Probation Period

by FormerlyIR (Irony_Rocks), Irony_Rocks

Summary:

Bucky takes convincing to join the team, but Yelena is certain she can get him onboard. Neither of them have the faintest clue what they're signing up for.

Especially when Yelena ends up losing another five years of her life to a botched mission.

Chapter 1

#

There were two separate handwritings.

Yelena judged them each likely masculine by the curves and the slopes that were more angular than evocative. The contents within it made her think it wasn’t a journal with the standard nonsense one usually found in a little notebook — passwords, diary scribblings, doodles, really bad creative poetry. Well, there were doodles to be sure. Few and far between, and demonstrating decent art skills with a pen or a pencil by the first set of handwriting. The old notebook had a faint crease down the middle, as if someone had folded it in half and stuck it in a back pocket only just the once. Red cover, majority of the pages still left blank despite its well weathered age. There was a tiny stain of spilled ink on one of the small pages and other signs of clear abundant use, but Yelena couldn’t help but think these demonstrated rare instances of carelessness, outliers in the otherwise very well cared for little red book.

It was important.

She knew how to find things that were important to her marks. It was amazing what people left lying around right out in the open in the comforts of their homes. She kept turning the pages, even as she sensed him before he walked through the bedroom door; it was in a way that made her think he purposefully made his arrival obvious for her sake, just like she’d left signs of her invasion obvious for his sake. One didn’t step uninvited into the home of a deadly assassin lightly, but this was old hat for Yelena.

Still, it was a heartening start to the night that the gun in his hand was pointed towards the floor rather than the back of her head when he said, “It’s rude to break into people’s apartments, y’know?”

She didn’t lift her head, still flipping through the pages of the notebook. The list in the first handwriting was clearly pop culture things, the type of stuff that spanned decades and across a variety of interests. American, mostly, going on for a few pages.

The second was a hit list.

Or very likely felt it like it because it had the majority of the names crossed off. It felt like something one wrote in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Considering it was the Winter Soldier’s notebook, Yelena highly doubted it was a list of people he needed to get Christmas presents for.

Bucky came up behind her and snatched the book right out of her hands.

“Rude,” she muttered.

“That’s private — most things are in a home when someone doesn't invite you inside.”

She shrugged. “You took longer than I thought. I had some free time.”

To snoop. To case the joint. To find out where he hid all his weapons.

He rolled his eyes and gestured with a nod to take this conversation to some other room. She followed him outside of his bedroom, where she noted the bed was carefully and neatly tucked in at four corners, military style. It didn’t look like he slept handcuffed to the headframe or in that hidden space underneath the bed like some of the other brain-washed assassins she’d known over the years. The hallway was short and empty, and the kitchen was clean and well-organized. She’d already made herself a peanut butter sandwich; like she said, she’d had time.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought I made it clear. I’m not interested.”

“Bucky — Buck, can I call you Buck?”

“No.” Flatly.

“James,” she pivoted, which somehow annoyed him more. “We need to come to an understanding, yeah. You’re needed in the group. You’re a vital role, even. I’m not looking for a co-captain, entirely, not really looking for a formal structure given the personalities involved and I really don’t want to deal with Walker’s griping if he thinks there’s another male alpha coming for the role of leadership. But I’m thinking we can work something out within—”

“No,” he said again. He made an annoyed face while he said it, subtle displeasure at only the eyes and the slight turn of his frown, but an annoyed face nonetheless that spoke volumes. “I’m not joining Valentina’s little band of misfits. Neither should you.”

“It’s not Valentina’s,” Yelena countered. “It’s ours.”

“It’s not, and you’re naive if you think she won’t have any control over it. You don’t strike me as the naive type.”

“You don’t strike me as shortsighted, either. This is an opportunity, James. I know how the optics of yesterday played out — we can play this to our advantage.”

He grimaced, slightly. “Call me Bucky.”

“Only if I can call you Buck,” she countered.

This was a negotiation, after all. A tête-a-tête with high stakes. She needed to start off strong.

He rolled his eyes and turned away, but it wasn’t another outright denial.

She was tempted to grin like a child. Progress.

#

It wasn’t that she didn’t understand his misgivings. She’d have to be not only naive but outright moronic to think Valentina wouldn’t press any advantage she had of her considerable power to get them all back under her thumb. But that wasn’t, she thought, Bucky’s main problem. She knew the man by reputation only — the newspapers, the old KGB talk bordering on legends, the stories about the Winter Soldier turning even more bewildering when he decided to take up politics — but she didn’t feel like she knew the man. Natasha even told her about him in passing once, but it was more of that Boogie Man bullshit, he shot clean through me to get at mark, yadda yadda yawn, more of that Ded Moroz type of nonsense that she didn’t find tangible. She couldn’t fully figure him out.

Still, she felt like they’d shared something yesterday saving New York.

It bonded a group. It made them something special.

“Thunderbolts!” Alexie’s voice boomed in her mind, before she even remembered the rebrand to the New Avengers.

“You want coffee?” he asked, all civilized.

She shook her head. “The caffeine fucks with me this late at night.”

That didn’t stop him from quickly making himself a cup. “Look, you should save your breath. I’m out of the covert operations business and I’m not a superhero. A man with this much blood on his hands can’t be next on a Wheaties box, despite what your father may think.”

She shrugged. “You have blood on your hands. Who doesn’t? Not to toot my own horn or anything but I’m a child prodigy in assasination and spycraft — brainwashed, chemically and surgically altered before I even fully hit puberty. At least you had a childhood. I had three years in a suburban Ohio household with a fake family made up of Russian spies that meant more to me than the woman that gave birth to me. We all have our villain origin stories.”

He clearly didn’t care for the comparison. “I’m not changing my mind.”

“You can make a difference here, Buck. That’s why you’ve done everything you have in the last decade and a half? Why you’re best friends with Captain America — both versions I hear. It’s why you went into politics, isn’t it?”

“I know the difference I can make with a gun in my hand. I’m not signing up for that again.”

Incredulous, here. “We met on the open desert road two days ago when you took out a pair of O.X.E SUVs with explosives?”

“That was a rare exception, and I didn’t use a gun then either.”

“Then don’t use a gun. We can get you a knife, or something. A sword? Not a shield,” she lamented, rolling her eyes. “Walker would throw the most epic hissy fit.”

Her mind wandered without her permission, thinking of arrows, but that would probably trample on annoying trademark issues and she really didn’t like the idea of him becoming Hawkeye version 2.0 or anything. Besides, she already knew Kate Bishop wanted that spot and the girl had a better aim than even the Winter Soldier, Yelena imagined.

“This isn’t an argument you’re gonna win because you think you’re clever,” Bucky warned. “I’ve been dealing with people like Valentina for longer than you’ve been alive. They don’t change. They don’t fall unless they’re taken out. The impeachment hearing was the best way, the cleanest way, of getting someone like her out of the business. Now she thinks she’s got the Temu version of the Avengers to make her relevant again, and she’s going to squeeze that for all it’s worth.”

“Only if we let her,” she replied. “You’re overlooking the power of extortion.”

“I’m not interested in blackmailing anyone,” he only replied.

She lifted an eyebrow. “That’s very high-handed. I thought you wanted to make a difference?”

“I do, which is why I choose politics.”

“And somehow you have a problem with extortion? I’m not following.”

He sighed, poured some milk into his coffee, and took a long sip with the resigned attitude of the old man. Which, granted, he was. It was really rather impressive given how young and fresh he could look if he didn’t make aggrieved his entire personality.

She paused, indelicately. “Also, since we’re on the topic, I’m still not entirely sure about why you went into politics or how that happened. No offense, but you don’t have the charm or appeal of the normal politician. I’ve seen your interviews. Some people pop and sizzle on camera, a Tony Stark type of charm. Some people go for the bookish nerdy look, or a statesmen with poise. You? You kinda just—” she stopped, stilling her body, rigid, alien, “—stand there. Vacant eyes, flat expression, mouth opening and closing. It’s not charismatic. It’s like a dead fish.” She paused, a shrug, and added again, “No offense.”

“You just compared me to a dead animal. How am I not supposed to take offense to that?”

“Would it be better if it were a live animal?”

A pause. “Yeah, actually it would.”

“Alright, okay, you’re like a— what’s that one overly used cliché? A reindeer caught in headlights? Yes, that one. Better?”

“Sadly, if my options are that or a dead fish — yes.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” she pointed out.

“Jesus. I don’t even know what the question was.”

“Why did you go into politics?”

A longer pause, his eyes distant, not looking at her even when he kept his gaze in her general direction. “I got tired of the killings.”

Yeah. She couldn’t quite make a joke about that one.

“Look,” she said. “Just give it a test run. A trial basis. What you’re doing right now, I think it isn’t working. Maybe you disagree with that but I doubt it. Maybe the New Avengers will be the way you make a real difference? You won’t know until you try. You don’t like it? You stop. It’s that simple.”

It really wasn’t.

“It’s really not,” he told her.

“You won’t know if you don’t try,” she told him.

“I think it’s time you left,” he said.

She didn’t argue this time. He needed to marinate. She could tell that. She lifted to her feet, made more inane small chit chat as she shrugged on her coat, and he was polite enough to listen even as he rushed her out the door.

“Think about it, yeah?”

He didn’t nod. He didn’t reply. He just closed the door in her face, but she took comfort in the fact that he hadn’t slammed it.

#

The damage control had taken root just within 24 hours —leaked emails meant to show Valentina’s corrupt dealings with various governments around the world, threatening all manners of extrajudicial authority and punishment, part of a packet compiled by Congressman Gary’s office — was now rendered a mere footnote in the volley of press coverage. Another attack on New York, another save by superheros. It brought Valentina her fifteen minutes of distraction. Her original press conference, hastily organized in the aftermath of the Void’s attack, meant to introduce Sentry and instead had unveiled the Avengers in a slapjob of a presentation — somehow, it had worked like a charm.

Well, maybe not a charm.

The impeachment trial unraveled at the seams, overshadowed by Valentina’s showy showmanship, but the actual Avengers themselves, or the New Avengers? That was a hit and a miss with PR. People gave them some benefit of the doubt given they’d saved New York and all, but then the stories started coming out about them. Their past, redacted, the holes more damning than almost everything else except perhaps the actual unvarnished truth.

Walker, most everyone already knew. He was also the one that had the most support from certain fringes of conspiracy nutjobs, conservative men and women that loved a man in uniform no matter his crimes, or even the incels, general losers as Yelena liked to call them — but it all came with a legion of faithful supporters and all of Faux News.

The rest of the team? It was partially reminiscent of a bloodbath, and Yelena had been in the midst of those a time or two.

They hated Ghost and supremely sexualized her, both simultaneously. Even from the first photos of her standing amidst the wreckage of Manhattan, it started. The headlines weren’t about her strength, her fighting, her ability to manipulate and phase through solid objects. They weren’t about her suit, which oddly earned the criticism of“trying too hard” to be woke, as if the amount of skin she covered up was inversely proportional to her competence, nevermind the fact that the suit existed exclusively to keep her alive. She had a pretty face and a frankly slamming figure, and that was all that was necessary for the internet to do its thing.

She remembered Natasha handling all that like a pro when it had come for her. Her sister had weaponized the sexism as well as she could anything else, using the glamor and appeal of her looks as just another layer of armor. Her ridiculous hero poses; her flawless makeup and endless supply of skin tight suits; her mysterious allure, all the more seductive with a half-smirk. She had played the part of a femme fatale well enough to hang with the rest of the big boys in their Avenger tower; after a decade of it, no one questioned why Natasha was part of the team anymore, no one asked why she was there. She just was — until she was killed.

Then people forgot about her sister like she was yesterday’s trash, like she hadn’t saved the entire world.

Yelena knew that same dismissal was coming for her, too. Probably twice as hard because she didn’t have the same level of familiarity or comfort with being sexualized half as much.

Ava, on the other hand — Yelena almost winced. Experimented, sheltered, generally unused to even basic social interaction throughout her childhood and beyond. Ava was a sitting duck of a target, of not only sexism but that special American brand of racism too, because anyone with her skin color automatically got it three times as bad.

Yelena got the sexism, but she knew it was coming.

Ava had no idea what was coming her way, hadn’t been prepared for it in the least.

But for Yelena, it was expected because she had boobs — and the accent. Alexie, too, earned the disdain of American vitriol. (Because of the accent, obviously, not the boobs.) It was a bit cliché. The brooding ex-KGB assassin who spoke in a thick accent. That was the sort usually typecast as the big villain in all those summer blockbuster movies. Both father and daughter were used to this type of thinking. They expected the distrust, and even embodied more than a few stereotypes. Although she had never quoted Dostoevsky while staring out a window into an unblemished sheet of falling virgin snow, she could drink vodka like water. She wasn’t a thing the American public needed to excessively worry about, though. Not anymore. It was probably for the best. She probably wouldn’t have known what to do with outright acceptance from the public, if she had gotten it.

Alexie handled it the way he usually did — with extra bravado. “They will rue the day they mocked the accent. This is accent of a fighter! A great hero. It will ring across the globe with might!”

As for Bob — the public genuinely didn’t know what to make of Bob, other than that he seemed harmless.

That left Bucky Barnes.

Bucky Barnes — the former Winter Soldier, Hydra’s elite of the elite, responsible for high-profile assassinations, a litany of covert operations and sabotage; hell, he was probably responsible for a few regime changes across the world, too. Yelena had her hands bloody, but she had the feeling she was small change in comparison to the type of wreckage the Winter Soldier had laid down. It was the type of blood one never washed clean, but somehow — the American public loved him for it.

A tragic figure caught between duty and trauma, elected a congressman representing Brooklyn only half a term ago. Valued not because of his politics, but because his bloody past as a mass murderer was overshadowed by a successful rebranding. Yelena had to hand it to him. She wasn’t sure how he’d done it, and to be frank she doubted he did either. But it was something about the lore and the rising. Everyone loved a fallen hero rising from the ashes, at least when it was a man. To the American public, Bucky Barnes was a hero. They adored him.

Yelena didn’t understand that.

She knew Bucky didn’t, either.

It was Valentina’s assistant, Mel, that brought it home with a succinct briefing. “He polls three times better than the rest of you, many of you even combined. If you want this to work, you have to bring him onboard.”

“We know,” Yelena said, in the same breath she could have sworn Valentina muttered no shit under her breath. Valentina covered it up by taking a hefty liberal sip of her coffee, also courtesy of her assistant, while Yelena continued, “He isn’t willing to join. Not unless someone—” here, a pointed look towards Valentina, “—is willing to make a lot more assurances about being hands off. He won’t join unless someone else drops out.”

“I already had that conversation with him, and it’s not going to happen,” Valentina says, unfazed. “I’m the only reason the New Avengers exist. I appreciate the pretty face and the optics of him, but you think someone with his background would be more realistic about how the world operates.”

“He’s aware,” Yelena supplied. “It’s why he decided to change the system from within.”

“Dear lord,” Valentina said, in the same tone one would expect her to describe a smelly piece of shit stuck to her shoe. “I don’t know how to cure someone from that type of nonsense. He’s got more kills than the rest of you combined, but that quixotic mannerism of his is more appealing on Bambi than it is on a politician or an assassin.”

“Former assassin,” Yelena felt compelled to add.

Valentina made a noise suspiciously close to a snort of disdain. “Let me tell you something, Ms. Belova. It’s in both of our best interests if you bring him onboard. He can get more of his do-gooder nonsense done as an Avenger than he can as a freshman congressman. I don’t care how well he polls. If he can’t pass a single piece of legislation, he’s as useful as a screen door on a sinking ship. Get him onboard, or this entire Avengers initiative falls apart faster than his political career does.”

“Funny, that sounded suspiciously like an order — and I don’t take orders from you, Valentina.”

She smiled. “Consider it a benevolent piece of advice, then.”

“So generous,” Yelena intoned, dryly. “So selfless.”

Valentina nodded, unabashed. “I do try, for the American people.”

#

A dream:

She was in the frozen forest again, but she was alone. There was no voice calling her to lunch, there were no footsteps stepping against the snow. She waited, alone. Miles and miles of trees, an absolute serenity.

It was the loneliest she’d ever felt in her life.

#

Another dream:

The fireplace lit, the stage set for a fake Christmas holiday at home. She turned a page in her coloring book, looking up to smile at her mother and father as they snapped a photo of her and Natasha scribbling side by side. Nothing more than a picture meant for a fake album for a fake family.

Mom’s hand felt like the warmth of a comforting hug. “Alright, that’s enough Christmas photos. Set the pieces for Halloween, Alexie. Girls, go change your clothes.”

It was always fake, but Yelena’s smile was real.

#

“No,” he told her.

“Relax, Buck,” she said, brushing past him. “This’ll be fun.”

This time, she brought backup. The entire group came in after her, right on her heels. It was a mark of his surprise that he hadn’t stopped them at the door. It would either be her shining victory or an unmitigated disaster, but she figured she needed to use the entire arsenal at her disposal. Her teammates ranged from the antisocial to the undomesticated, but there was something endearing about them altogether, like a group of feral mongrel puppies. Who could resist puppies? Well, she supposed cat people could, but she hoped Bucky liked dogs. He seemed like a dog person.

Though he looked appropriately uncharmed, she thought she could still bring him around because he hadn’t stopped any of them from trudging through the door, one by one. He could’ve, if he’d wanted.

As he brought up the rear, Alexie handed over a bottle of cheap wine that smelled of a gas station bouquet variety.

“You have very nice home,” Alexie offered, which was honestly more civility than she thought her father was capable of.

“Thanks,” Bucky said, bewildered, as he closed the door.

#

They ordered pizza, only after a debate about the toppings that lasted twice as long as it took to place the order. Walker wanted the classics (pepperoni); Yelena actually liked the taste of pineapples on pizza; Alexie took the opportunity to tell everyone that Russians had the best pizza in the world with, ugh, reindeer sausage, which only made Yelena make a retching noise. Bucky, surprisingly, resigned to his fate for the evening and not fighting it, offered only one opinion about a single pizza topping preference — anchovies, apparently a leftover classic from his old, olden days; Ava had vetoed that immediately. She didn’t eat like the rest of them. Couldn’t, not without a special box that allowed her to remove the suit without complications, but she sat next to the others and made her opinions on the topic just as clear as the rest of them, telling Yelena that she would leave if there was even a hint of anchovy smell in the air. It took forever to sort out the order.

“These are the people you want under a single command?” Bucky asked her, pointedly. “They can’t even agree on pizza.”

“Hush,” Yelena said. “We won’t rule by committee in the field.”

“So you agreed to a leader? Because someone has to be in charge.”

They had, actually. Surprisingly even Walker had agreed without much fuss. “I will lead,” she told him. “For now.”

Bucky nodded like he agreed, and that meant something to her even though she knew he wasn’t yet willing to agree to much of anything else. “What about him?” he said, pointedly, nodding towards the shadow sitting in the corner. “He didn’t make any of his pizza preferences known.”

No, Bob wasn’t one to offer many opinions freely. During the great pizza debate, he never said a thing. He wasn’t much for going out these days, but she’d dragged him along because some socialization was good. He sat at the side, corner chair set by the window, looking out as if he’d already tuned out the noise from the rest of the group. From the rest of the world. She couldn’t shake the thought from her mind that he always kept to the corners.

Despite their harrowing introduction, the reunion after averting disaster in Manhattan, the constant thrum of motion and preparation in the days that followed — of press junkets at the Avengers Tower, the fittings for the new suits, the daily debriefs, the insanity of social media — she found herself remembering the same picture over and over again when she closed her eyes. Bob, in that attic, hunched over himself as his parents fought in the room below. In her quiet moments, she would pick up the memory and study it, like it’d be another way for her to figure out how to help him.

It wasn’t, though.

He had a shitty childhood. That wasn’t the answer anymore than she could find closure by relieving her worst memories over and over again. It wasn’t about living with the reminders, it was about moving on. She hadn’t much managed it lately, too busy or preoccupied with trying to tie together this group of people that no one in their right mind thought would make a good team, but every once in a while, she’d get a moment to herself, a moment to breathe. Instead of peace she’d find that darkness slipping back in almost immediately. The aching bitter emptiness that somehow sat like a crushing weight on her throat. It was a paradox. How could something so void, so full of nothing, feel so heavy? It snuck up on her in a blink of an eye, and she doubted it was any different with Bob. He just sat in the quiet with it more often than she did.

Bucky followed her line of sight. “How’s he doing these days?”

“Better, I suppose. It’s a good thing he doesn’t remember the details of what happened, but he put two and two together from the press coverage. He knows— well, he knows enough now.”

“How’d he manage with that?” Bucky asked, concerned.

It was a concerning thing. Bob had the ability to grind cities to a halt, wipe people off the face of the planet. Right now, he was staring at a bird’s nest across the street, watching as if enraptured with a pair of new hatchlings cheeping. He looked the farthest thing from it, but he was the most dangerous man she’d ever known in her life, one already filled to the brim with considerably dangerous people.

“He’s managing, more or less,” she told him, a shrug. “Don’t really know if I’m helping most days, but it helps to have company if nothing else.”

Bucky said nothing.

The sharp lines of tension settled firmly on his face, and Bucky looked — old. Bucky was old, a fact so solid it didn’t even merit a joke, so old even if he didn’t look it. He felt it. He’d adapted to modern times, more or less; she’d seen enough of him by now to know that. Even if it made little sense to her, he was older than even Alexie in lived experience. More than twice as old as Alexie if you allotted for all the time Bucky had spent under ice.

Still, the slant of sunlight through the window made Bucky look aged like an old photo. The stillness of him helped, leant itself to the idea of comparing him to one of those old timey pictures, all withered and yellow. He was a handsome man, no doubt, but Yelena watched him with none of the interest like that. She liked women, mostly, just like she assumed he liked men, mostly. Still, he was interesting. Fascinating to her on a level she couldn’t yet define.

The furrow of his brow, the crows feet at his eyes, the soft stubble of his five o’clock shadow.

Bucky was appealing in the same way she found the architecture of an old church appealing. A soaring cathedral ceiling had often inspired peace in her, the same way the light filtering through the prism of a glass-stained window had changed her entire perspective of time and place. Don’t get her wrong, she was the furthest thing from religious. Still, every other curve evoked serenity in a church, every catch of light felt deliberate. She didn’t pray, but she saw the appeal. Bucky was much the same way.

If he was aware of her scrutiny, and she was sure he was, he said nothing. “Why do you keep asking me to join when I’ve given you my answer already?”

“Because you’ll change your mind. I know it.”

He looked away, tiredly. “You remind me of Sam.”

“Captain America? Can’t say anyone has ever compared me to the red, white, and blue before.”

“You both don’t know how to take no for an answer.”

She tipped her eyebrow up, curious. “And what did you refuse to him?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “You know he doesn’t like the New Avengers? He’s not happy with Valentina’s power play, and he has good reason.”

“I told you, this isn’t about her. It isn’t about Captain America, either.”

“Yeah, and what is it about? Me doing some good as a member of your team?”

She paused. She’d intended to give the old speech again, the same one she’d rehearsed and rehearsed in front of a mirror a dozen times now. It was a good speech. She’d worked out a lot of the kinks in it. It talked about all the stuff he could help with as an Avenger. The power it held to sway people, to help people. It played upon civic duty but not to a nauseating degree. She mostly had planned to appeal to his demons and the need he felt to atone, which was something she could empathize with to a degree that was outright depressing.

But she knew it now. That wasn’t the way to convince him.

She wasn’t above admitting to herself that Bucky was a bit of a question mark, and she hadn’t known before how to convince him. She knew in her soul that this was the right move, but you couldn’t convince anyone else of something like that. The pieces fit, or they didn’t. They made sense, or they didn’t. Nothing about this team should have made sense.

Bucky didn’t know it yet, and she couldn’t figure out where the conviction was coming from — but Bucky fit with the pieces of this new team. How, why – she couldn’t say. It was instinct. Yelena trusted her instincts more than logic. Logic didn’t make sense in a universe where magicians stopped time and rodents flew spaceships. It didn’t make sense in a universe where people disappeared with a snap. Logic was mercurial, and evasive.

“It’s the right move, Bucky,” she told him, with conviction.

He looked at her — and she could see it in his eyes. The waver, the edge of a precipice he so wanted to avoid. She had known that feeling many times before, the plummet into a sickly descent, the desperate reach to try and catch purchase on anything that could keep you from falling. The waiting, the wanting, the lure of darkness below. She hadn’t expected to see it in him the same way she saw it in Bob, in her father, in Walker, in Ava. The same way she saw it in her own reflection.

“You’re alone,” she told him, knowingly. “You don’t have anything anymore. All you do is sit and look at your little red notebook and think of all the terrible things that you've done. You go to work, and then maybe you drink, and then you come home to no one. Tell me I’m wrong.”

He didn’t.

“So don’t be alone anymore,” she said, a simple shrug, looking back at the others. He waited, watching her. “Join the team. Try it. Worst case scenario, we'll all be alone together in the dark.”

He said nothing to that — didn’t give her an answer, a response, not for the rest of the night, not even the day after that, but two days later he showed up at the Avengers Tower with a bag in hand.

“Alright,” he said, reluctantly. “Trial basis, or probation period. Whatever you wanna call it. I’m in, for now.”

#

Chapter 2

Notes:

TW: suicidal ideation.

#

A week later, their first official mission was an unmitigated fucking disaster.

It all started when Walker launched his shield at the tires of an SUV, but it hit the wrong way and set off a chain reaction of collisions that ended up taking out a family minivan six car lengths back. Another clusterfuck of a moment was when Alexie launched an entire motorcycle at the windshield, tossing the bike over his head as inelegantly as a thrown chair in a televised wrestling match. The end result was a six lane highway shut down for an entire day. The street-level to highway battle ended up racking up a dozen destroyed police vehicles, fourteen civilian car collisions, 64 injuries and hospitalizations including seven children, with two fatalities. Thankfully, the two dead were the bad guys, but the press coverage still raked everyone over the coals.

