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Yelena finds a new apartment and adopts a dog. She decides her apartment will be in Ohio, because right now she doesn’t know where else to go.
She names the dog Fanny and at first isn’t sure where the name comes from, it just seems right. It isn’t until she’s pouring herself a glass of wine that she realizes that it had been one of Natasha’s aliases.
The whole bottle of wine is empty before the end of the night.
Yelena’s apartment is small but it is suitable. It is not like she has enough friends in the world that would ever want to stay over, but the couch can be pulled out to be a bed in case she finds an old Widow, or they find her, and need a place to stay.
Her grief finds her in unexpected ways.
At the grocery store there is a mother with her two young daughters, one hanging onto the shopping cart, the other sitting in it. They are laughing, and the elder one is pointing to the box of Oreos on the shelf to ask her mother if they can get it, and even though she only spent three too-short years in Ohio, Yelena remembers it all too well, remembers many shopping trips with herself sitting in the cart and Natasha holding onto the side as they asked for sweets and Melina pushing the cart.
Yelena did not get any groceries that day, turning herself around and putting her cart back at the front of the store and driving home in silence.
She orders Thai from the restaurant down the street and calls Melina and Alexei as she waits for her food, but they don’t pick up.
They’re just busy. It’s late where they are. But it would be nice to have someone to speak to at this moment, when she feels like she’s being gnawed on from the inside like one of Fanny’s dog bones.
She takes Fanny to the dog park a few times a week, and most days it goes without problem. Yelena finds she likes to people-watch, a luxury that she hadn’t been granted previously. When she was outside of the Red Room in the past, she was on a mission, a task. But now, there were a few moments to sit and watch and people interested her the most.
The dog park was a good place to do that. Most people left her alone, except for one man who had handed her a piece of paper with a phone number written on it (which she promptly handed to Fanny to chew up), and the one woman who she had to apologize to for Fanny being overly excited to play with her little shih tzu and accidentally kept knocking over.
One day she thinks she’s alone in the dog park, it’s just her and Fanny, and she’s tossing the ball and just as she tosses it again and her dog runs off, she looks up and the world briefly falls apart.
She thinks it’s Nat briefly, for a moment. Her hair is red and in a braid down her back and Yelena almost feels her feet carry her to her, before the woman turns around and Yelena sees it’s not Nat. It will never be Nat.
There is little in Yelena’s life that can shake her now. She has seen too much and done too much, but her hands are shaking when she attaches the purple leash to Fanny’s color and walks her out of the dog park as fast as possible and there are tears in her eyes that she cannot shake.
Melina and Alexei finally pick up one of her calls as she’s cooking lunch on her tiny stove one day.
“Half a clove of garlic should work,” Melina said to her, her voice distant, and Yelena can imagine her huddled over her notebook as she writes something down quickly.
Yelena considers it and decides to put a whole clove of garlic anyway.
“I’m surprised you even remember me making the recipe,” Melina said.
In truth, she hadn’t thought about it in years, but it was one of those memories that Ohio brought back in small doses, little by little.
Yelena hears someone shuffle in the back of the room and Alexei’s booming voice fills the space.
“Yelena!” he almost yells, even though he must be standing right by the phone. “How are you?”
“Fine, Alexei.”
“Good, good. Now tell me- you’ve spent so long in America. When will you visit Russia again?”
Yelena paused in her stirring. “Well I don’t know. I’ve been busy.”
“Busy? Busy with what.” Alexei’s accented voice booms through the telephone speaker.
“With work.” Yelena turns off the stove. “You should be proud, Alexei, me with a real job.” It is quiet for a moment. “I am going to go eat now. I’ll call tomorrow?”
“Yes. Call tomorrow, dear.”
Yelena hangs up and plates her food and sits down on the couch. Outside of work, she doesn’t quite know why she’s so hesitant to leave Ohio. Maybe it’s Nat, maybe it’s the memories. She should visit Melina and Alexei again. Soon. But she can’t pull herself away right now.
Yelena would like to be pickier when she picks her jobs, but yet, when Valentina came to her doorstep back when she first came to Ohio, she couldn’t refuse. More money would be nice, but beggars can’t be chooser in this world that they’ve all found themselves fallen into.
But she would definitely like a raise.
Valentina gets on her nerves, their two personalities rubbing against each other like nails on a chalkboard. Yelena is always glad when Valentina finally hands her what she needs and leaves at the end of the day.
She is supposed to be on holiday when Valentina shows up standing next to her at Natasha’s grave and she’s filled with a newfound level of annoyance.
But it all changes when Valentina shows her the man on the iPad.
She only knows him vaguely, from all the videos about the Avengers she had watched when she was missing her sister. His picture is everywhere at the events celebrating the Avengers, but Clint Barton himself has disappeared from the public eye.
She wonders if he feels guilt.
Yelena’s felt guilt before. Intense guilt that eats away at you, trying to sleep at night. She’s spoken to the other Widows about it. They all have it and she’s fairly sure it may never go away.
She prints out the picture of Clint Barton and puts it up on the dart board she hung up on the wall, because it humors her and very little else does these days.
Perhaps it’s a risk, because her rental agreement specifically says she cannot damage the walls and one wrong move and the dart’s pointed end will pierce the dated wallpaper.
But if Yelena Belova has been trained for one thing, she’s been trained to not miss her target.