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Siberia was colder than Yelena remembered.
That was a foolish error on her part, forgetting her roots and returning to Russia wholly unprepared for the frigid Winter winds and heavy snow storms. By the time she reached Yakutsk, she was starving and dehydrated, frostbitten fingers wrapped in cloth and shoved into the pockets of her puffy coat, having lost all feeling in her feet days prior.
It wasn’t easy to find Alexei. Not when nearly every bar in the city had his face plastered on the wall, barring him from ever again stepping foot in their establishment. Not when most of the properties she’d checked had already evicted him once, or had refused his tenancy altogether. She did not need to wonder why.
She finally located him in the outskirts of the city, living in what she would not hesitate to call the slums of Russia. Temperatures easily reached below freezing here, and she tried to remain unphased as possible as she passed through the snow-blanketed streets, stepping over the frozen bodies of the homeless in the sludgy snow piles, shivering so hard that her teeth clattered cartoonishly loud in the otherwise quiet air.
Alexei was on the fourth floor of a rundown building that smelled of liquor, cigar smoke, and neglected garbage. The bandana tied around her face did nothing to stop the stench from invading her nostrils and overtaking almost all her senses, she could almost taste the rotten meat. It was so pungent she had to hold her breath as she scaled the wall, coming to a crouch on the fire escape next to his window.
Despite herself, her heart lurched at the sight of him through the cracks in the blinds. She could see his gut poking out from above the top of the couch, head tilted back against the arm of it, clearly fast asleep. She pushed open the window and flung herself inside, boots immediately crunching as she landed on broken glass and other debris.
Yelena’s throat went dry, she cleared it like she was hacking up sand, having extreme difficulty swallowing past the thick lump that had formed there.
For some odd reason, she suddenly felt like crying.
“Daddy,” she called out as she approached the couch he lay on, her eyes scanning every inch of the place. “You better be alive.” A muffled groan answered her, and she let out a sigh of relief.
The place was a disaster, to say the least. It looked so much worse than the most recent safe house she’d been staying in back in Jonava, which had been partially blown up by a pipe bomb just minutes after she left. Hell, even Kate Bishop’s messy, burnt-down Manhattan apartment had looked better than this.
[Ah, Kate Bishop... Intrusive thoughts of the younger woman, the beautiful tall brunette she'd only met because she'd been on a mission to kill the poor woman's mentor, passed through her mind more often than thoughts about death. It was very annoying.]
“Daddy! Hey,” she called out to him again when he didn’t move, louder this time. Still no response beyond an indignant grunt. Rolling her eyes up to the flood-stained ceiling, she repeated, “Hey!” and nudged his head with her boot.
His eyes cracked open, nose scrunching up much like hers was - Yelena hated how many faces they shared. Alexei blinked owlishly up at her; it seemed that his one brain cell was lagging as it tried to process the fact that she was here in front of him. Yelena understood the confusion written across his face, as part of her couldn’t believe it either.
“Yelena?” he croaked, his already deep voice sounding even lower from sleep. “What- what are you doing here?”
Yelena rounded the couch, plucking up empty liquor bottles on the way and tossing them into the only trash bag she could find here, and even that was riddled with little holes and tears. “Get up,” she ordered her dad, kicking him roughly in the ass. He grunted and shot her a look, shuffling over so she could gather up the broken bottles underneath him. “Der’mo, Mama was right.”
“What are you on about?” he huffed, pulling himself up off the couch. His body left an Alexei-shaped dent in the cushions, the fabric crusty and stained like he’d been laying there for days. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had.
“That you are filthy as pig,” Yelena spat, dropping the trash bag so the glass clattered noisily inside. Wrinkling her nose, she gestured up and down his body at his stained clothes and food-speckled beard. “How long has it been since you had a wash?”
“Huh…” Alexei squinted in thought, his hands coming up to scratch at his beard, crumbs cascading down his shirt at the action. Dirt and grime was crusted under his long nails. “What month is it now?”
“You are disgusting,” Yelena shook her head, but he seemed unphased by her insult. “And you say you have been busy, huh? Busy doing what? Being a couch potato?”
“Oh, I get it. First I am pig,” Alexei slammed his hands down on the coffee table, startling Yelena enough to make her flinch, “Now I am potato? Why don’t you show some respect to your father, the Red Guardian, eh?”
Respect was certainly not what Yelena felt for this man who was supposed to be her dad, but she didn’t argue. Arguing with Alexei meant going around in circles for hours, and she simply did not have the time.
“I am not here to fight,” she sighed, moving to take a seat on the couch before thinking better of it. She hovered awkwardly before settling on the edge of the arm, one foot planted on the floor and the other propped up on the coffee table. “Believe it or not, I need your help.”