What do you expect from second rate vigilantes? media pundits said. The list of flinching adjectives and descriptors kept adding up. Dangerous, foolish, a band of misfits demonstrating a reckless disregard for civilian life. Who are these New Avengers, and why should we trust them to keep us safe when they can’t even manage a car chase without endangering little kids?

Yelena shut off the news after the first hour. “But we got the job done,” she pointed out, tiredly, mostly to herself.

Clearly the way the people saw it, it all paled in comparison to the property damage. She’d never heard of the original team of Avengers having to field questions about urban development and reconstruction costs. Though that may have had to do with the fact that they had a billionaire to send off clean up crews — construction, medical, legal, whathaveyou. Valentina did not cover things with the same generosity as a billionaire that would freely write checks to deal with every known problem imaginable.

Still, she felt people were easily overlooking the fact that they’d halted the mercenary convoy without a single civilian fatality, She wasn’t used to being held responsible for the wreckage after a mission. She never had to care about the aftermath. Her job was always the mission parameters, the success of the chief objective. Yelena was never intentionally messy, but she wasn’t clean either. She was just used to creative problem solving that left a few factors as inevitable variables. The other stuff was just— collateral.

“Nothing's collateral,” Bucky told her, unhooking his arm and sticking it in the dishwasher for cleaning. The fourteenth level of the Tower were living quarters, and they always seemed to congregate around the main kitchen area. “It all matters. It all means something to someone. Some of it is bullshit, yeah, but most of it—” he shrugged with his good arm. “It matters.”

She frowned. “So what do we do?”

“You’re asking me?” Bucky said. “Send Valentina to clean up the PR mess. That’s the only advantage of having her onboard, so let her deal with it. We got another mess to clean up.”

Yelena frowned even harder, looking back at the rest of the group sprawled all across the floor, dead silent, dirty, and exhausted. The tower had several floors dedicated just for them, enough that they could spread out and not see each other all day if they wanted, but they’d all come back from the mission dogtired and dirty.

Once the news coverage began and the scope of their fuck up became apparent, the infighting had begun. Fingers pointed in each other’s direction, voices rising, a comically bad comparison made by Alexie to even the Soviet Space Program making a few mistakes too; if they were the dog in a tin can, Yelena wanted in that moment to put them all out of their misery, especially as the shouting got only louder and louder.

It all finally stopped only when Ava had to deal with another consequence of a dozen car pile up — a malfunctioning suit, which caused her to spazz painfully out of nowhere, as quantum energy leaked and destabilized her body. She almost fell straight through the ground when she dematerialized, and it scared the shit out of everyone when she almost got stuck halfway through the floor. Bob had been drawn out of his corner bedroom by the commotion, and it was something he did — no one really knew what — that managed to pull her out and drag her solidly back to this dimension of reality.

Afterwards, thankfully, everyone shut the fuck up and just sat down where they were, some literally on the floor.

Now, Bucky was looking at her like he meant for her to do something.

Something to rally the troops? A motivational speech, the coach re-energizing the team at halftime after a horrific first half? Yelena had no clue what to say. Her last team sport infamously ended up with a girl shitting her pants in midfield — and she only remembered Alexie, angry at her coach at the time, giving really bad advice from the sidelines. Never listen to the ref because he’s always wrong! Or, slide-tackle any that get near you! By the end of the first few games, there was always a bunch of six year olds with scraped knees and bruised elbows, and a lot of crying. And the aforementioned poo. Yelena didn’t really have relevant good advice to pull from, nothing to rally a team together.

“So, guys,” she said, going with her guts. “Crazy thought, maybe next time don’t try to kill the civilians. Aim in the general direction of the bad guys with your guns, shields, armored vehicles, just like— aim,” she pointed straight ahead with a stiff arm, “and maybe we won’t be on the six o’clock news for hitting the little children in the minivans. Just a thought.”

Walker flipped her the bird, but no one else bothered to respond.

“Good talk,” she said.

Bucky sighed, head hung low for a moment, but he didn’t have anything better to offer either.

#

She met the gang late Thursday evening at an Irish pub, which she had thought had been Walker’s suggestion but surprisingly had turned out to be Ava’s because “the bartender was cool,” which Yelena took to mean someone had a crush. She didn’t even understand why Ava had been to a bar in the first place considering she couldn’t drink with her suit on, but everyone had to socialize at some point, even women who spent their childhood as a quantum phenomena that defied the known laws of physics. Honestly, good for her.

The place was a bit of a dive, paper shamrocks pasted up in the windows bleached yellow by the sun. There were already several rounds of empty glasses on the table by the time Yelena arrived with Bob in tow, and he slid into the booth before her.

“Where’s Bucky?” she asked.

“No show,” Ava informed.

It wasn’t surprising, but Yelena narrowed her eyes. Instead of commenting, she ate stale pretzels. An hour later, though, the place was losing its charm as Walker kept complaining about the bar not showing the sports game he wanted, some American football game, to which Ava’s bartender friend (a slim fiery brunette with a nose piercing) had just shrugged dismissively and pointed to the group around them. The bar’s regulars weren’t the American football type.

“What type of bar doesn’t like football?” Walker groused.

“You speak of American football,” Alexie sneered. “Which is not football. Because football is football.”

Bob leaned over to Walker, helpfully. “He’s talking about socc—”

“Yes, thank you,” Walker snapped. “I know.” He turned back to Alexie. “And you’re on American soil right now, bub, so maybe get used to the local vernacular. American football is football, just like we use miles instead of the metric system, just like we use fahrenheit instead of celsius.”

She really had no interest in seeing the boys descend into another pointless heated debate, which seemed to be ninety percent of all general interaction, even amidst firefights and missions.

“If you wanted to watch American football,” Yelena offered, innocently, “Bucky’s place is just around the corner.”

He was the only one that refused to move into the Tower.

#

Twenty minutes later, Alexie was repeatedly and incessantly buzzing the building’s intercom system to be let up to Bucky’s apartment.

“Is this absolutely necessary?” Bucky asked, tiredly, when he finally answered.

Yelena leaned over her father’s shoulder to yell at the little black box. “Let me up! I need to use the little girl’s room.”

A lengthy pause, lengthy enough that Yelena started to become vaguely wary that Bucky would just ignore them, before the door finally buzzed open. Even as the group climbed into the elevator and Bob hit the button, she had the vague feeling Bucky was contemplating just vacating his apartment entirely before they all arrived up there. But no, he was waiting for them when they knocked at his door, glaring dourly as they all brushed past him without explanation or ceremony, as if hanging out at his place was all pre-planned and welcomed.

“If it’s any consolation,” Bob said, hushed, the only one to offer any sympathy, “I voted to go home instead.”

“If we’re gonna be doing this more often,” Walker said, as he flopped onto the sofa and began flipping through the channels on the TV, trying to find the game, “invest in a bigger TV, Buck. The government salary can’t be that bad.”

“Don’t call me Buck.”

“I’d thought we’d gotten past this,” Walker pointed out, then nodded in Yelena’s direction. “Besides, she calls you that.”

“She shouldn’t call me that, either. She only does that to annoy me.”

“So sensitive, Buck,” she murmured, but it was true. She was about to say more when a small white cat ran across her feet. The thing was young, barely out of the kitten phase, and ducked under everyone’s feet until Bucky scooped it up gently even with his metal arm. “You got a cat?” she said, surprised.

“It’s a new development,” he murmured. Even with his profile half hidden as he moved the cat towards the back, depositing her on a small cat tree, she could tell he was sheepish. “She just sorta wandered into the building when it was raining. This isn’t permanent.”

Yelena looked around. Aside from the aforementioned cat tree, there were little kitten toys scattered on the floor, the pungent smell of fresh cat food in the air, and an overly large pet carrier that seemed too big for such a small animal. Like he’d bought it with the idea she’d grow into it. Nothing looked like it was temporary.

“I’d thought you were a dog person,” she said, almost accusingly.

“I don’t have time for a dog. I’m never home enough.”

“And a cat won’t miss you? What’s the point of a pet if it doesn’t care about you?”

“Alpine cares,” Bucky said, defensively.

“Alpine, eh?” Alexie said, crouching low, attempting to draw out the animal with a psst, psst sound. “Here, little pussy,” he cooed. Which elicited an outcrying chorus of various disgusted noises and reprimands, so loud that it made the kitten jump up into the hidey-hole in her cat-tree. “What?” Alexie demanded, defensively. “It’s what feline is called! I say it correctly!”

But everyone had an opinion on cats. Enough that it had Bucky getting defensive. “She’s a good companion,” he said. “She cleans up after herself. She follows commands. She listens instead of endlessly talking. If only others would follow in her example.”

Clearly it was a sensitive subject. “Alright, alright,” Yelena said. “We didn’t mean anything by it. I just didn’t think you were the cat type.”

“I’m not,” Bucky insisted. “She’s only staying until I can find her a better home.”

Yelena didn’t particularly like cats, but it was kinda adorable how delusional he was being about all this. As if it wasn’t already plainly obvious that the stray had found a permanent home with him.

#

After Mel had complained that she had been getting too many obscure incomprehensible replies, they made a secure group chat so that Yelena could provide everyone with better updates on missions and events that the group needed to attend.

They’d limited public appearances for now, although the number of television requests and invites kept piling up more and more. (She hadn’t been opposed to deadpanning the hot wings challenge when the opportunity had popped up, but that had been vetoed.) Bucky ended up doing the majority of public-facing speeches, which didn’t really help their image a lot because he still had that dead fish/deer in headlights look, but Yelena wasn’t fully ready to face the barrage of press coverage head on yet. Especially when more and more of her past kept creeping up from various shady sources, and the rest of them hadn’t yet been granted the same sweeping immunity deal from the government that Bucky already had. Mel had warned them that legal hadn’t cleared them from talking about anything beyond the Void thing, and Yelena wasn’t in the mood to end up in prison because she slipped up joking about her Black Widow trauma on Jimmy Fallon.

Over everyone’s protests, Yelena had nicknamed the group chat the Thunderblunders. It predictably often descended into anarchy and a nauseating amount of memes. For the most part, though, it succeeded in allowing her to convey updates and she sent out a swift no-nonsense notification when it was needed.

Yelena, 9:51 PM EST: Group training. Tomorrow. 0800 hours. No excuses.

She got back a spattering of acknowledgements from the team — including one gif from Alexie that the internet had made famous, of himself, in New Avengers uniform, grinning and doing a double thumbs up at a bunch of flashing paparazzi camera lights.

And still, despite that, when the morning came no one besides Bucky and Walker had shown up.

#

“We’re fucking this up,” Bucky said, the following day.

Yelena had been in the middle of picking up her coffee at the local café, none of that Starbucks bullshit, and to his credit she hadn’t even heard him come up behind her. Not many people could do that. “Fuck’s sake, Buck, for Christmas I’m getting you a little collar with a little bell on it. Not for Alpine, but for you.”

He ignored this. “Need I remind you that you chose this. You convinced me to join the team, just like you brought everyone else together. You rallied them when they had no reason to care, much less stick around. This is your team. They need a leader.”

Yelena didn’t say anything, taking the moment to retrieve her coffee when the barista called out her given alias. It was lucky no one recognized her thus far, but already the barista was staring at Bucky with dawning recognition, a hint of a blush spreading across her cheeks. A darting look across to Yelena, now with widening eyes signaling her newfound realization. Chyort. She’d have to find a new coffee place.

“You can lead better than this,” Bucky said.

Annoyed now, she started walking away and didn’t look back as he followed. “How do you know that, exactly? Maybe this is the best I can do, that any of us can do. We barely know each other.”

“Please, you start telling people your life story fifteen minutes into any conversation. You tell strangers your life story. Marks that don’t even know your name come away with some irreverent obscure detail about your childhood. You share. You overshare.”

“Hey, no, that’s not fair— I make conversation,” she countered, feigning offense. “Which I understand can be a perplexing mannerism when your real superpower is the ability to brood in three different directions at once, but that’s how people relate to one another in polite society. You should try it some time.”

“I prefer to keep things bottled up inside, where they belong. At least until I find an appropriate method to expel them.”

“You’re talking about—”

“Violence, yes.”

“That’s not particularly healthy, Buck,” she tutted. “You might want to take that up with Dr. Raynor at your next session.”

He tipped his head to the side. “And how do you know the name of my therapist?”

She snorted. Please, even if she hadn’t looked up everything about him and thoroughly researched his plea bargain with the US government which clearly outlined court-mandated therapy, with his background he was entirely too calm and collected to have made it this far without copious amounts of therapy or psychopharmacological drugs. She made fun of him a lot, but Bucky was probably one of the more well-adjusted members of the team. A clusterfuck of a condemnation against the rest of them, really.

“Have you spoken to Sam lately?” she asked him, pivoting on a heel back towards him.

He blinked at the non-sequitur. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing, just making more of that polite conversation I was referring to. Since you’ve accused me of oversharing, I figure I’d ask after you — your hobbies, your life’s ambitions, your friendships—”

“None of your business,” he cut in.

She made an expression that was an equivalent of a facial shrug. “It’s a little my business.”

“No, it’s not.”

“A teeny-tiny bit, yeah, because as you’ve also pointed out I’m the Team Leader. If I’m to be a more effective leader, I should know more about my team, yeah?”

“My friendship with Sam is not your concern.”

“It is when he’s Captain America and making interview statements calling us — what was it? Ah, yes. A well meaning but misguided bunch, and not equipped to handle the heavy mantle left behind by the Avengers. Really good soundbite, strong quote. I think I’ve seen it splashed on every front page story today.”

Bucky didn’t sigh, but she could tell it was a near thing. “I know what you’re doing.”

She didn’t think she was being particularly clever about it, so that was unsurprising.

“I’m not going to walk away from this conversation just because you’re trying to make me uncomfortable,” he warned her. “My entire existence is uncomfortable.”

“Bucky, Jesus, I say this as a friend — you really need to double the therapy sessions.”

“And you need to focus on getting this team to act like they’re not an unmitigated disaster. If we have many more fuck ups like we did the other day, this will all blow up in our faces. The people will look to Sam to clean up our mess, and he’ll be willing to bulldoze us over.”

Yelena straightened, a little. “He’d do that to us?”

“He’s not particularly impressed by our reputations, individual or collective,” Bucky responded, dryly. “And we haven’t exactly given him anything to make him reconsider.”

She winced. Granted, they saved New York but so had several other superheroes. Spiderman, Doctor Strange, even that freaky guy with the devil mask out of Hell’s Kitchen. Still, she’d been hoping having Bucky on board would buy them some goodwill from the man who’d taken up the Captain’s Shield, even if Bucky was choosing to work side-by-side with the other man who’d last taken up the shield and desecrated it both literally and metaphorically. She knew Sam and Walker didn’t get along. Hell, most days even Bucky still looked like he couldn’t stand Walker much.

That was fine. They all didn’t need to be best friends, but Bucky was right. They had to be a team.

Yelena sighed. “Fine, yes, message received. I’ll do more team bonding. I’ll—I don’t know, do trust falls or something.”

He didn’t laugh at her joke. He never laughed. He could've been Russian in another life.

“You know,” he said, not unkindly, “it wouldn’t be entirely a bad idea for you to take a few of those therapy sessions yourself. The entire team could use it.”

Incredulous, here. “What? Like group therapy?”

“It— it might help, Yelena.”

She said nothing at first, just slid on her sunglasses and took a hefty sip of her coffee. “How about we leave that as Plan B?” she dismissed.

#

The next few weeks, in between missions and interviews and growing famous, Yelena had very little downtime. It was a rare opportunity that she had to find time for herself, and even then she preferred to keep busy. It was Bob that usually accompanied her on random personal errands, and Ava that she elected to spar with. On very rare occasions, it was both of them tagging along together.

“Yelena?” her name, tinged in familiar Bob-shaped anxiety.

A flash of a camera went off.

He hated being chased by the paparazzi, and honestly everyone of them did, but Bob had panic attacks about it. Panic attacks on anyone was bad, but especially when it was Bob. She’d made sure to cover them up before they left, hats and hooded sweatshirts, thick sunglasses, hair tucked unobtrusively away — it was a paltry attempt when they barely left a six block radius of the Tower before being spotted.

They made their way around the corner and disappeared up the fire escape ladder while the people with annoying cameras all rushed across the alleyway down below. It had been an easy climb for Yelena and Ava, but up a few stories and Bob was huffing and puffing.

“You need to get into shape,” Ava chided him.

“I’m in shape,” Bob protested. “A couch potato blob is a shape.”

“Blob,” Yelena repeated. “That should be your next superhero name.”

Bob grinned. “Right? Bob, the Blob. It has a certain charm to it.” He shrugged. “Besides, um, I— working out isn’t really my thing. It’s been on my to do list for a while, but cardio stuff wipes me out. I’ve been trying thirty minute walks, keeping it low profile.”

That needed to change. He wasn’t a standard addition on missions yet, not entirely, but hopefully one day that would change. When that happened, he needed to be physically ready as well as mentally.

Although she imagined post meth-addiction recovery would complicate an exercise routine somewhat, Yelena was unclear about what his physical ailments actually were, if any. He’d died and come back to life. Was there any lingering addiction issues for him physically if his body was so powerful that he could recover from death without anything more severe than a palled skin tone? That was probably only because he didn’t get enough sun as a lab rat. There were no physical ailments that showed up on his routine check ups and he got those four times as often as any other member. (He was also in therapy, but that seemed to be going less well and less routinely because he kept missing the sessions.) Yelena got every official update on his physical examinations, and she’d put a bug in the system that copied her on any updates that made its way to Valentina too, just in case.

Yelena looked him over, and decided. “You’re gonna work out with me and Ava from now on.”

He expelled a groan. “No, do I have to? You can’t expect me to keep up with you two. It’s like trying to get a puppy to run alongside two jaguars.”

“You should have more self-confidence, Bob. At least rate yourself as a dog, not a puppy. You’re a grown man.”

“Only in literal terms. Everything else I think society would quibble over the details.”

Ava was a full floor higher than them, and looked down at the pair. “I’m going to tell you the same thing all my handlers told me when I was growing up. This will be painful, but you’ll survive.” She paused, thinking loudly as she leapt up another level. “Well, to be fair they weren’t really sure about some of the things I would survive, but I’m sure you’ll do better.”

Bob scrunched his nose up at her. “Is that meant to be a pep talk?”

“Yes,” Ava answered. “Although all my handlers were pragmatic assholes that should be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity, so maybe not.”

Yelena told her, “You should consider giving Ted Talks.”

As they kept climbing up, Bob puffed out heavily, “I don’t want to slow you guys down. I’m—I’m not good with the physical stuff. Or—or the mental stuff, really, or pretty much all the stuff. Still not sure why I’m even on the tea—”

“And that’s enough of that,” Yelena cut in.

“You can’t argue with some of what I’m saying,” Bob said. “I’m a danger to you all. Best case scenario, you guys won’t get a real workout because you have to slow down for me. Worst case scenario, I kill everyone because jogging is one of the worst experiences a sober person can have and I’d rather commit suicide.”

“So we skip jogging,” Yelena countered, simply, dismissively.

A pause. “Maybe we start with yoga?” he suggested.

Not the worst idea, physical activity combined with breathing and mindfulness, but she shook her head.

“Pilates?” he said, next.

“Yeah? I had a former Black Widow say she joined a group that really kept her core tight. Those housewives were dedicated.”

It immediately deflated his enthusiasm. “Okay, so maybe not pilates.”

“We’ll figure it out.” She tapped him on the shoulder, and helped him climb another set of fire escapes. “We’ll start tomorrow morning. We’ll start slow.”

Bob frowned heavily, grumbling, “Don’t suppose I could fake an injury to get out of this?”

“No,” both Ava and Yelena answered, simultaneously.

“Better us training you than Walker or my father,” Yelena said. She meant it to sound encouraging, but she couldn’t deny there was a latent threat underneath it. It did the trick. Bob shut up and stopped complaining, if only so she wouldn’t follow through on her threat. “Think of it as team bonding, Bob,” Yelena said, more encouragingly.

He said nothing.

They finally had to dip into one of the office spaces within the building, going in through a cracked open window and coming through a lobby of some dentist office. Ava came across a magazine about the Avengers on one of the tables. The original Avengers, not them. Either it was an outdated magazine or people still carried a torch for the original gang, one hard to overcome. Yelena didn’t bother reading the date on the cover in case it was the latter.

“If you could date one of the Avengers,” Ava read, “which one would be your best match? Take our quiz and find out!” She flipped through the pages and skimmed down the paragraphs. “Apparently, if I like long walks on the beach, I’m more compatible with Captain Rogers, but if I value adventure, I’d be better suited to Thor. Funny, getting raised as a lab monkey, I thought I’d be a perfect match for Bruce Banner.”

“You’d be better off with Thor,” Bob said, seriously. “That man could put you through the mattress.” Both Ava and Yelena stared at him, in shock. “What? I’m bi, and not blind.”

After a beat, Yelena and Ava both nodded.

“Hard to argue with his logic, really,” Yelena confessed.

#

It was two o’clock in the morning — or is that still night? They had Avenger resources now during missions, which was super neat on top of being helpful. When she deployed her motorcycle from the quinjet in mid-air, through the deck that bifurcated the floor, it was into a pitch black darkness below; Yelena had these nifty high-tech night vision goggles that were loads better than anything else she’d tried before. She could zoom in on a bird from a hundred feet away. Very fancy. Still, the drop onto the vacant road hit hard with a loud bounce, and then she rode swiftly up through the base.

In the end, the hostage rescue was a success, but Valentina had Mel leak the security footage of the operation to a slimy paparazzi tabloid just so they could all maintain plausible deniability from a PR standpoint. Still, the mission was a success, and nearly thirty hostages were recovered alive — so Yelena was willing to play her part and give a pre-scripted “no comment” to any reporters that asked, even while footage of her mid-air motorcycle drop played out on the internet over and over again. Admittedly it was a cool shot, but Yelena found herself uncomfortable the next week when a pedestrian on the street zipped open his motorcycle jacket and wanted her to autograph his bare chest.

“This is what fame is about?” she asked, to no one in particular back at the tower.

Walker opened a can of beer while he flopped down onto the couch. “Be thankful it was just a man’s chest they wanted you to sign. I’ve gotten —yeah, a lot of colorful requests. Some that got me in trouble with the missus.”

He was still separated from Olivia, but you could never tell that with the way he talked about her. Every time Walker spoke about his family, it was Olivia wants this, or his son does that — present-tense, not past. Even though the entire team knew the truth. It wasn’t just the standard self-delusion or a conceited need for the front. She doubted even Walker believed his own confidence more than one layer below his skin.

They were still talking, though. Olivia and him.

Yelena knew that. Had overheard him on Facetime talking with his son, now a cute pudgy toddler, and his wife had been in the background. She hadn’t sounded mean or distant; just— guarded and cautiously reserved. Clearly it was complicated. Yelena could read most people and she’d bet a million bucks that there was still love there. That man was still loyal to her, even separated, even while he had fame back on his side and women who wanted him to sign their boobs. That had to count for something, right?

And people say romance was dead.

#

A dream:

Blood on her hands, her face, spilling down on her body from visceral wounds, but somehow the blood felt external as well. She was caked in it, drying, cracking peels of blood caught under her fingernails. She was bathed in it, spilling rich warm liquid from her abdomen as she stumbled and stuttered down a dark empty void. Someone jumped her from behind, legs wrapped around her waist like a trap, hauling her to the floor. Yelena hit the ground hard, log-rolling forward to pitch the assailant off her back — not entirely surprised to find it was a small woman, Black Widow uniform detected in brief skidding flashes.

Then other things flashed across Yelena’s vision: bright pink hair, the punk rock type, a slender body of a teenager. She looked up at her assassin, the one so annoyingly good at slicing her open, the same one Yelena had wounded back just as fatally — and saw her sister’s face staring back at her.

It was Natasha, but in her youth.

Not a woman, the fiery red bombshell superhero she’d become. It was Nat when they’d first been torn apart as children, when she was barely thirteen years old.

Her sister attacked and Yelena reacted on pure instincts and muscle memory to the next hit, grabbing Nat’s arm and twisting at the wrist. But her sister was always faster, sidestepping low and crouching, breaking free of any hold. Yelena slammed an elbow down, a move that she knew could put a wrestler down cold, but the teenage version of her sister just ducked away and then buckled Yelena’s knee with razor sharp heels.

“Ouch,” Yelena groused.

“You were only ever good at one thing,” Natasha said, lunging for another blow. Yelena dodged. “But let’s face it, I was always better.”

Yelena ducked below a swipe. “Taking this sibling rivalry thing a little bit far, eh?”

“Dad didn’t want you, Mom didn’t want you,” Natasha taunted. “I certainly never did. You clung on like a barnacle, even after two decades away. Now you’re latching onto a new team of losers and — honestly, Lena, it’s pathetic. Have some self-awareness.”

Then little Natasha was aiming her wrist, ejecting a small silver circular device from her advanced-tech gloves.

A Widow’s Bite always hurt, but Nat’s next words hurt more. “Still trying to pretend you belong anywhere,” she said, head tilted to one side. “When will you learn? No one wants you, baby sis. It’s always been fake.”

Don't say that. Please don't say that. It was real. It was real to me.

Yelena awoke from the dream covered in a sheen of sweat instead of blood, with the Tower sirens going off.

#

It turned out Bob had been having a nightmare. This had somehow translated into the all occupants within the entire building having a nightmare, awake or asleep.

