Chapter Text
“What do you mean I have to do therapy in order to be an Avenger? No one ever mentioned that! That was not on the paperwork!”
Yelena leans forward in her seat, the better to glare at her sister from across her obnoxiously big desk. She can’t believe Natasha has her own office now. What kind of self-respecting ex-assassin/superhero has an office? She really thought being a superhero was much cooler than this.
“There was a lot of paperwork, Natasha, and you told me I couldn’t lie on any of it, so it was very difficult to complete!”
Honestly, Yelena had nearly given up on this whole become an Avenger thing then and there. The Red Room had been terrible and all, and she very much prefers freedom and free will and ready access to all the food and clothes she could ever want, but the one thing the Red Room had going for it had been no paperwork. Widows had made their reports to handlers, who’d taken care of all the pesky, obnoxious bureaucracy. Working for Val hadn’t involved any paperwork either, probably on account of it being illegal, and also kind of evil.
If officially being on the good guys’ team involves paperwork, maybe Yelena should just stay freelance.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t pass your psych eval, which is a real amateur move,” says Natasha, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at Yelena. Maybe other people are cowed by this expression, but Yelena is not one of them. She knows where Natasha got it from after all, and Melina’s raised eyebrow is considerably more spine-chilling. “You know you’re just supposed to tell them what they want to hear, right?”
This makes Sam look physically pained. Yelena is pretty sure he’s only here to make sure that she and Natasha don’t let this official work meeting descend into loving sisterly insults and hair-pulling.
Also to say things like, “No, actually, that’s not the goal of the psych eval—“
“I told them I wasn’t traumatized at all and that I’m fine, what else could they possibly want to hear!”
Now Natasha and Sam wince in unison. “Yeah, no, that’s not what they want to hear. That’s actually one of the most suspicious things you could have said, Yelena,” says Natasha.
“Honestly, probably best to just never say you’re fine in a psych eval, even if you think you are,” advises Sam.
“What? Why?”
“For one thing, you are actually traumatized,” says Natasha with something far too close to gentleness in her tone for Yelena’s liking. “No one gets through the Black Widow program without, you know, copious amounts of trauma. You’re supposed to admit to it, and say you’re processing it. Maybe toss the psychiatrist a few bones by saying you’re having nightmares or you hoard food or whatever. Not admitting anything means you’re not dealing with any of it.”
“I’m totally dealing with it, I’m joining the Avengers, aren’t I?” retorts Yelena.
Though she’s really regretting that decision now, even more than she already had been. It’s probably fucked up, but the prospect of following in her sister’s footsteps is considerably less appealing now that Natasha is alive again. It’s turned what had been a noble gesture of love and grief into just riding her heroic big sister’s coattails. Yelena had only agreed to try this at all because Val demonstrably has no problem fucking her over, and Bucky had been pretty convincing about the merits of officially joining the so-called good guys rather than just helping out whenever their missions converge.
“The Avengers aren’t some kind of ex-assassin community service initiative,” says Natasha.
Yelena scoffs. “Okay, sure.”
“They aren’t!”
Sam tilts his head and grimaces. “I mean…I can see why you might come to that conclusion. But joining the team isn’t actually proof of mental stability on its own. Might even be the opposite, if I’m being honest.”
“You guys are really selling this,” says Yelena with a sneer, crossing her arms. She lifts her chin and meets Natasha’s eyes. “I’m not doing therapy.”
Bucky comes into Natasha’s office then, and immediately holds out his vibranium hand for a fist bump that Yelena carefully returns. “Hell yeah you aren’t, stick it to the man,” he says.
“She didn’t pass her psych eval, she needs to do therapy if she’s gonna join the team,” says Sam, exasperated. “And what are you even doing here, you were not on the meeting invite!”
“You didn’t pass?” Bucky asks her, and when she glowers in answer, he shakes his head, looking disappointed. “Amateur move, if I can pass one of those, anyone can. Also, I’m here as moral support.”
“I’m not feeling very supported,” Yelena tells him, still glaring, as he perches on the edge of Natasha’s desk. He just grins sunnily in answer.
Some days, having more or less automatically gained the Winter Soldier as an older brother is more obnoxious than others. The little bit of familiarity that is the Winter Soldier encouraging and/or enabling some probably pointless small rebellion is oddly comforting though. Bucky will probably never fully remember his time in the Red Room training Yelena and her fellow Widows, and he is very different now from the hollowed out Winter Soldier he’d once been, but some things haven’t changed. If Yelena truly puts her foot down about this, he will find another way for her.
