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Red Room | Sometime in the 1990s
She noticed it starting to fade only a couple of weeks into her return.
Of course, they’d made her scrub her head four or five times when she got back, trying to get the dye out. Individuality was frowned upon when you were in the process of creating an army, and not only was her hair bright but it was also too short to braid out of her face during training. There’d been talks of making her shave her head, but she argued that would only make her stand out more and make it impossible for her to be put undercover again if they needed her to until her hair grew all the way back out, and they had agreed.
Part of her was grateful for the remnants of her personal choice, and the other part hated the reminder. The memory of what she could’ve had. They were only a few months into the mission when she’d asked Melina if she could dye it for the first time, and she’d loved it so much that she cycled through colors multiple times over the course of those blissful three years. It was like every time she looked in the mirror, it was a reminder that she wasn’t under Dreykov’s control anymore. That she was herself. She could go outside and ride her bike or dye her hair. In the end, her sister had told her blue looked the coolest, so she stuck with that.
God, Yelena.
The sound of her little sister’s cries reverberated through her mind, and for a moment she could literally feel her hand being wrenched from her grip as they were dragged apart. Not a single day had passed in the last two weeks since her return where Natasha didn’t think about her, didn’t wonder about where she was and how she was doing. She was only three years old when they were put undercover; she probably didn’t even remember the Red Room in the first place. She was so little, and they had been her family. All of them, including Melina and Alexei.
She didn’t know where they were, either. She knew they were only following orders, only doing what they were supposed to do, but that didn’t mean her heart didn’t burn slightly at the betrayal. It was the first and only time that she’d ever uttered a word against the Red Room, that she’d ever tried to change something about the situation that she was in. Because it was the first and only time that she’d ever realized her situation could be different. She’d been eight when they went undercover, and even younger when she’d first been brought into the Red Room. She didn’t even realize that she’d had a life before it. But at eleven, three years felt like a million, and there was a period where she’d begun to feel like the Red Room had never actually existed. That maybe she’d had a bad dream, and this was where she really belonged.
Now Ohio was a quickly fading memory, a warm reprieve that she had no choice but to convince herself wasn’t real. She rubbed the fading blue strands between her fingers and promised herself she’d be good. She’d forget about it. She wouldn’t put up a fight anymore.
Yelena cried in her head again, and somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that wasn’t true. Now that she’d seen what she could’ve had, she wasn’t going to be able to leave that behind. Family dinners and high school football games and the laughter of her little sister on the playground. They told her over and over that the mission the Red Room was working towards was important, that she was a necessary cog in a machine that was driving the world in the direction of greatness. Dreykov had taken a liking to her since the altercation in Cuba, and she wondered how much of that was Alexei’s doing. How much influence he had in the treatment of his girls once he handed them back over.
But they weren’t his girls. She tried to remind herself, over and over. Melina and Alexei had not been her parents. Yelena had not been her sister. Ohio had not been real; it had been a means to an end.
She wished it had been more than that.
She knew she wouldn’t survive if she let herself dwell on it. She’d been through this before, she had expected all of this. Ohio was temporary. But as she noticed the first shades of blue fading from her hair, she allowed herself a moment to mourn the girl that she could’ve been. The life she could’ve had, if she wasn’t designed to be a soldier.
She would be good.
She knew how to be good.
She washed her hair.