It wasn’t like the last time, where he’d gone in and uncovered their worst memories, their most shameful moments. It was an amalgamation of the standard nightmares brought to a fresh reality — too real, too poignant. After checking in with everyone and being waved off by Bob, covered in cold sweats, Yelena had no choice but to go back to her floor and wait out for daylight.

But Nat’s taunts kept her awake because it was so apropos Yelena didn’t even need a shrink to dissect it. Abandonment issues. Feelings of inadequacies. Sentiments of insecurity. It was so textbook Yelena almost felt embarrassed for herself.

Instead, she spent the rest of the night quietly contemplating her greatest hits — the debate over the best way to kill herself. Swallowing a bullet, plummeting off a high-rise building, the classics of slitting her wrists and bleeding out for someone to find all the gore. It was all so messy.

She’d thought about it too many nights, deliberated through the logistics in a cold calculated way the same way she would plan out her missions; she gave heavy consideration to the best ways and all the reasons why, had back up plans should someone try to thwart her attempt. She knew how she’d do it when it came time. Find a quiet house, out of the way where no one would bother to look for her for weeks. A two-car garage where she could close all the doors and start the engine going on some classic pretty convertible with the top down. Let the monoxide poisoning fill up the garage, take her as gently as sleep, too generous of a death for someone as familiar with killing as her. It would be a mercy, a kindness.

It would be a good death.

#

Two hours later she heard the doorknob twisting and it was Alexie dropping by unannounced as he had the habit of doing now. He hadn’t been in the Tower during the nightmare incident, his flat left empty, and she hadn’t bothered to ask where he’d gone to in the middle of the night. Usually it was nice getting an unexpected visit from him, even if annoying, her father occupying this weird space of embarrassment and fondness that she was slowly learning usually attached itself to most parent-child dynamics.

Right now, it was just an annoyance.

He walked in, oblivious, with his hands full of Wheaties boxes, nearly a dozen overflowing in his hands, boasting about the new cover and the pics that he hadn’t shut up about for weeks now. He dropped them all unceremoniously on the ground when he saw her huddled in a crying drunken mess on the floor, the wall behind her dented in the aftermath of her flipping out and putting her fist through the plaster.

She felt pathetic. She felt a disaster, eyes puffy and red, face blotchy, nose running so badly the snot was dripping onto her lips. She was a disaster.

It was a joke, her trying to help the others on the team. Like she had any clue what she was doing. She was just as fucked up as the rest of them, probably worse. This is why she should have started with a dog. She’d wanted a dog. She couldn’t kill herself if she had a dog, not if another creature depended on her for survival. Now instead of a puppy, she had Bob. Fucking ridiculous. She shouldn’t have even been trusted with a goldfish.

She wasn't looking at him, but she heard the noise of his approach and got angry, like the mere rustle of his clothing, that ugly new uniform that he never took off, was grating on her ears. He looked ridiculous in that prototype of a new suit he was testing out, made up of multi-layer Nomex fabric, fire-retardant, the New Avengers logo slapped on like it was a paid sponsor. She hated the ugly thing.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I brought breakfast,” he answered, dumbly.

The boxes of cereal were still lying in a heap on the ground in her living room.

“No.” She shook her head, and she hated it, this vulnerability, she hated that she wasn’t strong enough to power through like Natasha had. “I meant why are you here? Natasha was right. You didn’t want me. Mom didn’t either. No one did.”

Alexie looked confused and quietly gutted. “Yelena, what—”

"Why was it so easy?" she asked him. “You just walked away. I remember it like it was yesterday, Daddy. Natasha had a gun to them— and you just took it away from her and let them drag us apart. You let them take me. Why?”

Why was it so easy for you to leave me?

Why does everyone leave me?

She knew she sounded like a child. Even in her head, she was disgusted with herself. She felt like that scared six year old little girl again, confused and abandoned, left to the wolves. But he was supposed to protect her. He was her father, and he was supposed to protect her.

Alexie looked at a loss. “Yelena, I—”

“S glaz doloy,” she accused, “iz serdtsa von?”

Out of sight, away from the heart.

An old Russian saying that she knew applied to everyone around her. It was why no one missed her. It was why no one ever came looking for her.

He couldn’t find the words, not even a shade of defense.

When she started crying, he just dropped down to the floor and held her.

#

Another dream:

She is a daughter, a sister, a friend — a mother.

#

It was practically a rumor of a rumor that set them on the next mission, ending in a withered book with a vital page all but illegible. The Hydra nonsense underneath was all obscured but for a small portion of the text. Only a small clue, lacking almost complete context, but it clearly meant something to Bucky immediately. His shoulders stiffened, jaw clenched, and he kinda got an alien look in his eyes, like maybe he was thinking of bad memories. It put him in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

Later that night, she tracked him down to the local bar.

"Has anyone ever told you that you glower too much?" Yelena commented, dryly.

"Virtually everyone who has ever known me in this century, save for this fine gentleman here,” Bucky wagged his finger at the bartender, “and the night's still young."

He didn’t comment when Yelena slid into the seat next to him, and the bartender brought her a drink after a quick order.

She took a heavy sip and looked at him. “You alright?”

“Fine,” he said.

He did it in the way she was coming to understand meant he was not fine at all. The really not fine, not just the standard denial. There were different levels to it, different shades. When you had a backstory like him, she doubted his definition of fine or ordinary was anything at all like other people’s grayscale. Blood tended to absorb into the muted grays until it took over completely.

“This is coming from a Russian, mind you, but your silent death stare is starting to concern me.” She paused, and decided to risk it, “What was in that book, Bucky?”

Bucky was silent for a long time. When he took another large sip of his drink, she knew she wasn’t going to get an answer. It was the way he did it. Final, brooking no argument, no compromise. He wouldn’t be moved by any of her entreaties.

“Why do you even drink?” she asked him, instead. “I thought this stuff didn’t affect you.”

“It depends on how committed I am,” he told her, darkly. “Your father knows. He gets drunk every other night.”

“My father has a drinking problem. He also has a beer gut out to here,” she motioned with her hand, half a foot away from her belly. “Not the best to follow in his example.”

Bucky shrugged. “Maybe he’s following in mine? I’m older.”

Yelena hummed. “Is it going to become a competition now? Because you should never challenge a Russian to a drinking contest. Here,” she said, and reached over to grab a vodka bottle from behind the bar. A shout from the bartender down the aisle had her holding up a hand, placating, “I’m an Avenger, I’m good for it.” And he seemed to cease his protest while she poured out a glass for Bucky and then herself. “How many shots do I need to catch up?”

He stared at her. “You don’t have to do this,” he told her. “You don’t have to hold my hand, or become my confidant. I’m not going to pour my problems out to you over a glass of beer.”

“Beer is for good ol’ Americans. Neither one of us qualifies for that.”

“I’m not one of your Lost Boys,” he said, tightly.

That stopped her. “Didn’t think you were.”

“Then don’t treat me like the rest of them,” he warned.

There was more than a hint of warning in his tone. Yelena looked at him, unfazed, reading the restrained anger flushing his cheeks enough to make him look like a real boy again and not just an impossibly attractive wolf in a black leather jacket. How anyone elected him to congress, she would never know, but every single person in this bar seemed to overlook the fact that she was sitting with a predator.

Good thing Yelena was one, too.

“Look, I got my own problems to deal with,” she told him, sliding off the chair. She dropped a hundred dollar bill on the countertop, more than enough to cover her drink and his too. “Come find me when you’re through with this pity parade. Whatever that book had in it, don’t go after it alone.”

She left without another word, without a glance back in his direction.

#

But he disappeared for the next three weeks without a trace, the bastard.

#

Chapter 3

Notes:

On top of “Thunderbolts,” this story heavily references the movies for “Avengers” (all of them), “Captain America” (all of them), “Black Widow,” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” Also the Marvel TV shows of “Falcon & the Winter Soldier,” “Hawkeye,” “Wanda Vision,” and “Agatha All Along.” 💀

Hopefully I’ll explain the backstory info that’s needed to know for this story but be prepared for some spoilers. This plot is about to EXPLODE now. I’ve been just setting up character dynamics for a few chapters before shit gets REAL, so I hope you enjoy the ride.

#

It took three weeks for her to track Bucky down, but it only took three days for Yelena to gain her first clue.

It only took that long because the first two days she’d told everyone she wasn’t entirely worried or suspicious about his absence. Everyone needed their space once in a while, and he could cover his tracks and take care of himself. She festered over it, though. Whatever had been in that Hydra book had shaken Bucky badly enough that he’d gone underground again, and his life couldn’t really afford him to do that longterm now. He was a congressman. He answered to people even beside the New Avengers. Yelena expected him to resurface shortly barring anything disastrous. She had promised herself to let him deal with it himself; he was a big boy, and he’d made a decision to deal with this all by his lonesome. The team didn’t need to be involved.

The third day, she’d given up the pretense that they weren’t going to become involved.

Stalking his apartment flat and finding Mel using a spare key to let herself in, Yelena was intrigued. She was deadly silent as she snuck in after the other girl. Mel had cat food in one hand, cattoys in a plastic baggie in the other, and airpods on. Yelena could faintly hear a Taylor Swift song that was actually fairly good in her opinion, even if it had been about losing five years of the singer’s life to being snapped and hit a little too close to home. How do you grieve for everyone when you’re one of the dead? Yelena was still trying to figure that out, even four years post-being snapped herself.

“Gaaaah!” Mel screamed, when she turned around and spotted Yelena lounging by the window.

“You have a key,” Yelena noted. “That’s nice. Bucky didn’t even leave me a note.”

Mel paused, clearly understanding the situation. She may have been young, but she knew plenty about covert operations to know when to keep her mouth shut. It was clear Bucky had entrusted her to watch over Alpine while he was away, which told Yelena a number of things.

“I don’t know anything,” Mel said.

Yelena smiled. “It’s cute that you think I’ll buy that.”

#

Her next visit was to a person she’d been meaning to connect with for months now, highlighted by a series of missed opportunities. Limelight moments in the public eye, fundraising events, even a Gala at the newly rebuilt wing of the White House.

Sam Wilson was not an easy man to track down when he was doing his level best to ignore your entire existence.

Yelena found the best approach was direct. She flew out in the quinjet to a quaint little corner of Delacroix, and parked in a field beside a bar that had the Confederacy Flag still proudly raised. Yelena never understood that — being proud of a fallen regime. That was probably the Russian in her, or maybe it was just that she didn’t have any personal allegiances leftover to the old men that had kidnapped her as a child. Still, everywhere she looked, people proudly bore the mark of the Confederacy on their shops and pick-up trucks. It left a distaste in her mouth.

When she finally made it to Sam Wilson’s family home, there was a pair of boys out front. The younger one took one look at her and then pointed to the back shed without prompting. Yelena followed the directions until she found Captain America himself, legs stretched out before him, reading the newspapers in a pair of stained jeans and a greasy old t-shirt.

From this angle, she could read the front page had some headline about the construction of the Tony Stark Memorial, plans to open it on the ten year anniversary of Thanos’ snap. Yelena felt an old familiar swell of annoyance rise in her. Natasha had died just the same as Tony Stark, the same sacrifice. Yet it was always his name on monuments, his name on everyone’s lips. The gratitude that should have included her sister was nothing more than a whisper, a footnote in history. Everything was always about Tony Stark. Even Steve Rogers, who’d similarly fallen in the great battle against Thanos of 2023, was overlooked. She wondered if Sam harbored the same resentments as her about that.

“Belova,” Sam greeted, crinkling the newspaper as he stared at her overtop.

“Cap,” she greeted, overly familiar.

It didn’t elicit the same annoyed response as it had with Bucky.

Sam just flashed a broad smile like they were the oldest of friends. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

“I’ve lost a super soldier. Yay high,” she brought her hand up to Bucky’s height. “Shoulder length dark brown hair, cybernetic arm. Broods a lot—”

“Piercing blue eyes?” Sam nodded. “Yeah, I know the one. Don’t know where he is. Thought he was part of your team now?”

She narrowed her eyes, mock indignation. “See, I want to believe you, but a little birdie told me he’d been in touch with you. The good Captain America surely wouldn’t lie.”

“You’re probably confusing me with the old Captain America, and even then Steve was prone to a fibbing or two when it suited his purpose.”

“I thought lying was against his creed?”

“I think you’re thinking of Honest Abe and the cherry tree, America’s other founding father.”

“Ah yes,” she paused, looking around the shed with interest. “Bucky’s been gone for three days. His mail is piling up, and the woman he left in charge of collecting it pointed me in your direction.”

“I’m sure wherever he is, Bucky will manage without his Sport Illustrated subscription.”

All these months this man had been avoiding her — nothing personal, of course, the good Captain’s only concern was keeping the world safe and the best people in charge of that — and she hadn’t exactly expected harsh words or any cruel looks from him. Maybe the slightest inkling of some scorn, perhaps, but it’d be buried too well under the surface for most to see.

But immediately she found herself once again wondering if Sam Wilson was like that at all.

She’d seen him in interviews, heard Bucky’s stories — he was chatty in a disarming way, in a way that made people’s guard disappear before they were even aware of it. And Yelena, this stand-in for her sister, this woman who’d come from nowhere, she figured he thought she would be a nuisance. That she had come in and taken his default place as the leader of the New Avengers. She didn’t want to be Sam Wilson’s rival. Even Yelena knew she wasn’t good enough for that.

But that was a separate thing and for another time to address.

“This isn’t Bucky needing space,” she told Sam. “He’s in trouble.”

“What makes you think that?”

“My gut.”

Sam tipped his head to the side, and set his feet on the ground — measured, calm. “The man likes his solitude. I think he’s struggling. Same as you. Same as me. But Bucky’s not reckless. If he vanished, it’s not by accident but he isn’t helpless either.”

“He was different, last I saw him. Not just his brooding self, but— off-kilter. Restless.”

She was worried about him. Sam seemed to read that.

“We found a book,” she told him, disquietly, “containing Hydra nonsense.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, tiredly, knowingly.

It was the tone that did it, a simple thing, a simple tell — resigned, but uncompromising. Sam knew exactly where Bucky was, she would bet money on it.

“What did he say to you?” he asked. “About the book.”

“Nothing, I just saw a single line in it that stood out. Circled three times. Test Subject 331b.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Another supersoldier?”

Sam grimaced. “Unfortunately for us, Hydra had more dangerous experiments than just supersoldiers.”

“More dangerous?” she said, incredulous. “Shit, don’t tell me that, that’s so vaguely ominous.”

Sam sorta hung his head, half in resignation, half because she knew he couldn’t fully face her. This entire thing was shrouded in this secrecy he clearly wasn’t willing to part with, something that struck too close to home not just for Bucky, but for Sam as well. It was personal for the both of them, she realized.

“Go home, Belova. He’ll come back when he’s through.”

She studied him for a long beat, returning his scrutiny in the same obvious way. “You’re worried about him, too. You’re worried he’s in over his head, that the both of you are.”

Sam said nothing at first. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm. “What he’s doing right now, he’s gotta do. You’re gonna have to respect that.”

“I suppose offering my help would be redundant? But he’s on my team. I just want to help.”

He gave her a deep look, studying her with a scrutiny she found both knowing and somehow not annoying when the same scrutiny from other men had withered away at her nerves. She did not know why this man’s opinion mattered. Maybe it was Natasha’s voice in her ear, maybe it was those few times Bucky had mentioned him. She did not know why this man’s opinion mattered, but it did.

“I know you mean well,” Sam said, “but this isn’t New Avenger business. This is old Avengers business, and Bucky has it covered. The boy doesn’t need assistance when it comes to this type of stuff.”

“And what type of stuff are we talking about here? Because Hydra and the Red Room are ugly step-siblings in the same family and maybe I can help in ways you can’t yet imagine.”

“My imagination has been pretty well-tested since I joined a team of superheroes and gods.”

“Try a fresh perspective,” she challenged.

Sam smiled, softly, but with heart. “Natasha was right. She knew I’d like you.”

That made Yelena freeze. “Playing the dead sister card isn’t fair.”

“Seems fair from where I’m standing. Nat and I were good friends, better than that even. You weren’t the only one that woke up to five years gone in a blink of an eye and a missing hole in your family.”

“Barton tried that same family nonsense on me, and it didn’t go so well for him.”

“I heard. You tried to kill him.”

Yelena was pretty sure that’d normally merit more than a pithy comment — some quick hint of judgment, something to admonish her for trying to take out a precious member of a team that she was now set to reforge. Instead, Sam shrugged indifferently.

She watched him. “You don’t sound too upset about that?”

“He’s not dead, so I’m thinking you didn’t try that hard.”

Yelena said nothing, and looked away. She stared at a pile of spare parts in the back, equipment strewn everywhere: lathes, pieces of jagged metal, old furnaces, gutted pieces of a motorboat engine. She stood perfectly still except for her thumb skittering over her other fingernails, thumbpad sweeping down to the knuckle, a soothing unconscious rhythm. She refused to become emotional in front of this man she’d only just met.

“Do you trust Bucky?” Sam asked.

“This isn’t about trust.”

“A little bit, it is,” Sam pressed. “Bucky knows how to handle himself. If he’s in the wind, you’re not going to find him. Trust me,” he sighed. “I spent several years figuring that out the hard way.”

#

“You need backup?” Walker asked, over the radio.

“No,” Yelena replied. “I feel like the more reinforcements I bring in, the more it’ll drive them to ground. They don’t want others involved.”

“Yeah, Bucky and Sam always liked to do things their way.”

There was resentment in the words that Yelena chose to ignore. Whatever happened between Walker, Sam, and Bucky in Latvia, whatever occurred while they’d been chasing after those Flagsmashers — it was still a sore subject. Yelena didn’t want to wade too much into it, but maybe one day she would have to. She’d read up extensively on it, even the redacted files that were hidden from the public’s eye. It told her enough, but nothing quite so much as the times Walker would mention his old partner, Lemar, and that long pointed bout of silence that would always follow after, the one that was filled with rage, stark grief, and a wallop of guilt.

“Call me if you need anything,” Walker said.

“Aww, you missing me already?”

Walker snorted and hung up without a response.

#

Despite Sam’s misgivings, it didn’t take her long to find Bucky after that, mainly because Sam led her right to him. It took a few days, of course. Sam was smart enough to lie low, and Yelena was smart enough to pretend to lose interest. One of them was better at the spying game, though, and it wasn’t the man in a red, white, and blue costume with wings.

It helped that Sam briefly returned to New York City, allowing Yelena to drop back into the Tower and keep up her appearances too. In New York, she hadn’t marked any deviation from Sam’s expected routine except for one visit to the Greenwich village, specifically to a Brownstone on Bleecker Street.

What was Sam doing visiting Dr. Strange?

Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t pick up anything said inside the large ominous building. Largely because she presumed Dr. Strange had fortified it with magic. Which — how the hell was she supposed to circumvent that? Sam stayed for over four hours, long enough that she presumed he’d stayed for dinner. At the end of the night, she saw the Bleecker Street magician shake hands with Sam before they both parted ways amicably.

Then, for a long span of days afterwards, it was nothing. Sam didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, didn’t deviate from his normal routine while he was in New York. They even crossed paths by complete chance on a Friday afternoon in downtown Manhattan, waving to each other across the street as Bob pulled her into a donut shop.

“He still hasn't told you anything about Bucky?” Bob asked her.

She shook her head.

“Why does it matter to you so much? Clearly he can take care of himself.”

Yelena paused. “Either we’re a team or we’re not. If it was you missing, I wouldn’t stop. Just like I wouldn’t stop if it was Ava, or my father, or Walk—”

“Even Walker?” Bob cut in, feigning shock. “Wow, you do take your job seriously.”

“I have to find him, Bob. I can’t explain it, but something in my gut is telling me I have to be there.”

Bob watched her for the longest time, saying nothing.

Then he opened his mouth and surprised her, “You’re mad at him.”

She looked back at him. “What? No.”

“No, you are. You get this little ridge right there—” he pointed to the spot between her brows, above her nose, “when you get huffy. It’s been a permanent fixture on your face since he’s been missing. You’re pissed he didn’t come to you, to us as a team.”

She paused. “Either we’re a team or we’re not,” she repeated, as if the declaration made sense.

It did to her. She hoped it made sense to the others.

Bob nodded. “Anything I can do to help — well, that won’t fuck things up exponentially worse, anyway. Anything I can do, just say the word.”

She appreciated that, mostly because she knew Bob meant it without any hidden ulterior motives. There was an earnestness in him that always warmed Yelena because she doubted she’d ever come across it before in her life. He volunteered because he genuinely wanted to help her. There weren’t many people in her life — in the world — like that. He constantly felt outmatched and overwhelmed in this new life they’d been thrust into, but whenever Yelena asked anything of him, he always said yes. Unwaveringly, even if terrified. Sometimes he said yes before she had even opened her mouth.

“Thanks, Bob.”

#

“Yelena, let it go,” Alexie told her. “Winter Soldier is not weakling. He will be fine.”

Yelena nodded, already tuning him out.

But Alexie had to continue, “This isn’t— you’re not involved with Winter Soldier, no? I see tabloids. I see pictures of you and him—”

Yelena groaned, a full body visceral cringe overcoming her at the idea of having this conversation with her father. “Ugh, god, no. Please stop talking. I will pay you.”

“I just notice things. He is beautiful man, no denying that—”

“A thousand dollars, I will pay you a thousand dollars.”

There were pictures of Yelena and Bucky because they were pictures of her and every team member of the New Avengers, some generated by AI, some that just made wild speculation of innocuous pictures. The public loved to speculate about her non-existent love life and generally gave her far more credit for having a life than she actually lived. It hadn’t stopped the wild rumors of her with Bucky, her with Walker, her with Bob — although that last one had seemed to be less prevalent than the others, simply because Bob was less of a known entity among the public. The only one that was spared her pairing was Ava, which was likely just bigotry in play.

“You could do worse,” Alexie offered, conversationally, still unable to let it go.

Yelena wanted to scream into the air until no more words could be heard, but settled for a groan so deep that she could feel down to her bones instead.

#

Ten days later, she got an alert that Sam was headed out of the state again.

She immediately dropped everything and followed him from the Quinjet, piloting by herself through gray-cast clouds. She dropped back from a considerable distance as he drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, passed the dense urban sprawl of the cities, and headed towards the direction of a small town that was only a tiny blimp on the map.

A small New Jersey town called Westview.

“Oh, shit,” Yelena said under her breath, in realization.

#

She saw Sam meet up with Bucky at the edge of town, near a half-empty diner. The first hint of Bucky brought about this strange sort of relief, thankful to find that he hadn’t somehow been left dead in a ditch somewhere or, more likely, reclaimed by some Hydra operative by the utterance of a few simple catchphrases. He bore none of his stuffy congressman suits, just a black leather jacket he tended to favor when he was off the clock, a black henley shirt, a pair of equally black jeans that made the ensemble look monochronistic. Opposite him, Sam looked like a splash of color in contrast — brown bomber jacket, a tight white tee, blue jeans. A girl passing them by gave them both a second glance and honestly Yelena couldn’t fault her.

Yelena, herself, was dressed in cargo pants and a small black tank top that had the annoying habit of cropping up her belly repeatedly. She’d been waiting outside for them for over half-an-hour, and the heat had become insufferable even this late in the evening. She pulled her hair back into a sloppy ponytail that left wisps loose at the base of her damp neck, sticking to her skin in curls. She pulled a baseball cap over her head, tucked her ponytail through the hole in the back, and marched across the asphalt towards the diner with purpose.

She knew better than to surprise them. She doubted she could, so she didn’t bother with the attempt. As soon as she threw the side door open, Bucky had spotted her and then Sam was looking over. They were seated opposite of each other in sticky pleather booths, and Yelena took the opportunity to slide into the seat next to Bucky, forcing him to shove over.

“So,” Yelena said, “this is about Wanda Maximoff?”

Westview wasn’t just some quant little town in the middle of nowhere. From what she’d seen of it, it was almost unnervingly perfect, surrounded by quiet roads and rolling suburban neighborhoods, with nearly identical rows of two-story houses complete with white picket fences — which all would have made Yelena uncomfortable enough all by itself, but she knew what the town hid underneath.

The redacted files, the rumors, the history no one spoke about.

The general public seemed to have limited and somewhat obscured knowledge about the events that had occurred in this small uninspired New Jersey town. A few years back, S.W.O.R.D. had become involved in quarantining the town because of some “chemical anomaly,” a military lockdown facilitated by a ridiculously large federal response. The cover story only held up weakly, a simple whisper enough to tear it to pieces. Too many leaks, too many inconsistencies, and that one viral video about the Hex that made it to the internet before it was deleted from all known sources and marked classified.

Suddenly, it made sense why Bucky and Sam had been so closed off. This wasn’t about any Hydra supersoldiers. This was about one of Hydra’s greatest creations.

The Scarlet Witch.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Bucky warned her.

Yelena didn’t bother with dignifying that with any answer.

She picked up the menu and looked through her options. “It’s too late for coffee, yeah, but maybe a milkshake. Oh, there’s a unicorn dream milkshake?” She made a face, suspicious. “Not sure about that.”

“Chocolate,” Sam told her, deadpan. “Can’t go wrong with Chocolate.”

Next to her, Bucky heaved an aggrieved sigh. “This town doesn’t concern you, Yelena. It’s not safe.”

“We’re in suburban New Jersey. How dangerous could it possibly get?” The twin glares she received were really quite impressive for how they matched, given it was coming from two different corners and from such starkly different faces. She raised a placating hand up. “I know, I know. It concerns Wanda, who you both see as another member of your fallen family. And by the rumors, she has — wow, fallen, a lot. Do you think it’s safe, just the two of you, going up against the most powerful of the Avengers? Telekinesis, telepathy, mind manipulation, reality distortion. Seems like a lot. Seems like maybe a friend who has his own reality manipulation and powers would come in handy, yeah?”

