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Yelena was famous for being a mama’s girl. Anyone could see it — the way she looked at Melina like she hung the moon, and she might as well have. She knew everything about it: the moon and the stars and the fireflies and everything else in the universe. In Yelena’s universe, at least.
Her fellow kindergarteners used to tease her for running into her mommy’s arms in the carpool pickup line, but she didn’t care. Natasha used to roll her eyes every time she sprinted to claim her spot next to Melina at the dinner table, but she didn’t care. Her instructors in the Red Room told her that she had no family, no mother — she doesn’t now and she never did and she never will — but she didn’t care. It was real. It was real to her.
Yelena wishes she didn’t care now. Didn’t care that Melina was the one behind the chemical subjugation. Didn’t care about Melina at all.
But she does, and she can’t bear it. Can’t bear the swirl of emotions she feels — more confusing, even, than her own identity — when she looks at Melina, feels her hand touching hers. Melina’s hand is a flame: the same thing that kept her warm as a child has burned her, charred her, turned her into ashes.
Yelena was famous for being a mama’s girl and notorious for throwing tantrums — her emotions are too big for her little body, Melina used to say.
She feels too small now. She feels too small and the room feels too small and she has to get out of it until they both collapse into themselves, so she storms away. Grabs the bottle of vodka and stomps into the bedroom, reveling for a moment in the petulance of it. Of saying her piece and walking away without handcuffs holding her back.
The adrenaline lasts only a moment, the high leading to a low so devastating it brings her to her knees. She leans against the bed, legs squeezed to her chest, sucking down the vodka like a man finding a spring in a desert. Like herself after being locked in a Red Room cell for three days with no food or water after attempting to escape — the first and only time she tried it.
Her tantrums used to shake houses, burst eardrums, but the instinct to scream has since been trained out of her. Now it’s only her body that shakes, only her own eardrums subjected to the screams inside her head. Instead of pointing the pain outward, she directs it in until it rots her, makes her lungs tight and heart fast.
Melina opens the door, and the wave of betrayal crashes into her all over.
She can’t reconcile the fact that the person who bandaged her scraped knees is the same person who helped them plunge a knife into her brain. It hurts. It hurts so fucking bad.
But hurt, she reminds herself, has gotten her nowhere.
Scratch that.
It’s gotten her strapped to an operating table. Gotten her organs ripped out and her mind rewired.
It’s gotten her trapped in the Red Room, years and years of her life gone just like that, if you can even call it that.
It’s gotten her beatings and beratings and nightmares every night.
Anger, she thinks — that’s the secret. That’s what got Natasha out. What’s getting Natasha through this. Calling Alexei an idiot and Melina a coward and bitterly telling her that none of this was real anyway.
She tries to copy her big sister. Just like she used to and, though she’ll never admit it, still sometimes does and maybe is always destined to do.
“Get out,” she orders Melina, and it gives her a glimpse of what she could have been like if she made it to 13 in Ohio — slamming doors and giving teenage attitude.
Melina walks further into the room, and it gives Yelena a glimpse of what Melina could have been like, too — always opening those doors and never putting up with it.
“Did you not hear me? I said leave me alone,” Yelena repeats.
She feels small again. She always has next to Melina, but it’s not comforting now. Melina is no longer her protector but her puppeteer.
“I heard you,” Melina nods, taking a seat next to her — too close for Yelena’s liking. “But I’m not leaving.”
“You had no problem doing it the first time,” Yelena scowls, scooting further away from her.
She’s baiting Melina into a war she knows she won’t fight her in. She’s not like Natasha — won’t give her the satisfaction of the brawl, of slamming a plate over her head, wrapping a curtain around her throat. And she’s not like Alexei — won’t say the wrong thing over and over until it’s easy to forget she used to love him.
No. Melina picks her battles and only says the right things. That’s what makes her lethal.
“You have to know that isn’t true,” Melina says gently, pursing her lips.
Yelena does know — or she can imagine it, at least — all the hell Melina has gone through. And it doesn’t make it feel any better. She wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy, let alone the closest thing she’s ever had to a mother.
It unlocks a vault, a memory she’s tucked away to keep her safe, stuffed away with hundreds of other recollections and reactions and feelings.
She remembers.
Not just remembers — relives.
Suddenly it’s the Melina from 20 years ago sitting next to her, as if she’s conversing with a ghost. Melina with a bullet in her skin. Melina with a ribbon of blood seeping from her body. Melina on a stretcher, sweat crowning her brow.
It makes Yelena feel ill, the flashback and vodka churning in her stomach. Her throat closes, tightens like the man with the severe peanut allergy she once killed outside of London with nothing more than the little bag of them she got on the airplane.
Melina must see it on her face.
“It’s okay,” she assures her.
“No, it’s not,” Yelena snaps back through shallow breaths. “Nothing about any of this is fucking okay.”
She wants Melina to slap her back into sanity, threaten soap in her mouth for that kind of language, do anything other than what she does: place a hand on her back, rubbing between her shoulderblades.
Hand firm and grounding and soft and soothing and just like when she lost her pacifier when she was three except now she hasn’t just lost her pacifier she’s lost two decades of her life and she’s lost herself and she’s lost everything she’s ever had and part of that was Melina’s doing.
She wants to sink into Melina Her Mom’s touch and she wants to shove Melina Her Brainwasher’s hand away so hard it breaks and it’s not fair they’re the same person. It’s not fair that life’s an eclipse and the dark has to overshadow the light.
Because it does — it has to. Those three years Melina spent building her can’t possibly override all the time she spent taking her apart.
