Chapter Text
Natasha brings out the orange slip of paper at dinner. “Mom,” she says, gathering Melina’s attention from where she has been listening to the winding down of Yelena’s animated tale of the games she’d played at preschool that day.
Mom. Eleven months into their Ohio mission, most days the word rolls off her tongue as if it has always been there, but that is acceptable, as long as she can turn it off just as easily when it’s all over.
It’s just a word, after all.
She slides the orange half-sheet across the table, and Melina picks it up from next to her plate. Natasha’s hands return to her lap, fingers twisting together as she watches Melina’s sharp eyes scan the paper. “They sent another one,” Natasha says, careful to keep the hope out of her voice. “A reminder.”
“What is it?” Alexei asks, leaning toward her so he can see it too. Melina hands it off to him instead, and though Natasha’s eyes follow the movement like a hawk, it doesn’t look like a calculated move to get him out of her space, as so many had been in the beginning. They are partners now, like she and Melina are. Widow and Widow-in-training. Iron Maiden and Red Guardian.
No longer the center of attention, Yelena lunges out of her chair and almost upsets a dish of peas with her insistent grabby motions toward the bread basket. Alexei’s hand slams down on the other side of it in an attempt to catch it, and the bowl flings upward to make peas go cascading everywhere anyways, nearly hitting the ceiling before clattering back down on the table.
“Oops,” he offers Melina before slouching off to get the dustpan amidst peals of Yelena’s laughter for the chaos she has caused.
Toddler Terror and Indulgent Father Figure.
“I can just go as a ghost,” Natasha offers, turning back to Melina. She bites her lip. “That would only require a bedsheet, and we can use the one off my bed. Maybe some holes for eyes but if you don’t want to ruin the sheet I can just try to look through it and be extra careful not to bump into anything—”
Melina picks up the paper from where Alexei discarded it and taps it with two fingers right over the word party. “It is amazing any learning gets done in American schools at all,” Melina says, but by now she has that resigned look on her face that Natasha knows means she’s won, like when Alexei convinced her that children’s television programs with talking vegetables or large flightless yellow birds could be good for English language development skills, or anytime they dare bring Yelena into the cereal aisle of the grocery store and expect to leave with any fewer than three boxes of Lucky Charms or Cocoa Puffs. Natasha’s heart makes a leap in her chest. “We should get you both proper costumes; it will be good for the cover if we appear invested in this.” Melina turns to Alexei, who has finished with the dustpan and emptied the scattered peas into the trash. “I have book club with Mrs. Morrison and Mrs. Smythe on Saturday—perhaps you can take them then?”
“We’re gon’ play dress-up?” Yelena asks, dropping her spoon back into her bowl as she tilts her head at them.
“A whole day of dress-up,” Alexei nods, clearly holding no grudge over the spilled peas. Though it was partially his fault, not that that excuse would ever have made a difference in the Red Room if she had made such a careless mistake as that. But not here, in this brightly lit dining room in Ohio, filled with the smells of Melina’s home cooking. “It is for the big holiday we told you about last week, remember? Everyone gets a costume and Natasha has a party at school and then we will go re-appropriate candy back to the proletariat that night.” He catches Melina’s eye. “It’s called trick-or-treating. Sounds fun, huh?”
“Candy?” Yelena’s eyes practically bulge out of her head, obviously paying no heed whatsoever to Alexei’s Soviet faux pas. “Candy?”
“Well, you have to dress up first,” Alexei laughs at her single-mindedness. “What do you want to be, ‘Lena? Anything you want. Like I always tell you, shoot for the stars, girls. Princess, witch, fairy…”
“Firefighter,” Melina says helpfully. “Mailman.”
Alexei’s forehead scrunches. “I’m not sure you have the right idea about Halloween, honey…”
“Yelena loves the mailman.”
“She tried to take him out at the kneecaps.”
Melina nods. “Yes…he runs very fast for an American postal person.”
“Ballerina!” Yelena interrupts, and a sudden silence falls over the table, Natasha’s blood freezing in her veins. She immediately looks down at the table, then further to her lap, and in her periphery she can tell Melina can’t look at Yelena either, has become cold and still in her own chair. Out of all the things… Yelena as a ballerina is unthinkable, blonde curls bound up into a bun so tight that her scalp aches, her toddler fat stripped away, feet and tiny ballet slippers stained red with blisters set to bursting. Yelena does not belong in that hall with its vaulted ceilings and lacquered wooden floors, her little legs bare to the instructors’ hungry gazes, dark specters always ready to devour them from the sidelines, to pounce at one misstep. She does not belong in that place of pain and misery.
