Chapter Text
Yelena tightens her grip on her half of a photo strip, holding onto the half of herself she is afraid to lose. Tears prick at her eyes, but when she arrived, she was crying, and a stern woman with hatred carved into the lines on her face told her that crying is a weakness that would get her killed before her next birthday (not that anyone cared when that was), so she bites her lip and makes up her mind to be strong like her father would have wanted. He told her every time she was afraid that his girls were the toughest in the whole world, and Yelena couldn’t bear the weight of his disappointment when he found out she wasn’t as strong as he thought. She forces herself to hold it together and to prove him right.
Still, she longs for her big sister’s hand, her arms wrapped around her, her warm voice assuring her that nothing could hurt Yelena as long as her Natasha had something to say about it. She begged to keep her sister next to her, screaming and pleading in the way that always made Melina give in. It should have worked. Nobody had ever resisted her before. But Natasha’s older—she always will be—so a guard grabbed each of them by the arms and ripped them apart, carrying each of them to a different room for training.
Now Yelena walks into the dining hall next to a different redheaded girl, a stranger whose name she doesn’t even know and who is certainly not her sister, not even close. She scans the room for a familiar face, searching for the warmth of her family’s fireplace in a room set ablaze by rage. A black-haired woman stands over a group of older girls, and Yelena almost breaks from the line to run to her before the woman turns around and she realizes it isn’t Melina at all. Hardly even looks like her, really. Just another phantom that no amount of wishing can make real.
She takes her seat at a long table where each chair has a number plastered on the seat. Yelena is seventeen—an age she already worries she may never reach. The hatred-filled woman’s voice echoes in her head, telling her to remember her number. Fill her thoughts with it. Unless she is good enough to make herself memorable, she will be referred to only as number seventeen.
She wonders what Natasha’s number is. Not that she’ll ever know. Natasha will always just be Natasha to her.
The girls around her already eat in perfect synchronicity. Yelena tries to fall into their rhythm, timing each motion of her spoon into what the Red Room was trying to pass off as soup so it lined up with her companions.
She is always just a breath too late.
From across the room, Yelena hears the voice she has spent the past three years learning to recognize and to listen to and to trust. Faint. Little more than an echo. But it’s there nonetheless. Her heart pounds against her ribs. Her sister is here. Her sister is here and everything is going to be okay again. They could keep each other strong. They would lace their hands together and hold each other up and nothing would hurt them or separate them. She breaks attention for a moment and catches a glimpse of blue-stained red hair and somehow manages to meet vibrant green eyes from across the room. Yelena can’t help the smile that crosses her face. And she waves like she did when she saw her sister coming up the driveway when she got home from school.
Natasha looks away.
Yelena’s smile falls. She stuffs her spoon into her mouth to stop herself from crying again and crosses her arms. Numbers Sixteen and Eighteen look at her funny, but she doesn’t care. If her sister doesn’t want to see her, that’s fine. Then Yelena doesn’t want to see her either, no matter what the sinking feeling in her chest says.
But when Natasha stands up to put her dishes away, Yelena pretends her stomach isn’t begging for more food and darts after her. All eyes in the room land on her. She pretends not to notice them too. For an instant, she and Natasha are all that exist in the world.
Yelena stands on her tiptoes to put her dishes on the counter and whispers, “Nat, I’m scared,” into her sister’s ear. She prays the use of the nickname is enough to break through the hard shell Natasha has already retreated into.
And for a second, she thinks her scheme worked. Natasha’s eyes flicker down to meet hers, her eyebrows knit together and her mouth turning down into a frown. She sets her plate down so suddenly she may as well have dropped it. All that’s left is for Natasha to grab Yelena’s hands and they would break out of this terrible place together, strike out on their own and live a life on the run. Maybe they’d find Melina and Alexei again too and just go back to Ohio. The world was theirs to explore, and they’d wipe the red out of their pasts and get to be normal.
But Natasha refocuses herself on her environment. Fixes her mouth back into a neutral line. Refuses to look at Yelena, who finds herself choking back a scream. What did she do so wrong that her big sister, her hero, doesn’t want to be around her anymore? How had this terrible place already ruined them both?
Natasha walks away. And something inside Yelena breaks that she’s not sure she can ever repair.
She stalks back to her seat, starving and disappointed and betrayed. Sixteen and Eighteen offer no comforts—just fall back into the terrifying monotony of life in the Red Room. Yelena stares at the table, struggling to read the graffiti former trainees carved into the concrete top. A sharp pain bites into her chest, reminding her over and over again that Natasha had not chosen her.