“Bob?” Bucky said, incredulous. “I don’t think introducing Bob into this situation is really what anyone needs.”

“He could help,” Yelena said, defensive. “He’s been working on his—”

“Wanda would chew him up and spit him out for breakfast,” Bucky cut through.

Yelena scrunched up her nose. “And you are going to go up against her with — what? A pair of shiny wings and a metal arm?”

“We know her,” Sam said. “We’re her friends.”

She tipped an eyebrow up. “Rumor has it she hasn’t been friendly in a while.”

“Rumors are unreliable.”

“Not mine,” Yelena countered. “Mine are perfectly respectable and reliably sourced.”

A lie, of course. But Yelena was willing to bet it held more truth than speculation, especially given how colorful it was. The rumors were so outlandish that it wouldn’t be bandied about unless there was some truth to it.

“I’m here,” she told them. “I’m not going away. Might as well accept it and tell me why Test Subject 331b had you throwing a conniption. Did Hydra get to Wanda again?”

The boys exchanged a look, thick and layered, lips pinching and grimacing as a series of silent commands and objections were conveyed and vollied back and forth among the two. She could have watched it all day the same way one watched a tennis match.

Finally, they came to some sort of agreement because Bucky sighed again and his shoulders dropped in resignation. “It isn’t Wanda,” he told her. “Test Subject 331b is her son, Tommy Maximoff.”

She blinked in surprise.

She hadn’t heard anything about any son.

#

Apparently, Wanda had twins.

Most of the story had been told to them by Dr. Strange, who in turn had been told the story by various residents of Westview who now no longer remembered many of the details after he’d whammied them into forgetting. It wasn’t safe, knowing that the Scarlet Witch had twins — both boys, one in possession of mind control powers almost as powerful as Wanda herself.

Tommy Maximoff was the other one; the speedster like Wanda’s brother had been, Pietro.

“And why are we in Westview?” Yelena asked. “Hydra wouldn’t have dumped him back here.”

“Billy Maximoff, her other boy,” Sam said. “He might still be here, although under an alias. It’s — confusing, but it’s the best clue we’ve got, the only one from Dr. Strange that has the hope of panning out.”

She looked at both of them, frowning. “You’re worried he’s going to be as dangerous as Wanda.”

Bucky looked away. “We haven’t exactly had good experiences with mind control.”

Yelena found herself remembering the cold biting snow crunching under her feet, Anya’s voice calling out to her from behind; she knew the emptiness afterwards when Anya had been left bleeding out, dead, on the frozen ground, the utter pervasive silence that settled in heavier than the snow.

Not for the first time, she wondered what Bucky had seen. If he’d spent the whole time shoving his way through one dark room after another in the Void’s mind palace, reeking of blood and the bodies he’d slain; if there was one memory of his that had haunted him more than any other. They both had so much blood on their hands that they could never scrub themselves free of it. Bucky had never told her any of the details of what he’d seen inside Void’s vision, and she’d never asked. Some things even she would never ask.

It wasn’t like it was the first time for either of them, being fucked in the head. Black Widows shared the same history of mind control as the Winter Soldiers, though slightly different in nature and execution. The idea of potentially being under the absolute mind-fuckery of someone else’s control — she wondered if he felt the same shiver crawl up his spine as she did, the same rising bile in his throat that she had.

Sam didn’t miss the look exchanged between them, and discreetly shifted topics. “I’m meeting with an old military friend of mine across town,” he told them. “She may have some info. We’ll regroup in the morning.”

“Who put you in charge?” Bucky asked.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Would it be better if I said please?”

“Honestly,” Bucky answered. “Yes.”

Sam left the diner shortly afterwards, without so much as a please or thank you slipping past his lips. By then, it was late in the night. Too late to go knocking on any suburban doors without attracting unwanted attention. Yelena and Bucky made their way towards the local hotel, instead. It wasn’t a dive, certainly a head and shoulders above most of the establishments that Yelena had been forced to visit during her many years as a Black Widow. The lobby was modestly small, but clean — the kind of place that aimed to be welcoming without trying too hard. A faint citrusy cleaning solution lingered in the air, masking the older, mustier scent of decades past.

Behind the front desk, a bored-looking clerk scrolled on her phone, half-glancing up at the door when they came through. Yelena immediately clocked her as a student by the college textbooks stacked at the side. Yelena slipped into the act between one breath and the next, adopting an atrocious persona of newlyweds who’d made an unexpected pitstop on their road trip honeymoon. Very spontaneous, very romantic. Or at least in theory it was, if only Bucky hadn’t stood beside her as stiff as a corpse. While she could manage a mid-western American accent when she needed it, Bucky’s talents clearly did not lie similarly in acting.

His metal arm twitched slightly under her grip when she curled her hand through the crux of his elbow, enough that Yelena had to send him a small glare. Thankfully, the clerk didn’t spare them much of a glance, pulling up the registry of available rooms.

"Room three-twelve,” the clerk announced, sliding across a keycard. “No smoking, no pets, and the heater’s... temperamental."

Instead of lingering too long and risk exposing themselves, any attempts at eliciting the local gossip was overridden by Yelena’s need to conceal Bucky’s awful inability to act like a normal fucking human being.

“What was that?” she demanded, outraged, when they were alone in the elevator.

“What? You didn’t tell me we were playing a bit.”

“Newly weds don’t attract attention,” she explained, although it was perfectly obvious. “It’s the easiest cover in the world. No one likes public displays of affection. Instead you stood there, like, once again — reindeer in headlights.”

He said nothing, seemingly thankful when the elevator doors opened to their floor. As he walked out briskly, she couldn’t help but feel a little bad at his obvious discomfort. He was over a hundred years old, and she doubted with his dour social skills he’d managed to date much. Maybe she’d pushed too hard.

“Has it really been that long?” Yelena asked, when she pushed the room door closed behind her.

“What has?”

“Since you brought a girl to a seedy hotel room to fuck senseless?” she announced, unceremoniously. “Or a guy. I’m not judging.”

She watched, delighted, as the back of his neck turned a splotchy red. He refused to turn around to face her or respond.

“Relax,” she told him, the devil in her preening. “I’m just fucking with you.”

He turned away, a tick in his jaw jumping.

“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. It was a joke. A joke, yes? Shared among friends. If nothing else, I think we can call ourselves friends, yes?”

“Colleagues,” he corrected. “And barely that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. That message had been received loud and clear, and she didn’t particularly appreciate the reminder. Maybe it was because of that, that she couldn’t let her teasing immediately go. “Not that it’s any of my business, but I kinda feel like the whole laid joke hit a little too close to home. How long has it been since you’ve—”

“Stop,” he warned her. “We’re not doing this.”

“Come on, I’m not a prude. I like casual sex as much as the next person. I understand not being in a relationship. Lives like ours do not lend themselves to attachments or any type of meaningful lasting romantic relationships, but you can’t tell me you haven’t had a one-night stand here and there. Look at your face. You wouldn’t even have to say anything.”

If the force of his glare could kill her, she’d be dead by now.

He grabbed a bag to use the bathroom facilities, angrily shuffling around the room without a word.

“What?” she mused, aloud. “At least in this century, right? I understand you were snapped for five years but still—”

The bathroom door slammed shut behind him.

#

In the bathroom, when the shower had turned off, she hadn’t thought anything of it until she heard his muffled profanity from the other side. "What is it?" Yelena asked, distracted as this late at night the only TV worth watching were those old-timey sitcoms, the black and white kind. The old classic was interrupted as BREAKING NEWS flashed across the screen and a newscaster came on, telling people there'd been an attack on the west coast of California, primarily surrounding San Francisco.

The video showed a wave of some red shimmering energy field covering the entire city, something clearly preternatural and surreal. It sealed the city in a dome across the night sky and completely destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge where it crossed over it, the force field so strong that the bridge collapsed into the Pacific Ocean as if it was cleaved in half by the red barrier. Cars plummeted into the ocean, and it was a mark of how close the cameras were to the falling debris that she could almost count the number of vehicles if she had wanted.

This was the same type of advanced magic craziness that Yelena had seen in that leaked video of Westview from years back, the one of Wanda’s Hex magic — except on a vastly larger scale.

"You're fucking kidding me," Bucky said blackly, pushing out of the bathroom with only a towel slung low over his hips.

Any other time, she might’ve stared harder at his naked chest, which was glistening — glistening — with water.

It was a mark of the shocking news that she couldn’t notice or appreciate any of it.

A moment later, Bucky got a call from Sam, which he put on speaker. “Yeah, I say it’s a safe bet Wanda doesn’t know we’re in Westview. Or maybe she doesn’t care. She’s clearly got her eyes on something else.”

“Stay put,” Sam told them. “I’m going to go check it out, but you two need to stay here and gather info. Find out what you can about the twins. I’m sure whatever Wanda is up to, it has to do with them.”

There were a few more logistics to work out, and despite Sam’s assurances that he could handle it fine by himself, Yelena insisted that the rest of her teammates join him on the west coast. “You’ll need the back up,” she insisted. It was also a good opportunity to work in some good will between Sam and her teammates, but she wasn’t about to admit that out loud. “Just— maybe don’t send in Bob.”

If Yelena wasn’t there, she didn’t entirely trust Bob to handle the stress without Void reemerging. She doubted the rest of the team would even think about risking it. She was the only one that had a handle on Bob’s meltdowns, and now wasn’t the time to test him in combat without her direct supervision.

Sam hung up, and Bucky and Yelena spent the next few hours watching the news, but it was hopeless pontification from mediaheads who had no clue what was going on. The speculation was wild, and she suspected it was largely baseless. They’d watched as the US Air Force had scrambled in fighter jets from Travis Airforce Base to test out the red barrier with a few air-to-air missiles, only for it to crash and implode on impact with no lasting effect on Wanda’s barrier.

Hours later, they’d shut off the TV and reports from her teammates and Sam were only trickling in, mostly as uninformative and abysmal as the public media reports.

“We can’t get in or out of the city,” Ava told her, sounding exhausted. “I tried to phase through the barrier and even I couldn’t make it through. Dr. Strange showed up. The Governor declared a statewide emergency and the National Guard has been called in, but there’s no point. Nothing is going in or out.”

It felt particularly hopeless given she and Bucky couldn’t do anything sequestered so far away from the fight, all the way across the country. They’d debated back and forth about packing up and heading west, but neither of them had any superpowers that could make any bit of difference to this type of magical attack. If Wanda needed talking down, Sam was probably the better man to do it than Bucky. So, in the end, they stayed in that crummy hotel room while the rest of the world woke up.

No one really knew what was going to happen next.

No one could figure it out.

And certainly no one had any idea it would mean the beginning of the end for so much of what Yelena Belova held near and dear.

#

Chapter 4

Summary:

Just to clarify the timeline, I looked it up and Avengers Infinity War happened in 2018. Five years later, the second snap brought everybody back in 2023. The main events of Thunderbolts took place in later 2027, according to Google. The beginning of this chapter is roughly a few months after the movie events, so 2028.

#

A dream:

A cathedral was falling apart over her head and a storm was coming through. A huge section of the vaulted ceiling had collapsed inwards, revealing a stormy grey-cast sky and the onslaught of thundering rain that soaked the length of several pews under a torrential outpouring. Yelena was soaked, but she had nowhere to find safe haven.

Natasha came to stand beside her, calm in the midst of the raging storm. “It’s a shitstorm out there.”

Yelena looked up, letting the rain come down hard on her uptilted face. “I’ve handled worse.”

Nat smiled, and Yelena never noticed it when her sister slid a serrated blade between her ribcage. Natasha twisted the handle while Yelena glanced down, sputtering and spitting up blood.

“You always say that,” Natasha admonished. “But between us girls, this time I think you’re wrong.”

#

She awoke in a cold sweat, gasping.

“You okay?” Beside the bed, Bucky stood, still watching the California coverage.

She didn’t have the wherewithal to face him. He was alert, wide awake. She doubted he’d gotten any sleep. He once told her he didn’t get exhausted or tired, and needed little to no sleep. A byproduct of his supersoldier serum but she wondered if he was like her — that he avoided sleep when he could. Nothing good came for them in their dreams.

“Yeah, I’m—” She tried to steady her heartbeat, slow her breathing. It was useless, but she managed something approaching normal after a hard swallow. “I’m fine.”

She wasn’t, but there was no use in either of them pointing that out. Nightmares were intimate lovers to a pair like them, and she highly doubted Bucky wanted the details of her dreams when he probably had his own nightmares to contend with.

She sat up, bleary-eyed and slow, still fully dressed and having slept atop the covers.

She looked towards the TV. On the screen, the date and location scrolled along the bottom of the broadcast, San Francisco, CA; April 22, 2028; the unfolding drama that probably should’ve been the highlight and focus of her nightmare.

A news reporter on screen was saying, “—hours ago in what authorities are now confirming is a large-scale assault involving Wanda Maximoff — also known to many as the Scarlet Witch. Witnesses describe a ‘wave of red energy’ that tore through the sky and encased the entire city in an impenetrable force field that has prevented anything from going in or coming out of San Francisco. Overnight, widespread panic has erupted, but we urge the public to remain calm. Select members of the New Avengers have been brought in to supervise from outside. Within the city, SFPD, the Department of Damage Control, and domestic members of O.X.E. have cordoned off multiple zones as emergency services continue to—”

“Any new developments?” Yelena asked.

“—officials are urging residents to remain indoors. So far, Wanda Maximoff has not made any demands, and her motivations remain unclear.”

“Nope,” Bucky answered, wary.

The sun had risen for them in New Jersey, but San Francisco was on the other side of the country and three hours behind. It was still pitch dark on all the news coverage, still trapped in a little snow globe of Wanda’s powers. From what they’d been told, Antman and the Wasp were trapped inside the city too, the only ones already inside when the dome had closed in over them. Neither of them had found Wanda, much less discovered the purpose of her secluding the entire city under the yolk of her powers. It was too big of a statement for Wanda to do recklessly, too much noise and panic to draw public outcry and fear. Whatever it was, whatever she was after, it was important to her. Wanda didn’t seem to care how much noise it made.

For lack of anything else to do, she alternated between staring at the TV and then at Bucky. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, Yelena realized, studying him in the dim light, but he looked rough. He was still clean shaven and well-groomed, still put together for a man who had every reason to disappear into a bottle like her father had done for years, what she had done herself, but he was so visibly worn out, too; pared down and more stiff in his movements, less relaxed than even his normal not-relaxed features. There were sketches of deep crow lines at the corners of his eyes, the faint indentations of exhaustion that made itself more apparent in the slight purple bruising under his eyes. She’d missed their gradual appearance before, but he hadn’t had an easy time of it last night. Wanda was his friend. He had so few of them, and those that he did she knew he protected with fervidity.

Maybe he didn’t get exhausted, but this morning he looked weary in a way that went down to his bones and his soul.

On the tv screen, an anchorman was saying, “ — it’s been almost four years to the day since the Avengers brought half the universe’s population back, but Wanda Maximoff was hailed as one of the heroes who helped stop Thanos. She saved us back then, so the question remains — what happened to her to drive her to such extremes now? Why are our heroes turning into villains?”

Yelena glanced once more at Bucky.

“What?” he finally demanded, with his eyes still locked on the TV.

He’d clearly felt her scrutiny. She hadn’t bothered hiding it.

“What will you do if Wanda isn’t the person you remember?”

“I’ll try to talk some sense into her.”

“What if you can’t?”

He turned to look at her. “Did you give up on Bob?”

No, she hadn’t. Even if it had killed her, she wouldn’t have given up on Bob.

“Get dressed, Yelena. Finding her kids might just deescalate the situation.”

After a slow beat, she nodded.

An hour later, tired and wired on two cups of coffee and nearly non-existent sleep, Yelena and Bucky made their way across the quintessential darling town of Westview to its neighboring city, Eastview. It had the same ambiance as Westview but she wondered just how far the rot festering underneath had spread. The suburban neighborhoods all looked alike, but Yelena was enchanted anyway, thinking back to those brief few years she’d spent with her fake family in Ohio before everything had gone to shit. The American dream wasn’t all bullshit, even if this place had more than a few skeletons.

“It has its charm,” she noted, absentmindedly.

Bucky gave her a flat look.

“What? Don’t tell me a man that grew up in the forties America doesn’t at least nominally appreciate the trappings of a domestic suburban life.”

“I was never about the domestic life back then, and besides—” he made another face, this time, one of disgust. “This is Jersey.”

That apparently meant something to New Yorkers and Yelena rolled her eyes, but chose instead to focus on a different part of his sentence. “You were what— a scoundrel back then? Men had to lock up their daughters when you were around, etcetera etcetera?”

“Something like that.”

Yelena snorted. “I have trouble believing that. You seem so—”

“Spare me whatever colorful description is coming my way.”

“—monkish,” she finished, as if he’d never spoken.

Bucky sighed, heavily and aggrieved, and knocked on the door of a quaint three story house. When it was answered, a middle-aged woman came to greet them, one that Yelena already knew was named Rebecca Kaplan, born June 1, 1975 as Rebecca Weaver; wife of Jeff Kaplan; real estate agent, book club aficionado and a fan of Gone with the Wind according to her facebook profile. Also, she was mother to William Kaplan, a seventeen year old kid who was far more than the average teenager. The family had suffered a horrific car accident several years back that had mostly affected the boy; in the opposite of a coincidence, he may have become the spirited embodiment of the Scarlet Witch’s firstborn son around that same time, becoming something of a telepathetic ingenue himself.

All of this was rumors, though. Less than that. Rumors of a fairy tale told by citizens in two sister towns that had their mind whammied multiple times. To say their sources were unreliable was a vast understatement.

“Hi,” Bucky said, smiling his attempt at a real boy smile at the woman. His smiles always felt like a facsimile to Yelena, who resolved herself to one day not only know what Bucky’s real smile looked like, but also to elicit it herself. “We were looking for your son, William?”

The woman eyed them. “He’s not here right now. And who are you?”

But before Bucky could open his mouth, the world tilted on its axis, warped into an intense distorted version of itself, a hazy feminine voice in the back of her head. "Remember the day you found my son. Tell me everything—"

And then Yelena Belova blacked out.

#

She awoke in slow splintering fragments, a pain pulsating in her head that felt like she’d eaten shards of glass and it’d somehow gone through the back of her skull. There was a flash — a red coat. The sound of someone talking in rushed Slavic whispers. Black nail polish. Long brown hair. A cold metal gurney, Then… pain. So much pain. Someone was screaming, they’ve come for her, but she could barely track that, groaning, turning over on all fours to push herself upright and then retching all over the floor when the dizziness came at her from all angles.

When she finally managed to pry her eyes fully open, the scene around her was one of chaos. A basement of some kind, and she was sprawled across the concrete floor, and there were filthy windows, broken glass near her body, spent bullet shellings scattered across the floor. There was a mirror across from her, cracked and dirty, but Yelena could hardly recognize the reflection staring back at her. Eyes brimmed with tears, dark smudges of kohl atop her eyelids. Her hair was framed by long blonde hair with a shock of a pink streak down one side, messily tucked away from her face in a braid. It was long — longer hair than she’d had in years.

She closed her eyes—the fluorescent light was glaring — and breathed determinedly through her nose, trying not to vomit. Details, later. She had to figure out how deadly the situation was, instincts kicked into high gear when she heard footsteps of some soldier rushing into the cold room. He took one look at her, huddled on all fours, defenseless, and raised his gun — and Yelena acted without thought. Launched herself at him, ducking wildly under the bullet, landing an incoming uppercut and whirling, grabbing the man's arm next, making him drop the gun. She kicked it out of reach and locked him in place.

“Where is Bucky?” she demanded, while she had the man caught in a bind.

“She’ll deal with your boyfriend soon enough,” the soldier sneered. She twisted, breaking bone, and he screamed out. “He’s— he’s outside! He’s coming for you!”

She slammed an elbow into his face, and he fell back unconscious to the floor.

Yelena retrieved the gun and started moving.

It took some time but she found the exit, spilling out into the back alley way of some dark building. It was nighttime, but Yelena almost felt blinded by the shimmer of a dozen and one bright lights from her little corner. She took a few steps out of the alley, and to her surprise a seedy neon-lit urban sprawl greeted her, a compact district that pulsed around her with an electric hum, towering billboards flickering with animated faces, kanji, various languages — Mandarin, Japanese, Thai. It was shockingly clear she wasn’t in New Jersey anymore from a mere glance. The city was steeped in LED and halogen, telling her this place never slept, informing her she was somehow in Asia of all places.

“How—” she muttered to herself.

What the fuck was going on?

Despite her disorientation, the cityline and the bridge that divided hightown from lowtown was familiar enough to her, because Yelena had been here plenty before. A haven for smugglers, mercenaries, and clandestine operatives. A city built for the criminal underworld — Madripoor.

The questions kept piling up.

A wail of a cop car flashed by, and out of instinct and history Yelena ducked her head and walked swiftly down the street, forgetting for the moment that she was an official superhero. Her jurisdiction was a little ambivalent past international waters, but Yelena fell back into old habits in times of confusion. She tried to stroll less urgently, seeming unconcerned as another cop car flashed by, stopping to lean idly against the occasional building with her head ducked low and her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets — some cargo tactical vest with plenty of pockets, dark gray in color; it was her style, certainly, but she couldn’t remember ever purchasing it.

Her head couldn’t clear the questions. Why was she in Madripoor? Where was Bucky? What had happened with Wanda and her sons? None of them had answers.

In the distance, she felt a rumbling. Almost an earthquake, but Yelena knew better. She turned her head towards the building she had just escaped out of, to see a glowing red figure levitate above the street; the Scarlet Witch, with her fingertips burning with red energy, hurling cars telekinetically at someone in the street. It only took a moment for Yelena to see her team assembled and facing opposite Wanda. Even from a distance, she could see Walker trying ineffectively to take downWanda with his flying taco-shaped shield.

Bucky was attacking Wanda next, all of them here, trying to save Yelena from— whatever was going on. The only thing she could figure out from the circumstances was that she had somehow been taken from Eastview, knocked unconscious? The details were disorientating, but Yelena didn’t have time to dwell on that when she saw Wanda fling a double-decker bus at her father. Ava phased through the bus and then knocked Alexie out of the way before it could crush him.

Yelena ran forward, firing precision shots with her stolen gun; the bullets stopped mid-air and disintegrated into smoke only inches from Wanda’s face. Wanda only tilted her head, eye narrowing as she found Yelena in the streets. “There you are,” she said, floating through the air towards Yelena. “The amount of trouble you’ve caused me. If you only tell me what I want to know, none of them would be necessary.”

“Lady,” Yelena hissed, outraged and baffled. “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

From the left, some guy emerged, donning a deep purple helmet and a long heavy trench coat, fashionable with a fur-lined collar in muted white. He took out a machine gun and fired it off at Wanda, which of course did nothing.

’Who the fuck is that guy?’ Yelena wondered to herself.

But it hadn’t been about hitting Wanda with a barrage of bullets; Ava used the opportunity of Wanda’s distraction to take a running attack at Wanda’s back. Decent strategy, but it proved devastatingly poor in outcome. Some sound eruption, a screeching sound that Wanda emitted only with a flick of her wrist, penetrating Ava and her suit. Ghost crumpled at the waist, flinching in obvious overwhelming pain.

Bucky stood up from a pile of broken concrete. “Wanda, don’t make us do this.”

“You can’t stop me, Bucky,” Wanda returned, determined in a way that was — Yelena could not lie — intimidating. “When will you learn? Stop trying, or I’ll be compelled to use lethal force.”

The next few minutes was a horror show as Yelena joined the chaos. Even Bucky, Walker, Ava, her father, that unknown weirdo in the helmet, and Yelena all on one side, all against one, it was no match. Wanda handled them all too easily. She flung buildings like it was a child’s toy; buildings scorched and brought to the ground as she utilized everything around her like a battering ram, including a collapsed tram line which caused Alexie and Ava to break off from any offensive strike just to save civilians. All around them, people ran through clouds of red-tinged smoke, trying not to die or be crushed by the falling debris.

Then, with eerie precision through the chaos, Wanda looked back towards Yelena, eyes locking on her. “Give me the Black Widow, and the rest of you will be spared.”

Yelena stilled. She felt it trickle in, a memory half covered in fog— Wanda’s hand on her skull — whispering a hex: "Remember the day you found my son. Tell me everything—"

The world descended into red, then twisted into shadows, blackness — a void.

But Yelena recognized this. She knew this. She feared this.

Bob.

He emerged from the skyline like a floating god; he was dressed in some new superhero costume that was nothing like one she’d ever seen before. A bright blue bodysuit with yellow piping. Yelena felt her throat close off with fear, anguished steps carrying her forward in horror as she thought of Bob pushing himself into this before he was ready. It was clear Wanda was more dangerous than anything the team had faced before, and Bob — he wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t stable enough, he wasn’t strong enough (or maybe he was?), but the point was that he wasn’t stable enough. He couldn’t handle nightmares most nights. Wanda could twist and turn reality like a master, while Bob only had unwanted lingering nightmare concoctions of his subconscious evil alter ego.

Before her fears could manifest into reality, Bob flicked a wrist and Wanda became a shadow splash flat against the concrete. “Uh, this won’t hold her for long,” Bob said — and it was Bob that said it, not Void, not even the creepy blonde Sentry she met back at the Avenger’s Tower when Valentina had been trying to control him. His voice was soft, a little hesitant and straining, but his eyes were still blue and clear. “She’s very very strong, guys. We should book it before she breaks out of my mind palace.”

Yelena looked up in astonishment, almost needing to be told twice just to push her out of her stupefaction.

“C’mon,” Bucky said, catching Yelena by the elbow with his metal arm, which — ow. He propelled them into movement, breaking Yelena’s stupor. “Let’s move. Zemo, we need that escape route.”

“On it,” Helmet guy said.

