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Usually, their apartment was quiet—save for a barking dog or two. It was orderly—if you ignored the blankets strewn around and occasional splattering of mac and cheese ingredients from last night’s dinner. And it was safe—except for the one incident with the bullet hole, but Kate was almost positive it was a stray one and not at all related to their stakeout two days prior.
But today? Today, it was chaos in its purest form. Loud clanks and bangs of the stainless steel pots being moved from the sink to the burners and back, the clattering of the spice jars that tumbled out of the cabinet, and her own off-key singing of Christmas music replaced all the usual tv chatter and noise from their neighbors.
That was to be expected of their first official holiday party together, though. Especially given that Yelena’s calm, level-headed personality had been replaced with a minor level of panic Kate aspired to and occasionally achieved.
Although Yelena informed Kate how not big of a deal a western-style Christmas was in Russia, her behavior over wanting the entire affair to go off without a hitch was the biggest mixed signal since the start of their relationship. Kate reminded her girlfriend of this anecdote only to be scoffed at as Yelena put a beanie on before heading out in the icy cold of New York to the bodega. On the plus side, it really lowered the expectations and pressure on her end to research the best traditional Russian dishes to serve, aside from a particular potato salad recipe Yelena insisted they make. The absurd receipt for imported cheeses and the biggest beef roast the butcher’s shop down the street offered were things she’d just make do with until later.
Her only hill to die on was in the drinks department.
“You use a little of a few different kinds. Brandy, whiskey, and rum,” Kate explained, gesturing to the line of liquor bottles set out along the counter. “I’ve made this like a thousand times. Just trust me and follow the recipe.”
“If you mix alcohol anyway, why not add vodka, hm?”
Kate stared at Yelena who stood with a wooden spoon in her fist at her hip, completely serious over her thought that vodka makes everything better. “Because… Because we aren’t making White Russians. This is just simple, traditional eggnog.”
“What is a White Russian?”
“It’s…” Yelena’s eyes widened and gave Kate pause, afraid she might’ve walked into a trap to scrap her grandma’s eggnog recipe from the menu. “Kahlua, vodka, and cream.”
Yelena’s eyebrows rose ever slightly. “What if—”
Kate put a hand over her lips. “What if we just stick to the plan?”
“I was simply going to say we could have those for breakfast,” Yelena explained, as if that were so obvious. “With the eggnog added, of course.” She threw Kate a smile almost impossible to refuse.
Almost.
Kate wrinkled her nose. “Four kinds of liquor first thing in the morning? Are you at least taking me to a diner afterwards? I’ll need hash browns and pancakes to soak it up.”
Yelena shrugged, proceeding to pour the tablespoon measurements of whiskey, cognac, and rum into the egg mixture. “Look how small this spoon is. This does not count.”
Does not count her ass. Clearly, she’d be the one to judge the contents of the drink since Yelena was an unreliable source for that kind of thing.
“Let me at least try it before you add—” Before she even had time to grab a small glass from the cabinet, Yelena was tipping the bottle of rum over the edge of the bowl and at least doubling if not tripling the amount. “—more.”
“Whaaat?” she asked, faux-innocence coloring her voice. “The recipe says add to taste. And I do not taste anything!”
“Adding to taste does not mean adding until you only taste the whiskey.”
“No hablo inglés!”
“You speak three languages and that isn’t even one of them!” Kate’s mouth drew into a tight line at the smirk intensifying on Yelena’s face. If she weren’t crazy in love with Yelena, she’d lose her mind over her antics. “Well, you at least have to even out the amounts now…”
“Yes!” Yelena exclaimed with a fist pump.
Kate eyed her girlfriend and shook her head as she poured more from the other bottles in—measuring with her heart, as she claimed Kate taught her to do. “You know what? I’m just gonna go set the table and leave you to… This.”
While she busied herself trying to ignore the catastrophic concoction being made in the kitchen, Kate fixed the garland centerpiece and lit the small candle in the middle. It wasn’t until Yelena’s panic had subsided that hers returned over what she was getting herself into, inviting other former Soviet agents into her apartment, and wondering how many watchlists that kind of thing probably put her on. Even if they were her potential future in-laws.