“Passing the psych eval is non-negotiable,” says Natasha. “I know all the bureaucracy is a pain in the ass, but it’s that or something like the Accords, or worse. We only get as much independence as we do so long as we play by these World Security Council and GRC rules.”
“I’m not doing therapy with some stranger who’s going to be judging me the whole time, and who’s making me talk about things.”
“I promise you, the therapist isn’t going to be judging you. Me and Bucky vetted the Avengers’ therapists ourselves, they’re both great, and neither of them is going to force you to talk to them,” says Sam.
Bucky’s expression turns solemn as he nods. “You don’t need to trust them right away, but you could at least give it a shot.”
“It’s going to feel exactly like the Red Room,” Yelena tells him, and turns to her sister. “Tell me it wasn’t the same for both of you, when they made you do therapy or deprogramming or whatever.”
The psych evaluation had been bad enough, for all that the psychologist had been polite and kind. Maybe it’s far enough in the past for Natasha that she’s forgotten, or let it fade in her memory, but the Red Room is still fresh in Yelena’s mind, and that includes the sickeningly named “counseling” sessions that had nothing to do with mental health. They’d just been part interrogation, and part assessment to make sure the mind control was still working.
Bucky grimaces, and doesn’t deny it, only offers, “It got better,” and Natasha says, “That was with SHIELD when it was still half HYDRA, we’re doing better than that.”
Yelena scoffs and shakes her head. “Just let me do the psych eval again, I’ll pass this time!”
Natasha gives her a sympathetic but still unimpressed look. “Because that won’t be suspicious,” she says, and then hesitates, which is unusual enough that Yelena tenses, as if readying herself for a blow. “And I’m not sure you should pass, after that mission in Belgrade.”
And there’s a sucker punch, if only in words.
“Wow,” she says. “Seriously? Am I not allowed to be upset when a mission goes that badly?”
It hadn’t gone as badly as a mission could go: Yelena’s still alive, after all, and so is her team, and many others are too. But then again, the team hadn’t been in danger of dying, not really. And sure, it hadn’t ended in half of the entire universe turning to dust either, a useful and instructive extreme to keep in mind when it comes to mission failures, if only for the morale boost.
“Of course you’re allowed to be upset, we were all upset,” says Sam, and Bucky nods, frowning over at Natasha.
“That mission was FUBAR, it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he says. “They called us in too damn late to do any good.”
“We did some good,” Sam corrects, weary lines etched on his face, and reaches over to take Bucky’s hand. They share one of their long, couple telepathy glances, and somehow, it ends up with both of them relaxing and brightening again, like thinking about that awful failure of a mission is just a brief cloud passing across their sunny skies. Lucky them. Sam looks back at Yelena. “You did good.”
“It wasn’t enough,” Yelena snaps.
“There was nothing more you could have done, and you endangered yourself by trying,” says Natasha, and it’s not Yelena’s sister saying it, it’s her commander.
“And that makes me crazy?”
“That’s not what I’m saying! That’s not what anybody is saying. I’m saying—I know that mission was hard for you. There are going to be harder ones. We can’t always save everybody.” Natasha smiles grimly. “Hell, sometimes we lose half of the entire universe.”
“No offense, but if that happens more than once, none of us are doing our jobs right,” Yelena says, not that this stops Natasha’s little speech.
“If you can’t handle the losses, if you can’t be willing to admit that you might need—“
“I can handle it!” says Yelena, too close to a shout. She lowers her voice and says, “I handled it. I’m just—not used to failure. It won’t happen again, I’m fine. You don’t need to do an intervention about it.”
Yelena is a Black Widow, after all, and failure has never been tolerated in Black Widows. Failure for a Black Widow means—meant—death. But Yelena had survived her training and her missions, and had even survived her ill-fated escape attempt with the Soldier, and her failures in the Red Room had been few and far between. She doesn’t intend to get into the habit of failure now, even if failure means something different as a good guy and/or Avenger.
“This isn’t an intervention,” says Sam.
“But you do still need to do the mandatory therapy,” says Natasha.
Yelena narrows her eyes at her sister. “And I’m still not letting some shrink psychoanalyze me into insanity.”