“Help? Ha!” A laugh bellowed out from deep within his chest. “Why, I never thought you’d ask!” She could not get away fast enough; his big, stinky arms enveloped her and pulled her into a crushing hug, “Daddy and daughter duo, back together again!”
“No,” Yelena roughly shoved him off of her, fighting an involuntary gag from the stench of his unwashed clothes and greasy facial hair rubbing across her cheek. "That is not what's happening here. I have business to get back to.”
“Oh, yeah?” Alexei asked, bushy eyebrows furrowing. “And what has my girl been doing since we parted ways, huh?”
Yelena wrung her hands, not looking at him. She didn’t know why she felt shame trickling down the back of her neck like a cold sweat, since this was probably the proudest Alexei would ever be. “I’ve been taking contracts in the states. I have jobs, unlike you.”
It wasn’t the dig she wanted it to be. Sure, she had a job, and what was that? The only thing she’d been taught, conditioned to do - the only thing she knew she was good for. Her dad may have been a washed up super-soldier now, but she was still nothing but a trained killer. That was all she would ever be. She'd proven that when she'd finished her mission and had gone right back to her roots not long after.
If Dreykov could see her now, the blood on her hands would probably make him proud, and while that thought made her physically ill, it was not enough to lead her away from the business. She was not as strong as Natalia.
Alexei said nothing, just frowned at her. It was honestly pathetic. She looked around her at the trashed living room, at the used dishes piled in the sink and dirty laundry leading a path to the bedroom.
“You feel fulfilled?” she asked him, skeptical.
Alexei grabbed at his gut and gave her a toothy smile. “So full. So filled,” he said. He was telling the truth. Then his eyebrows scrunched back together as he asked her, “But what brings you here?”
Yelena hesitated to answer, as she felt that Alexei had no true concept of the complexity of his own question. What brought her here? In another world, visiting her parents might have been a regular occurrence. She and Natalia may have come to Russia for annual trips, sat around the dinner table and talked about their lives. She might’ve celebrated Mother’s and Father’s Day, birthdays, holidays with them all. If it weren't for all the trafficking, she might've even been a daddy's girl.
In this world, it was strange and unusual for Yelena to drop by unannounced to see him, something that her father clearly did not understand. And why would she want to see him? Just because they freed Widows together did not mean they were friendly. She most definitely was not on speaking terms with her Mama, after all.
So what brought her here? Well…
Desperation, first and foremost. Her days were all the same. Most mornings, she would wake up from nightmares to a piss-soaked mattress and sweat-soaked clothes, lurching over the side of the bed before her stomach rushed up her throat, only held back by the handcuffs rubbing bloody marks into her wrist. She'd wash the sheets and scream at herself in the bathroom mirror. She'd make herself a hearty breakfast, pushing back the intrusive thoughts of slicing open her own arm as she chopped up fruit.
Sometimes, she'd do it - just a little cut, just enough to draw up tiny bubbles of crimson, just to see if her body would listen to herself. Then she'd take a scalding hot shower and scrub a little too roughly at her skin, raw and red, as if she could rid herself of all her sins with spice scented body wash.
She'd walk Fanny every day, twice a day. She'd take an assignment from Valentina and return to a safehouse days or weeks later, shedding a bloody uniform to reveal the walking corpse of the woman underneath. She did this because even without the chemical agent controlling her every thought, feeling, and movement, Yelena was really good at killing. She couldn't help it, she was just too talented.
When she wasn't killing, she was shopping, because she was really good at that, too. It helped stave off the negative thoughts somewhat, but there was only so much that new clothes and jewelry could do for her mental health.
Frankly, she was getting sick and tired of it.
The monotony of her day-to-day life was starting to chip away at what was left of her sanity, but it wasn’t really the boredom that got under her skin so badly. It was the constant feeling of emptiness in her gut despite how much she ate, the never-ending exhaustion no matter how long she slept. The numbness that overtook everything, making it hard to feel much of anything, even anger, at times - but it was there whether she felt it or not, the white-hot rage simmering just under the surface, waiting to boil over and burn everything around her.
Most of all, what bothered her was the nagging feeling that nothing in this world was truly worth it. That there was no real reason for her to still be here.
“There is something wrong with me," she replied, eyes fixated on her fidgeting hands, hands that shed enough blood to fill the Pacific. “I cannot help but feel… unfulfilled.”
Unfulfilled was an understatement, but she had no other way to explain it.
It was difficult to come to terms with the vastness of her freedom before. Without Natalia here, it was nearly impossible. She couldn’t understand why she was here after everything - after defying and escaping the Red Room, after nearly blowing herself up to destroy it and kill Dreykov, after being Blipped for five seconds - no, no, five years - why was it that she survived?
