Chapter Text
“I want to believe that there's more. That we could be more. Hell, we could be heroes.”
―Victoria Schwab, Vicious
Yelena was never afraid of the dark—hell, sometimes it felt like she was born in it. But the night before her first mission as a New Avenger, the dark felt suffocating. Everything did, really. For hours and hours she tossed and turned in her bed, her sheets—so new they still reeked of their plastic packaging—wrapped around her like a full body noose. Her entire room was all so new. The majority of her stuff (clothes mostly) still lay scattered around the space, trapped in their cardboard box prisons. The only thing which had been successfully retrieved from one of these boxes was a blue knit throw blanket. The same blanket Yelena lovingly chucked to the floor with the rest of her scattered bedding. Yelena’s skin felt heavy and itchy, like her mind had decided to become hyper aware of every inch of skin, and everything touching it, all at once.
Fanny, Yelena’s special little baby princess, did nothing to help the matter. The dog insisted on attempting to curl into Yelena’s chest when she wanted nothing more than to not be touched. It made the Widow’s heart sink every time she whacked Fanny’s chest, begging her to just leave her alone. The dog’s eye sank, her ears flipping down, head bowed. Fuck. Yelena squeezed her eyes shut, her hands coming over to cover her ears. The silence was so fucking loud. Go away. Go away. Go away. Stupid fucking dog…
But even with her shut eyes, Yelena was protestingly aware of the blinking, bright red digital clock mounted on her wall. It flipped to five minutes past one in the morning.
Fuck it.
She’d had enough.
Yelena sprang out of bed in an instant, causing Fanny to jet off—finally, part of her thought—out of her room. Yelena couldn’t find it within herself to care at the moment. She pulled a duffle bag out from one of her boxes, ready to collect her essentials. Frantically, and rather clumsily, the Widow scampered around the room, throwing in random shirts, as well as a few knives and a taser. Her kindle, too, went in the bag. That was a gift from Ava, a part of Yelena’s head, the part she begged to shut up, reminded her. A journal—Bob gave this to me, said it would help with the nightmares, liar—got thrown in as well. Lastly, Yelena reached for the framed picture of Natasha which rested on her night stand. This and only this made Yelena pause.
In the photo her sister’s hair was dyed half red and half blond, tied back into an intricate braid. She was smiling wide. Little creases formed under her eyes. The lighting made those sunkissed, almost hidden freckles pop. Yelena had found it a few weeks ago when going through some of the stuff left in Avengers Tower. Or the Watchtower as they called it now.
Natasha would’ve never let her sister live it down if she knew Yelena slept with her framed picture on her night stand. Good thing, Nat wasn’t here to do such things. Good thing. Good…
Yelena clenched her jaw, squeezing the frame in on top of everything else in her bag.
Nothing about her death felt good. The mere thought made Yelena’s stomach clench. She hated herself for even thinking the word good anywhere near it, albeit passively.
No matter. Yelena finished shoving all her crap into the duffle, zipping up its bloated contents. She did her best to ignore the burn of tears welling in her waterline. Don’t cry, don’t you dare fucking cry right now. Her heart was beating a hundred miles a minute, her breath all jagged and sharp. Get out. Get out. Get out. She rushed to the door, frantically.
It was foolish of her to think she, out of all people, could be a hero. Be anything like Nat. Yelena was shit—everything about her was damaged and broken and…and unloveable. How could she have been so stupid? How could she convince herself she could be more than what she was? That she wasn’t alone? That—
“Shit—” Yelena exclaimed, her racing heart pounding an extra aggressive jolt.
Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, reluctant leader of their little gang the “New Avengers,” loomed in her doorway. Fanny, her supposedly loyal dog, sitting at his heel, tongue flopped out. Traitor. She must have woken the Super Soldier up.
Arms crossed, Bucky raised a brow. “Going somewhere?”
Yelena wanted to punch this man.
“No,” she told him. Desperately, she attempted to slip past him, squeezing between him, the dog, and the door frame. Bucky raised his metal arm, blocking her escape route and stopping her from getting away. “Bitch,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
If Bucky even heard her, it didn’t show. He pushed her back into the room with a light shove. On her bed, somehow, was Alpine, Bucky’s cat, perched on top of the last remaining pillow on the mattress. Upon seeing her best friend, Fanny leapt onto the bed, sniffing Alpine’s fur eagerly. With a groan, Yelena tossed her bag to the floor, landing it on top of her pile of discarded blankets. It was clear Bucky wasn’t going to let her leave. But the room was too stuffy, too dark, too quiet. The air was too thick, and that fucking clock was just too fucking bright. Get out. Get out. Get out, part of her brain still yelled.
Second best option: the balcony.
Stalking across the room, Yelena pulled open the sliding glass door, running through it before Bucky could follow.
