezing temperatures.
Because that’s what Natasha did. She persisted.
Melina is a woman of science. She has never believed in signs.
But there was a time when Melina didn’t believe in love, either. Didn’t believe in family. Didn’t believe in much of anything at all.
So when Melina feels a soft breeze as she, her husband, and her youngest daughter kneel in the dirt in silence — a soft breeze that fills her with the same feeling of holding Yelena in her arms, of Alexei holding her in his, of her and Natasha holding each other that day on the trampoline — she chooses to believe that it is Natasha still persisting.
She chooses to believe that she herself is something so that her daughter’s sacrifice would not be in vain.
And she chooses to believe that Natasha is air: silent, invisible, but everywhere.