“Breathe for me, baby,” Melina says, and Yelena digs deep to push her away. It would be so easy not to, to just give in, but her life has never been easy. Not since Ohio.
“I’m not your baby,” Yelena spits, maneuvering herself away from Melina. She’s cornered herself against the dresser, teeth gritted and bared. Primal. Animal. Because that’s all she is, isn’t it? “I’m your pig on the floor.”
“Never,” Melina shakes her head, guilt deep in her eyes. Yelena knows Melina will live with it forever. She knows it still won’t be enough.
Melina reaches out again, and Yelena jerks herself away. The movement causes her breaths to come even quicker, her windpipe nothing more than a coffee stirrer — and a clogged one at that.
Melina sighs, dropping her hand to the floor between them.
“Yelena, please — now is not the time to be stubborn,” Melina says, harried. Just like it wasn’t the time when Yelena refused to listen to bedtime. Like when she decided she didn’t want to take a bath. Like when she climbed a tree and proclaimed she lived there now, high and hidden away from anything that could ever hurt her. Invincible.
“You can hate me while I help you,” Melina adds.
Melina is a lot of things, and at the top of that list — Yelena hates to admit — is logical. The only thing more humiliating than accepting Melina’s assistance is dying in front of her because she refused it. Melina is the red vial — the crimson powder bringing her to her senses.
So she crawls her way back over to her, lets Melina take both of her hands, direct one palm so it’s sitting on her chest, the other on Yelena’s own.
“Match my breathing,” Melina instructs, inhaling deeply through her nose.
Yelena’s ears ring, head pounding. She’s trying to focus on what Melina is saying and doing, but she can’t. Can’t focus on anything but the blood under her skin, flowing so fast and hard she thinks the veins might burst.
“My heart,” Yelena swallows, suddenly feeling how fast it’s reverberating in her chest. Faster than she’s ever felt it before. It makes her panic — sheer terror at her body becoming her enemy once again.
“It’s still there. It’s still beating,” Melina says calmly. “That’s a good thing — it means you’re still alive.”
Control. Control. Control. She fought so hard to get it back, and now it's gone again, and she doesn't have anyone but herself to blame. Her mind has poisoned itself in the absence of an outside toxin, weakness invading every neuron.
The world functions on a higher level when it is controlled. Melina's words, so chilling and sinister they might be true.
The tightness in her throat turns into a burn, her eyes following closely behind.
And now there’s a new target, Yelena focusing all her attention on keeping those tears away. Because she isn’t ready to die, but she’d rather that than let anyone see her cry.
She tries to suck in a panicked breath, but it gets stuck — so watery and pathetic it sends her into a coughing spell. She frantically repeats the cycle once, twice until she feels a warmth on her cheek. Battle lost.
She turns her head to the side, grabbing her hands back from Melina to wipe at her eye, rid herself of any trace that weakness was ever there at all.
“Yelena, look at me,” Melina orders.
She won’t. She can’t. Not in this state and maybe never again.
Yelena feels hands on her face, her head being turned. “Yelena, look at mama.”
It’s a truth so visceral it cuts through the noise — an epiphany so clear Yelena can finally dull the chaos in her head to a low buzz in order to listen.
Melina — her mama. Not just the closest thing ever had to one but hers, full stop and present tense. And for now, that is enough.
“If you try to fight it, you’re going to make yourself sick,” Melina says, looking at her seriously, almost pleadingly. “You have to let go.”
So she does. She lets the sobs come, lets them wrack her body while Melina holds her. Lets her heartbeat steady, match the cadence of Melina patting her back. Lets her breaths get slower, as soft as the reassuring words Melina is whispering into her ear that mama’s got her mama’s right here mama’s not going anywhere.
She finds control in losing it — finds power in being powerless. For so long, she wasn’t allowed this. To mourn everything lost. Everything taken. She unravels like a braid, gives herself some relief from being wound tight and gathered together.
Eventually, she finds herself lying on the ground, head in Melina’s lap.
And maybe it’s the exhaustion settled in her bones or the vodka settled in her head or the comfort in being settled here, curled into her mother like a child, but when Yelena can finally speak again, she finds the courage to say the most terrifying words of all.
“I don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Melina asks, brushing back Yelena’s sweat-matted hair.
“Hate you,” she quietly admits.
The confession causes Melina’s jaw to tighten, her hand — still running through Yelena’s golden locks, the ones she combed every day for three years — to quiver ever so slightly. Melina fixes her gaze forward, away from Yelena and toward the door.
But she doesn’t leave through it. Not this time. Just like she promised she wouldn’t.
“I hate myself enough for the both of us, if it’s any consolation,” Melina finally says.
It’s not, Yelena realizes. She thought it would be, but it isn’t. For the first time, she understands that Melina was holding her marionette strings but only because someone was holding hers, too. They ran on different wheels in different cages, but they were both only mice to him.
Yelena looks up, puts her hand on top of Melina’s. When Melina looks down at her, her face is full of shame. Yelena knows the feeling well. She’s done unthinkable things, too.
“You did what you had to do to survive,” Yelena absolves her. “I’m glad you did. Survive, that is.”
Melina’s face morphs into something like gratitude, a glint of surprise shining in her eye, and she leans down to kiss Yelena’s forehead. She’s done it hundreds of times before, but it’s been thousands of days since. For a moment, Yelena swears it’s like she’s back in Ohio and no time has passed at all.
Back then, she thought it was real. Now, she knows it is.
It’s the closest thing she’s ever felt to whole.