Her whole life had been built on the idea of her big sister. When Natasha did something, Yelena had to do it too, even when Natasha and Melina told her it was a bad idea. Natasha started playing softball, and Yelena begged Alexei to take her to practices so she could learn too. It took three softball-sized bruises on her knees and countless tears and a doctor’s visit after she took a bat to the head before she realized the sport wasn’t necessarily for her. Natasha auditioned for The Nutcracker with a local ballet company (at Melina’s urging), and that Christmas, Yelena asked for a pair of ballet shoes. Yelena’s first class was at the same time as her big sister’s, and when two different teachers led them to two different rooms, she started crying. Natasha had to leave her class to comfort her.
Yelena spent her sunshine days running in Natasha’s shadow, mirroring her motions and praying for her sister to tell her how proud she was. Everything she did was so she could be more like Natasha.
And now, it was like their life in Ohio together was nothing to Natasha. She was still Yelena’s big sister—but Yelena wasn’t Natasha’s little sister.
Three quick, harsh taps on her lower back break her free from her own mind. And a little bit of hope numbs the ache she doesn’t yet know is heartbreak.
When Natasha and Yelena were still in Ohio and needed to talk about something without Alexei and Melina knowing, they would tap each other three times over the course of the day. Hands brushing under the dinner table or one finger giving a bit more pressure when Natasha pushed Yelena on the swings. Natasha would come get Yelena once Alexei and Melina were asleep, and they’d sit in the hallway and talk until they had gotten everything off their chests. Usually, they fell asleep there, heads on each other’s shoulders. Melina never brought it up in the morning. It was sweet that, even if the whole world was fake, the love the two girls shared was real. Comforting and innocent. They deserved to have that before the Red Room tore the light out of them and crushed it under its heel.
Three taps let Yelena know she hasn’t been forgotten, not yet. Her sister still has something to say to her.
She spends the evening with quiet anticipation buzzing just below her skin, threatening to bubble over. In her final reading lessons of the day, the teacher strikes her with a ruler for reading too quickly, but even pain can’t bring her down from her high. When she has to repeat her ballet combination because one of the other girls stumbled, she doesn’t mind, even though her muscles burn. She doesn’t flinch when she is handcuffed to her bed, even when her supervisor makes sure to catch the tender skin of her wrist in the lock. Nothing matters, nothing except Natasha and the knowledge she hasn’t been abandoned.
Yelena stares up at the low ceiling, counting the cracks and scars that crisscross the unforgiving concrete and feeling it press down on her. Thirty minutes pass. An hour. Her drooping eyes fix on the vent in the center of the room. Her anxious mind rebels against her hopeful spirit, asking itself if she imagined her sister’s code. Melina tells her (told her?) all the time she’s too lost in her own head sometimes, that she lets herself fall headfirst into daydreams and one day it’ll hurt her.
Melina’s comments stung at the time. She cried in her room and Natasha had to hold her for an hour before she calmed down. Yelena knows now she was trying to prepare her for the horrors their ‘big adventure’ would bring.
She is ready to give in and fall asleep when she hears it. Three metallic taps against the grate above her head. Nothing more than a rattling heater working overtime to anyone but Yelena. Her eyes snap open. A smile bursts across Yelena’s face like a supernova.
Natasha came for her. Natasha will always come for her.
Yelena raps her knuckles against the metal frame of her bed with all the tenderness a six-year-old can muster. The sound echoes up, off the wall and through the slits in the vent.
Metal scrapes and shrieks against concrete. The cover slides off, and Natasha’s blue-dyed head peeks out of the now-gaping hole in the ceiling. She gestures for Yelena to come with her.
“I can’t!” Yelena hisses, flailing her wrists so the handcuffs jingle against the poles of her bedframe. The supervisor looks over her shoulder. Both girls freeze as a hopeless second passes, pinned in place by the woman’s eyes. But she turns around, clearly not convinced any of the six year olds could break free, and certainly not counting on one of the eleven year olds breaking and entering. Natasha seizes her moment. She positions herself so she can grab hold of the edge of the vent and swings like she did on the monkey bars back home. It occurs to Yelena that nothing the sisters did in Ohio was a game, not really. Not to their parents, at least. Maybe not to Natasha either. She’s been here before. Melina knew what was going to happen. Yelena figured Alexei did, too. They prepared them for this.
Melina trained her girls to survive in a place designed to destroy them, a teacher disguised as a loving mother. Or perhaps just a loving mother forced to become a teacher when she remembered her daughters were destined for cruelty. Yelena can’t tell the difference, and she won’t be able to until years later, and even then the line still blurs sometimes.
Natasha lands on Yelena’s mattress in a semi-lunge with one hand extended behind her, the other on the mattress to stabilize herself, and her head down. She tosses her hair back as she gets to her feet, leaping onto the floor and landing on her toes, all her years of ballet paying off in an instant. Yelena giggles, her excitement rising to the surface and escaping like the bubbles in the sodas Melina only let her drink once a day. Natasha presses her finger to her lips, which just makes her little sister laugh more.