“That’s not really how psychoanalysis works,” offers Bucky, and when she turns her glare towards him, he just blinks back placidly.
“It’s basically an interrogation and I’m not doing it!”
“Hey, that’s fine, one-on-one therapy like that isn’t for everybody. There’s more than one kind of therapy though,” Sam says. “How about group therapy, or a support group?” He looks towards Natasha. “You think that would fly with our bureaucratic overlords?”
“Maybe,” says Natasha, tilting her head as she considers it. “What kind of group is that even going to be though? You can’t just send Yelena to the VA or a civilian support group.”
“It’ll be a group of reformed ex-assassins, of course,” says Yelena. She tilts her head and considers for a moment. “Maybe also people who have been experimented on or mind-controlled?”
“And you know a lot of those?” says Natasha, and Yelena raises her eyebrows in disbelief.
“There are literally three in this room right now! And there are all the other freed Widows.”
“Even if you’re just sticking with the Avengers, there’s Shang-Chi too,” adds Bucky.
“Wait, really?” Yelena says. “But he’s so normal.”
Well, apart from the magic bracelets or whatever, that is. Other than that and the being wildly skilled at martial arts thing, Shang-Chi just seems friendly and cheerful, a normal guy with normal interests and hobbies like cars and karaoke. She wouldn’t have thought he had a tragic assassin backstory at all. That’s almost more impressive than the very impressive martial arts.
“His dad was head of the Ten Rings, trained him as an assassin,” says Bucky. What is with all these people training children to be assassins? Is this like some fucked up version of outsourcing? Is no one willing to just train and hire adult assassins anymore? “And there’s the, you know, space people too—”
“They’re called the Guardians of the Galaxy,” says Natasha.
“Yeah, no, I’m not calling them that. Anyway, there’s Nebula and Gamora,” says Bucky. He pauses, face screwed up in uncertainty. “And that talking raccoon?”
Natasha looks both pained and amused now. “Rocket’s never been an assassin, he’s more of a thief. He has been experimented on though.”
“Poor little raccoon thief,” murmurs Yelena. “He is invited too.”
“Uh huh, that’s sweet, but he’s not really a support group kind of guy,” says Natasha.
“Okay, well, raccoon or no raccoon, we know plenty of people who could join a support group for ex-assassins. Maybe Ava who works with Scott and Hope sometimes counts too,” says Sam. “Scott mentioned she wasn’t one of SHIELD’s more willing employees, back in the day.”
“And if you’re expanding it to people who’ve been, you know, experimented on or changed or whatever, there’s Danvers and even Pepper Potts, and Wanda,” Bucky says.
“Wanda’s on another plane of existence or something right now, but okay, I get the depressing and alarming point, we’ve got a lot of ex-assassins and science experiments,“ says Natasha with a wry grimace.
“And there’s the spider child!” says Yelena, snapping her fingers.
Natasha looks far more confused than she should. What, like there’s any other superhero who could possibly be the spider child other than the disgustingly earnest kid who swings around the city in a red and blue onesie?
“What, Spiderman?” she says, and then she does that lip pursing thing she does when she’s trying not to smile too wide. “No, he’s just, you know, a guy.”
“Wait, really? Then why all the, you know, spider stuff? He shoots webs! From his hands!” It’s actually kind of gross, and Yelena does not want to think about where the webs are coming from. Ew.
“He’s not part spider,” says Natasha, looking at her like somehow she’s the crazy one here. “It’s just his costume. He’s enhanced, sure, but it was an accident, not evil scientists.”
“Okay, but why be a spider person,” presses Yelena, leaning forward in her chair. “We’re Black Widows, but the branding, it’s just, you know, a red belt and a black suit, and ha ha, very funny, they fuck and kill men. What’s the spider kid’s deal?”
“You know, she has a point,” says Bucky, his brow furrowed. “What is the spider kid’s deal? Ant-Man is Ant-Man ‘cause he can get all small, like an ant, but Spiderman—”
“Is that really what’s most relevant now?” asks Sam, but the look he sends Bucky’s way is the usual mix of amusement and poorly concealed affection. Ugh, when are they going to get married already, Yelena really wants to win the betting pool. “The point is, depressingly, there are more than enough Avengers and Avengers-adjacent people to make up an ex-assassin and/or unwilling science experiment-slash-mind control support group. Hell, I even think it’s a good idea.”