“It’s pouring out there!” he called out a moment before the door was slammed shut.
In all honesty, Yelena hadn’t noticed. But as the chilling gush of wind hit her skin—maybe shorts and a sweatshirt were a bad idea—it was clear Bucky was right. How stuck in their own head did a Black Widow have to be to not notice a cat in their room or the rain outside?
God, the water droplets felt good though. Microscopic flecks hit her skin, cold air filled her burning lungs. It was absolutely pouring. Luckily, the lip of the roof covered the balcony from the majority of the rain, just enough to still allow the rain to lay soft kisses on Yelena’s acidic skin. She was able to slip down the wall which separated her part of the balcony from the next room’s—Yelena had yet to take out the wire furniture she’d ordered, it was stuck in one of the boxes lying around her room—only getting her shorts damp, not soaked through with rain water.
She took in another deep breath of cold, humid air. It was far better than her room. The bright, twinkling lights of New York buildings blurred in the haze of the rain. A sky line, which had been a bright, dazzling blue just a day before, was now dark with a coat of clouds and the persistent infection of night. This was the quietest she’d ever heard the city, perhaps the combination of time and weather had driven The City That Never Sleeps to rest.
Her heart beat managed to calm down, her skin no longer felt like it was covered in fire ants. When she regained some partial level of control over her mind, Yelena took to counting down the seconds until the Winter Soldier inevitably came after her. As if a part of her semi-stable mind begged to not be alone.
…31…32…33…Finally.
The sliding glass door slid open. Yelena hated that a small part of herself was slightly worried he wouldn’t show up.
“You’ll freeze your ass off,” Bucky told her, dragging the knit throw blanket from her bed (well, the floor now) outside. He threw it at her.
Yelena said nothing as she wrapped it around her shoulders. The yarn felt good this time. Yelena had barely even registered how cold she was getting—were her hands shaking? Shit, they were. Her entire body was quaking; when had that happened? How did she not notice?
Bucky let out the classic old man groan as he slid down across from her, against the other wall, looking out to the sleeping city. For a moment nothing but the wishy-washy dribble of the rain and the muted scuffle of their pets playing in the room behind them filled the air. It took 47 seconds for Bucky to say something, not that Yelena was counting again.
“You wanna talk first or am I gonna have to?” He waited a beat before carrying on, “Okay, fine. So, you're testing me, that it? You're having a hard time accepting you have people in your life willing to show up, so you're seeing if, when unprompted, they’ll leave you. Like a dog tugging the leash to see how far it goes. Well, joke’s on you, kid, I’ll wait here all night if that’s what it takes for you to talk.”
Yelena shifted, uncomfortable. She pulled the blanket around herself a little tighter because of it.
I’m not doing that, she thought. I’m just…doing what’s right—what’s best for us all. I was supposed to be the one holding everyone together, weren't I? And I’m failing. I-I’m being a dick. Dragging Bucky into the rain in the middle of the night. Such a piece of shit. I’m acting like a pouting little kid. They’d all be better off with someone else—
“Whatever you’re thinking, stop it.” Bucky looked over, casting her a knowing glance. “Tell me what you're thinking…please.”
Huh, the Winter Soldier said please. Must be the ‘40’s kid in him, or the congressman. Yelena didn’t want to tell him the knotted entanglements of her inner workings. Oftentimes when she heard her thoughts aloud it only made them feel stupid. Worse. Still, she felt her lips moving—clearly she wanted to say something. She just didn’t know what until she heard the words leave her mouth. “I’m not a dog.” Yelena hated how small and raw her voice sounded. It was such a stupid thing to say.
“Then why test the leash?” Bucky asked.
Because for a few weeks the void was lighter, and tonight it all came crashing down on me. Nothing good lasts. Natasha didn’t.
I always do, though.
I always survive.
If nothing good lasts, maybe I’m just not good.
“I-I don’t want to get hurt again, Bucky.” God damn it, the tears were coming back. Yelena choked on the red-hot sob welling in her throat. A peach pit was jammed in her esophagus, and she didn’t know what to do to fix it. She hated talking about Natasha—hated how…cut open it made her. She hated it, hated it, hated it.
“Romanoff?” Bucky guessed.
Somehow, she nodded, like a little kid in trouble at school.
The pain in her chest was too much, Yelena wanted to claw it out with her finger nails and chuck it off the balcony. (She wanted to watch as it fell and fell and fell. See her pain plummet to the point of no return, laid out flat across the concrete street below. Much like Natasha jumping off that cliff, or at least how Yelena pictured it. She pictured the fall like her sister was a samara, sometimes, drifting in the air, slowly turning with the wind. Then, she pictured Natasha’s limbs spread out around her, smears of blood erupting from where her head made contact with the ground. Eyes open. Hollow. Dead.)
“You miss her?” That was Bucky’s voice, Yelena knew. It felt so far away.
