Work Text:
Yelena had been quiet for a while, looking up from her phone and glancing out the window, a frown drawn on her face.
“Hey, Yelena,” Kate said, sidling up beside her girlfriend. A part of her still thrilled at the thought of using that word – girlfriend – in the context of one Yelena Belova.
Girlfriend. She’s my girlfriend. And Kate felt the warmth blossom in her chest, cuddling her heart with soft fluffy rainbow colored clouds.
Ignorant of the fuzziness in her girlfriend’s chest, the blonde grunted, her face still frowning, as if preoccupied.
“What’s wrong, babe?” Kate asked, peering over her shoulder to look at the headlines. It was the Daily Bugle. Maybe there was something in the headlines?
LATVERIA ON VERGE OF CIVIL WAR.
AGAIN.
“What is it?” Kate asked, roaming the rest of the paper, trying to figure out what had Yelena preoccupied. “The civil war?” But you’re Russian, she wanted to say. Civil wars are basically Tuesday for you.
“It’s just…” Yelena looked up from the article. “How is it possible to have a civil war?”
“What?”
“I mean…” the blonde’s brows knotted together, a look of complete seriousness. “Do they say things like ‘please die now, thank you very much, so grateful for your consideration’ as they shoot each other?”
Blonde and brunette stared at each other, Yelena’s face shifty, Kate’s expression disbelieving.
“How long have you been saving that for?” Her voice was accusatory.
“It was funny, Kate Bishop.” Her voice was defensive.
“It’s lame.”
“You are lame.”
“Maybe I am,” Kate replied. “But you like me still.”
“I do.”
“Which makes you lame for liking me.”
“It does not!” Yelena looked positively affronted.
“It does,” Kate said primly, leaning forward to kiss the blonde on the forehead. “Now go get ready. We’ve got dinner with Jack in like an hour.”
Jack’s apartment – now that he was no longer living with Eleanor – was massive. Really massive. And pointy. Incredibly pointy, from all the swords lying in glass cases and hanging on the walls. This did not escape Yelena’s notice.
“Kate Bishop.” She had that look again, the look that Kate knew – just knew – was the prelude to yet another episode of Yelena Does Stand Up.
“What.” Kate was attempting to convey, by use of a flat tone of voice, that Yelena’s singular brand of humor was not at present welcome.
“Everything is so big and pointy.”
That did not seem so bad, and Kate allowed herself to relax. Which, of course, was a mistake.
“Almost like he is overcompensating for something, no?”
“Yelena!” she hissed. “What did I say about making a good impression?”
Yelena scoffed. “I always make good impression, Kate Bishop. I come in, I impress. That is how I do it.” She shook her head, as if Kate were being silly.
“Jack is as close to family in the city as I have, so be nice.”
“I am always nice,” Saint Yelena, Patron Saint of Niceness answered innocently. “You are the one who is not nice.”
“What do you mean, I’m not nice?”
“When I first came to visit you, you threw a bottle at me. That is not nice behavior, Kate Bishop.”
“You broke into my apartment – “
“I told you before, I did not – “
“Ladies! Welcome. Welcome!” Jack came in, and both women straightened immediately.
“Jack! Hi!” Kate ran her hands down the front of her shirt. “This is – I mean, you probably know – or maybe you don’t know – because how could you, since you weren’t – “ She paused, her brain finally catching up with her mouth.
Yelena stepped in, as Kate sought to extract herself from the bubble wrap of words that had spewed out of her mouth. “I am Yelena. I am her date. We are dating, Kate Bishop and I.”
Hearing those words coming out of Yelena’s lips made Kate glow. Had she been small and able to fit in a box, Toys’R’Us would have shipped her by the thousands.
To his credit, Jack seemed unfazed by this impressive display of combined strangeness. Any person having dinner with the daughter of your ex-fiancée who framed you for murder would probably have been unfazed as well. Years of New York high society good breeding had come to his rescue.
“It’s nice to meet you.”
Dinner was going well. Incredibly well. None of the horrifying scenarios that Kate Bishop had played out in her mind had happened. She wondered, briefly, if thinking about bad things not happening fell under the definition of jinxing it.
Yelena and Jack appeared to be really hitting it off. Yelena was especially proud that her well timed, perfectly appropriate dinner jokes were being laughed at. Her eyebrows lifted in the direction of her girlfriend as Jack threw his head back and guffawed, as if to make a point. Which, of course, was exactly the point.