Oh well. She’d just search her own name through a few databases later since she was just grinning and bearing the security risk, for Yelena’s sake. She had a complicated enough relationship with them without Kate adding to it.
The obnoxious chime of their doorbell startled her from the daze she’d fallen in, going over the spark notes version of Alexei and Melina’s many lives before they stepped into the apartment. Here goes nothing…
“I got it!” Yelena shouted from the other room, passing by her so quickly the strings of her plaid apron billowed behind her.
“Yelena! Baby girl!” A man with a thick Russian accent, who she assumed was Alexei, exclaimed before pulling Yelena into a tight embrace and kissed the top of her head. “Oh, how I missed you. The phone works both way, you know.”
“Hi, dad,” she replied, her voice muffled by the thick wool of his red sweater. “And hi, Mama.”
“Hello. And this is?” Asked the dark-haired woman with a polite smile, stepping around Alexei with her hands folded in front of her.
Somehow, Melina was exactly how Kate imagined her while Alexei’s neatly groomed gray-brown beard and haircut didn’t match the stories Yelena told of the Red Guardian at all, except for his gold teeth and the tattoos across his knuckles and at the base of his neck showing above his v-neck.
Yelena extracted herself from Alexei’s arms and moved to hold Kate’s hand. Despite being together a year already, Kate glanced down at their joined hands and then back up to meet the green eyes focused on her. “Mama. Papa. This is Kate Bishop. My… Girlfriend.”
Kate gave an awkward wave she wanted to take back immediately with a smile, hoping to change the blank expressions on the faces of their guests. She had no clue if those were good or bad signs, and no way of inquiring, either. As Yelena’s hold on her hand got a little tighter, she hoped a hole would open up in the floor and swallow the two of them in one big gulp. Maybe they’d highly overestimated how well her parents would take the news. They could’ve led with—
“Kate Bishop!” Alexei responded, at last, before the bear of a man wrapped her in a hug so tight her feet lifted off the ground and strained her arm as she desperately tried to hold on to Yelena. “Ah! It is pleasure to meet you!”
“The pleasure’s all mine,” she managed to wheeze out, wondering how much pressure her ribs could actually take. At least it was better than about a thousand other alternative reactions she thought of. A few that involved much more literal crushing of her bones.
“Alexei, you put the girl down!” Melina snipped, smacking his shoulder with the back of her hand. “Please. Forgive him and his… Enthusiasm. It’s so very nice to meet you, Kate.”
With her feet planted firmly on the carpet again, she glanced over at Yelena and hoped her face conveyed the ‘Holy shit, that guy is strong!’ thought, going through her mind before directing the attention back to Melina. “It’s so great to have you both here! C’mon, make yourselves at home! We have a few things to finish in the kitchen and then—”
“And then we eat, yes? Good, I’m starving,” Alexei said, cutting to the chase. Melina glared at him like she was trying to burn a hole right through the star on his sweater.
“And this is why we have Alexei at the farm. See? Resemblance, just like I tell you.” Melina followed after him as he muttered something in Russian and waved her off in favor of taking a place at the table.
“Oh my god,” Yelena groaned at another mumbling of Alexei’s that gave Melina’s cheeks the faintest pink color. “This was the worst decision.”
“What?! No way. I love them already! And I see where you get it from.”
Her brow furrowed. “Get what?”
Oh, she didn’t know. Her stubbornness? The poise? The sass? They may not be her biological parents, but nurture was making a strong case against nature with Yelena Belova and the Shostakov-Vostokoff duo in the living room.
Kate grinned back at Yelena and shook her head. “Absolutely nothing. Let’s go check on the food.”
The aroma coming from the kitchen was to die for, if she said so herself. Their beef roast browned beautifully, and the vegetables surrounding it were almost as tender as she wanted them to be. Yelena grabbed a spoon from the dish rack to sample the olivye salad—the resulting noise mirrored ones she’d only heard in the privacy of the bedroom. Another weight off her shoulders because she wasn’t feeling that great about how finely chopped the carrots and potatoes were to match the peas, or how the final dish was supposed to taste. Yelena’s reaction was all she needed, though.
“It turned out okay?” Kate asked, grabbing a set of punch glasses from the dish rack.