“Seriously, who is this guy?” Yelena demanded in a bewildered whisper.

No one answered anything. They were all too busy getting out of the chaos that Wanda had left a sizable chunk of Madripoor’s poorest lowtown district in. Yelena couldn’t entirely argue, not when she knew retreat was the best option for survival, even with Bob demonstrating surprising and quite frankly baffling control of his powers — especially for a man that had difficulty managing anything more complex than moving small objects with his mind, last she checked. And where did that costume come from? She supposed Valentina might’ve had that hiding somewhere, knowing her.

And seriously, who the fuck was the guy with a helmet?

She wasn’t going to get any answers to any of her increasingly multitude of questions. Not yet, anyway. Not until they made it to safety.

#

Alexie drove the getaway car, and Bob sat upfront to keep an eye on the skyline in case Wanda made any reappearances. The car was a fancy armored large vehicle equipped with all the types of fancy gadgets and weaponry Alexie ever wanted, the type he had coveted back in the day. There was a New Avengers symbol at the side, embossed and etched into the interior of the car door, but it was slightly different from the one she knew, refined and more angular. Perhaps a rebrand she hadn’t yet been aware of.

It was like that all around.

Little details too off center, too misplaced just to the left of where things were supposed to be.

She felt it in the team, too. Ava sporting a small bob, vastly different from the last hairdo she’d sported — much like Yelena’s own longer hair. Her team’s uniforms were all slightly different, too, now that she had an opportunity to study them underneath all the grime and dust. Walker was clean-shaven, and she’d never known him without the gruff on his face. It was little details, but the little details mattered. They were too telling.

Bucky came and sat down next to her, and the place in the back of the vehicle was so crowded that they were thigh pressed to thigh. Some of the agitation must’ve been showing up on her face, or maybe it was the fact that she was bouncing her knee unconsciously, looking around the place for more and more clues on what was going on.

“How long did Wanda have me?” she finally asked.

“Only a few hours,” Bucky answered.

That— that made no sense.

Even the relief was tinged with confusion.

Bucky stilled her bouncing knee with a hand over it, stopping her movements in its track — and even that was left of center, something too bold and out of the ordinary for him to do. Bucky never initiated physical contact unless it was to beat up a bad guy. She was mindful enough of that that she very rarely touched him herself, even in the camaraderie that she engaged in with the others.

“What happened?” Bucky asked.

“You tell me,” she retorted. “The last thing I remember is New Jersey. What happened there?”

He stared at her, naked confusion over his eyes. “New Jersey?”

“When?” someone asked, speaking up. She turned to find the helmet guy watching her, and his voice was muffled a bit by the mask, but she could recognize a slavic accent when she heard one. “When was that?”

She shrugged. “Yesterday? Today? I don’t know.”

“Wanda’s powers aren’t to be underestimated,” the helmet guy said, which was fucking obvious. Then he finally pulled off his helmet. Underneath, he had a trimmed beard and calculating blue eyes that studied her. “She could have invaded your mind, perhaps changed perception, altered memories— anything up to and including brainwashing.”

“Hey, whoa,” Yelena returned, outraged. “Let’s not go throwing the term brainwashing around lightly, especially with this crowd. And who are you anyway to be giving us advice? Seriously, who the fuck is this guy?”

Everyone stopped and stared at her, tangibly disquieted.

“You don’t recognize him?” Walker asked, and not with his normal asshole voice that was a little belligerent, but one that marked genuine worry lacing his voice.

“No, who is—“

But then she did recognize the face.

It was an infamous one, one of the man that had torn apart the Avengers from the inside.

Baron Zemo.

“What is he doing here?” she demanded.

She swung her gaze towards Bucky as she said it, because she thought he of all people would have put Zemo through a wall considering their past colorful history.

But Bucky’s voice was careful — neutral and controlled as he explained, “Helmet is part of the team.”

He said it like he had expected her to know that.

She looked at him, incredulous. “Helmet? His superhero name is actually Helmet?” She’d just been calling him that in her head this entire time as a joke. “That’s like calling Walker the bent taco.”

“Helmut is my first name,” Zemo informed.

“That’s somehow worse,” she accused.

It was said as a joke, but there was something slightly unhinged in her tone, bordering on hysterical.

“What’s today’s date?” Zemo asked, tilting his head and curiously studying her. “From what you can remember.”

She swallowed, thickly, suddenly afraid to voice the answer. The blood didn't drain from Yelena's face, because of course it didn't. Because a Black Widow was more collected and trained than that, because she knew in her line of work that things like this happened. That mind manipulation was something as familiar to her as morning breakfast, that she had become inured to the harshests parts of it, compartmentalizing all the blackest pits she could, excising them. It was why she had tumbled down a bottle of vodka on frequent occasions, once upon a time.

“If you're fucking with me, I swear to god—” she said, to the team at large, but there was a hitch in her throat.

Because Helmet-guy was right. Something was wrong, deeply wrong. Nothing made sense. Not Madripoor, not her distorted or missing memories, not a new team member, not Bob showing up in a fancy new suit and handling a threat like Wanda all by himself, not even everyone’s new fucking hair and grooming choices.

Bucky’s voice near her ear, calm and steady. “It’s okay. Breathe, Yelena.”

She just stared blankly for a long beat, then lifted her head. “April 22nd,” she answered, tightly.

A shift in people’s seats. Clearly the wrong answer.

“The year,” Bucky pressed, not unkindly.

She squeezed her eyes shut. No, no, no, no, no.

Not again.

Not something like this, a blink and years gone by. A snap of a finger erasing so much of her life. It couldn’t be like the snap again.

The last time she had lost so much — her sister.

Bucky seemed to recognize the panic slowly seizing her, crawling up her throat, settling there like a stifled scream. He, more than anyone else in the world perhaps, more than those even snapped, knew the weight of what he was asking; the Winter Soldier put on ice and only rewoken every few years between missions.

Her breathing grew labored. “2028,” she finally answered, with creeping dread.

But she already knew the response to that would be negative and too telling. Sure enough, it was. No one said a word. Most of them froze in place. She saw Ava and Walker exchange a concerned look. Bucky just stared at her, and it was perhaps a mark of how well she could read him now, better than she had previously given herself credit for, but there was something shadowy in his eyes more than just mere concern.

“No,” Bucky answered, softly, carefully. “It’s 2033, Yelena.”

#

Chapter 5

Notes:

I am of half the mind to ignore the "Sharon Carter is the Powerbroker" plotline from F&tWS, so just assume that none of the good guys have made the connection to it yet and she is known only for her other underworld hustles.

#

It was a bathroom just like this one where Yelena had lost five years of her life before.

The walls didn’t dematerialize again around her from white to a garish green, but she felt just as unsteady staring at her reflection in the polished mirror this time as last. The blip had taken enough from her, too much, but the world wasn’t through fucking with her apparently. Yelena didn’t believe in karma because if she did, she’d probably already be dead by now for all the killings and missions and coups. She didn’t believe in karma because too many bad men got away with too much shit in the world for her to believe in some sort of divine intervention or any true sense of justice. There was no balance in the world, no real fight between good and evil. She didn’t believe in karma. She didn’t.

But as she stared at a bathroom mirror for the second time in her life as her world turned upside down, slowly collecting herself before turning off the faucet, she knew this was somehow a punishment for some horrible offense she’d committed in her long brutal life.

There was no other explanation.

She wiped her hands and went out into the hallway, where she could still hear her teammates bickering about the potential explanations of her missing five years of her life. Bob was still outside, keeping an eye on the skyline in case Wanda chose to attack again, and Ava and Walker had joined him, but the room still felt unreasonably crowded when Yelena walked towards it.

“We cannot rule out brainwashing,” Zemo said, severely.

“I know brainwashing,” Bucky countered, just as heavily. “This doesn’t feel like that.”

“You would be an expert,” Zemo agreed, “but even the Winter Soldier does not know all there is to know about such a subject. But perhaps you’re right. It could be parallel universes. Wanda dabbled in it before to get what she wanted. Perhaps this is not the Yelena Belova we know, but one pulled in from another universe?”

Bucky sighed heavily. “You can’t tell her something like that without—”

“Hush, hush,” Alexie hissed. “She comes.” He turned towards his daughter as Yelena entered the room, watching everyone else turn towards her, too. “Come, Yelena. You need rest. We sort out in morning—”

“Parallel universes?” Yelena repeated, critical.

Everyone shifted feet around her, except for Baron Zemo who only gave her a flat consideration. “It’s a working theory, but it would help if you could tell us what you and Wanda spoke about before you broke out.”

Yelena snorted, but it lacked any sort of humor. “Nothing. I was barely there. She left before I regained consciousness.”

“And the last thing you remember before that,” Bucky said, shoulders stiff, “was going to New Jersey with me to collect Wanda’s boy from Eastview five years ago?”

She nodded. “I’m sure that isn’t a coincidence.”

“No,” Bucky agreed. “Wanda will never let the idea of her sons go. We didn’t find the boys then, either of them. New Jersey was all a deadend.”

“And Wanda never gave up the hunt,” Zemo explained to her. “Such a personal mission like that of recovering lost loved ones — it has driven her to extremes. I would know. Well, that, and the Darkhold.”

“The dark what?” Yelena repeated, confused.

“The Book of Sins,” a lithe blonde woman said, as she airily reentered the room. “Also known as the Book of Spells or the Book of the Damned. As the delightful nicknames suggest, it contains transcribed dark magic based on ancient engravings. Carved by Chthon, eons old. My buyers would pay a fortune and a half for it, but there’s only two copies in known existence. Wanda had possession of one of them for a time.”

Yelena hadn’t come to know much about Sharon Carter in the brief few minutes she had come to be acquainted with her, but already she was peeling back the layers. They’d arrived only a half hour ago to some swanky uptown building in Madripoor with more security than Fort Knox, passed millions and millions of dollars of framed priceless art, led in by this woman who seemed more annoyed and inconvenienced with all the commotion than anything else.

Sharon fixed herself a drink at the bar. “You know what sucks about running a business in the criminal underworld? When the Avengers just swing by, unannounced, and drag in with them the most powerful known witch in the universe. I’m trying to run a business here, gentlemen. I don’t need you smashing everything to pieces again.”

“We’ll only be here a night,” Bucky told her.

“Isn’t that what you boys said the last time?” Sharon returned, archly.

Zemo looked over. “We did leave town fairly quickly, the last time.”

Sharon glared at him. “Yeah, after setting half the city on fire. You pissed off a lot of people the last time, a lot of powerful people in Madripoor and beyond. I was the one that had to stay behind and clean up the mess. And — oh look, history repeating itself.”

“Quibble later,” Yelena cut in, testily. “Tell me more about this book.”

Sharon moved lazily, seemingly, but Yelena could read in the woman’s movements that she knew how to handle herself in a fight. “The book holds power,” Sharon told her. “Dark magic, and plenty of answers to the meaning of life, apparently. Including mysteries involving parallel universes. It also corrupts souls, if rumors are true.”

“How do you know all this?” Yelena asked.

“I’m in acquisitions,” Sharon told her, dropping ice into her drink. “I get people what they want, especially rare and sometimes exotic items.”

Bucky seemed lost in his own thoughts for a moment. “The book is what drove Wanda mad. She wasn’t always like this. She used to be—”

“I don’t care,” Yelena snapped. “I don’t care about the woman Wanda Maximoff used to be. I care about the woman she’s become — someone currently fucking with my entire existence.”

“We know,” Zemo said, evenly. “We’re not undermining the severity of—”

“Fuck you,” Yelena countered, harshly, too loud, and she wasn't remotely sorry for it. “I haven’t known you for very long, but already I can tell your ego and your sense of self-worth overcrowd a room even filled with superheroes. You do not speak for me. You do not understand what I am going through. None of you do. It’s not you that lost five years of your life for the second time. You don’t understand what I’m going through.”

“I do,” Bucky spoke up, quietly from the side.

Yelena paused, turning to stare at him. Because, yes, the Winter Soldier would know something about this, this repeated invasion and destruction, this lack of sense of self that felt like an implosion from within. Just like her, Bucky had been programmed to kill, to follow orders, to complete assignments, and he’d shaken off someone else’s mind control more than once before, too.

“I know what you’re going through,” Bucky said, steadily. “And this time, you’re not alone.”

It was nice to hear, but Yelena wasn’t a child. “It could be brainwashing or parallel universes,” she replied, “or it could be plain old boring amnesia. It could be a hundred and one other things in this universe where infinite possibilities exist whenever you’re an Avenger. We don’t know what this is.”

“So we figure it out,” Bucky replied, in a soft voice, which was— wrong.

Bucky was never soft. Understanding and empathetic, yes. He always listened. He always cared, even if he pretended he didn’t, even if it would have been infinitely easier on himself to just not give a fuck about anything anymore. He was less hostile than the other harsher personalities on the team, sure, and if she had to pick a heart-to-heart with anyone on the team, the list would go — Bob, Alexie, Bucky, Ava and a distant last spot, Walker. Bucky was more approachable, but only by a flimsy margin and probably because he had somehow gotten a headstart on therapy ahead of everybody else. But he was not soft. She had never seen him soft, and that freaked her out a little because the severity of the situation required Bucky Barnes to pull deep from his reserves of visible human emotion.

"I know your instinct is to scream, or run, or to throw a punch,” Bucky said. “Trust me, I get all those impulses. What happens from here on out is up to you—we can hunt down leads about Wanda, about the Darkhold. Strange will give us his insights. You’re not alone. This isn’t a hopeless mission. You have the entire Avengers and all their resources behind you, Yelena. You’re not alone."

“Yelena,” Alexie said, qu ickly on its heels. “This is what we do. This is what team is for. We come across insurmountable foe, and we mount it to victory! We do this, over and over again.”

Yelena shook her head. “No, not to me. None of that makes sense. Not in my head. To me, we’re still a bunch of fuck-ups thrown together. We’re playing heros, with only catastrophic results occasionally — if we’re lucky. Forget about being superheroes, we barely qualify as adults.”

“We’ve grown, malýshka. We are not like we were.”

“How am I supposed to know that?” she demanded, thickly.

Alexie’s face softened, seeing something hideous and too vulnerable in Yelena’s tirade. She could feel her control slipping. She could feel it spiralling further and further away as more of the reality and endless possibilities took hold of her. Her eyes threatened to water, and she could not contain the thick rise of bile in her mouth, nor how it seemed to constrict the air in her throat uncontrollably.

When Alexie tried to reach out, she flinched, backpedaling quickly.

“Yelena,” her father said again, quietly.

Yelena flinched, tears prickling the corners of her eyes. She knew they were right, that this was going to require careful planning and consideration, but Yelena was not sure she could manage that, not when everything felt too raw and confusing. The room spun circles around her.

She needed a minute — far more than a minute, to recover from her shot nerves.

She saw others exchange another awful infuriating glance; she saw Bucky step forward to reach for her — but she bolted before he could touch her, before he could make contact and she’d react in a way neither of them would like. It was unthinking, but then again it wasn’t because she had enough sense to grab a bottle of vodka off Sharon’s bar before she fled.

She rushed down the hallway. Found a vacant room in the back. Privacy a cold comfort, doing her little good. What did it matter if there were no witnesses to her descent? The humiliation and destruction was still there. What did anything matter? Yelena was fairly sure that this was normally where the team would disband for the night, each screw up retreating to their own dark corners to lick their wounds; maybe Bob would follow after her, because he always knew how to sit with Yelena in the dark sometimes, saying nothing, just keeping her company, but she didn’t even want that at the moment. She wanted — she didn’t know what she wanted, but it was not to find an empty bedroom and huddle up on the floor, spine against the bed frame, and swallow gulps of vodka until it felt like battery acid flowing down her throat and settled like lead in her stomach. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was all she got.

‘Was it like this for you?’ she wanted to ask Natasha.

She had to close her eyes and breathe through the jarring sense of unreality closing in around her, too many sharp edges, not enough relief. Hell, it had been easier dealing with the blip than this, because at least she’d come into it with others able to provide nominal answers (five years gone, Thanos, alien invasions, Avengers crippled, her sister dead.) This time, there were only questions and a startling lack of— anything. She felt like a stranger in her own life, her own team — the one place she had felt at home since she was a six year old child. Now, she didn’t even have that. It was like she kept trying to grasp onto something solid in her life, anything — family, friendship, even cold camaraderie — but it was a clenched fist around sand.

Nothing stayed.

Nothing lasted.

#

She took out a phone at some point, apparently her own although she could not recognize the make or model. Began doom scrolling through headlines and websites, staring at every date marked 2033 like it was a horror show all on its own. She took swigs of vodka every time something surprised her, and at the rate she was going she was headed for alcohol poisoning.

Read up about Mutant Legislation, because apparently mutants were a thing now. “U.N. Ratifies Sokovia Accords Revision – Mutant Registry Optional Under Global Law.”

Saw a picture of Sam in his full Captain America regalia, flanked on either side by Kate Bishop as the new Hawkeye, and another girl not much older than Kate, brown skinned and with a large lightning bolt across her uniform; Ms. Marvel. Jesus, they were recruiting kids now, but she supposed they’d always picked them young. Then she realized that Kate wasn’t as young as she remembered, not anymore.

Read another article (well, skimmed) about the Global Repatriation Council being under fire again amid rising multinational tensions, and a renewed Flag Smashers initiative.

A Wakandan-Skrull alliance was confirmed with some signed accord.

And then she stopped short when she saw an article about Latveria’s former Prime Minister Victor von Doom being questioned by several global authorities, but found to her bewilderment Doom was captioned under a picture of what was obviously Tony Stark. She didn’t even bother trying to figure that one out.

On and on, it went.

Proof that the world wasn’t the one she knew.

#

And then, suddenly, at some point in the night the room wasn’t remote enough.

Suddenly, the isolation was not extreme enough.

She’d been drinking for a while, the vodka was nearly down to less than a sliver of the bottle. It didn’t slow her down when she fled, and even half drunk sneaking out of the building didn’t take more than half her concentration when she decided to scale down the side to avoid detection or the others seeing her leave. For a long moment, escaping out a pried open window after disabling the sensors, she perched out on the window ledge in the open air, looking down, balanced perfectly even on her drunken feet several stories up. The people below were less than ants to her. She considered how weightless it would be if she took a single step off the ledge, caught the thin tendril of adrenaline at the chance that she could plummet, but a splinter of rationality kept her in check. Kept her from following through. This was instinct. She wasn’t scared of heights. She took another pull from the vodka bottle, tucked it into the inside of her jacket, and started scaling down the building.

This was flight or fight, and for once Yelena was choosing flight because there was nothing to fight. What would she fight? A witch who was powerful enough to erase her from existence. Her fists were useless against such an enemy. What would she fight? Parallel worlds? Amnesia? The gaps in her own mind? Programming set secretly in the recesses of her mind like a ticking time bomb?

Yelena’s breath hitched, and it came to her even in her drunken stupor. Too quickly, too harshly. She knew who she could go to, someone she trusted more than another famous face on the Avenger’s team. If it were parallel worlds, she would go to Dr. Strange, sure, fine. That was fine, but first she wanted to rule out that her mind had not been tampered with in a way that it had been tampered with too many times before. And there was one expert she could go to above all others, someone that would tell her the facts, could examine her, someone that could give her the painful truth even if it was vile.

Melina Vostokoff, a scientist and former Red Room operative.

Her mother.

Brilliant. Why didn’t she think of that before?

Just as she reached the ground, there was a voice speaking up behind her. “Yelena.”

She turned around, and found Bucky waiting beside the exact car she had marked as her escape vehicle. He even had the keys in his hand. “Really?” she said, already a little annoyed. “You were elected out of everyone? Or— don’t tell me. You choose to come seek me out? Are we best friends now, Buck? Is that what happens to us in the future— present, whatever the fuck this is?”

Bucky sighed, and didn’t comment as he came up to her. He took the bottle from her open jacket flap, and didn’t do anything so profane as drink from it, useless as it was in getting someone like him drunk, but he just sat it on the asphalt between his feet.

He stood straight, and stared at her. “Don’t do this,” he told her.

“Do what?” she challenged. He didn’t say anything, and she found that worse than a condescending answer. “I can’t—” she whispered, hating that she couldn’t contain her gruff voice. Felt ruined and wretched, and unable to stop herself from tearing up against the biting cold wind of the night. “I can’t keep doing this. This can’t keep happening.”

She reached for the bottle again, but this time he laid a hand on hers to stop her. This time — this time it didn’t feel out of place, didn’t feel so wholly out of character that she recoiled. Maybe she was too drunk, maybe she really did make a pathetic image, but she only looked at the hand on top of hers and wondered if maybe they had become close in this future after all. No derision or spite in the thought. Just a quiet question hanging in the air. She didn’t want it answered.

She didn’t want it answered because she couldn’t remember any of it.

She pulled back, stepping away, looking away. She was tired of not knowing who she was, where her place was in this fucked up world; she was tired of—

“I am so tired, Buck,” she confessed, simply.

Bucky swallowed, harshly enough that she saw the bob of his Adam’s apple highlighted by the slant of the moonlight. “I know,” he told her, and it was true, because he was one of the few who could say that and it not be bullshit. “But you told me something long ago, and it probably saved my sanity back then so I’m returning the advice.”

“Don’t tell me,” she muttered, and she would’ve snorted if she hadn’t been on the verge of crying. “Something else I can’t remember from the past five years?”

“No, this one you will. It was at the beginning. You’re alone, you told me. And you were right. I had no one. I came home to nothing. So, join the team, you said. Worst case scenario, we'll all be alone together in the dark.”

She sniffled, remembering the words parted in a quiet corner in his apartment, the ones that must’ve struck true on their mark. It didn’t escape her notice that he was offering her company in a dark alleyway now. It didn’t escape her notice that the company somehow diminished the blackness surrounding her, even by a small fraction of a degree.

“I’ve been where you’ve been,” Bucky told her. “I know what it’s like to question everything around you, especially yourself.”

And she couldn’t — she couldn’t trust herself, which was the worst thing of all.

“So what?” she asked, and she didn’t care if it was a childlike question with no easy answer, she still had to ask it. “What did you do?”

He was quiet for long enough that she felt he may not have had an answer, but then he said, “I trusted Steve,” he said. “And I trusted Sam, and then I trusted you. It’s never led me wrong once.”

She paused.

“Trust the team, Yelena. Trust us.” He paused, and spoke almost too quietly, “trust me.”

#

Chapter 6

#

They were lying to her.

She knew her team well enough to know when they were hiding something. For as much as half the team had espionage in their background and supposed skill set, they were all absolute shit at lying. Zemo, the newest and most confounding team member, quickly jetted off to points unknown in the morning, but she wouldn't have trusted a word he said anyway. Walker had never really done any undercover work, and Ava had never needed to learn how to lie when she could just phase away from any awkward situation or interaction. Bob was — Bob. He didn’t count. But Bucky was laughably bad when he had something to hide, because he had two or three major tells that she had figured out early on just from the way he stood or had his hand placed. Even Alexie, a man who had fooled everyone back in the nineties with a flawless American accent and his rendition of a proud father of two little girls, could not lie to her for shit anymore.

The only thing that tripped her up was what was being lied about.

Given the lapse in her memory and the current set of circumstances, it could be anything. Yelena could not even grasp the severity of the lie. It could be something as petty as them avoiding telling her that she had gotten an embarrassing tramp stamp tattoo on her lower back. It could be something as big as them telling her she had contracted a rare fatal alien disease from flying into outer space with a bunch of alien gods. As an Avenger, she couldn’t rule anything out but it was clear the team was sitting awkwardly on some type of secret. They avoided looking at her. They started and stopped conversations mid-sentence, as if catching themselves. They kept exchanging glances as if to see if what they were saying was appropriate or not, and nine times out of ten, they looked to Bucky as a default on the ruling.

So, Yelena went hunting for answers.

She sat next to Bob on the flight over to Novosibirsk on the quintjet. The scientific and industrial nerve of the Russian empire where her mother was now operating. Melina Vostokoff had left the Red Room program, only to be swallowed back up into the relentless Russian machine. To hear Alexie defend it, it made little difference if she worked for the Russian government or the United States. Yelena couldn’t entirely argue with the point because she knew both were corrupt and full of self-interest that hurt the greater world at large, but she was still disheartened to learn Melina was following the same line of research that had made guinea pigs of people like her, defenseless little girls who’d been handpicked off the streets and recruited into wars. Her mother had her chance to leave like the rest of them, but she’d stayed in Russia knowing who would come after her for her skillset. It was disappointing, but not surprising.

The plane ride was rough and choppy. Next to her, Bob sat quietly trying to pretend the turbulence wasn’t getting to him, but like she said earlier — she knew all her teammates’ tells. Bob was the worst liar out of all of them. She could get him to break. She was positive about that. So Yelena sat cross-legged on the side bench next to him, arms folded over her chest, fingers nervously fidgeting with a loose thread on her vest as she contemplated her best opening salvo.

“What?” Bob said, looking over at her suspiciously.

Just as well as she knew him, he knew her. He could tell when she was up to something.

“Nothing, nothing,” she told him nonchalantly, shrugging. “Just wondering how we’ve been. So much could happen. So much could change. Five years, Bob. That’s another snap. That’s… an entire lifetime. People die. People change. Did anyone—did we lose anyone?”

“No. Not anyone we were close with. Not permanently, anyway.”

“Don’t say ‘not permanently’ like that’s normal.”

Bob shrugged.

“You and me, we’re still friends, right? Good friends?”

“Of course.” He almost looked offended by the question, which Yelena found flattering and heartening.

“Good, good. So you’d tell me if there was anything I needed to know, right?”

“Needed to know?”

“Yeah, like any major news I needed to hear. Anything life changing, life-altering. That kind of thing. I feel like everyone here is walking on eggshells around me. Everyone keeps looking at me like I’m glass. Like I’ll break if you tell me something.”

