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She slips out of the trees like a ghost. He only knows one other person who can move that quietly.
Knew.
The lilt in her voice is the same soft accent that had peeked through Natasha’s English during her first few months at SHIELD. The sound of it is like a knife twisting into his already aching heart. He wonders idly how it can be possible to feel so much love and so much pain simultaneously. He’s felt the ache of her absence every day since Vormir, but never as acutely as today, watching his family gathered around the Christmas tree, his eyes drawn to the empty space in the room no matter how hard he tries to live in the moment, because he knows it’s what she would have wanted him to do.
“She has another grave, you know.” Yelena’s gaze is fixed on the nondescript headstone, marked only with the initials NR.
And neither holds her body, Clint thinks.
“We wanted to remember her here.”
Yelena nods once in approval. “She would have wanted that too.”
“Why are you here, Yelena?”
She doesn’t look up, but her gaze darkens as she stares at the headstone marking her sister’s empty grave. A vacant, transient resting place befitting one who spent her life in the shadows. “I want to meet the people she died for.”
“We loved her so much,” Clint says, voice breaking, and it’s an echo of her tearful confession from back in New York when he’d seen her façade crack. “We all did. I need you to know that.”
“I know,” she says simply.
“Do you want to come inside?”
For the first time since she stepped out of the trees, she meets his eyes. The ghost of a smile dances on her lips, and she’s so like Natasha that his heart breaks all over again. “I would like that.”
Laura’s starting a second pot of coffee in the kitchen when Clint walks in, tailed by Yelena. Her eyes flick around the house and he knows that in a fraction of a second she’s assessed every potential threat and asset. Her gaze finally comes to rest on the figure beside the tree and she breaks into the first true smile he’s seen.
“Kate Bishop.”
Kate pauses, mug of coffee halfway to her mouth. “Is this a good thing? Are you here to take me up on that drink I offered?”
Yelena’s grin widens as she pulls a flask out of one of her vest pockets. “What do you think?”
Clint, about to follow her into the living room, is stopped by Laura’s hand on his arm. “You didn’t tell me there was another stray.” Her tone isn’t accusatory. Laura’s heart is the biggest he’s ever known, and there’s always room for one more. But she wants confirmation of what she’s already guessed, wants him to help her put the pieces together.
“I didn’t know she was coming,” he answers honestly.
“Is she what kept you in New York so long?”
“Among other things.”
“Have you told her she can stay?”
Clint reaches past her, reaching to the back of the shelf to wrap his fingers around the handle of Natasha’s favourite mug, the one that – out of an unspoken agreement – none of them have touched since her death. “I’m not sure she wants to stay, Laura.”
“Nat didn’t, either. Not at first.”
“Nat didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Does she?”
I’m going to look for my family, Natasha had told him when he’d called to check in after Steve had come to break them out from the Raft. She’d told him the story later at the compound after she'd brought him back from Tokyo, her voice full of pride as she told him about Yelena and her new mission; to find the Widows hidden all over the world and to tell them that it was finally over, that they were free.
Laura meets his eyes with a knowing look as he takes the coffee pot in his other hand and pours the steaming liquid into what he still can’t help but think of as Natasha’s mug. She trails behind him as he re-enters the living room, passing the mug wordlessly over the Yelena, who immediately tops it off with a splash of the liquid from her flask. Noticing Lila watching her with interest she grins, holding out the flask. “You want to try?”
Clint clears his throat.
Yelena looks up at him, rolling her eyes. “All those years and you really think my sister never gave them vodka when you weren’t looking?” She pours another splash into the mug that Kate holds out in front of her.
“She never-” Clint begins, looking to Cooper and Lila for confirmation. Neither of them will meet his eyes. He whips around as Laura bursts into laughter behind him. “Did you know about this?”
“Are you really Auntie Nat’s sister?,” Nate asks Yelena.
She nods once. “I really am.”
Five years ago Clint would have been hesitant with her and Kate being so candid around his kids. He knows Laura thinks he’s overprotective, but he’s always wanted to shield them from the world for as long as possible. But now that they’ve literally experienced being snapped out of their very existence in the fabric of the universe only to return inexplicably five years later, he guesses it isn’t too much of a stretch to tell them Natasha has a sister she never told them about.
“Prove it,” Nate demands, with all the bravado of a child.
But Yelena smiles, reaching into another vest pocket to pull out a folded photograph, worn and tattered around the edges. “That’s me,” she says, pointing out the small blonde girl on the left. Clint doesn’t miss the way her finger trembles almost imperceptibly as she slides it to the right until it’s resting on an older girl with her arm wrapped firmly around little Yelena’s shoulders. “And that’s Natasha.”
“Can I see that?” Clint asks her quietly, hoping his voice doesn’t betray him.
Wordlessly, Yelena passes him the picture.