With a roll of her eyes, Natasha pulls a bobby pin from the underside of her hair and bends it into an L-shape. She pops the bent end into her mouth and pulls, spitting the plastic piece she took off across the room. It rolls to a stop next to another girl’s bed. The next morning, when the supervisor finds it, the girl will be punished for it, and Natasha will learn to be more cautious in her rebellion. But for now, she cares only about freeing her sister.
Yelena watches in quiet fascination as Natasha sticks the pin into the lock on the cuffs. Not even a minute later, the lock clicks, and Yelena’s wrist is free. “You have to teach me how to do that,” she whispers, marveling at her wrist like she’s never seen it before.
“Later,” Natasha mouths, climbing over Yelena to get to the other bedpost. She picks the other lock in even less time than the first, then bends the pin back into its proper place and sticks it back in her hair. She gets back up onto Yelena’s bed and offers her sister her hand. “Follow me.” Yelena scrambles to her feet, threading her fingers through Natasha’s.
Natasha climbs up onto the bedframe with all the grace of a tightrope walker and, with a flying leap, catches herself on the edge of the hole in the ceiling she swung from in the first place. She lets herself swing for only a moment, her legs helplessly paddling the air, before using that momentum to pull herself back up into the vent. “Alright. Your turn,” she whispers as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
Yelena’s eyes widen as she clambers up to where Natasha jumped from. Suddenly, the floor looks a lot farther away and a lot less forgiving if she was to fall. “I can’t,” she whimpers, nothing more than a kitten who’s gotten herself trapped in a tree.
“You can. I’ll catch you.” One of Natasha’s arms dangles from the vent, a lifeline waiting for Yelena to grab it. “You can do this.”
Yelena looks up at her sister, her hero. The only person she is sure she can trust. “Are you sure?” Her voice and her legs tremble in equal measure.
“Absolutely.” Natasha’s voice has a certain gravity to it that calms Yelena’s storm, even if just for a moment.
And that moment is all she needs. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and jumps toward Natasha before she can fill up with fear again, arms extended upward.
She falls short.
The sensation of falling washes over Yelena, and it takes all her willpower not to cry out. She hasn’t made it. She braces herself for the pain of hitting the floor, though that will surely be nothing compared to what she will have to endure when the supervisor sees that she has new bruises and scrapes that could not plausibly have come from a training exercise in the morning. Closes her eyes. It’s better not to see what’s coming.
But it never comes. Fingers wrap around her wrist along the dent her handcuffs left. She opens her eyes to see Natasha above her, halfway out of the vent and breathing harder than Yelena’s ever seen.
She caught her.
Natasha really caught her.
Her relief lasts only until she realizes she’s still dangling eight feet off the ground, and her sigh turns into a tiny shriek. “Hold on!” she yelps, kicking her legs.
“I will always hold on. I promise,” Natasha says, her tone remaining level, though her shoulder screams with pain. “But you’ve got to hold on too. Ready?” She anchors herself against the wall of the vent and, with one mighty pull, they’re both tumbling in, panting. The sisters laugh in spite of themselves, laying on their backs in a pile.
For a second, Yelena is back in Ohio. The day they left. Natasha and Yelena were still invincible then—holding backbends for as long as they could because it was a game, not because they would be struck if they fell. Back when the only pain Yelena knew was a bumped knee her mother was always there to kiss better and to bandage, and the only times she was afraid were thunderstorms or scary movies or when her sister came up behind her and grabbed her shoulders. If she closes her eyes, she can still see the fireflies in the trees in her backyard. Hear Melina, ever the analytical mind, explaining the concept of ‘bioluminescence’ to a girl who cannot even form the word yet. Feel the setting sun warming the back of her neck.
Yelena opens her eyes, thinking she will be greeted by a blue and pink and orange sky and seeing only a dark gray wasteland instead, a violent shock reminding her that Ohio isn’t home anymore. There is no such thing as home now. She turns to look at Natasha, who is sliding the grate back into place, laying on her stomach to minimize visibility. “You know what, Tasha?” A devilish grin spreads across her face. “We’re both upside down.” She pushes up into a backbend, ignoring the soreness in her muscles after a day of training. “And I bet you’re gonna fall down first.”
But Natasha doesn’t answer the challenge. Yelena lowers herself back down, her aching arms catching up with her. She curls up next to Natasha, sensing something is wrong. Natasha flinches away, sitting up and pulling her knees up next to her.
Yelena knows this pose. Every time her sister would get too far into her own head, Yelena always found her sitting like this in her bed, tears making their silent paths down her face. And she always climbed into bed next to her big sister, wrapping her little arms around Natasha, trying to do everything Natasha did for her when she was upset.