Natasha sighs, then shrugs. “I guess we’ll see if the World Security Council thinks so too.”
Yelena doesn’t leave after the so-called meeting is supposedly over. Sam and Bucky leave, Bucky tousling her hair and pressing a kiss to the top of her head on his way out, which is both incredibly obnoxious and weirdly nice. Embarrassingly, Natasha watches this with unconcealed fondness and delight, and Yelena scowls at her. This only makes Natasha smile wider. Yelena narrows her eyes and stares Natasha down.
“I’m not traumatized,” says Yelena. “And I’m not crazy.”
“No one’s saying you’re crazy,” Natasha says, her smile shifting to a totally unnecessary level of sisterly concern.
Yelena snorts. “I’m pretty sure mandatory therapy is something for crazy people.”
“Mandatory therapy is something for people in a dangerous, high-stress job where your mental stability is a matter of life and death, for yourself, and for others.”
Ha! Yelena crosses her arms, smug at having caught Natasha in this particular verbal trap.
“Sam literally just said that being an Avenger isn’t a sign of mental stability.”
“Hence the need for therapy,” says Natasha, an inviting you into the joke kind of curl to her lips. Yelena is in no mood to find it funny.
“I’m playing nice, I help on missions, I’m not murdering people left and right, and you even said that Belgrade wasn’t my fault,” she says, listing each point off on her fingers. “So what is the problem?”
“This isn’t about how well you are or aren’t doing, you’re doing fine on the job or I’d have pulled you out of the field myself.”
“So what is the problem!” Yelena demands again, throwing up her hands.
“There are going to be more missions like Belgrade, you know that, right?”
“I know,” says Yelena through gritted teeth.
“You can’t save everyone.”
“I know that.”
“When you’re an Avenger, the missions aren’t so cut and dried. You can’t just kill someone or retrieve some intel, make a clean exit, and call it a day. Hell, it isn’t even always as simple as defeating the bad guys.”
“Next you’ll tell me that water is wet and I should always aim for the heart. This pep talk could have been an email!”
“It’s not a pep talk—“ Natasha stops, and takes a breath. “This is me checking in with you, okay? Because of how things went in Belgrade.”
“Why is everyone acting like I’m going to have a nervous breakdown about Belgrade! It sucked and I hate failure, but I’m fine, okay?”
It’s fine and good and normal to hate failure, right? Especially when failure means people die? Admittedly, this is quite the reversal of her previous experience of failure, which was generally that something had gone horribly wrong with the mission if no one had died. But assassin and spy skills are pretty transferable, it turns out, they just hadn’t been much use in Belgrade. Yelena hadn’t been much use in Belgrade, in the end.
“You still didn’t pass your psych eval. That means therapy, or being benched, no exceptions.”
“You’ve become such a bureaucrat,” sneers Yelena, making sure the word sounds like the insult and curse that it is, but Natasha is unmoved.
“I’m playing the game, because that’s what it takes to keep the Avengers going. That’s what it takes to keep this family safe,” says Natasha, low and vehement, and then she sighs. “It’s just some therapy, Yelena. A few sessions to convince a mental health professional that you’re as well-adjusted as can be expected, that you can handle the pressures of the job. Who knows, it might even help.”
“It’s bullshit that I have to do this, and I don’t need it,” Yelena insists. “I’m not sad or crazy, okay? I don’t need help, and I don’t need to be fixed. I’m happy! I have everything I’ve ever wanted! You’re alive, and I can go see Alexei and Melina whenever I want to, and I have a dog. I’m free, you’re free, even the Soldier is free and here with us. We have a family! I’m fine, I’m great!”
She has more than all that, even, and it’s more than Yelena could have ever even hoped to want. She’d call it a miracle, only she doesn’t think there’s any such thing. Even Natasha coming back to life is no miracle: that’s thanks to magic space rocks and Steve Rogers’ stubbornness. If it all seems too good to be true sometimes, if Yelena’s chest goes tight with the sudden certainty that she will be dragged away from her family again, well, that’s a small price to pay. Yelena is fine.
“And I’m more happy than you can ever know that you have all that. But Yelena, you can’t bullshit me about the Red Room. I was there too, I know exactly how bad it was, and I know how long it takes to really deal with all that, to adjust.”