Their quiet interaction goes unnoticed by the rest of the room, who are listening to Kate regale them with the harrowing tale of how she saved Lucky from being hit by a car.
“But I saw that on the news!” Lila exclaims. “A ninja saved a dog! That was you?”
Kate shoots Clint an apologetic smile before turning to wink at his daughter. “This is top secret classified information, you know. You can’t tell anyone.”
“We won’t,” Nate promises her solemnly.
Kate pulls a piece of old pizza crust out of her pocket. “Wanna see him dance?”
Confident that his family is sufficiently distracted, Clint backs out of the room unnoticed, slipping into the kitchen so that he can look down at the photo in his hand. The first thing he notices is her smile. He’s catalogued thousands of her smiles, knows what they all mean, is practiced at reading the emotions behind them. At first glance, this one looks real. But there’s a shadow behind her eyes, so faint it could almost be passed off as a trick of the light to someone who isn’t intimately familiar with her face the way he is. He remembers, as if it was yesterday, Natasha telling him about her childhood in bits and pieces and halting sentences, unpacking the things she’d kept locked up and compartmentalized her entire life. I wanted so badly for it to be real.
Were you happy?, he’d asked her. I think so, she had responded.
“You said she told you about me.” He starts momentarily before looking up to see Yelena leaning against the doorframe, watching him as he looks down at the picture. She raises an eyebrow delicately at him in a gesture that reminds him so much of Natasha that he has to choke back the wave of emotion that wells up at the back of his throat.
“She did,” he acknowledges. “But she never showed me any pictures. She thought…”
“They were lost,” Yelena finishes for him. “I know. So did I.”
He hands the picture back to her, not missing how she brushes her fingers gently over her sister’s face before folding it in half again, tucking it back into her vest pocket.
“Thank you,” he says quietly. “For showing me.”
“I’m glad she had a family,” Yelena replies. “If it couldn’t be me, I’m glad it was you.”
“And who did you have?”
The shadow that passes across her face is all the answer he needs.
“Could you have stopped it?” Her eyes are glistening with tears the same way they were when she heard her sister’s secret whistle back in New York.
He drags a hand across his face, willing himself not to cry. “I think about that every day.”
Yelena holds her flask out to him, a silent offering.
He accepts, taking a swig, relishing the burn of the liquid at the back of his throat.
“You think I didn’t care.”
“It’s hard not to see it that way,” she admits.
“You have no idea how hard I tried to die for her,” he whispers. “To leave all this behind…I would have done it in a second. It,” he shakes his head, blinks, feels the traitorous tracks of the tears he’s been holding back as they slide down his face. “It should have been me, Yelena. It should have been me.”
“I never got to say goodbye,” she chokes out, brushing tears out of her own eyes.
The absurdity of the fact that he’s crying in his kitchen with the assassin sister of his dead assassin best friend who was hired to kill him and has only just recently decided not to do it after all almost makes Clint laugh.
“If you say no I won’t be offended,” he tells her. “But if you have nowhere else to go, well…you can stay here. As long as you need. There’s, uh, there’s a spare room.”
Natasha’s room. She looks up at him through her tears and he can tell she’s picking up on what he isn’t saying.
She finally cracks a small, sad smile. “Is Kate Bishop staying too? I like her.”
“I actually haven’t offered yet,” Clint tells her honestly. “But I don’t really think she has anywhere else to go either.”
Yelena looks him over for a long moment, as if she’s deciding something. Finally, she nods once. “You’re all right, Barton.”
“So you’ll stay for dinner?”
She grins. “I hope you have more than one fork.”
Dinner proves to be a chaotic affair. Clint watches as they all cram around the old scrubbed wood table, talking and laughing and sharing stories, each of them slipping food to Lucky as he makes his round of the table, gently nudging their knees and elbows to alert them of his presence. The mood in the house has been subdued ever since he came back without Natasha. She’s a ghost that lurks around each corner, an emptiness that reminds them all that no matter how happy they are there will always be someone missing.
But today the house is filled with love and laughter and light despite that emptiness, and all the colours in the room seem a little brighter.
Laura looks up at him from where she’s seated across the room, and she must notice something in his face because all of a sudden she’s getting up, coming towards him. Not for the first time, he reflects on how lucky he is to have been chosen by so many incredible people. To choose them back.
She comes behind him, slipping her arms around his waist so her chin rests on his shoulder, her hair gently tickling the back of his neck. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he tells her honestly, because despite the emptiness that he’s come to accept will be something he’ll carry with him for the rest of his life, this is the happiest he’s been in months. “I just wish she was here.”
Laura looks around the room; at Lila making Lucky dance the way Kate had before while Nate watches on excitedly, at Yelena winking at Cooper as she slips her flask out of her pocket again and pours a splash into his cup, at the empty place they’d all insisted on setting at the table because it just wouldn’t feel right without it.
“She’s always here.”