There was a time when Natasha had wanted to be a ballerina too, watching them spin across the floor, beautiful and wild and free and perfect.
“Ballerina, huh?” she hears Alexei asking through the whistling in her ears. It is nothing like her and Yelena’s whistle, but more the roar of a great rushing river, making everything seem distant and far away. “How do you know such a big word already?”
“School,” the girl babbles back at him, clearly pleased with herself. Alexei says something else Natasha misses, and Yelena responds with a giggle just as Melina taps Natasha’s foot with hers under the table.
Natasha jolts in her seat, then blinks at Melina gratefully, refocusing in on the conversation at hand. It seems impossible for Yelena not to know the word ballerina and all it entails, but Natasha reminds herself that Yelena has never seen the inside of the Red Room either. Her spirit, already too large for her little body, is yet unbroken.
“And what about you?” Alexei turns to her. Natasha swallows, eager to appear as if nothing is amiss, despite her hands still being folded and clammy in her lap.
“I…I don’t know,” she admits, and the words are scarier than she expects them to be. It is only play pretend, but still, no one has ever asked her what she wants to be before. Her path has always been laid out in stone…set in marble, hard and unforgiving like what she is to become.
She had chosen a ghost in her initial request, because that was the most efficient way to fulfill the requirements, but…
(She had chosen ghost because she already is one, a shadow of a girl pretending to be real, to be more than a marionette on strings.)
“I…” she tries again, hating the sting of failure. “I want to be…” Stymied, she stops once more, biting her lower lip.
(She had chosen ghost because she is already compromised, from the moment she’d begun to believe in the softness of Melina’s touch and the infectiousness of Alexei’s smile.)
“I want…”
(She had chosen ghost because in truth she is already dead, like all of the other girls in the Red Room, just lined up and waiting for their body bags.)
Natasha shakes her head, letting it hang limp between her shoulder blades. “I don’t know, Dad.”
“Then I’ll just have to help you decide,” Alexei replies heartily regardless, as if it is a decision to be made without a care in the world, and she can only smile back uneasily. “We will find the perfect thing for you; don’t you worry, Natasha…”
“Ballerina?” Alexei asks her later, after the girls have been put to bed. He is perceptive when she least expects it, though she has read every single one of his weekly reports submitted back to Dreykov and she should know better than to underestimate him by now.
“It is part of the training,” Melina says easily, folding back the covers. The words roll off her tongue as easy as the rest of the lies, though this one is ostensibly true, even if it is only the tip of the iceberg, as the Americans would say. The understatement of the year. Lacking the whole enchilada.
Such a colorful language they have to obscure deceit.
Melina slips into the bed and sits back against the headboard, hand reaching for the book on the nightstand.
“Oh?” he asks, climbing in with her. The bed bounces slightly as he gets settled, pulling the comforter over himself and turning to look at her, propping himself up on one arm over the pillow. It will have to be fluffed tomorrow, Melina thinks, or it will appear unnaturally flat. Not that any of their neighbors should be peering in through their windows, but Madame B did not train her to be sloppy. “Well, there is a ballet studio by the Target; we can enroll her.”
Of course, he wants to upkeep her skills. She should have expected it. Gymnastics is one thing, maintains flexibility and strength among all the major muscle groups of the body as well as improves balance and coordination, but ballet provides other things, poise and discipline and grace. “Oh. Yes. We wouldn’t want her to get sloppy,” Melina agrees, withdrawing her hand. Alexei is feeling talkative; she will not be reading tonight. “Yes, that’s a good—”
“No, I just meant…” Alexei makes a gesture in midair with one large hand, one she would have posited meant he was momentarily stuck in English, if she had not seen him do it on the day they shot their wedding and honeymoon photos, fumbling before her in her wedding dress before this whole charade in America began. It is just Alexei, like most of him that he has brought with him to Ohio, whereas so much of her and Natasha is not them at all. “…you know, if she misses home.”
She smoothes the bedspread with her hand, giving her time to think, to formulate an appropriate response. It occurs to Melina perhaps she has overestimated him after all, how little idea he truly has about the Red Room, about Dreykov, about how they were trained and what it means to be a Widow. Or perhaps she has underestimated herself, and Natasha too. Their ability to keep secrets. Their ability to hide their pain, even from those closest to them.