“We are not the same person,” Yelena snaps. “Maybe it was hard for you, maybe you did a lot of very heroic brooding and weeping about all the terrible things you did and all your fuck ups, but I know all of that is pointless. Talking about it is pointless. It’s done, it’s over. The Red Room is gone for good, and sometimes we can’t save everybody.”
Yelena isn’t pissed off enough to add, you of all people should know that, though she sure as hell thinks it. And she’s not pathetic enough to add, I should know, you didn’t save me.
“Alright. If you say so,” says Natasha.
Her voice is calm but her eyes are so sad, and suddenly it’s like Yelena is a little girl again, when she’d been too dumb and naive to understand the things her big sister was sad about, too clueless to have any idea why talking about the future always made Natasha look terrified and heartbroken. Natasha had been right then. Yelena refuses to entertain the possibility that she is right now too.
Yelena had not told Natasha the truth, when she said she had everything she ever wanted, and she’s not talking about the unicorn she’d wanted when she was four, or the spaceship she wants now, or even the still-nebulous and confusing possibility of wanting something more with Kate Bishop. There is something Yelena wanted—wants—that she will never be able to have now.
She wants all of the Black Widows safe and free, every single one of them. Natasha would say she has that, that between Yelena’s own work, and Sonya’s and Natasha’s and Melina’s, and the work of countless other Widows. They have destroyed the Red Room finally and totally, and spread the Red Dust antidote to its chemical chains to every last Widow left. Every Widow they’ve found, anyway. Every Widow who’s still alive.
And that’s the problem. Because Yelena still wants it, she wants freedom and safety for Ingrid and Oksana and Darya and Ksenia, only they are all dead. Well, maybe Darya and Ksenia aren’t, but Yelena has no idea where they are, or when they died, if they’re dead at all. Ingrid and Oksana are definitely dead. Yelena failed to save Ingrid, and she killed Oksana, so this want of hers is impossible.
Yelena isn’t stupid, so she knows that Ingrid’s death is not her fault, or Natasha’s: Ingrid was what the Red Room had made her to be, so of course she had pursued her mission to the point of death. And Yelena knows Oksana’s death isn’t entirely her fault either, because Yelena was what the Red Room had made her to be too, and Oksana had known it. Not killing Oksana had not been an option. Yelena quite literally could not have done otherwise, could not have even conceived of wanting to do otherwise.
There were plenty of things you could want in the Red Room—a second helping at dinner, a room of your own, a movie you chose to watch rather than an assignment for the purposes of keeping up with popular culture, a family, your family—and you could even want to escape. But once the orders were given, the mission under way, there was no room for anything else. That was just a matter of science, of neurochemistry: an immutable effect of an inescapable cause. Melina has explained it to Yelena many times.
But Belgrade—that had been all Yelena. Not her fault, she knows that, but still all her choices.
And yet. And yet, Yelena still wants, still wishes, still thinks about it, about them: Ingrid and Oksana, Ksenia and Darya. She still looks for them, even Oksana and Ingrid, even knowing they’re dead, even knowing it’s a waste of time. That’s probably crazy of her. She can’t un-kill Oksana, can’t save Ingrid, can’t make the Belgrade mission go any differently. The therapist would tell her that, if she told them, would say things about grief and closure and, maybe, if she’s unlucky, about delusion.
She doesn’t want to know what else the therapist, or anyone else, would say about her.
It doesn’t matter though, because Yelena is fine. She doesn’t need an intervention or therapy, she already has everything she needs, if not everything she wants. Everything it’s possible for her to have, that is. And that’s more than enough.
The next day is one of Yelena’s usual training sessions with Bucky, though training session is a flexible term for what they do. Sure, they do spar or go on the range a lot of the time, or take training flights on the Quinjet, or even do a bit of light hacking into old HYDRA and Red Room accounts to reappropriate and redistribute the funds and keep their hacking skills sharp. But they also take Fanny for walks or go out for sushi or go thrifting or, on one notable occasion, try rollerblading because Yelena had wanted rollerblades so badly as a child but Melina had refused, saying she was too small for them. It had been very fun, but Bucky had declared it ridiculous and refused to do it again. I’ll go ice skating with you, but you’re on your own with the rollerblading. He’d cast her a sly sidelong look. Or you could go with Kate.
He thinks he’s so subtle with the totally unnecessary matchmaking.
Today’s training session is rock climbing, which is both practical and very fun, even if Bucky cheats by fully leaping halfway up the wall.