Yelena's eyes fluttered as she hummed. “Better! It is like the best memory of my childhood in one bite.”
Everything might’ve been falling into place after all?
“What is the wonderful smell coming from here?” Melina asked, venturing into the kitchen.
“We have…” Kate started, pausing for Yelena’s dramatic drumroll on the countertop. “A beef roast, mashed potatoes, baked mac & cheese, and—”
“And!” Yelena jumped in, shoving the large bowl of salad in front of Melina. “Look!”
“Is that what I think it is?” Alexei asked, leaning his large frame against the doorway as he peeked over the top of Melina’s head. “Olivye! Yes, you make my favorite! I’ll take the whole thing to go.”
Yelena stared her dad down like she might drop kick him at any moment if he made a move for the bowl in her grasp. Kate wasn’t sure if she’d let either of them have even a spoonful.
“We also made eggnog,” Kate added, lifting a finger to call the attention back to herself. “And enough for everyone to have as much as they want.”
“But with no vodka,” Yelena grumbled, only to be backed up by Alexei’s sudden gasp. See? More proof of seeing where she gets it from.
“But…” Melina wandered over to the punch bowl, taking the potato salad away from Yelena as she went. “But you make it with alcohol, yes?”
“I mean, it doesn’t have to—” In an instant, all three of the Russians were staring right at her, including Yelena, who knew full well she’d put enough rum in it to put Hemingway to shame. “Y-yes, yes it is,” she stammered out at last. “Three kinds.”
Melina hummed, grabbing a glass to replace the salad she handed off to Kate. She carefully ladled the drink into the row of glasses, swirling it around like wine. It felt like a moment of truth—a formative one that all other memories of the day would be based on. Kate’s heart pounded in her chest, waiting on a verdict as she raised the glass to her lips.
“Ooh, this is very good,” she said, as polite as her smile had been. Then she twisted her lips, considering. “It’s a little… Light, though. Isn’t it? But this is how Americans prefer it, I think. Like the watery beers.”
“See! I told you,” Yelena replied, grabbing Kate’s hand and shaking it. “I so told you.”
Oh, god. Kate buried her face in her hands. She would never hear the end of it now.
Melina held out a hand and stepped back. “No! No, it’s good. I mean… It is, really.”
Melina’s expression flipped back to its prior neutral state as Yelena tried to defend the drink, and Alexei joined the spirited discussion with a glass of his own. Though, he declared any alcohol was good alcohol and Kate counted that as a win. She considered they might finish the bowl before they even got to dinner or dessert while they argued over what the right ratio of alcohol would’ve been.
In that moment, Kate thought about the parts of Yelena’s former life she knew of. The memories she could hardly recall of fake holidays in Ohio and the idea that this would be their first genuine one. The brutality of the Red Room and their reunion and how hard she was trying to repair the only family she ever felt she had. They’d talked about how Yelena didn’t owe them forgiveness, how she shouldn’t feel compelled to go along with Alexei’s (at times) revisionist way of explaining the past, but Yelena told her she wanted one. Or at least wanted to try. And that led them to today.
So, staring at the three of them, they didn’t seem like super soldiers and trained assassins. Just an unconventional, slightly dysfunctional family bickering over cooking techniques and the contents of their fridge. And who was she to judge—not that she ever would—given the state of her own relationship with her mom?
“All right, it’s decided. Next year? I will make the drinks!” Melina threw her hands up from her place between Alexei and Yelena and clapped. “For now, we eat before Kate’s hard work all goes to waste.”
Yelena was primed to make a comment back about her own efforts, but Kate shook her head and whispered to fight the urge. Instead, they watched as her parents carried the platters and plates into the other room, still throwing jabs at one another between the laughter.
Yelena leaned against the counter with her hands behind her back. “They are kind of a disaster, right?”
Kate slid in to rest her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. “Maybe a little. But I think they’re gonna be our disaster.”
In the next room, they overheard the terrible attempts at a whisper with their paper-thin walls as Melina made Alexei promise not to tell embarrassing stories about Yelena. Kate nudged her with her hip and laughed at the long explanation Alexei gave before giving his word he wouldn’t.
“Yeah.” Yelena turned her head and smiled, her features going soft. “I think so, too.”