So she does the only thing she knows how to do: pulls Natasha close and rubs her back and tells her everything is going to be okay, even if she isn’t certain it’s true. Natasha tenses for a moment, it’s what she does when someone tries to help her, but relaxes, putting her head on Yelena’s shoulder. There’s an instant of perfection that Yelena wishes she could bottle and keep in her pocket for dark days.
But joy cannot last. Not anywhere, but especially not in the Red Room.
Natasha pulls away from Yelena, sorrow in her eyes that’s visible even in the low light. Presses herself against the walls of the vent. Looks at Yelena with unspoken apologies on her lips. “Nat?” she says softly, hopelessly, full of dread.
“We can’t keep doing this.”
And with those five words, Yelena finally begins to cry in the arms of a sister she fears doesn’t want her anymore. Her reality crashes and shatters, and she is at its epicenter. She can’t escape the feeling that she’s done something wrong. Natasha isn’t the type to leave without cause—so Yelena must have given her one. But she can’t say that. Natasha would just tell her nothing is wrong, that it wasn’t her fault, and the last words her sister ever says to her will be a lie. So she buries her face in Natasha’s shoulder, quietly trembling so her sobs don’t echo through the Red Room—not that anyone would think anything of it. Girls lie awake crying every night. Natasha runs her fingers through Yelena’s hair, and only the shaking of her body lets Yelena know this is hurting Natasha too, maybe even more.
Against her better judgment, she asks, “Why?” A simple word for a simple question that should require a simple answer. Why can’t they stay together? They managed to meet each other tonight. What’s stopping them from doing this every night—or every week, at a minimum? “We did this. Anything’s possible.”
Natasha shakes her head. “They’ll notice. And we won’t know they’ve noticed until it’s far too late. Madame B has eyes everywhere. She’ll see us together, and she’ll know that we’re each other’s weakness. She already knows I tried to protect you when they brought us here. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to pit us against each other yet. She’ll make me try to kill you, Yelena. And I won’t be able to. And then she’ll kill me—and you. I can’t protect you if either of us are dead.” Natasha sighs. “I’m sorry, Yelena. I love you.”
Yelena wants to pretend she doesn’t understand. To ask Natasha to explain it again in ever more detail until the sun comes up, to soak in every second of time she can spend in her sister’s company and let it motivate her to survive so they can see each other again, no matter how long it takes. But Yelena’s no fool. Melina made sure of that, teaching her things far above her age level to ‘set her up for success.’ She set her up to have a fighting chance, no matter how small, of making it out alive. Natasha knows that. And she wouldn’t fall for Yelena’s charade, despite how much she wants to spend another moment with her sister.
“I love you too,” Yelena whispers, squeezing Natasha a little tighter.
“I’ll be watching out for you. I promise. And one day, we’ll get out of here and go back to Ohio,” Natasha says, trying to convince herself as much as Yelena. “But until then, you have to pretend you don’t know me. Can you do that?”
Yelena isn’t sure if she can. Her big sister has been her entire life, and to act like she doesn’t exist could be more than she can bear. But the promise of more time together, outside of this hell, is enough to make her nod her head and try. They’ll get their chance. Melina always told them their pain only made them stronger, and this pain will make them the strongest they’ve ever been.
“Okay,” Natasha says, wiping her tears and steadying her voice. She gets to her feet. “Guess it’s time to get back.” Yelena admires how quickly her sister turns her emotions off. Makes a note to learn to do that, too. Even if they’re apart, Yelena will strive to be more like her sister. Natasha survived this place before. To walk in her footprints is to do the same.
And if living isn’t enough of a reward, Yelena knows Natasha’s pride in her will be.
So she stands up on wobbling legs and wipes her eyes on her sleeve. Watches, cataloguing every move Natasha makes as she moves the grate out of place again. Yelena’s heart sinks as she catches sight of her sterile, empty bed again. Natasha offers her hand to help Yelena swing back to her bed, but Yelena shakes her head. She has to start learning to do things for herself.
Yelena grabs the edge like she saw Natasha do earlier and swings. She tumbles to a stop on her bed just before she hits the headboard. Sloppy. She’ll have to do better next time (assuming there is one). Natasha leaps down after her, landing in the same pose she had earlier. Yelena bites back the urge to ask her how she did it, and instead resolves herself to find her own technique. Mimicking Natasha would do nothing but raise suspicion that would kill them both. Quickly, silently, efficiently, Natasha fixes the handcuffs back around each of Yelena’s wrists, once again using her bobby pin as a key. Then, without so much as a goodbye, Natasha perches on top of Yelena’s footboard, and, with another bound—
She’s gone.
And Yelena is, for the first time she remembers, truly alone.