“That is not how rock climbing works!” she tells him. “Stop showing off and climb like a normal person!” Yelena pauses as an idea occurs to her. “Or at least throw me into the air so I can—”
“Absolutely not!” calls out a gym employee from the ground. “Both of you need to climb like normal people or I’m kicking you out!”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Bucky, sounding chastised though he winks conspiratorially at Yelena. “We should try the throwing thing at the Compound though.”
After their totally normal rock climbing, they go get smoothies and amble around the neighborhood people-watching, which remains a soothing pastime for Yelena, even now that it’s not more or less the only pastime she’s allowed.
“I’m not doing the therapy,” she tells Bucky. “I don’t need it, and it’s not going to help me.”
“Okay,” he says. “We’ll figure something out if they don’t approve of the support group thing.”
“You’re not going to try to convince me?”
Bucky shakes his head. “Nope.”
“But you still do it. Therapy, I mean.”
“Sure. The government gets antsy when I don’t, and I’m still kinda crazy,” he says, matter-of-fact.
Which is bullshit.
“You’re not crazy, you’re just hurt and you’re still healing,” says Yelena. “Suffering isn’t crazy.”
Like Yelena, Bucky has a very good life now, but sometimes, he absent-mindedly calls her Becca or Darya or Ksenia or Alice. Of all the little sisters he’s had, both by blood and chosen, Yelena is probably one of the last ones left, other than Sarah Wilson and perhaps Princess Shuri, so she lets these slips of the tongue pass unremarked.
(One time, he called her Oksana. Yelena doesn’t remember what she did or said then. But it’s fine. She knows Bucky can’t help it.)
The last time Bucky had to take a kill shot on a mission, he’d thrown up afterwards and spent the whole flight back to base shaking, and then he’d barely slept for a week, wandering the Avengers compound looking increasingly haunted and haggard, and Yelena had almost apologized to him for not having taken the shot herself, but she’d suspected that would not make him feel better. Some days, Bucky can’t bring himself to leave his bedroom, let alone his apartment, sending her apologetic texts that he’s not up for training that day, no, not even if Yelena comes to his apartment.
Yelena has seen all of this, so she knows: Bucky is still suffering, and she is not.
Yelena had been childish clay molded into the vessel of a Black Widow—there is little point in mourning or missing the clay she had been. She is whole and unbroken as she is, even if the shape she’s been molded into is dangerous, even if she’s still kind of hollow now that all the chemical compulsion and orders have been poured out.
The making of the Winter Soldier had not been like that, she knows. It had required breaking and shattering Bucky, and making something new and jagged with the pieces, and unmaking the Winter Soldier had involved more breaking still. It’s not a surprise to Yelena that he’s still putting the pieces back together. He’s not crazy for needing to put those pieces back together, and there’s nothing wrong with him if that process hurts.
Yelena’s not trying to put herself back together; she’s just trying to fill herself up.
Bucky’s face does a strange thing, and oh no, has Yelena made him cry? Sam and Steve will be so mad at her if she’s made Bucky cry.
“Jesus Christ, maybe you oughta be a therapist. I’m pretty sure that’s a breakthrough my therapist tried to pound into my head for like two months’ worth of sessions,” says Bucky, blinking rapidly. Before Yelena can decide whether this statement requires an apology, teasing, or outright ignoring, Bucky continues, “It’s okay if you’re still hurt and healing too.”
“I’m not! Everything that was wrong with my life, it’s fixed! I have my family, I have a dog, I’m free. I am all good!”
Why doesn’t anyone believe her?
“There’s a reason you didn’t pass your psych eval though,” Bucky says.
“I’m pretty sure the dumb therapist thinks it’s bad that I’m happy.”
“The dumb therapist probably thinks you’re repressing everything. They really don’t like it when you say that sometimes repression is the healthiest option.”
“Right? Exactly!” She stops walking and points the straw of her smoothie at Bucky. “How did you pass your psych eval if you told them that?”
“Oh, I have so much trauma to pick from that my therapist pretty much went, ‘yeah, okay, fair enough’ when I said I never, ever want to talk about the, you know, torture and all that,” he says, his voice even and calm. “It’s over. No point in talking about it.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!”
“A lot of it though…it’s not over. It’s never going to be over. The memories I’m not getting back, the family you grew up without, what they made us into—those are some of the parts that aren’t over, Yelena. Pretending they are is why you failed your psych eval.” He takes a noisy sip of his smoothie, which somewhat undermines all the attempted wisdom, and adds, “The Belgrade mission didn’t help.”