A pause. “You might. No one could blame you under the circumstances.”

Yelena held back a wince, unable to deny that. “Try me,” she said instead, steadfast. “You’d tell me the truth, right? You’d tell me if there was something I needed to know.”

“Like what?”

“Like — whatever. Five years is a lot of time.”

What was it that everyone else was refusing to tell her?

Bob huffed a small laugh nervously, eyes darting briefly to Bucky before it returned to her. “That’s a loaded question. Lots of things. We elected another SOB to the White House, we—”

She stopped him. “With me, Bob. Personally.”

His face softened, and he dropped a hand over hers, comforting. “You were doing good. More than good. You found your place. The team meant something to you. We meant something to you.”

“Did I become one of those annoying people who drinks kale and says ‘live, love, laugh’ like a throw pillow is a mantra for life?”

He laughed. “No.”

“So what is it that everyone is not telling me?”

He paused. “You’re still the same person you were five years ago. Still very much fueled on sarcasm, still yourself. But... you softened. Around us. Around—” here, he hesitated, and again glanced at Bucky quickly, eyes darting there and back towards her so swiftly she would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been paying such close attention.

“Around who?” she pressed.

Bob was choosing his words like he was stepping on landmines. “You should talk to Bucky about that. It’s—yeah, it’s something you should discuss with him.”

Yelena narrowed her eyes, feeling something like vertigo set in.

The quintjet finally started to descend before she could further press Bob on the matter. When Walker announced the landing from the cockpit, switching flips up for the autopilot to take over, Yelena stood. Yelena joined the rest of the group and tried not to stare at Bucky across the platform, feeling like there was an answer there she may not have fully wanted to hear. Everyone was acting so strange around her, so tight lipped. Bucky had been the only one talking to her about much of anything, as if he’d been elected as her handler. Yelena hated being that, being handled. She preferred brutal honesty without all the bullshit and ambiguity. Her imagination didn’t need the fodder, and her paranoia certainly didn’t need the help.

“We should go in smaller numbers,” Alexie said, stretching. He’d been anxious the entire ride, the idea of reuniting with Melina both fraught and appetizing to him. “Melina can be touchy when it comes to her research. Yelena and me, we go in alone.”

“And me,” Bucky said, tone brooking no argument. “Someone should watch your back.”

“We can handle ourselves,” Yelena cut in. “She’s my mother.”

Bucky wasn’t backing down. “All the more reason to go in with someone with no sentimental attachment.”

Yelena eyed him briefly, wanting to argue, still unnerved by the small conversation she’d left open with Bob, the hanging hypothetical with too many unspoken implications.

“Yes, yes, fine,” Alexie said, absentmindedly, waving away the discussion with a gruff bark. He tried to inconspicuously suck in his gut and make it seem less apparent, clearly self-conscious about another reunion with her mother. “Come. Let us get a move on.”

She watched Bucky as he took point once the quinjet’s docking bay parted, and he started walking out, disappearing into the unbroken sheet of white virgin snow, the icy-cold bitter grounds. Her father was eager to follow, grabbing his helmet and donning it on.

“Good luck,” Bob said, standing behind her with the rest of the team. “We’ll be here if you need back up.”

Yelena nodded, then followed her father and Bucky out into the cold, leaving the questions and hypotheticals for another moment to ponder.

Right now, she needed her head clear and her aim focused.

#

Tucked into the snowy outskirts of Siberia, they already had intel that the compound lay hidden beneath dense pine forest and intermittent permafrost. At first glance, the facility resembled an abandoned Soviet agricultural complex—rows of concrete outbuildings with faded chipped paint, partially buried under frost and weathered with time. The trees surrounding Melina Vostokoff’s compound were brittle, weighted down heavily with snowfall, skeletal birches trembling in the bitter wind. The iron gate that greeted them was partially rusted but fortified with tech far beyond what was visible, and when Bucky, Yelena, and Alexie approached, the camera zoomed in only on the latter two of them specifically.

“Melina,” Alexie said, towards the camera. “Let us in. We need to talk!”

No response came.

For a long moment, Yelena took to figuring out the logistics of breaking into the facility. She could tell a low hum of invisible electromagnetic shielding surrounded the perimeter; spotted motion-sensitive aerial drones, small as sparrows, nestled silently in the trees; she even caught onto the fact that the surrounding snow was subtly patterned with infrared tripwires.

Beside her, she could see Bucky similarly assessing the environment. They looked at each other in tandem, clearly thinking the same thing: access led underground, and that meant the best way to break in was—

A buzzing sound alerted them to the fact that the gates were opening.

“Good, good!” Alexie said, excitedly.

“Come through,” a mechanical voice told them, over the speakerhead.

They trudged down the snowed-in path in silence. The front of the building looked abandoned — a small storage facility, a smaller kitchen. The same mechanical voice led them to a radiation-shielded hidden room, tucked behind an old refrigerator. Inside, the underground facility was larger. The multi-level subterranean laboratory had clearly seen better days, but it had been restored and rebuilt using scavenged tech and a touch of Melina’s own genius sat in every corner. They passed by one chamber containing cells for her lab animals—pigs, rats, even a crow. Yelena spotted a monitoring station nearby, filled with EEG charts, behavior logs, and a map of neurochemical tests. A shiver of disgust ran up Yelena’s spine, because her mother was still up to her old tricks.

They came to the last door, the largest one, and pushed it open. Melina Vostokoff sat behind a bank of computers, looking up from the glow of her screen, expression instantly taut. She wore her usual slate-gray coat, half-buttoned, and a pair of slim glasses perched low over her nose. She didn’t stand, but her fingers were still on the keyboard.

Melina offered a small nod. Quietly, almost coldly, she said, “So the wayward come back.”

Alexie grinned widely. “Come now, is that how you greet family?”

“I thought last time it was obvious family was not a word we all agreed upon.”

Yelena had a different interpretation of the last time they were all together. With Natasha, with the final destruction of the Red Room and Antonia Dreykov. Although now it occurred to her that maybe in the last five years, there had been more reunions, one Yelena should have clarified before coming here.

“We didn’t come for sentiment,” Yelena offered to her mother. “I need your help.”

Melina eyed her. There was something stiff about her—her posture, her tone. Yelena saw it instantly, the flicker of uncertainty behind Melina’s eyes.

Yelena stepped forward, stripping off her gloves with a false sense of casual disinterest as she looked around the place. “I’m missing time,” she said, cutting to the chase. “Five years. I woke up a day ago thinking it was 2028. Everything after that... it’s gone. No memories. No triggers. Just a— void.”

Melina's breath slowed, and she finally stood. “And what makes you think I can help? It could just be trauma.”

Yelena rolled her eyes. “Because this feels like something familiar. Like I’ve been unraveled and sewn back up again. The Black Widow program. Dreykov. The Red Room.” She paused, steadying her voice. “Someone’s been in my mind. Again. I was taken by the Scarlet Witch. I want to know what she did to me.”

If any of this surprised her mother, she hid it well. Everything had a clinical nature to it when it came to her mother. Melina studied her for a moment, but her hands were already moving—tugging aside a tray, leaving behind a gun that Yelena had clocked the moment they were let into the room.

“I’m not an expert in—” Melina said, hesitating, frowning, “—sorcery, or whatever it is that the Scarlet Witch does.”

“I know,” Yelena returned. “But who else knows the brain better than you?”

That silenced and stilled Melina for a long moment before she was swiftly nodding. The harsh exterior softened just a fraction—enough to expose the woman underneath who still, somehow, Yelena wanted to call mother. It wasn’t a typical family. Both her mother and father had trafficked Natasha and Yelena before they’d even hit puberty, and she’d lost touch with all of them for decades. Still, some sentimental part remained. Some part that made no rational sense given their history and their shared inflicted pain. Yelena had never tried to make sense of it.

None of her life adhered to the normal rules, anyway.

#

“Sit down,” Melina instructed. “I’ll scan your frontal and temporal lobes. Start with neural mapping.” She glanced at Alexei with warmth but admonishment. “And you—don't touch anything.”

Alexie, trying to lighten the mood, only held his hands high. “Here for moral support.”

Melina raised an eyebrow. “That would be a first. Why don’t you go outside with the others? You know you always get in the way of my experiments.”

Alexie sighed, but seemed resigned to being dismissed, as if this was something they had argued about before and he’d lost the debate every time. “We— reunite later?”

Yelena groaned. The way he emphasized the word made it seem like a euphemism.

Melina shushed him, shooing him off with a wave of her hand. Yelena watched as her father disappeared behind the door, muttering something slavic and aggravated under his breath.

Meanwhile Yelena tried to get situated in the medical apparatus that reminded her too much of the probes that would reprogram and decondition her in the Red Room. She felt a sense of unease creep over her as the overfamiliar smell of disinfectant washed over her. Fluorescent lighting hummed above her, reflecting off steel tables and instruments laid out with clinical precision. Yelena had been in this exact environment plenty before, but none of those instances had been under pleasant circumstances.

Bucky stepped up to her right, with his usual wariness—eyes scanning, footsteps measured, shoulders slightly tensed.

He read her anxiety the same as she could read him. “You alright?”

She tried not to let her frayed nerves show anymore than it already had. “Hunky-dory, I believe the American colloquial goes.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he told her. “Not if you don’t want to. We can still go to Dr. Strange. There are other ways to figure out what happened to you.”

“Appreciate that, but I’m fine, Bucky. I have to do this.”

He frowned, but didn’t say anything else.

Instead, Melina turned slowly in her chair towards him, studying him like a specimen that just walked in on its own. “And you, Winter Soldier.” Melina stood and walked towards him. “I’ve read every classified file available to us. You’re— more functional than I expected.”

Bucky eyed her. “Thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s not—” Melina returned, frowning. “I don’t get many visitors with your neuro-architecture very often. Call it scientific curiosity.”

“Jesus,” Bucky muttered under his breath.

Yelena couldn’t entirely disagree. Her mother was a lot to take in.

Melina stepped closer—not invading Bucky’s space, but near enough that he looked weary by it. Her mother’s eyes weren’t cold, exactly, but clinical. Calculating. Intrigued. “You have a fascinating brain, James. They went old school with you. Electroshock therapy, drugs, psychological trauma. Decades of repetitive memory erasure, neural reprogramming, forced cognitive compartmentalization, and yet you’re still neurally intact.”

“I have the Queen of Wakanda to thank for that,” Bucky replied, wryly.

Melina hummed. “You present a fascinating rare case of functional post-conditioning reintegration, maintaining both coherence of identity and emotional capacity, despite extensive manipulation.”

Bucky looked at her, deadpan. “Stop. You’re making me blush.”

“I don’t suppose you’d allow me to look at your brain? Purely diagnostic.”

“It was people like you that did this to me.”

Melina stared back, refusing to appear ashamed. “None of us had control. You killed people. I performed experiments. We all had our orders.”

There was a mutual assessment between them. Melina was clearly intrigued, and he was just as obviously unsettled by the observations, but he was trying to hide it behind his customary flat-eyed, stoic posture. Neither trusted the other, clearly, but Yelena observed them both in silence and felt a strange affinity for both, a strange understanding of the kind of unspoken horror beneath either of their stories: we are all built from broken things.

Bucky didn’t have the same perspective, outright displeased now, arms folded over his chest. He’d had enough of her mother’s scrutiny. “Well, I’m not here for dissection. So let’s keep the curiosity theoretical.”

Melina offered a small chuckle—low and brief. “Relax. I don’t cut unless invited these days.”

“Enough,” Yelena interrupted, tiredly. “Let’s get on with this, shall we? The way I keep losing years, I’m definitely not getting any younger.”

#

Yelena sat motionless on the padded exam chair, temple leads affixed with precision. A soft pulse of blue light glowed over her face from the neural interface above, creating a grid that scanned and rescanned her face.

Across the room, Melina watched the monitor with increasing agitation—her sharp eyes narrowing, lips pressed thin and frowning. “Strange,” she muttered. “No normal cortical response to memory probes. No echo in the frontal lobe. Nothing from the hippocampus either.” She typed faster, adjusting sensitivity filters, overlays, and artifact cleaners—but the screen remained almost eerily still, but for a few static bursts of activity that Yelena didn’t understand. Melina’s voice grew in agitation. “It’s not trauma. It’s not damage. It’s— interference.”

Yelena tried to stay still, but tensed nonetheless. “What does that mean?”

On the monitor available to her, she could only see a smooth void, as though the neural map was present, but veiled. It looked like— it looked like something was actively disrupting the scan.

Melina looked towards her. “The integrity of the diagnostic is compromised. I can’t figure out how. There’s no natural cause for this. No drugs that I know of to account for this. No defects in my technology. This machine is ten times more advanced than the standard EEG machine. I’m decades ahead of anything out on the market. It’s not a problem with the equipment, I assure you.” A beat, as she settled into a frown. “This is theoretical, but— it looks like your consciousness is wrapped up in something not— not of current scientific understanding. I told you I’m not a student of whatever nonsense that Dr. Strange practices. That isn’t my area of expertise.”

Yelena settled back in the chair, voice flat. “Say it. You think this is magic.”

Melina frowned, clearly disliking the word. “I think this is something that defies neurobiology. There are veins of structure in your scan that resemble dream logic—nonlinear patterning, memory displacement, symbolic bleed between emotional and sensory regions. Someone has rewritten your brain using metaphysical means.”

She heard Bucky sigh from somewhere behind her. “You mean Wanda.”

Yelena pulled off the EEG nodes with trembling fingers, her breath catching. Not from pain or disappointment, but from the shiver of a memory she couldn’t quite reach. Something sharp. Stained in red. Like burning static at the edge of her mind.

Yelena closed her eyes. “Why did she do this to me?”

Melina said, “That’s the better question. And I suspect Bucky may be the answer.”

“What?” Bucky said.

Melina looked only to Yelena. “You said you lost your memory when you went to New Jersey five years ago? And the only other person that was there with you was him. If something happened to you back then, comparing your scans to his might tell us something.”

“You sure this isn’t just an excuse to get him under your microscope?” Yelena returned, suspicious.

Melina stared at her, flatly. “You came to me for help. This is what I advise.”

Yelena didn’t like that. “Bucky shouldn’t have to subject himself to your experiments. He’s been through enou—”

“I’ll do it,” Bucky cut in, already moving forward. Yelena looked at him, uncertain, and he explained. “If it helps you, I’ll do it.”

It seemed to be answer enough for her mother.

#

Bucky sat rigid in the reinforced chair, sensors affixed to his scalp, his vibranium arm glinting under the harsh fluorescents. His jaw clenched and unclenched as Melina calibrated the EEG array, and Yelena didn’t need to be a mind reader to understand that he was intensely uncomfortable with being a guinea pig again.

Yelena watched from across the room, arms folded tight across her chest, the weight of her misgivings sinking further into her stomach. “You don’t have to do this, Bucky.”

He brushed it off. “It’s fine. Let’s get on with it.”

Melina nodded. “The amnesia you’re experiencing isn’t typical memory loss, Yelena,” she explained. “Someone rewrote you—or overlaid something. Like encryption. If we compare your patterns with Bucky’s, we might identify the intrusion point. Of course it’ll be more tricky to recognize because he’s endured similar interference before.”

“You mean programming,” Bucky said, flatly.

Melina didn’t blink. “Yes. Conditioning. Trauma. Neural rerouting.” She paused in her final set up, and turned towards him. “I’d like to ask you a few basic questions as I record your responses. This will only work if you remain still—and honest.”

A clench of his jaw. “Sure.”

Melina activated the machine. Yelena endured the tedium of a few control questions. What is your full name? Can you describe what you did this morning? Name as many animals as you can in 30 seconds. Repeat this sentence after me. There was nothing surprising about those questions, though Melina quickly explained, “Neural map stabilized. Monitoring electrical activity in the cortex, limbic structures, brainstem.” She typed some more. “His baseline suggests high amygdala sensitivity. That's consistent with PTSD and long-term memory fragmentation.”

A few minutes later, it was, “Let’s begin with early memory recall. James, tell me about the mission in New York, December 16, 1991.”

Bucky paused, then said, tightly, “Assassination. Two targets. No survivors. Tony Stark. Maria Stark.”

The scan lit up. “The prefrontal cortex and left hippocampus,” Melina explained, “showing structured recollection of long-term memory. But the amygdala went wild here, implying extreme emotional response. A classic marker of conditioned memory recall, with trauma.”

“Yeah,” Bucky offered, flatly. “I just love thinking about how I killed off old friends.”

Then Melina said, rather clinically, “And your most recent memory of being used—against your will?”

A clench of his fist. “Vienna. 2016. Zemo pulled me back under. Used the trigger words.”

Melina slid closer to the monitor, tapping a part of his brain as she explained to Yelena. “Yes, see here? The hippocampus shows deterioration and regrowth. The markers of memories rewritten and then repaired.”

“I’m not a case study, Melina,” Bucky warned, tightly. “You don’t have talk about me like I’m not in the room.”

“Right now, you are the test subject,” Melina responded. “And your time in Vienna. 2016. The trigger words?”

There was a flicker on the screen. “Longing,” he said, tightly. “Rusted, Furnace, Daybreak, Seventeen—”

He continued on with the list, while Melina studied the map of his brain. “The amygdala spikes, briefly,” she murmured to herself. “The thalamus activated as well—processing fear and confusion. A suppressed trauma cluster.”

Teeth clenched, Bucky said, “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” Melina cut in. “You’ve developed adaptive suppression mechanisms. You choose not to feel the pain. That’s impressive. But the structure of the trauma is still embedded in your synapses, and I need to understand it if I’m to understand your brain.”

“Let's move on,” Yelena pressed, uncomfortable.

A pause, but Melina nodded reluctantly. “Fine. To emotional and associative prompts. James, tell me about a time you felt safe.”

Bucky’s jaw clenched. “Pass.”

Melina sighed. “You can’t pass.”

“I’m passing,” he snapped back. “Next question.”

Yelena didn’t understand that. He’d answered the pain-filled, trauma-inducing questions with little pause, but a question about comfort had him panicking?

Melina paused. “James, do you remember the mission as the Winter Soldier where you first met my eldest daughter, Natasha Romanov?”

Yelena stiffened. “What—”

“Answer the question,” Melina cut in.

Bucky hesitated. “Yes.”

“Where was it?”

“Odessa. It was an extraction and elimination assignment. She was there as collateral engagement.”

The EEG spiked in the prefrontal cortex. “Logical recall,” Melina explained to her, in a whisper. “Trauma-linked memory nodes flaring.” Melina marked the data, almost clinically detached. Then with absolute calm, she seemed to change tactics, glancing briefly at Yelena, then back at the monitor. “Describe one of your significant formative memories of Yelena Belova.”

There was a beat of silence. Bucky hesitated, brow tightening. Then, almost automatically, “Rooftop in Prague. 2029. She covered me. I got careless. She yelled at me for being stupid.”

That sounded like her, but Yelena watched as the scan exploded in color, accompanied by his heart rate increasing slightly, too. It seemed a strange reaction to a simple enough memory.

Melina continued to monitor the colors, and explained, “The limbic system flared—” bright crimson and gold on the monitor, “—especially the amygdala, hypothalamus, and anterior cingulate cortex. There’s also activity in the ventral tegmental area—dopamine release center associated with reward and attachment. Interesting.” She looked up at Bucky, now with a curious expression on her face rather than a clinical one. “What’s your impressions of Yelena Belova?”

Another flicker on the screen. Then the monitor surged with electric color—and his limbic system lit up like wildfire, especially the amygdala and hypothalamus. “Emotional response,” Melina said, curiously. “Deep-set. Instant—”

“What do my impressions of Yelena have to do with anything?” Bucky cut in, angrily.

Melina wasn’t finished analyzing him. “Emotional stimulation increasing, the limbic system fully engaged.” A pause, as she turned surprised, looked up at him. “You associate her with fear, yes, but also protection. Safety.” A tilt of her head. “And— something more. Significant emotional attachment. Possibly—”

“Alright, stop,” Bucky flinched, ripping off the nodes from his temples.

The screen froze at the last moment of his readings, all lit up. The silence was immediate and felt heavy. Yelena blinked, processing everything. His fingers curled slightly into fists around the nodes, while Yelena could only sit back in silence and growing shock. He wouldn’t look at Yelena—but she was focusing on the screen anyway, not on him.

More clarity dawned on her, but it was a trickle and not a downpour.

She’d known something had been different about him since she woke up in this Wonderland, something significant. He’d touched her too easily, too frequently; the rest of the team always looked to them both, as a pair, as co-leaders but something perhaps more. And then there were the ominous words Bob had left her with.

The Bucky who looked at her now was different from the Bucky she remembered from before, the one who stood off to the side and radiated a primal need for isolation. Where the old Bucky had looked tired, this new one only looked determined and focused. He always seemed to stand within eyesight of Yelena too, even when Yelena may have preferred something else. She hadn’t known the specifics of what had changed between them, or what to make of the confusing emotions it caused, but now she was growing more certain.

The nature of their relationship had shifted, changed over the last five years — adapted to something that Yelena didn’t want to outright name. Even when she felt the certainty of it creeping up her throat.

Bucky looked flushed now, and angry. “I feel like you’re fishing for something besides clinical analysis here,” he told Melina.

Her mother studied him, aloof. “You didn’t spike like that even when I asked about your assassinations.” A beat. “You’re terrified of her knowing. That’s the core of it, isn’t it? You came here to help with her memory, but you’re hiding something major from her that you could just as easily tell her—”

Bucky, sharply now, with warning. “I said stop.”

But he’d already told them too much, even unintentionally.

#

“He’s not lying to you,” Melina told her, later, while Bucky was out with the others. “But he’s not telling you the full truth, either.”

No, he wasn’t. Yelena didn’t think it was out of cruelty. “You think he knows what happened to me?”

“No,” Melina said, as she came around the table to stand in front of her. “But you’re not just missing memories. You’re missing attachments. Emotions. Tethers. That kind of loss rewrites identity. I think he’s terrified of that, and it’s making him— compromised.”

Compromised.

That was what Natasha used to call emotions. What she used to call things she hated to name, anything with any sort of attachment or sentiment weighted to it.

Yelena felt a chill in the air that had nothing to do with the artificial cold in the laboratory nor the permafrost outside.“Just come right out and say it.”

“I’m saying—” her mother paused, for once showing human emotion, something in the vicinity of sympathy. “I think in those five years, he became someone to you. And now you’re not that someone to him anymore. Not in the same way.”

Yelena's breath stuttered, caught on something hard in her throat, and she tried to swallow past it. A numb, sharp ache behind her sternum welled up, something that felt like confusion, that felt strangely like bitter grief. Yelena was pretty sure that normally this was when she’d come up with a pithy rejoinder, a smart retort — something to defuse the tension of the situation. She had nothing. No loaded joke in the chamber, nothing for her to aim at.

She said nothing at all, recognizing the words her mother left unsaid, the ramifications.

The writing on the wall.

#

Notes:

I know nothing about the brain or it's makeup, but I researched a bunch of stuff. Please excuse any heinous inaccuracies as artistic liberties, and leave it at that. ;)

Chapter 7

#

The forest looked vacant, blanketed by thick snow and frost-bitten shadows. She knew the others had wandered into the facility, started to raid the kitchen and whatever other hospitalities and amenities Melina had set out for them. Bucky was the only one left out in the biting cold, a voluntary self-exile. The clearing was just beyond the lab’s back entrance, wide open and spattered with trees. It looked like he was doing some idle target practice in the snow, but his posture was stiff, motions too tense for the ease he normally displayed when throwing knives with a scarily proficient accuracy that it even managed to impress her.

Her breath clouded the air when she joined him. Her footsteps were loud as she approached, boots crunching the layers of snow beneath her feet, but she doubted she’d have been able to sneak up on him even if she’d been trying to be silent.

“My mother isn’t a soft touch,” Yelena offered, breaking the ice. “She means well, mostly, but she doesn’t have the best bedside manner.”

“No shit,” Bucky replied.

Across from him, his blade hit the tree with a hollow thud, dead center in the middle of the carved-out “X” he’d made in the trunk. Unsurprisingly, he hit the bullseye. Several marks on the tree told her he’d been doing this for a while now. Since he seemed determined to keep his back to her, Yelena quickly removed a blade from one of her many pockets and a second later her knife hit the target with a solid thunk, dislodging Bucky’s in the process.

“I win,” she announced, a tilt sardonic.

Bucky still didn’t turn around.

Yelena sighed. “You want to tell me what that was all about, back in the lab? ‘Cause it kinda feels like you’re holding out on me, Bucky.” A pause, heavy and weighted with too much. “You lying to me?”

He finally turned around. “No. I— withheld. That’s not the same.”

She scowled. “Save the semantics for a time when it’s not about fucking with my life. I need the truth about what happened to me, who I am. I thought you of all people would understand how important that is.”

He didn’t flinch, entirely, but she could see a schism of something pass through the entire frame of his body. “Ask, then.”

“Why do I have to ask? Why don’t you just tell me?”

“Because a person just doesn’t get told some things. There’s a way to break these types of things, and just blurting it out isn’t going to end well for anyone. Especially you.”

“What do you mean, especially me?” she returned, affronted. “I like to think I’ve been handling this existential crisis well enough, given everything. I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t run screaming into the night just because once again I’ve lost a handful of years in my life into some dark void and everything around me has changed into some fun-house-mirror version of itself. I’ve been brainwashed before. I’ve been snapped. I can handle whatever you have to tell me, Bucky. I’m a trained fucking assassin, for god’s sakes. I don’t scare easy.”

“Not about death or enemies or battle, you don’t,” Bucky countered. “But you’re a light touch when it comes to other things.”

“Other things?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to say this.”