Widows aren’t supposed to get close.
Alexei prods her side, and she does not flinch away from his touch. “Why are you being so weird?”
“It’s nothing,” Melina tells him with a small shake of her head. She reaches up to turn out the light, plunging the room into darkness. Her home, where she resides the best, unseen. Alexei is silent on the other side of the bed, and she settles down on her left, facing away from him, arm coming up as always to rest above her head though she cannot cuff herself here. She shuts her eyes and pretends she does not see Yelena in a black leotard behind her eyelids, face and bodice soaked through with fluids as she had not been allowed to stop. She pretends she does not see the whiteness of Natasha’s already pale face, staring down at her lap.
True Widows do not feel pain, or fear.
(Except when they are supposed to.)
Alexei lets out a breath like the big rumble of a Siberian cave bear, but he is not yet given up—or better yet, asleep—as she had hoped. “If it bothers you, you know she’ll change her mind by next week,” he says softly. “She always does.”
And Melina wonders how it was that she was placed on a mission with a man such as this, how Dreykov, the master manipulator, ended up with a Red Guardian so disinterested in controlling everything and everyone around him. How he ended up with a kindness to him that even rank and serum and a shield couldn’t erase.
It has been so long since she has met a decent man.
(No wonder Dreykov put him out to pasture.)
Natasha gets home from school every day that week and thinks about who, or what, she wants to be.
On Tuesday, she carpools with Avery to gymnastics first, and when she is dropped off by Avery’s mom Yelena is getting her blonde hair braided by Melina. She asks if Natasha wants hers done too, and with the older Widow’s fingers working their way gently through her hair Natasha decides maybe she wants to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a movie they watched in class last month. At least then she would have an excuse to ask for this again, and let them both pretend together that she is not leaning into Melina’s touch as her fingers weave together the red strands.
On Wednesday, Annalise and Rebecca are arguing about which Disney princess is the best, Ariel or Belle or Jasmine, and then all the girls are involved in the debate. “What do you think, Natasha?” Rebecca asks, turning to her in a not-so-hushed whisper during what is supposed to be math worksheet time.
“I like Belle,” Natasha says, because that’s Yelena’s favorite and lies are all she knows here in Ohio. She goes home and thinks maybe it’s more fitting for her to be Ariel instead—the Red Room the sea in which she had been drowning only to be swept out here to Ohio and finally find her own legs on which to stand. Ohio is the land Ariel had found, full of gadgets and gizmos aplenty and all its other wonderful, nonsensical things, like the gas station slushies that can exist for no other possible purpose than to hear the sound of Yelena’s laughter as they turn her sister’s entire mouth blue.
On Thursday, Melina picks her up with Yelena already in the car and takes them to the local library, where she and her sister spend an hour crawling through stacks of books on their hands and knees. Like costume choices, there are too many to choose from, and as always Natasha brings home a whole stack and Melina’s proud smile.
On Friday, she thinks she might just ask to be a ghost after all, and save everyone the trouble. Alexei has a half day at the North Institute every other week and Yelena’s preschool is a half day every day, so the both of them are already home when she arrives. Yelena is chasing him through the small garden Melina set up in the backyard on tiny toddler legs, alternately shrieking and growling like a great wild animal, but this is Yelena, and Natasha doesn’t even blink at her strangeness. Melina asks if she wants to join them in trampling her handiwork in that warm yet deadpan way of hers, but Natasha just shakes her head and slinks off to her room.
The question comes to a head at dinner that night, chicken and mashed potatoes and salad with varying amounts of ranch—a splash for each Melina and Natasha because she had copied the older Widow when they first arrived and now she likes it that way, and nothing on Yelena’s as she is perfectly happy to eat with her hands and Melina is perfectly happy not to have to clean drips of dressing off of the table or off her toddler. Alexei’s lettuce and carrots, of course, are practically doing the backstroke.
“So, girls,” he says just as Natasha shovels the last bite of food in her mouth. “Tomorrow’s the big day. Well, not the big day, but it is the shopping trip day. Have you decided on your costumes? Natasha?”
“I don’t know yet,” Natasha says with a shrug of her shoulders, still so cognizant that it is not her place to choose. Melina and Alexei should be making the choice, something appropriate to their covers and hers, and yet they offer this wide open world of possibilities to her instead.