“And how do you like your steak?”
This was a question that Yelena Belova had been waiting for. She had anticipated this question, and knew the correct answer to it.
“Rare,” she said, as airily as she could.
“Are you sure, babe? I mean – I know steaks aren’t really your thing, and – “
Yelena Belova had not destroyed the Red Room only to have Kate Bishop question her choice in meat doneness.
“Rare,” she affirmed, refusing to meet Kate’s eyes.
Jack had brought out the main course – a nice, juicy steak for each one of them. Yelena picked up her knife and fork, and began to cut into her steak, the way she had seen people do.
Which was when she discovered what ‘rare’ meant.
‘Rare’ was something she had heard a man say once, in a tone that conveyed richness and opulence and arrogance and certainty, while on a mission, a long, long time ago.
What ‘rare’ had turned out to be was several-minutes-on-a-hot-grill short of actually being cooked, or, for that matter, being edible. Yelena Belova thought that she could probably have resuscitated the cow with her Widow’s Bites if she had wanted to.
This, she was beginning to realize, was a problem. Yelena Belova was a firm believer that with every problem came a solution, if one only looked for it hard enough.
Could she claim veganism? Maybe – but she had already expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the steak.
Could she claim to be allergic? Could you even be allergic to steak? It occurred to her that the time for such a claim had long since passed.
She sat there, fidgeting with her fork and knife, worrying about how she was going to get away with not eating this slab of raw meat that was masquerading as a steak.
“Ah, excuse me a moment, ladies – I’m just going to check on dessert.”
Which was when inspiration shone upon the head of Yelena Belova, as her eyes caught sight of the open window across the fancy dining room in this penthouse high, high above the ground.
Yelena Belova knew that she would have to be decisive, knowing full well that Jack could return at any moment. Her Daddy had always extolled the necessity of grasping problems by the hand.
She committed. She grabbed the steak in one hand, and executed the perfect throw right through the center of the open window.
Only to realize – belatedly – that no one in their right mind would keep a window open in the evening in New York City, especially when they were living in the penthouse.
There was no open window.
There was instead the cleanest window in the entire city. So clean, that it was almost transparent. So clean…until Yelena’s mostly raw slab of steak slammed against it, slowly sliding down…leaving a trail of bloody juice in its wake.
Yelena swore she heard it go ‘moo’ as it landed on the window sill.
Kate, whose steak was a nice medium and was wholly unaware of Yelena’s predicament, turned. Her jaw dropped, and her eyes fixed on Yelena, looking at her girlfriend as if she were an alien from another planet.
This expression of shock slowly morphed into more of the “You are so dead and there is no place on this planet where you can ever hide from me” look of demonic anger.
The piece of ‘steak’ must have moo’ed, because Jack (who had heard the impact of steak meeting window and had hurried over in concern) came in quickly. The man took in the scene – Kate Bishop with a look of astonished anger on her face, the steak now grazing on the lush pastures of the window sill, the blood trail dripping red and staining the window, Yelena’s empty plate, and Yelena’s face.
Yelena’s red, shocked, guilty face.
Jack gave her a puzzled look.
Yelena had absolutely no idea what to say. What was just three seconds of silence felt like an entire lifetime. “I…I…I am so sorry. I am so clumsy. So clumsy. I was…I was…cutting it, yes…and my knife slipped…yes, that makes so much sense…and the steak just flew…to the window.” She looked desperately to Kate, searching for support. “I am just the clumsiest, am I right? Right?”
With no help forthcoming from her girlfriend, she turned to Jack, making a last ditch appeal to his grace and mercy.
“I will clean this up. I am so sorry. So, so sorry! I do not know how it happened. Let me just clean this…”
Kate and Jack continued to stare at her as if she had just escaped from an asylum, while Yelena frantically smeared blood around the window with her cloth napkin.
Her eyes fell on the steak.
She picked up the steak.
She knew that no one was believing her.
She knew that her dignity was gone.
Yelena Belova knew that there was only one thing left to do.
She inched back to her seat, while the other two people stared, and proceeded to eat every bite of the raw, cold, bloody, dusty steak.
Kate Bishop’s only two words to Yelena Belova for the rest of the night (for the rest of the week, really) consisted of only two words.
“I’m fine.”