“Maybe just come right out and say it? If you’re still my friend—”

“Oh, fuck that, I’m still your friend, Yelena.”

“Then stop dicking around,” she challenged him.

Bucky stared at her for a second. Then, exhausted by her and for her, she really couldn’t tell, he braced himself and nodded. “Right, okay. Say hypothetically, in the last handful of years, I told you we fell in love—how would you react to that?"

Yelena stopped breathing.

She felt like he’d suckerpunched her in the stomach with a declaration like that, framed in a paltry hypothetical. In love. Not got together, not hooked up, not fucked a couple of times or toyed indiscreetly with the line of sexual tension. She’d imagined something had changed between them, but he’d labeled it love right out the gate and she had no recourse to that, no way to downplay it or mitigate it or brush it off. It’d have been one thing if they’d fucked. She could have compartmentalized that after a beat of absorbing the news, alcohol or another one of her poor choices an easily acceptable explanation, maybe. Even dating would have been more palatable, more digestible, even if it made them sound like fucking teenagers.

But in love didn’t leave a whole lot of room for evasive maneuvers.

“Breathe, Yelena. You have to remember to breathe.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped, suddenly angry. “If this is you messing with me—”

“Do you really think I’d do that to you?” he barked. “Really? After everything you’ve been through, after what I know you’ve been through because I’ve been through the same exact fucking thing — you think I’d mess with you like that?”

She paused, her agitation doused in ice-cold water.

No, he wouldn’t. He’d never do something like that.

He wouldn’t mess around with words like love, either. The Bucky she knew was so emotionally constipated he made the rest of the team look normal. He didn’t like being alone, of course. No one did. Even if it was his default setting, he didn’t like the loneliness or isolation. It wasn’t like he had been afforded many other experiences with his history. None of them did. It was what made them work as a team. They were all fucked up. The only one who had a shot in hell at a normal loving life was Walker, and that was only because he’d already been married before he’d been fucked up in the head.

For Bucky to casually throw around the word love like that—

“No,” she said, an announcement or declaration or something like it. “No, this doesn’t make sense. That’s not— we were friends. That’s what I remember. Teammates. Co-leaders, maybe. Nothing else. You had difficulty even admitting we were friends.”

Bucky flinched. “That’s how it started. And then it changed. Slowly. Over time. One day I realized I wasn’t watching your six out of habit—I was doing it because I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to you.”

Yelena scoffed, arms folding across her chest. “You expect me to believe that? That I— we —fell in love? I don't even remember you looking at me like that. I know when a guy is interested in me, and you never—”

“You think I never looked at you like that?” Now, it was Bucky’s turn to look incredulous.

She threw her hands up in the air. “I thought you were mostly into guys!”

“I try not to label things,” he snapped back, voice rising in frustration himself. “I know you had an image of me in your head when we first met as some sort of monk, but I got news for you, Yelena. I have never been a monk. I have never been devoid of emotions or desire, and I always looked at you like that. You just didn’t realize it because I got good at keeping my walls high.”

She closed her eyes again; when she spoke, her voice was a little haggard. “You never acted like you liked me,” Yelena pressed.

“Because I didn’t think or expect anything to happen.”

Bewildered, here, and at a total loss. “So what changed?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, agitated now to match her tone. “Both of us changed. I can’t explain it any other way. I’m not any better with this stuff than you. It— just happened, over time.”

“The romance,” she deadpanned. “I’m swooning.”

He scowled. “What do you want me to say, Yelena? You want me to condense five years of our relationship into a neat soundbite, I don’t know how. It happened, and we both wanted it to happen. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

There was a term for that type of answer, and it was bullshit. It tripped over her tongue but somehow lodged somewhere deep in her throat, because it was one of those instinctive reactions that she did when she wanted to wound, when she wanted to lash out. It was rooted in a dialect she knew better than Russian, a heavy weight in her mouth that felt like the thick copper taste of blood.

“That sounds like a platitude,” she warned. “For the last two days, you stood there and watched me tear myself apart trying to figure out what I lost—and you knew.” Her breath was coming out faster, more labored. “You knew we were… that we were—”

“We were in love,” he finished for her, quietly, like repeating the phrase would somehow make it less explosive. “How was I supposed to tell you, Yelena? You just woke up in a nightmare, and you’re not the best with emotional fallout. None of us are. I was trying to manage the radiation. I told the others to back off because I wanted you to get your bearings first before I dropped this on you. Then your mom—” he grimaced, face pulling tight and angry, and a little dejected, too. “This isn’t easy for me, either.”

She remembered Melina saying about him, “You’re terrified of her knowing. That’s the core of it, isn’t it?” and “I think in those five years, he became someone to you. And now you’re not that someone to him anymore. Not in the same way.”

No, none of this made any type of sense.

“Maybe this isn’t memory loss at all,” she said, still trying to scramble for answers. “Maybe this is some alternate timeline, or dream, or spell. Because this version of me you’re describing—this woman you claim you loved—I don’t recognize her.”

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut in frustration, visibly trying to find the right elusive words. “No, you’re still you.” He cracked his eyes open and stared at her, determinedly. “This type of stubborn denial is only classic you. I’d recognize you anywhere, Yelena.”

There was a less-than-casual assessment in his gaze that made her innards feel splayed open, set out on a table for his dissection; he’d never looked at her like this before — this firm, this knowing, an almost-imperious tilt in his stare like he knew her through and through to the deepest darkest ugliest parts of her. She wasn’t sure what he was seeing beyond the dark circles under her eyes that never went away, beyond the gaunt expression of worry and the thin veneer of control that blotted her face into almost pinched-features; she felt like he could tell all the awful thoughts running through her head, all the voices of incredulity that screamed at the idea of him — of anyone — loving her in the way he was describing. Her hands were shaking, and not just from the bitter cold.

She looked away because staring back at him was too much. The sound of him approaching did nothing to alleviate the tension in her body. There was rustling fabric and a scent she had never realized felt familiar — his aftershave, perhaps, but a ghost of something that had a faint trace of citrus and woody overtones.

His voice was low, graveled, a quiet inflection full of too much intimacy: “That look on your face? I know that, too. It's the same look you get when you’re trying not to feel something too big.” He softened his voice. “You’re right here with me, Yelena. You’re just— missing the piece of yourself that let me in.”

Yelena shook her head and looked back at him, somehow feeling betrayed. “And you didn’t think I deserved to know?”

"You weren’t ready. You still aren’t, clearly. I didn’t want you to feel cornered by a version of us you couldn’t remember. I was protecting you.”

“You were protecting yourself,” she snapped back, voice rising. “You didn’t want to deal with how I’d react. How maybe I’d look at you like a stranger. How maybe I’d say it wasn’t real.”

His jaw clenched, her mark hitting true. “It was real. It is real,” he refuted.

This— this was too much.

Yelena backpedaled on her heels — needing to flee, to deny, to avoid any of this as any sort of reality. It wouldn’t be fair if she had something like that and couldn’t remember. It wouldn’t be fair, and it didn’t make sense, either. Love was for other people. Love came for those who didn’t have so much blood on their hands; that didn’t wake up every night covered in sweat and tears and the faint traces of vodka; that weren’t raised from little orphanages that trained little girls to gut a man with a serrated knife in a dozen different ways; that didn’t have their innards and organs fucked up and ripped out so they wouldn’t get their periods. Love was not for people like her — and to find it in him? That was impossible. Incredulous. They were too fucked up for that.

“No,” she muttered. “This doesn’t make sense. You can’t convince me—”

“Jesus, Yelena, I’m not trying to trick you—”

“You don’t know me,” she told him, loud, too loudly. “This is bullshit. This is such utter fucking bullsh—”

He surged forward, the immediate jolt of a hot mouth covering hers had Yelena stumbling back. It was the demand of the kiss that shocked her more than anything else, the certainty, his metal arm dragging her closer to brush his tongue heavily against hers, to taste and taunt and torment her with an onslaught of too many sensations all at once. She couldn’t get her bearings. Strong at first, then melting into a spine-tingling commotion of heat and devastation, that had her instantly inebriated by the caressing contact of his lips that opened up her mouth again and again, the scrape of his stubble against her skin, the slide of his fingers tangling through her hair and the others across the span of her back. Even his metal arm, caging her in, felt warm. Heat flared. Her hands fell to his shoulders, his chest. When she folded into his kiss he only grew bolder, nipping a second kiss from her lips, stealing a third. It was the assurance of his touch that was utterly mindmelding, completely overwhelming her senses, fragmenting her doubts.

Because he kissed her like he knew how — none of that fumbling around that she had experienced in every other first kiss, none of the uncertainty and clumsy experimentation.

Then he pulled away, only an inch or two, and Yelena felt her stomach bottom out as she opened her eyes and took stock of what had just happened.

“I know you,” he told her, panting a breath that clouded the air, a rasp that she felt like a shudder down her spine. “I know you better than anyone else, Yelena. And if it takes me another five years to prove that to you, so be it.”

He walked away before she had a chance to mutter a word in response.

#

Notes:

Okay, so this story had been hidden for about a week. I've been flooded with a series of entitled and rude reviews lately that actually made me prematurely conclude my other Haladriel novel piece, "Reforged in the Making." While that story may be a lost cause entirely, I was caught over what to do with the rest of my writing. I contemplated stopping fic writing altogether, because the years of death threats, bullying, and mean-spirited and/or entitled review buildup has been slowly eroding my love of writing fic. However, I had an anti rejoice at the thought of me deleting my fics, and spite has driven me to try again! So, here I am.

I'm going to limit comments only to registered users in the hopes of limiting the negativity I could get with posting this. Hopefully, I get none. If I do, I'll block. Hopefully, I do not get the urge to delete this and all other fics entirely. We'll see. But just once more, for posterity — be kind to your fic authors. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything. Thank you.

Chapter 8

#

A dream:

She heard a commotion outside her bedroom door, and shoved her feet into boots and pulled on a faded sweatshirt, stretched at the collar and fraying a little at the sleeves, before she walked outside to a warzone. The sky was falling, another alien invasion, and she saw an airport runway stretched out in front of her doorstep. There were a few stragglers running outside behind her, and one of them knocked into her shoulder as they fled. Then, incoming, she could hear the distant whine of a missile being launched and headed straight towards her building. Yelena stood there and just— watched, as the thing came closer and closer, as people around her all ran futilely for cover, until she closed her eyes and accepted the fate barreling towards her, the imminent death.

She awoke, sweat drenched and crying out, bolting up in bed.

“Yelena?” a voice came, blearily, beside her.

Belatedly she realized there was a warm arm coming around her, and she looked over at Bucky rumpled from sleep, blinking up at her. He was naked, and in her bed, and he looked perfectly at ease with both.

“You okay, baby?” he asked, groggily.

#

She awoke again, this time from the dream within a dream, and she didn’t know which dream had her heart hammering worse. She groaned, the telltale migraine of a hangover raging in her head. She looked across the floor where a half-empty bottle of vodka sat within arm’s reach of the bed; she’d spent the better part of last night drinking her confusion away, and if she didn’t nip the habit in the bud, she’d be relapsing into her worst tendencies all too easily.

With a wince, she moved to get up. The team had spent the night in Melina’s bolthole, a bunker adjacent to her lab facility. She wasn’t looking forward to facing them again — to facing Bucky — but she had little choice. She brushed her teeth and washed her face, wiping the day old eyeliner from her face and reapplying a smidge of makeup to cover the fact that she felt half-dead. Her body protested every moment, but Yelena stared at herself in the mirror and gave herself the only peptalk she could manage. ‘Move your ass,’ she told herself. It worked, marginally.

By the time she was joining the others, the rest of the team was almost ready to leave. Half were already waiting in the quinjet, and the other half were finishing up breakfast. Food was laid out on the table, and most of the dishes were already piled high in the sink. She studiously avoided the gaze of Bucky, who was propped up by the hip, braced near the kitchen sink. The ease of the conversation flowed around her as she went to the small kitchen counter and pulled out a plate for food. It was kolbasa, unfortunately, which Yelena wasn’t a fan of, but she wouldn’t complain. She took out a heaping slop of the porridge instead, and reached overhead for an accompanying glass, but the only remaining tumbler was on a shelf that was obscenely high. She couldn’t quite reach it. After a beat of futile stretching, Yelena felt a familiar presence at her back; Bucky reached up behind her, easily grabbing the offending glass with a brushing proximity that made her breath catch in her throat.

He set it on the counter for her. “We’re leaving soon,” he told her.

She nodded. “I’m ready.”

He studied her for a beat longer, an intense scrutiny she didn’t appreciate considering she felt like roadkill. The less-than-casual assessment in his gaze was a little too piercing, and yeah, sure, she knew what he saw. The circles under her eyes, her limp hair that needed a fresh wash, her lips chapped and bitten because she was dehydrated all to hell after going on another vodka binge—she knew how to recognize unstable the same way he did, knew he was seeing in her what she had seen in the mirror.

She was a little surprised by the direct eye-contact, to be honest. She’d figured after the other night, after that— kiss. That kiss. Where he’d touched her like he already knew her, like he’d already been all over her skin, mapped and memorized everything. She’d expected him to be just as skittish of her as she was of him, after that. Yet, once again, her expectations were thwarted and inverted, and it was honestly a little dickish of him not to be more thrown by it like she was.

That fucking kiss.

“What?” she said, a little defensive.

His frown deepened. “You can’t keep disappearing into a bottle every night.”

She knew that, of course, but she really didn’t want him telling her that. “Don’t worry, it won’t become a problem.”

He said nothing, but she could feel the waves of concern wafting off him like cologne anyway. Frowning, she skidded past him and sat with the rest of the team for breakfast.

#

It turned out that the entire visit to her mother’s facility was a bust, more or less. Other than the revelations and bombs that Bucky had dropped on her, Yelena set off from the Siberian facility without a whole lot of answers. The other members of the team were all returning back to New York to recoup and strategize their plans. It helped that Doctor Strange also resided in Greenwich Village, which was only the next obvious place she had to go for answers regarding all this magical nonsense. The flight took relatively little time on the quinjet, but Yelena was anxious and jittery the entire time.

She spent some of it changing the bandages on her arm, replacing it with fresh ones. The cuts and scrapes she’d suffered from the battle in Madripoor were mostly gone now, with only one small cut on her bicep that still looked a little iffy. She was applying ointment on it when Bucky came to sit next to her.

“Let me help you with that,” he said, taking over wrapping the strip of cloth over the wound.

She let him do it, quietly.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he said.

She lifted an eyebrow. “For what?”

“Yesterday. I shouldn’t have acted without thought. It’s just—” he stopped himself, pausing indelicately.

“It’s just?” she prompted, clipped.

He did a one-shouldered shrug, unabashed. “Kissing you was always the one sure way to stop an argument. Fell back on old habits, I guess.”

She did her best to stop her face from flushing red. That’s not fair, she wanted to say. She just stared at him, watching him stare back at her with an utter lack of squeamishness that she would have found abnormal on him on a good day. At least when it came to anything personal like feelings. Bucky spent most of his days doing his job as stoically as possible, with as little fuss as possible. He had always been careful and quick and focused, forever efficient in a way that could almost border on robotic if she didn’t know his messy history. Yet she’d never seen him display anywhere near that same level of confidence when it came to his personal life. She’d been expecting awkwardness from them, an ill-defined strain erecting between them because of yesterday’s conversation and, yes, that kiss.

Instead, it seemed Bucky had settled more firmly into his skin than he had been before.

She didn’t understand it.

“Why isn’t this bothering you more?” she asked him, point blank.

He blinked. “Who says it doesn’t? You’re not the only one that lost something in the last few days, Yelena. The difference is I have a grasp of just what that entails.”

She floundered for the right words. “You’re just, you know, you’re just—”

“What?”

“Calm,” she said. “Too calm.”

He went back to securing her bandages. When she looked down, he ran his thumb over his work, once, twice, and when her eyes met his again, the terror in them was so naked that it knocked her breath clean out. “I’m not calm,” he admitted, quietly. “I’m terrified as fuck that everything I’ve come to know, everything I’ve come to rely upon these last few years is— just gone. In a blink of an eye. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me, not even the second or the third. I guess I’m just still hoping it isn’t all a lost cause, not yet. This— team is important. You’ve come to mean a lot to me.”

The gravity of what he was saying overcame her, even if she got the sense the last part had been a copout, a way to gentle the blow of all he was admitting. He really did care about her, didn’t he? She couldn’t wrap her mind around declarations of love, or even the intensity of that shared kiss from yesterday, but this… this was something that she could understand. The idea that he’d lost some touchstone of his, some foundational element that kept him grounded. That, Yelena understood. That, Yelena could appreciate. She didn't have memories of the last five years, but this team was a cornerstone for her already. It gave her purpose. It gave her a connection she’d spent her entire life looking for. If something threatened to rip that away, she’d be shaken too.

It was oddly reaffirming to realize she wasn’t in this scary mess by herself. That someone felt as frazzled as her, perhaps, in his own way.

She couldn’t understand the rest of it, but this was reassuring.

“Yeah,” she said, simply.

He nodded, cleared his throat, and looked away.

The rest of the trip, they sat side by side silently.

#

She’d been all over the world, but New York had become oddly familiar all too quickly when she’d joined the team. What had once been glibly thought of as a tourist destination now had familiar pockets and known favorite restaurants, but she’d quickly discovered the city was never just one thing. It had so many facets she doubted she’d ever come to recognize all of it, no matter how long she chose to live there.

She hadn’t gone to Greenwich Village all that often, though. The afternoon sun slanted golden over the old brownstones and crooked cobblestones, as they arrived at 177A Bleecker Street. The narrow, meandering streets—unlike the gridlock rigidity of Midtown—felt like a different city entirely.

It was just Bucky and Yelena now. The others had gone home to recoup and recover, and she didn’t know what it said that she was mostly relieved not to have to deal with the others while unwinding the mystery of whatever had happened to her. Bucky presented a whole host of conflicting emotions, but he also wasn’t obnoxious about any of it. She couldn’t say the same for the rest of her teammates.

Bucky knocked once with his metal fist and the door opened on its own. Yelena hesitated at the threshold, eyes narrowing as she peered into the dim corridor. She looked around— it was cooler inside. The foyer opened into a vast hall, too large to fit logically within a townhouse.

Bucky shared a look with her, but pushed his way past any discomfort and made his way through to the library. Bookshelves spiraled up the walls, filled with ancient tomes, scrolls wrapped in silk, and relics bound in chains or glowing faintly with protective runes. They found someone in the corner, but it wasn’t Doctor Strange. Instead it was an Asian man wearing a layered eastern-fashioned robe, standing before a floating map.

He didn’t turn around. “You’re late.”

Bucky frowned. “We weren’t on a schedule.”

The man turned around. “When you bring Wanda Maximoff’s name into my sanctum, time is of the essence.”

Yelena looked at him. “We’re looking for Doctor Strange?”

“He’s busy at the moment, but you get better than him. I’m the Sorcerer Supreme. Overseeing magical threats and maintaining order across dimensions is in my job description.”

“Wong, right?” Bucky said, in slow recognition.

The man nodded. “Strange sends his regards. Wanda has kept him busy, but I can help you.” He motioned them forward. “Come, Ms. Belova. I’ve already been brought up to speed on your circumstances.”

Ten minutes later, Yelena sat cross-legged inside a sigil etched into the floor, chalk-white and pulsing faintly with some sort of magical power. Her face was pinched, lips pressed tight, shoulders tense despite the warmth of the room. She hated being examined—but Bucky had convinced her to let Wong try, and she owed him this after what her mother had put him through. So now, there was no turning back.

“This might feel strange,” Wong told her.

“You mean invasive,” Yelena replied, tiredly.

Candles flickered in concentric circles around Wong and Yelena, casting golden rings of light on the worn stone floor. The chamber smelled faintly of incense and ancient paper—unsettling magic, heavy and unfamiliar to her. Above them, the ceilings stretched impossibly high, crowned by a domed skylight, its intricate circular pattern of stained glass casting a kaleidoscope of shifting colors onto the hardwood floor below. The Window of the Worlds, Wong had called it. It shimmered faintly, as if responding to the energy in the room.

Wong lifted both hands and closed his eyes, chanting in a deep deliberate voice. The air grew thick. From his fingertips, delicate threads of golden light spiraled outward and touched Yelena’s temples. Her eyes widened, and she gave a sharp inhale—but didn’t move. The threads spread across her skull, forming a delicate neural lattice, mapping her mind with red constellations. Wong’s brow furrowed. He moved closer, murmuring some incantation, trying to isolate and look closer. But as he did, the red magic resisted, sparking violently in vibrant arcs, lashing out like a living wound.

Yelena gritted her teeth, feeling a headache spike. “What’s happening? That’s not you, is it?”

Wong shook his head. “No. This is her magic.” Wanda’s. He narrowed his eyes, focusing again. The golden threads flared, now interweaving with the red. The chaotic cluster of spellwork in her mind began to reveal some pattern to him. “This isn’t just a memory block. If Strange were here, he would likely call this a surgical attack. A specific memory had been targeted.” Wong paused. “Wanda didn’t just wipe your mind. She tried to take something from it. I do not know if she was successful, but—” He looked at her now, gaze sharp with certainty, voice low with unease. “One memory. One very precise, important one.”

Yelena frowned. “Which one?”

Wong’s fingers trembled as he adjusted the spell, focusing on the edges of the missing fragment—what it had once been connected to. “She tried to harvest it. She didn't care about what else she excised in the task.”

“So I’m what—” she exclaimed, angrily. “Swiss cheese now? Some… broken storage locker?”

“No,” Wong said. “You're still whole. But that piece of you—it was valuable to her. Enough to tear the fabric of your mind for it.”

“Can you undo it?” Bucky asked.

Wong shook his head. “My magic is not like hers. Unfortunately, not as strong either.” He stepped back, releasing the spell gently. The golden lattice faded. Yelena sagged slightly, blinking as if waking from a deep dream. Her hands curled tightly on her knees. “The only way to retrieve it and restore your memory is to undo the spell, and only someone like Wanda can do that. A witch or warlock of her strength.”

Bucky locked eyes with Yelena. “Five years ago, before everything went black for you—we were tracking her children. It was a dead end, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you can’t remember anything after that.”

“Tommy and Billy Maximoff,” Wong said, a realization lifting his voice. “They were lost when Westview collapsed. Fragments manifested in her power. But perhaps pieces of them—” He stepped closer to Bucky, eyeing him sharply. “And you said it was a dead end?”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah. We followed the leads. It led nowhere. We got frustrated. We turned around.”

But the words sounded brittle, rehearsed. Even as he spoke them, something in him visibly flinched.

Wong narrowed his eyes. “Hold still.”

Before Bucky could object, Wong raised his hands again. This time, the spell twisted differently—coils of silver and blue light formed a lattice around Bucky’s skull. The sorcery reacted violently. “Your memory is blocked, too. Not as massively. It’s not chaos magic. Not Wanda,” Wong murmured to himself. “But close. There it is.” He leaned in, eyes wide. “Your mind was shielded. Gently. Deliberately. A single memory erased.”

Yelena stood up now, eyes narrowing. “Who would do that?

Wong looked from one to another. “Someone powerful. Someone perhaps scared.” He turned slowly. “It wasn’t a dead end five years ago.” A beat. “I bet you all the rupees in my pocket that you found Billy Maximoff. He’s a telepath like his mother. His magic is similar, but each magic user has its own distinctive traits.”

“He wiped my memory,” Bucky said, in slow realization. “To protect himself from Wanda. So she wouldn’t find him through us.”

“Likely he did the same thing to Yelena, too,” Wong nodded.

Yelena bit her lip, breath catching in her throat as she finally figured it out. “And Wanda —she found out. She couldn’t find him—but she saw the thread of his magic. In my mind.”

Wong nodded. “If Wanda is looking for him again—and her only clue is inside your brain? She’ll stop at nothing to get to you. Strange has her preoccupied right now, chasing her across time and space. Eventually that game will end.”

Bucky met Yelena’s gaze. There was something deeper behind his dread now: confusion, and maybe—buried deep—a faint glimmer of fear he refused to let surface fully. He was scared for her, more than he wanted to admit. Bucky shaken was not a thing she could easily dismiss; not a lot of things shook him.

“Then we have to find Billy Maximoff,” Bucky said. “Again. Maybe he can undo what Wanda did to her. Maybe we can get ahead of this, for once.”

That was easier said than done.

Wong sighed heavily. “Come with me,” he instructed.

He led Yelena and Bucky through a hidden archway that opened into a narrow spiral staircase, descending beneath the heart of the Sanctum. As they moved deeper underground, the air became cooler. At the bottom, they stepped into a vaulted chamber filled with relics sealed behind floating runes. Wong moved purposefully toward a small pedestal draped in crimson silk. Atop it sat two rings, simple in form, yet she doubted she’d ever have mistaken it for something common. Wong picked them up, and as he did, they gleamed with subtle enchantments etched in inverted runes that shimmered when viewed from the corner of the eye, vanishing when looked at directly.

“These were created by Strange himself,” Wong explained, “shortly after the multiversal collapse we narrowly avoided a few years ago. After the first time we went against Wanda.” He picked one up carefully. “She tried to hunt someone else down once, and we thought it prudent to prepare for the next time she chose a victim. These rings are keyed to Wanda Maximoff’s chaos signature. So long as you wear them, she will not see you—not through spells, not through dreams, not even through her eyes if she’s standing a foot away.”

He handed the first to Yelena. She turned it over in her fingers, suspicious. “This hides us completely?” she asked, skeptical.

“Only from her,” Wong explained. “It creates a pocket in the spectrum of magical perception. You will be absent from her vision, from all of her senses.”

Bucky looked dubious. “And what’s the catch?”

Wong looked at him, serious. “Like any enchantment, it is delicate. You must not remove the rings—not in sleep, not under stress, not even if your life depends on it. If you break contact, she’ll find you instantly.”