“That’s okay!” Alexei says, his voice still cheery despite Natasha’s failure to make a decision. “We’ll just see what they have at the store. Yelena?”
“Dinosaur!” Yelena shouts happily, banging her fork against the plate.
“A…dinosaur?” Melina asks.
“Yeah!” Yelena scrunches up her face and makes a low growling sound in her throat that ends in a yowl.
“Are you sure you don’t want to be the dinosaur wrangler?” Melina tries with a perplexed glance at Alexei, who is struggling not to smile. “A zookeeper? Something more…humanoid.”
“No, dinosaur!” Yelena insists. “They’re big and they chomp you up!”
Melina turns to Alexei fully, who suddenly becomes very interested in clearing the table, grabbing up Natasha’s and Melina’s empty plates as well as his own, despite that one still having a mound of food on it. He does not touch Yelena’s, as they’ve made the unfortunate discovery when taking unfinished food away from her that she has a ferocious bite. “You said you were going to show her the one about the large pumpkin.”
“Well…it is the next auditorium over…and the signs with the numbers on them are so small…” Alexei hedges, hurriedly scrubbing at the plates in the sink. “It’s not like it says above the door in big letters, Jurassic Park.”
“You took her to watch this in a movie theater? She’s three!”
“Am not!” Yelena cuts in with a pout. “I’m almost four.”
“That’s the same thing as three,” Natasha tells her, and the look of absolute betrayal on Yelena’s face is almost comical.
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Is too.”
“Is not!”
“Is—”
“Natasha,” Melina says, and she retracts guiltily. Yelena sticks her tongue out at her from across the table, kicking her feet against it hard enough to make the plates rattle. “And what is this ‘Jurassic Park’ movie rated, hmm? PG-13?”
With no more dishes to hide behind, Alexei returns to the table and leans in close to her ear, whispering, “What, she is spy in another country. Adds at least ten years, no?” He pulls back. “And it is, you know, educational. Historical.”
“Hey, no secrets!” Yelena pouts. She scrambles out of her big-girl-chair—they’d had a high chair for the first few months until she’d tried to do a headstand in it and Melina had decided something closer to the ground was safer—and tugs on Melina’s sleeve, eyes big and round and completely innocent of the horrors the Red Room can inflict, surely much worse than anything that could be in a PG-13 movie. Yelena, whose screams feel as if they can level the house and who is anything, anything but subtle, especially when she thinks she has a secret. Spy by association, at best. Their cover, a prop piece, at worst.
Yelena deserves more than that, and Melina recognizes that too. She has to.
“I can be dinosaur, right, Mama?”
“She can be, right?” Natasha cuts in quietly. “You said whatever she wanted.” Even if it’s just this once.
“Is this movie at least scientifically accurate?” Melina sighs even as she pulls Yelena into her lap. Natasha sets her elbows on the table, leaning forward to catch the slight wistfulness in her tone that happens whenever Melina talks about science, masked as it usually is by her dry tone and quick, efficient sentences. But it’s there all the same, just like it’s there when Melina and Alexei sit up late going through the paperwork from his job and she coaches him through the next day’s duties, patiently going through the lab processes and formulas again and again.
It should be Melina infiltrating the North Institute, but it isn’t, and Natasha doesn’t know why. She supposes Melina doesn’t get to be what she wants either, all three of them spiders caught in a web of someone else’s making.
Melina kisses the top of Yelena’s head as the girl wraps her arm around her neck, settling into her lap like she belongs there. “Please, Mama?”
“Of course you can be whatever you want to be,” Melina says, and Natasha breathes a sigh of relief. “As long as they have it at the store. Deal?”
“Deal!” Yelena shrieks happily, and Melina turns back to Alexei.
“Now, tell me about the science of this educational movie about the Jurassic Period…”
Alexei gulps. “Well, actually, it takes place in the present day…”
“Oh?” Melina raises one dark eyebrow, and Natasha smiles, relaxing as Alexei begins a rambling explanation involving mosquitoes and amber and islands with electric fences, causing Melina’s eyebrow to inch ever higher. Any further costume discussion is tabled for now, but it doesn’t matter.
Melina cares. She is a Widow, but she still chooses to show them again and again, to push this forbidden fact into Natasha’s brain over and over. She cares, and she is teaching Natasha that it’s okay to care too.
As she looks at the woman she wishes really was her mother, Natasha already knows somewhere deep in her chest what she is going to be.