Yelena was bad at hiding this feeling, unlike so many others. Still, she managed a stiff nod of her head, doing her best to pretend the burn of her cheeks or the sting of her tears wasn’t killing her.
I am not a hero. How could I dream such things, hm? Chase them? Now I've dragged all of you down with me.
The little A on her shirt and the matching one on Bucky’s sweat pants were mocking her. Oh, her sister, the Avenger. After all this time she still felt like she was just putting on Natasha’s clothes and playing pretend.
In their silence, Yelena was momentarily worried Bucky would try to touch her: offer a comforting squeeze of her shoulder or try to hold her hand. He didn’t. Thankfully. Yelena’s whole body still felt too prickly for such things. The blanket was nice though. Warm, soft. Somehow, Bucky got this mental message, instead he looked out to the rain with an ease to his hardened features. Even the rushing drops of rain water reflected in his sky blue eyes. While some eyes were a window to the soul, Bucky’s were a mirror to the world and all of its cruelness.
“I miss Steve sometimes,” he told her, even though it had been ages since she confessed to her grief. “All the time, actually.” He didn’t meet her eye, couldn’t. He was too busy watching the city. “Val, eh, decided to put me up in his old room. I don’t know why.”
“She put me in Nat’s.”
Bucky huffed, something close to a laugh. “Wanna switch?”
“Yeah.”
A beat of silence, a pause. A moment of pattering rain and the thumb of her broken heart. “I keep expecting to find some trace of him,” Bucky carried on, “a drawing or letter or something. But it’s like the room’s been scrubbed clean. Hell, I keep expecting him to pop up around every corner of this damn building. All smiley, like nothing’s happened. Probably just to tell me he got into another fight.” Bucky was smiling now, shamelessly. Yelena wasn’t sure if she’d seen anything like it before. “It’s like I’m waiting for a ghost to come back and tell me everything's normal. Okay, even.”
“‘Together until the end of the line,’ until he left,” Yelena muttered.
Bucky whipped his head over to look at her. “How did you…”
“They, em, slapped your little mantra or whatever onto all the museums. I went to one after… well… everything, I suppose. I, er, needed to see the Avengers. Not just watch clips on, hm, YouTube. Just to check if they were even really real.”
“But it’s just stuff, all hidden behind glass. Fossils. Relics.”
“And plaques.”
He snorted. “Yeah, a lotta plaques.”
Yelena felt a bit of her heart warm. He’d obviously done the same thing, even if he wouldn’t admit it aloud. It felt good to talk about it to someone who understood what it felt like to lose a hero—their hero. Lighter in a way Yelena hadn’t felt sense after the Void.
Perhaps that’s why the next words leaped off her tongue so easily, “After I went, I came home and, eh, drank. Vodka. And I, em, just sorta kept drinking and drinking and…yeah. Hours later, I was passed out on the bathroom floor, covered in my own sick. Unable to remember a thing I’d read that day.” Yelena wasn’t quite sure what compelled her to tell him that, but he did not interrupt or ask questions. Bucky listened, eyes fixed on the rolling storm, no judgement wafting from him whatsoever. “A week later, I went back. Wanting nothing more than to—to remember.
“S-Sometimes when I drink I-I feel like back in the Red Room, under the…em…mind control.” Oh, fuck, she said it. “That, er, detachment. That separation between myself and, eh, m-me.”
And just like that Yelena was done, she said a scary thing and did not die.
“Like you’re watching yourself move,” Bucky offered, understanding.
She nodded, the tears streaming down her face now. “I don’t know why I’d want to go back to that feeling, but I do it over and over and over again. Any time something feels hard—”
“It’s familiar. That’s why you go back.” Bucky met her eye, he was as stoic as ever. She was a blubbering mess. “Still, you didn’t reach for a bottle tonight. I mean, you tried to run, but you didn’t eminently go and drink. That’s progress, on some level at least. If you ever want help—”
She sniffled, her sleeve whipping her nose. The tears slowly died down, replaced by a mixed feeling in her gut. “I don’t think an Avenger can go to an AA meeting.”
“We’ll figure something out, I promise.” He offered Yelena a comforting gaze, it made her feel just a shred better. “I punched a dog after I went to Steve’s whole exhibit once.”
“You what?”
“I felt really bad about it afterwards, if that makes it any better. It just wouldn’t stop barking. And—and I was in a bad head space, I guess. Instinct just kinda took over. And, eh, it-its eyes looked…they looked so much like Steve’s. I just hated those eyes right then—I know it sounds stupid—”
“It doesn't.”
He hesitated. “Thanks.”
Yelena chuckled, the drying specks of tears still on her shirt. “You punched a dog. Such a cat person thing to do.”
“It was with the non vibranium arm.”
“That hardly helps!”