They’d dismantled the Red Room. They’d killed Dreykov. They’d finally freed all the widows, and Yelena wasn’t even here to see any of that because she was nothing but a speck of fucking dust!
What was the reason? What was the point of it all? They didn’t need her anymore, they hadn’t needed her for five years.
“Unfulfilled?” Alexei threw out his beefy, hairy arms into the air, “My girl, how can you feel that way? You are greatest child assassin in the world!” He grabbed at her hands and held them up, and she wriggled and squirmed to break out of his vice-like grip, to no avail. “You are the daughter of the Red Guardian, the sister of Natalia Romanova! You have made your family so very proud!”
Yelena flinched at his words, which were supposed to be uplifting and reassuring, but it did the exact opposite. That was exactly the problem; she didn’t speak to Melina at all, her daddy was a dipshit loser, and her sister was still dead. How could she have made them proud?
She certainly couldn’t see Natalia’s soul smiling down at her from within the cosmos. If anything, Yelena knew she would be disappointed in her. She still remembered the last conversation they’d had, over a shitty phone line from different sides of the world, just weeks before she’d freed her last widow. Before she’d been Blipped. Before she died with a purpose and came back to… nothing.
Nothing. No reason, no purpose, no end goal to work towards. She and Natalia had spoken about getting together once Yelena’s mission was officially done, settling down on a farm somewhere, living off the land and raising goats and sheep - now that Yelena thought about it, it was just like Barton and his family, and a sharp spike of pain shot through her heart at the realization.
But Natalia was dead, so there would be no farm, there would be no goats and sheep, there would be no happy ending for someone like her. Now nothing was worth it. Why was she still fucking here?!
“That is just it,” Yelena told him, shaking her head. She could hear the desperation creeping into her own voice, and it was pitiful. Pathetic. “I have nothing else but that, you see? Nothing.”
All she had was being an assassin. Perhaps for Alexei, that seemed like enough, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t the life Yelena wanted to live. Traveling the country in search for targets wasn’t the newfound freedom she should be enjoying in her adult life. Her mission had ended, and she could do anything she wanted to do... Except that the one person she thought she'd get to spend her freedom with was no longer here.
She missed her sister so bad it felt like a hole had opened up in her heart - a Natalia shaped hole that could never, ever be filled again.
Visiting her grave did not even help Yelena to grieve, because she knew that Natalia’s body was not down there. No, her body was in a different time, not even on Earth, but on a completely different planet. How could she possibly come to terms with her death if her body was not here, if she couldn’t even feel her late presence in this timeline? It made about as much sense as the Blip, which was to say, it did not make any sense at all. None whatsoever.
There was no logic or reason to it. That was Yelena’s final conclusion - she’d often wondered about the true meaning of life before Thanos snapped his fingers. After five years of her life passed in the literal blink of an eye, finding meaning was no longer a thought in her mind. There was no meaning. To live this life of hers meant to suffer, she knew that now.
She suddenly realized that coming here was a mistake. She didn’t know why she bothered.
She didn’t need his help with this mission, not really. She could do it all on her own if she really wanted to… But there was something off about the whole thing. It tickled something in the back of her brain, instincts from the Red Room that taught her to be on high alert for anything fishy. This mission was fishy, and as much as she had thrown herself into her solo work the past few months, she did not want to go at it alone.
[But how did that matter? How did that matter, when she held her own Widow Bites up to her temple just weeks ago? When she contemplated jumping off the icy cliff just days ago, on the way here?]
“I’m not in Russia long. Mason secured me another plane,” she told him. That was another thing - life was nothing but transactions and payments. She owed Rick Mason more than she would ever owe Alexei. “We leave for the states in two days.”
She didn’t give him much time to respond before whirling around on her heel and stalking towards one of the rooms down the hall, which was significantly narrowed by piles of trash and boxes of stuff climbing the wall, stacked almost to the ceiling. It seemed that her daddy was a hoarder. Fantastic.
Alexei did not follow her as she turned into what she assumed to be his ‘office’ and kicked the door shut behind her, dropping into the desk chair. The leather was peeling off, revealing the yellow foam underneath, and Yelena picked idly at it as she ran through her plan for tomorrow.
Tomorrow. She’d started to despise that word just like she’d grown to resent waking up in the morning.
“Yebat!” She slammed her fists against the cluttered desk, sending papers flying and pens clattering to the floor. The constant thoughts of death were impossible to shake, she felt like she was drowning in her own mind. Like the shadows in the corners of the Red Room had seeped into her bones, dimmed the brightness of her soul. But that wasn't it, either.
She didn't want to succumb to the shadows. She didn’t truly want to die.
More than anything, she just wanted a reason to live.