Chapter Text
It’s a matter of some debate, afterwards, as to who was actually the first to spot Melina in the Watchtower.
John will swear up and down that he saw a cleaning lady coming out of Alexei’s suite who must’ve been her. Ava, of course, will counter and say that she saw a woman in the emergency stairwell a week before that - only a glimpse, of course, and with too-light hair, but who else would’ve been sneaking through there at two in the morning, not stealing anything? Bucky will have a few different instances of someone getting just barely caught on security footage around Alexei’s rooms late at night, but everyone else maintains that that doesn’t count as seeing it himself. Also, there’s no way to prove that it’s Melina on camera, besides ‘who else would want to be there?’
The first person to actually catch her, though, is Bob.
It’s kind of a ridiculous situation that leads to it, and he knows it’s ridiculous. It’s been a handful of weeks since what Bucky calls “the Incident” and Alexei calls “the Assembling of the Team”, and in that time, pretty much every night Bob has either been woken up by Yelena coming down to his suite to crawl into his bed, or he’s given up on sleep on his own and gone to crawl into her bed. Literally nothing has happened besides sleeping - if it had, he might’ve known where he stood enough to just cut to the chase and join Yelena from the beginning every night. As it is, they’re stuck doing this weird dance.
Which is fine! He would rather be doing this than not having anything to do with Yelena at all. She’s kinda become...everything to him, since the Thing that he’s only remembered in bits and pieces so far. He’s not gonna mess that up, no sirree.
But anyway, it’s because of this that he’s out of bed at one in the morning, creeping up to Yelena’s floor. He takes the stairs, because the elevator is kinda loud to enhanced ears at night, and he doesn’t want any of the Super Soldiers Three catching him at this. It’s dark, and he’s a little fuzzy from not sleeping right, but he’s mostly sure that he’s counted the number of levels right. Yelena’s is the topmost residential level, where her sister used to live way back when.
He opens the stairwell door quietly and slips inside, and the first thing he notices is that there are lights on. The second thing is that there are rugs and old Soviet propaganda posters on the hallway walls, which are definitely not part of Yelena’s decor (she doesn’t actually have much decor yet). The third thing is the smell, not unpleasant, but a distinct mix of vodka, CK One, and a floral scent he can’t identify. The fourth thing is the pile of stuff on the floor a few feet away - a lab coat and scrubs that look like what they wear in the labs downstairs, a short black wig, and something shimmery that he takes a moment to recognize as one of those facial disguise things.
Bob freezes. There’s an intruder in the Watchtower; he should do something. But he’s not sure what that something should be - he’s been told in no uncertain terms to stay out of fights, so he probably shouldn’t try to handle this himself. Should he go for Yelena or one of the others and risk the intruder getting away? Should he find a panic button and sound the alarm and risk having to confront the intruder himself?
While he’s debating with himself, he hears voices speaking Russian down the hall. One of them, male, might be Alexei’s; the other is a woman’s and definitely not Yelena’s.
Then a woman comes around the corner towards him, still talking in Russian, wearing a black combat jumpsuit and with dark hair pinned up on her head. She looks kind of like if the lady from The Mummy was his mom’s age and gave the impression of being very deadly, and she smiles back over her shoulder at someone. The someone she’s smiling at comes around the corner too, and turns out to be Alexei in a bathrobe, and he grins and plants a big smooch on the lady, and she starts to kind of twine herself around him, and Bob yelps, understandably startled.
The two of them separate, spotting him.
“Who is this?” Mystery Lady asks in accented English, and “Bob! What, what are you doing here?” says Alexei, and “Bob? Why are you...wait. Mama?” says Yelena.
Wait. Says Yelena. Who’s just come in behind him from the stairwell.
Bob twists around to face her. “Yelena? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” She gestures broadly. “I was going...downstairs like I do when I can’t sleep, only then I heard you as I was coming past this door, and when I came to see what was wrong I saw my mom is here somehow without telling anybody.”
“I told Alexei,” Mystery Lady - Yelena’s mom? - interjects.
“That doesn’t count. I hadn’t heard from you in months and now when I do it’s because you broke in to see him and not me.”
“I tried to tell her --” Alexei offers.
“You are leader of New Avengers,” Mystery Lady says. “It is better if you have plausible deniability about continued connections to the ex-Widow network.”
“I don’t care about that,” Yelena says, her voice shaking. “I just wanted my Mama.”
At this possibly least opportune moment, the stairwell door bursts open and Bucky, John, and Ava all pile in, knocking Yelena aside and into Bob. He catches hold of her without thinking about it and then doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and the other three all stumble to a halt as they presumably spot Alexei’s hand still on Mystery Lady’s waist.
“What are you all doing here?” Alexei rumbles.
“Silent alarm went off,” Bucky says, rotating his shoulders restlessly. “Indicated a situation on this level.”
Yelena gestures with the arm that’s not pinned between her and Bob. “Look, I was going by and heard Bob yell, okay? Figured it was an intruder.”
“Well, uh, you would yelp too if you wandered onto the wrong floor and saw Alexei randomly making out with somebody!” Bob says defensively. “No offense, man.”
“I take little bit of offense,” Alexei says. “We are married, is not so shocking.”
“You were fake married for three years in the ‘90s and haven’t lived together in years,” Yelena says, rubbing her temples like she’s trying to either ward off a headache or hide.
“So we are good at long-distance,” Mystery Lady says. “‘Lena, are you going to introduce your friends, since they are here?”
Yelena sighs. “Ahh sure. Why not. Melina, these are my new friends Bob, Ava, Bucky, and John, which you probably already heard about from the news and Alexei. Everybody, this is my mom, Melina Vostakoff.”
“You need to increase security in this place,” Melina says casually. “It’s ridiculously easy to get in and out, I tell Alexei every time.”
“Every time?” Yelena interrupts, breaking away from Bob to advance a few steps down the hall. “How many times have you been here without letting me know?”
The argument descends into Russian at that point. Alexei shoots the rest of them a shooing signal that probably means the three of them need to work this out without an audience, and Bucky starts to nudge the rest of them out. Bob hesitates, feeling vaguely like he should help Yelena...but he doesn’t really have any idea what that would look like, so he shuffles back to his floor to try to get back to sleep.
In the morning, when he ventures down to the common area to try and find some breakfast, he finds Yelena eating buttered bread with a bunch of stuff piled on it, and Melina making enough eggs for a small army. She loads him up with a bunch when she sees him, and with Bread With Stuff, and some kind of oatmeal, and the others get more of the same when they turn up. Whatever fight was being had last night seems to have been resolved.
Melina disappears without a trace sometime later in the day, but Yelena doesn’t seem super bothered by it.
“She’ll be back,” she says, stretching out on the couch with her feet in Bob’s lap. “She’s got this whole operation, life, thing going on. I never expected her to stay. Just to actually let me know if she’s coming is all.”
Bob doesn’t really get it, get Melina. Why would anyone choose to miss out on time with Yelena? Why would anyone not grab all the time they could with the person they loved?
But he decides he doesn’t need to get it, with how happy Yelena and Alexei are when Melina drops by again (still breaking in and disguised) a few weeks later and greets everyone like she was barely away.