A chill that has nothing to do with her own smoothie rushes down her spine. It sounds too much like the kind of thing Dreykov and the handlers used to say, that there’s no escaping the Red Room. She turns and keeps walking, fast enough that Bucky lengthens his stride.
“I’m still not talking to some random shrink who doesn’t know anything about me, about us.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to,” says Bucky, and before she can bristle at his totally unnecessary gentleness, he continues, “So, what do you want to do for training next week? I was thinking a bike ride in the country. The leaves are changing and the weather’s still good, it’d be pretty.”
“It would,” agrees Yelena. “It would also be a beautiful time for a wedding.”
“What do you know about weddings? Have you ever even been to one?”
“No, which is why you and Sam need to hurry up and get married already.”
“Uh huh. How much money you got riding on it?” He casts a suspicious glance her way. “And why isn’t there a betting pool about when Steve and Nat will get married anyway?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Yelena lies, then before he can pursue this line of investigation, “Anyway, you know Natasha and Steve are going to be boring and just go do the paperwork some day and never tell anybody, that barely even counts.”
“Ugh, they will, won’t they,” says Bucky with a scowl.
As funny as it might be, she’s not really in the mood for a rant about her sister’s romantic skills or lack thereof, so she asks, “Do you think Fanny could come with us on the bike ride?”
“She’s too big for a bike basket,” says Bucky, his scowl now a thoughtful frown, and pulls out his phone. After a minute or so of tapping and scrolling, he stops dead in his tracks and shoves his phone in her face. “Yelena, they have dog trailers for bikes. The future is amazing.”
“Yes,” hisses Yelena. “This is the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life, order it, we are going on a bike ride with Fanny.”
Here and now, Yelena is happy, she thinks, as she and Bucky plan their next training session. She doesn’t care what some dumb psych eval says. She’s happy, she’s fine. How could she not be?
“Okay, so, shockingly, the World Security Council is on board with this group therapy idea, with the caveat that someone who’s not a participant in the group has to lead it, and that person should have some kind of qualification,” says Natasha at the next Avenger meeting, which Yelena is now officially allowed to attend, along with whoever else has bothered to show up. Which isn’t many people today: just Natasha, Colonel Rhodes, the Captains America both current and former, and Bucky, and now Yelena, who’d even gotten to confirm her attendance via email.
Not that she’d ever waited for any kind of official meeting invitation or superhero status on her previous visits to these meetings. The meetings themselves are almost always dull, but the food is excellent, so really, if Natasha doesn’t want people, aka Yelena, to crash them, she should stop having them catered. Today’s morning meeting has an excessive array of bagels and bagel fixings, and, once she’s accepted the congratulatory fist bumps that are her due for her victory, Yelena assembles a bagel for herself under Natasha’s unnecessarily judgmental eye. At least Steve Rogers is impressed by her creation.
“Lox, cream cheese…and jam?” he asks.
“It’s delicious!” she says, her mouth possibly still slightly full of bagel. She swallows hastily. “So okay, I get to do group therapy, hooray, but the whole point was to avoid a dumb therapist. Who else can lead the group?”
“How about Sam?” suggests Rhodes. “That used to be his actual job, right?”
“Sam is too busy for that,” says Bucky with a forbidding scowl, and Sam nods in agreement.
“Sam is definitely way too busy for that,” he confirms. “Also, as an active Avenger, it’d be one hell of a conflict of interest.”
Ugh, professional ethics. So inconvenient. No worries, Yelena is not letting herself be deterred yet.
“Oh, what about Professor Hulk?” she asks. “He has qualifications!”
Natasha snorts. “What he has is more PhDs than any sane person should have, and none of them are in psychology. No, Bruce is not your guy.”
Yelena’s about to suggest FRIDAY the AI when Steve says, “I can do it.”
“What?” Yelena says, incredulous, and she’s echoed by Rhodes and Natasha.
“I ran support groups during the Blip!” says Steve, with somewhat suspicious defensiveness.
Bucky casts a long and deeply dubious glance at Steve. “Yeah? Were you any good at it?” he asks, and Steve scowls.
“Hey!” retorts Steve, and Bucky just raises his eyebrows.