Bucky laughed too. Much like the smile, it too wasn’t like anything the Widow had ever seen before. Those lines which added a hundred years to his face melted into a slight upturn of his lips. It wasn’t a full belly, losing his mind kind of laugh, but it was a laugh. Gruff and slightly awkward, sure. But a laugh nonetheless. Yelena found herself giggling, just a bit more. That knot in her throat disappeared before she even noticed it.
When their slight gittiness died down, and Bucky’s smile faded, he looked down to his hands, fiddling his fingers together slightly. His gaze fell back to the rain, and Yelena followed suit.
“For a really long time, I wondered if there was any real point in moving on if Steve wasn’t there to…to just be there.”
“You, er, ever figure it out?” Yelena pulled her arms to her chest, locking them around her knees.
“Yeah, I-I did,” Bucky slowly told her, as if unsure.
“And?”
“And there is a point, it just takes a long time to find them.”
Them?
Oh.
“Sam Wilson?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about him, though. Not tonight. If that’s okay.”
She cast a slight glance over, yet Bucky still gazed meagerly at the view. “Of course,” she assured him.
Yelena would be lying if she said she was not disappointed though. For a long time, ever since a very interesting conversation with Walker, Yelena had been wanting to find out more about the new Captain America’s relationship with Bucky. She knew they texted, called sometimes, but not much else. A quick Google could’ve probably brought her to a Tumblr fan page or to a collection of photos taken by some paparazzi, yet that felt like an invasion of his privacy.
Though every time the team was in the living room after a day of training—normally watching some very bad reality TV show that Bob and Alexi were way too into—and Yelena caught Bucky texting on his phone—a stupid, thin ghost of a smile on his face—she knew exactly who he was texting.
“Would it be okay if we just didn’t talk for a while?” the Winter Soldier asked, his voice something Yelena would dare to describe as small.
“I would like that.”
There was an air of understanding between them from then on. Their friendship was forged in staring into the rain storm, not a word uttered between them. A friendship of simply being there, not having to talk all too much to feel just a bit better. Almost like the other’s very presence was enough to remember why the little voices which creeped into their heads at night were wrong. Why the two of them—all the New Avengers, really—could at least try to be good.
After hours of watching the same hazy, dark city rest for the first time, the morning finally broke through. The light finally arrived after a night of such darkness for the Widow. Just in time to watch the run rise, the gray clouds which had smothered the stars were forced aside. Instead, a sheet of oranges and pinks and beauty coated the sky line, spreading rays of the warmest of light to Yelena’s skin. By the time the storm had finally decided to lighten up, Yelena’s clothes and her blanket were in fact soaked through. But the warm rays of sun settled across her legs, heating them until she felt like Alpine when the cat bathed in sunshine rays, and it made Yelena almost completely forget what it felt like before.
Bucky dragged himself off the ground, more old man noises escaping him, to get a better view of the sky. But Yelena couldn’t help but notice how he never dared go near the railing.
“I’m not too good with heights,” he explained when he caught Yelena staring.
“Yeah, neither am I. Not anymore.”
Thought that didn’t stop either of them from leaping off trains and building tops countless times. They both really were a psychologists field day. Yet as they stood, back from the edge, letting themselves catch the beautiful start of morning Yelena reminded herself, I am not unlovable. I know I’m not. People who are unloved do not have someone to run into the rain for them and sit next to them in the middle of the night for hours, just to make sure they are okay. I am good. I am good. I am good. I last, and that is a strength, not something to feel weakness over. I let the bad thoughts in for a while, but that does not make them true. This new chapter, the New Avengers, does not have to be in memory of Natasha, it can be for me. I can be angry at her, and love her, and miss her, all at once and that is okay. That’s valid. I am good. I am good. I am good.
In all honesty, it felt like it was a copy and paste email from her therapist, and most of Yelena did not believe it, but she forced the thought anyway. And that sliver of her soul which felt a bit lighter because of thinking it was worth it.
Still, once the ocean of color dissipated from the sky, replaced with the long forgotten, ever reliable blue, Yelena tugged Bucky’s hand, signaling to go inside.
Their entrance woke their pets up. Fanny immediately trampled Bucky, but the man did not seem to mind as he knelt to the ground, giving the pup all the love Yelena obviously wasn’t giving her enough of. Yelena flopped down over her bare mattress. It no longer felt like it was made of fire.
“Hey, lil puss,” Yelena greeted Alpine. The cat lazily trudged over to her, nuzzling her head into Yelena’s side. “Do you think we’re ready for this? Our first real mission?” she asked Bucky.
“I think we’re ready to try,” Bucky responded, his metal hand eagerly scratching behind Fanny’s ear.
And it was only as the distant cries of their fellow team mates leaked into the room, and the light of day-break made its full effect on the sky, that Yelena and Bucky set off to do just that: try.