“Well? Were you?” he asks. “Because you know I love you and all that, but, uh. Not sure that kinda thing is your strong suit, bud. Unless support group is code for fight club.”
This makes Yelena perk up. “Wait, is that an option? That should totally be an option, it would be super therapeutic for me, personally—“
“It’s not an option,” say Rhodes and Natasha in unison.
“And it’s not code for fight club, for god’s sake. I’m perfectly capable of leading a support group Buck,” says Steve, still scowling, until he turns to Sam with a sweet smile. “I had a great example, after all.”
“Hey, that’s nice of you to say, man—“
“You’re such a suck up, Rogers!”
Before things can descend into a food fight or a pitched under-the-table kicking match, Yelena asks, “Are you sure this will work? The soulless bureaucrats will accept this?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah,” says Steve. “I can write up an impressive enough proposal to get the Council to rubber stamp it. And hey, who could be better and more trustworthy to run a support group like that than the former Captain America?” says Steve, assuming the noble and dignified Captain America expression that Yelena cannot take seriously, not after one of her first exposures to the man had been him being a weepy, sentimental drunk on Asgardian ale at Natasha’s welcome-back-to-life party.
“And there’s precedent too, with VA peer support groups. I’ll put in a good word, I think it’ll fly,” adds Sam.
Rhodes nods. “It helps that we can even sell this as being the most secure option. Steve’s already got all kinds of clearance, nothing anyone says at group is gonna be an issue.”
“You didn’t answer the question about if you’re actually good at it though,” Yelena points out to Steve.
Steve ignores her, and Bucky grins, shooting her a wink and an eyebrow waggle that somehow very clearly communicates, that means he definitely wasn’t good at it.
“It’s a good idea,” says Natasha. “I don’t think there’ll be any problem getting approval. The real problem is gonna be getting people to show up.”
“Whatever, there are at least three of us already: me, you, and Bucky. Maybe four, if Shang-Chi comes.”
Natasha raises an eyebrow. “Oh, I won’t be attending this little support group. Conflict of interest.”
“What? You have to come!” Yelena definitely doesn’t whine. “And what conflict of interest? Because you’re my sister?”
“No, because me and Steve are—“ Natasha falters, apparently brought short by needing to come up with an actual word for her and Steve’s relationship. Yelena widens her eyes with exaggerated patience and basks in her sister’s self-inflicted awkwardness.
“You’re…?” she prompts.
To all the Avengers and Avengers associates’ amusement and fascination, Steve and Natasha conduct their relationship with only marginally less opsec than a mission. For all that they bicker, it’s Sam and Bucky who are the more visibly, adoringly affectionate couple of the Avengers. They make no attempt to—or maybe can’t—hide the way they light up for each other, and they’re always watching each other so closely, only not in a surveillance kind of way, it’s something softer than that. Romantic love is still something of a mystery to Yelena, but she thinks she understands it a little, when she sees Sam and Bucky.
Natasha and Steve though…they strenuously avoid public displays of affection, and they practically sneak around like they’re having an affair or breaking the law or something, despite the fact that their relationship is, in fact, public knowledge and not even against any Avengers regulations or HR policies or whatever. Kate says it’s all weirdly, sweetly repressed. Yelena just thinks it’s weird.
“Significant others,” finishes Steve, ostentatiously ignoring Sam and Bucky booing in response.
“Weak!” says Sam.
“That’s the vaguest, dumbest term for going out I’ve ever heard,” says Bucky.
“Our romantic relationship would make Natasha attending a support group I lead a potential conflict of interest,” Steve says primly.
“Yeah, it’s unethical,” adds Natasha.
“How convenient for you,” Yelena sneers, and Natasha sticks her tongue out. Very mature. “Ugh, whatever! It’ll be me and Bucky then, two people is enough for a group, right?”
Bucky grimaces. “Uh, actually, I’m not sure—“ When Yelena glares at him, leaning forward in her seat with every intention of leaping across the damned conference room table and tackling him, he winces and slouches down. “Yup, uh huh, I’ll be there. You name the time and place.”
Steve beams at them all. “I’ll make flyers and send out an email!”
Flyers, mouths Yelena to herself, horrified. Maybe she should stick with the therapist, actually, because the more she thinks about it, an ex-assassin support group sounds like a terrible idea. Too late now, though. Yelena’s just going to have to make the best of it. And if all else fails, she supposes she can always sabotage it.