Bucky accepted his ring, sliding it onto his right hand. It shrank slightly, adjusting perfectly to fit his finger, and gave off a brief pulse of yellow light—as if confirming its bond. She slipped hers on afterwards, feeling a faint warmth travel up her finger, through her arm, and outstretch to her entire body. It was a strange current that receded into nothing.

“Find Billy before she does,” Wong said to her. “Because if she gets to him first, those rings will mean nothing and I doubt you’ll be able to retrieve your memories otherwise.”

#

The quinjet descended quietly toward the Avengers Tower. “Shouldn’t we be going into hiding?” she asked Bucky.

“Nope,” Bucky answered. “The Tower is the safest place for us to be now.” He pointed to the skyline, which shimmered a little in the sunset, as if the building itself pulsed with something other than tech, something she was starting to recognize as supernatural. “It’s woven with enchantment, a fusion of Stark innovation and Kamar-Taj sorcery.”

Yelena stood by the viewport, arms folded, eyes narrowed. “That wasn’t there the last time I lived here.”

He nodded. “Upgrades. It’s not just runes. Wards. Anti-divination grids. Strange helped design them after— everything.”

“Wanda?”

Bucky shrugged. “Wanda. Kang. Loki.” He didn’t say it bitterly—just tiredly. “Take your pick.”

The Quinjet docked in a landing bay now shielded by hexagonal golden panels, rotating slowly in a rhythm she couldn't place. Everything felt familiar and foreign at once—like walking into your childhood home after someone else had redecorated it. Inside the Tower, the corridors were a little familiar, but they passed by rooms now that she didn’t remember—training sanctuaries, a fusion of physical combat space and reality-bending simulations, able to recreate battlefield scenarios from across the multiverse; a med bay staffed with augmented tech; a large library guarded by some AI with a new accent.

But it wasn’t until they reached the elevator that her stomach twisted. “My living space was on the fifteenth floor,” she said, staring as he hit another floor bottom.

Bucky was quiet for a beat. “Yeah, you don’t live there anymore. We… share space on the eighteenth floor.” Yelena stopped breathing, just staring at him. A second later, the elevator pinged open to reveal a wide hallway, dim and quiet. Bucky glanced at her, uncertain, then gestured down the hall. “It’s this way,” he said, softly. “I can grab some stuff and move out—”

She held up a hand to halt him. It was already late. She didn’t want to make things more complicated. “Don’t worry, I can take the couch.”

This didn’t need to be more awkward and disruptive than it had to be.

He walked her to the front door, which slid apart with a soft whoosh. Inside, the apartment was— lived-in, not sterile like she expected. Dim lighting, soft rugs, a couch with a blanket thrown messily across it. The faint scent of coffee, and something vaguely citrus lingered in the air. And then— a white blur leapt from the couch. Alpine, Bucky’s aloof cat, landed gracefully in front of them, blinking her icy blue eyes before purring. She crept closer to Bucky’s feet, bunting her head and rubbing herself affectionately at his feet.

Yelena wandered further inside, slowly, eyes scanning everything. Her leather jacket was draped over the back of a chair. A knife she used to carry was mounted beside a tactical gear locker. Her toiletries. Her boots. Her handwriting on a sticky note taped to the fridge: “Don’t eat my yogurt unless you want to lose a finger.” She walked deeper into the space. Her fingers grazed the bookshelf. On one shelf sat a book about dog training, another about Russian folklore. She didn’t remember reading either. Interspersed with everything were his things — Bucky’s motorcycle keys on the corner table, his leather jacket hanging on the coat rack, his stuff strewn around the room intermixed with hers.

There was only a single photo in the entire space, not even in a frame but pinned to a board with a thumbtack; it was one of her and Bucky on a beach, out on the sand. They were both smiling.

“So,” Yelena said, clearing her throat. “We live together.”

Bucky scratched his neck. “I moved in two years ago, the last hold out to move into the tower. It, uh, happened after a mission in Bhutan. We didn’t plan it. I just… didn’t leave. And you didn’t ask me to.” She turned to him. His voice was low, uneven. “So, I just stayed at your place. Then you went and brought Alpine here the next week without asking, and then we moved up to this floor for a bigger living space.”

Yelena had always been a dog person.

She crossed to the window, watching the city flicker beneath them. Her reflection looked back at her, fractured by lights and glass. Yelena was struggling to breathe normally, to keep her heart rate at a reasonable pace. She couldn’t figure out if it was mere anxiety restricting her airways, or if she was barrelling towards a full blown panic attack. Everything felt sideways, and this was both too real and not at all tangible in the same breath. Like she was living someone else’s life. Like she borrowed a version of herself that she didn’t recognize. Behind her, Bucky stood still, tense but patient.

All around her was proof she was in a relationship with Bucky Barnes. They shared space. They slept together. They did more than sleep.

They were, somehow, in love.

A tentative voice from behind. “Yelena?”

“Yeah, just give me a sec, alright. I just— need a second to absorb this latest piece of information. It’s not like we got married or anything—” Her eyes widened, whirling around. “Please tell me we’re not married, or engaged, or one of those weird couples that take each other's last names without tying the knot because we’re new-aged or—”

“No,” Bucky cut in, quickly. “No to all of that.”

Oh, thank god.

“I can take the couch?” Bucky offered, quietly. “I can even move out, if you need it.”

He looked tense, close to freaking out as he could look, obviously triggered by the fact that she looked to be having a mild identity crisis for the fifth time in three days.

Yelena shook her head. “No need,” she said, forcing herself to breathe, to relax, to unclench her fists. She sat down on the couch, testing the cushions’ give, pretending everything was simple and all right. “I’ll manage the couch.”

And Alpine hoped straight into Yelena’s arms.

She stared at her, stunned, not knowing whether to laugh or throw her off. “You used to hide from me.”

Instead, Alpine rubbed her head against her shoulder, utterly content. “Yeah, well,” Bucky said, wryly. “She warmed up. Eventually.”

Alpine purred louder, curling into her like she’d done it a hundred times before.

#

Chapter 9

Notes:

One day late contribution to bucklena week, Day 1: “First Time.”

#

She actually got some sleep, surprisingly.

The couch was lumpy but she’d slept on worse over the years. In the morning, the hum of Manhattan was faint through triple-reinforced glass. She’d spent the night studying the details of this apartment she’d shared with Bucky, noting things here and there. The room was clean, minimalist, but there was a subtle mix of order and cozy domestic chaos. She was a messy person; Yelena could admit that. Bucky seemed to like cleanliness. She got a sense that a lot of the order was his, and the chaos was hers. It shouldn't have made the place feel like a home, but somehow it did. Their stuff coexisted in this weird harmony and balance. Yelena couldn’t explain it, but it certainly fascinated her a lot.

Other things threw her, too. Like the claw-marked cat tower by the corner that stood next to a pile of novels, some written in Russian; she wasn’t entirely sure it was her selection because the topics were more autobiographical than anything, and she never cared for those. She got a sense it was his books, written in Russian.

She padded barefoot to the kitchen, pulled on an oversized hoodie — one she only belatedly realized was not hers because of the faint scent of cologne clinging to it — but by then she couldn’t be bothered to take it off. She hit the coffee machine like muscle memory. The smell was comforting. The pervasive silence was not. Alpine hopped up on the counter beside her. She let the cat nuzzle her sweatshirt, and wondered if Apline was also smelling Bucky on the material before she realized — nope. The cat just liked me now. That was still new, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to return the affection, absently scratching the cat behind her ears until Alpine started purring.

Then the bathroom door opened, and steam billowed out and curled along the ceiling. She turned at the sound, half-lost in morning fog—until she saw him. Bucky stepped out. Shirtless. Hair damp, curling slightly around his jaw where his hair had grown a touch too long. A towel hung low on his hips, clinging to him like a second skin with an affixed knot just underneath the v-dip of his hips. Her gaze betrayed her— hungry, automatic, traveling entirely of its own recognizance down the length of him. The small stubborn drops of water cascading down the natural hard lines of his chest and body, the frame of his build, the firm exposed muscles at his wet torso, the litany of old scars and wounds.

Then Alpine let out a meow and Yelena caught herself staring.

She jerked her head away like she’d been burned, spun back toward the coffee machine as if it required immediate attention, as if she hadn’t just mentally stripped him down the rest of the way.

Behind her, silence.

Then the soft scrape of a throat clearing. “Morning.”

“Morning,” she muttered back, distractedly.

She heard him move—barefoot steps across wood, steady, unhurried. He rounded the counter, scratched idly behind one of Alpine’s ears in a brief greeting, still clad only in that damn towel, moving with the same quiet confidence she’d seen him fight with countless times over.

He reached up to the cupboard and she — stupidly — continued to look as he stretched. The muscles of his back shifted with feline grace, perfectly defined, his spine like a fault line of scars and strength. Below that, beneath the towel, a promising hint of a firm ass. Yelena tried to stop her eyes from venturing, but it was completely involuntary — at least until she dragged her attention back up again. His left shoulder bore the brutal remnants of past surgeries—deep, jagged scarring where the metal arm connected. A dark reminder of pain, of violence, of survival. She’d seen wounds like that in others, many in people she cared about, but this one struck her raw, as particularly cruel.

“You’re wearing my sweatshirt,” he said, casual, sipping from his mug as he turned around and met her gaze. Like he hadn’t just detonated her nervous system.

“Why?” she fired back, eyes flickering down his chest, then back up again with practiced control—like a soldier sighting a target. Her voice came out steadier than expected, dry as flint. “You don’t look like you need it.”

He didn’t laugh. Didn’t tease.

But she saw it—a slight curling at the edge of his lips. It wasn’t cocky. It wasn’t smug. It was worse: it was warm. It was understated. It was knowing.

And somehow, that disarmed her more than anything else.

And then, as if he knew she was quickly reaching her breaking point and chose mercy, he turned and disappeared into the bedroom, presumably to dress. She stayed in the kitchen, hand wrapped around her mug, sipping coffee when what she really needed was a fucking smoke. She’d often teased him for being "too pretty," but this—this was something else. She was becoming too aware of him. The fact that he was an insanely attractive man had never escaped her notice before, but now it was becoming distracting. In her experience, men were not, in general, prettier than women. It was a rule she’d noted all her life and very infrequently did she find it violated.

Bucky Barnes broke all those norms.

It wasn’t just physical, either. The man had no right looking like that and still being kind. Still being the one who gave her space when she needed it, who respected every unspoken rule she’d drawn up around her. Bucky didn’t push. Didn’t prod. He just stayed . Constant. Steady. Solid as the metal on his arm.

The more she came to untangle this future, the more she became aware of Bucky. Not only his looks, but his mannerisms too, which tended to be even more distracting because they carried such weight to it. He cared a lot about her, that much was obvious. There was a tacit admission of care in every one of Bucky’s actions, and she was coming to realize how much it kept her sane and grounded. How it kept her from freaking out even more. That was the kind of man Bucky was. With his history, he could have easily become a monster. Instead, he’d gone down another route and Yelena knew exactly what that entailed because it so equally paralleled her own journey out of the woods.

Maybe that was what had drawn them together in the first place?

Sure, he was stupidly handsome — anybody with eyes could see that. The man tended to be the most attractive person in the room at any given point, without even trying. But there was so much more beneath the surface. Yelena was just starting to realize how deep the well of Bucky Barnes ran; she wondered if she could fully appreciate its depth with her memories still missing. By his own account of their history, he’d let her past all his defenses. He’d found her worthy of his time and his care. Yelena couldn’t quite grasp how they’d happened. She wondered if maybe they’d bridged that gap together because they shared so much paralleled history and unspoken trauma, a kinship born of a hellish upbringing.

Who else could love someone so damaged other than the damned themselves?

#

“So,” Bucky said, sounding like he was gearing up to explain something. “The structure of the Avengers has changed somewhat over the years. The New Avengers, us— that’s still the same as when we started out at the beginning.”

The Thunderbolts, she thought to herself.

Yelena snorted. “What about Helmut Zemo?”

Bucky made a face. “He comes and goes as he pleases. Plus his presence in the US is a little more dicey. We only call upon him when his connections are needed, but it’s proven helpful over the years. I know what you’re thinking — how can we trust anyone like him? That’s what a lot of people have said about all of us at one time or another.”

Yelena couldn’t deny that.

Instead, she focused on getting her arms around the evolving structure. “Who else is there?”

“Sam stepped up a while back,” Bucky says, scratching behind his ear. “You still have control of our team, but he’s—”

“The head boss,” Yelena cut in, a sinking knowing feeling.

A beat, and Bucky didn’t do her the disservice of refuting it or trying to undercut the weight of it. He just nodded, not unkindly, certainly not indifferent to the pit of reluctance that bloomed in Yelena’s gut. She’d always known her control over the Avengers was tenuous at best, that she’d wrestled control over the Tower and the IP by playing into Valentina’s powerplay and using it to her own advantage. Still, it wasn’t a great feeling — to be replaced, to be outshone.

If it had to be anyone, she guessed that she was glad it was Sam Wilson — but it still stung.

“Yeah,” Bucky said after a beat, continuing quietly. “He’s got a whole roster of people under him. The Avengers have grown. You know some of them — Shuri, Spiderman, Hawkeye. Then there’s Shang-Chi, Kamala, the Fantastic Four group—”

“Whoa, the Fantastic Four? As in the group of superheroes that disappeared into space back in the sixties?”

“Yeah, they reappeared,” Bucky explained, quickly, tiredly. “There’s been a lot of that over the years.”

Yelena blinked. When they came up to the briefing room of the Tower, Sam Wilon was already there, leaning against the edge of the war table, a tablet in one hand and a protein shake in the other. His presence wasn’t the only one surprising.

“Kate Bishop,” Yelena greeted, in shock.

The other girl — woman, now, really — was seated across from Sam, legs kicked up on the table, looking like she hadn’t slept the night before. “Yelena Belova,” she returned, familiarly, smiling. There was a hint of caution in her eyes. “Boss—” she gestured to Sam with a head bob, “—told us what went down with you. It’s sounds so— fucked up.”

It was.

Then she realized that when Bucky had mentioned Hawkeye, she’d assumed Clint Barton, but now she remembered seeing pics of Kate Bishop in her purple uniform that one night when Yelena had gotten smashingly drunk and decided to pursue the internet to get her arms around this new future world.

That was how she recognized the other girl next to Kate, one that Yelena had only ever seen on cameras and CCTV footage. Kamala Khan sat eating a donut, permeating unmistakable youthful energy, bright-eyed, wearing a Stark tech backpack way too large for her frame. Yelena slowed as she took in the new team members and they all greeted her in return. Younger faces. More of them than she remembered. The Avengers had grown so much.

Sam’s expression changed, understanding overtaking calculation in his eyes as he set down the tablet. He straightened and came toward her, his voice soft, “Yelena. Hey. Good to have you back.”

Yelena gave a small nod. “Back-ish.”

He smiled — and clapped her on the shoulder. “Whatever pace you need. We’re just glad you’re here. And don't worry about catching up — most of us are still figuring it out.” He stopped in front of a large holographic table. The Avengers logo pulsed faintly beneath the surface. Sam set his protein shake down and gestured to the display as it flickered to life. “All our info on Billy Maximoff.”

Yelena settled across from him, leaning forward with her hands planted over the screen, sharp eyes trained on what it told her.

The file opened:

SUBJECT: WILLIAM “BILLY” MAXIMOFF
Aliases: Wiccan (informal, unconfirmed)
Status: Unknown
Affiliation: Wanda Maximoff (maternal connection – unverified existence for years post-Blip)
Threat Level: Variable – Potential grade-3-level

The screen cycled through a few images — most were blurry, partial captures. One video feed cut out just as the subject turned toward the camera. There seemed to be nothing concrete.

“He’s good at keeping a low profile,” Sam explained. “Every lead we had either disappeared or ended in scorched earth. Literally. Power signatures that matched Wanda’s — sometimes even stronger. But inconsistent and volatile. Like someone trying to hold themselves back or stay hidden.”

Yelena frowned. “No confirmed sighting?”

Here, Kamala jumped in. “One possible visual in London three years ago.”

“And another in Brazil,” Kate added.

“Right,” Kamala agreed with the reminder. “By the time anyone got any boots on the ground, both sites were empty. No witnesses. Just residual magic so dense it messed with every sensor we had.”

Bucky flipped the tablet in his hand to another screen: a child’s drawing. Crude crayon scribbles of a woman and two boys. “MOMMY” scrawled under the figure in red. Yelena tilted her head slightly, confused.

“That came from Westview,” Sam explained. “Before the Hex came down. One of the few things we recovered. We didn’t think it mattered until the energy signatures started showing up again. Around the time Wanda— changed.”

Yelena’s jaw flexed, but she said nothing. Sam was like Bucky, still stubbornly clinging onto the woman Wanda used to be when she’d been one of the Avengers. It didn’t mean they didn’t acknowledge who she’d become now, or the dangerous and unhinged obsession she had with getting back her children, but both of them were compromised when it came to Wanda.

Yelena had no such muddled allegiances. Instead, she had a whole host of valid beefs.

”You think he’s alive?” Bucky asked Sam.

“Yeah. Whether that’s Billy Maximoff — or something wearing his face — we can’t say. But whatever it is, he doesn’t want to be found.”

Yelena stood and walked to the screen, studying the flickers of data. Even from a mere glance, she could tell there was nothing solid — no photo, no voice recording, no biometric proof. Just whispers and scorched earth.

Kate gave Yelena a look like she was reading her mind. “If it is Billy,” she adds, helpfully, “if he survived the collapse of Westview and the fallout from all that stuff — then maybe he’s been alone a long time. Or worse— trained by someone else.”

“Trained in what?” Yelena replied. “Magic?”

“If so,” Kate replied, “apparently not the friendly kind. His signature doesn’t match Kamar-Taj or Strange’s school. It’s darker, or at least that’s what America said.”

Yelena blinked. “Who?”

“Sorry, another new team member,” Bucky explained, quickly. “It’s kinda hard to keep track sometimes.”

By the end of the brief, there wasn’t a lot of added information to go around. Billy Maximoff was like a ghost, who may or may not have been palling around with a real-life-honest-to-god ghost by the name of Agatha, if some of the rumors were true. But there were too many rumors for Yelena to take seriously, too much suppositions, and some absolutely wild guesses to fill in the blanks. They didn’t have a solid lead, even if Sam had put out feelers and made it clear to everyone that this was a priority.

“We don’t mess around when it comes to Wanda,” Sam explained. “This is all hands on deck kinda thing, so if you need anything, shout. We’ll jump.”

Yelena nodded. She appreciated that. She’d appreciate it more if there were actually clues and progress on the hunt for Billy, but she kept that thought to herself.

#

After the brief, she watched Sam turn to Bucky — and something eased in her chest as she watched the way they interacted now. They still bore all the familiar marks of easy friendship, that trust which was so hard-earned especially when it came to Bucky. A brotherhood or a bromance, either way she was especially glad he had someone like Sam around now. Yelena felt like she’d been put through the ringer lately, but she wasn’t the only one that had their life turned upside down. Hopefully Sam could be someone Bucky could lean on since Yelena barely felt steady herself. She watched them disappear together, headed toward the training bay, easy banter already traded between them.

Yelena lingered in the doorway. Kamala bounced over, eager, introducing herself again, rapid-fire and sincere, but then she had to split for university classes.

That left Kate Bishop.

“So,” Kate said, crossing her arms and fixing Yelena with a look. “Spill. You seriously remember nothing from the last five years?”

“Absolutely zilch,” Yelena replied.

“Fuuuuuuccck,” Kate breathed, long and dramatic. “And you and Bucky?”

Yelena hesitated. She had the distinct feeling she'd gotten a lot closer to Kate over the missing years. She remembered Kate — Christmas in New York, a rooftop fight, a dead-eyed mission to kill Clint Barton. Fun times. Even then, Yelena had liked her. Kate had guts. Humor and heart, a charm that was hard to pin down.

And now she stood there, looking like the kind of person Yelena probably FaceTimed at 2 a.m. while drunk.

“Are we close?” Yelena asked.

Kate blinked, then nodded solemnly. “Very.”

“How close?” Yelena narrowed her eyes, took a long sip of coffee.

“You once described the exact length and girth of Bucky’s dick to me.”

Yelena choked. Coffee launched out of her mouth and hit the holographic table with a splat. “Jesus,” she muttered, wiping her chin.

“Yeah,” Kate said, hands up in surrender. “You were extremely descriptive. And just for the record, I didn’t ask. You were just in a very oversharey mood.”

Yelena wiped her chin, mortified. She hadn’t thought of herself as that kind of person. But apparently? That kind of person.

Kate tilted her head. “You guys don’t, like, make out in front of people or anything. But you're… intense. The kind of intensity that makes people sometimes clear the room.”

Great. That sounded worse.

“I could tell you some stories,” Kate offered, a little too cheerfully. “You know. Help fill in the blanks. Lot of them are R-rated, though.”

Yelena narrowed her eyes. Kate didn’t look like she’d pull punches. Not the way Bucky had, carefully editing the past down to bite-sized, digestible pieces. Kate would throw the raw footage at her, director’s cut and all.

But maybe that was what she needed.

“Okay,” Yelena said warily. “Will I need alcohol for this?”

“It’s eleven in the morning?” Kate scrunched her face.

“Are you about to tell me stories about my sex life?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Then, yes. I will absolutely be needing vodka.”

Kate patted her on the back. “Welcome back to the Avengers, babe.”

#

They choose to camp out in one of the Tower's cozier lounges, tucked between a ridiculous stack of throw pillows and the wreckage of what was once a charcuterie board. A bottle of vodka sat sweating on the coffee table, but only Yelena partook of that because Kate swore the taste of vodka always made her retch. Instead, claiming to be classy, she decided to get shitfaced on red wine.

Kate broke out immediately into storytelling mode — hands flying, eyes wide, more than a little energetic. “So first of all,” she said, wagging her wine glass like a pointer, “you need to understand — watching you and Bucky fall in love was like watching a grumpy old cat slowly decide it liked one specific person and then violently hiss at anyone else who got too close.”

Yelena raised an eyebrow and immediately downed her first shot. “You’re calling me the cat?”

“Oh god, no. He’s the cat. You were the—I don’t know. The emotionally constipated assassin with commitment issues? I suppose you both match that description, sadly, but the dynamic weirdly worked."

Yelena gave a snort, rolling her eyes.

Kate leaned in, voice dropping conspiratorially. “Okay. Want to hear the first time I knew you two were already a thing even though you insisted you weren’t?”

“Please,” Yelena said, readying herself another drink.

Kate grinned. “So, this one mission — Riga, I think? You and Bucky were pretending not to be sleeping together, but somehow when I came to debrief you both, you were wearing his t-shirt and he had a hickey the size of California on his neck. The rest of the mission I had to graciously pretend I didn’t just see the two of you post-coital creeping through the hall like horny teenagers. It was— bad.”

“Really bad,” Yelena cut in, dismayed. “We’re both spies. You’d think we’d be better about—that’s so— juvenile.”

“Yep, ripped straight from the archives of “Yelena and Bucky: The Secret Romance That Wasn’t Actually a Secret.”

She sputtered a laugh. Yelena’s cheeks were flushed, whether from the booze or embarrassment, she wasn’t sure. Probably both. “Very bad at secrets, apparently.”

“Disastrously bad,” Kate agreed. “But adorable. And gross. You guys make heart eyes at each across briefing tables when you think no one else is looking. It’s disgusting.”

Yelena snorted again, then slumped deeper into the couch. “I really lo—liked him, didn’t I?”

Kate’s face softened immediately. She leaned in and placed a gentle hand on Yelena’s knee.

“Yelena,” she said, more serious now, “You love each other. Like — it’s stupid how much. And yeah, it was obvious but it took you both a long time to get there. You weren’t exactly the PDA type, but if anyone so much as looked at him wrong, or in a way you didn’t appreciate, you were five seconds into plotting an elaborate murder.”

Yelena didn’t speak for a while. She had never considered herself the jealous type. Her fingers curled around the glass. Her throat felt thick.

Kate gave her a sympathetic smile, but then brightened, clearly trying to lift the mood.

“Okay, okay — last one. Raunchy story incoming. You ready?”

“Hit me,” Yelena muttered.

“So,” Kate began, “Safehouse compound on the west coast, three AM. Power goes out. I go down to check the generators. Do you know what I find?”

Yelena waited.

“You. Bent over the table. Half-naked. Bucky behind you looking very focused on, um, tactical recon.”

Yelena groaned and dropped her face into her hands. “Oh my god, no.”

“Oh yes,” Kate said with glee. “And I’m just standing there holding a flashlight like a dumbass, frozen. And he looks up — cool as hell — and just goes, ‘Don’t suppose you could give us a minute?’ Like I was the one being inappropriate!”

Yelena was wheezing with laughter now, red-faced and mortified. “God, how many people saw us?!”

“Well,” Kate said, refilling her glass, “after that? Probably just me. Unless you count the security cameras. But I may have hacked those later and deleted some footage, you’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” Yelena muttered.

The afternoon drifted lazily into late evening. The two of them drank more, laughed harder, and slowly the weight pressing on Yelena’s shoulders felt a little lighter. Kate didn’t try to coddle her — she just showed up, as honest and weird and loyal as anyone had ever been to Yelena. She could tell the friendship was real, and deep. It was unlike any other friendship Yelena had ever known before.

It was hours later when the lounge door hissed open, and Bucky and Sam stepped inside — both sweaty from training and looking vaguely alarmed at the sight that greeted them. Sam took one look at the mess of snack wrappers, two mostly-empty bottles of alcohol, and the way Yelena and Kate were lying on opposite ends of the couch under a shared blanket and scattered cheese cubes.

“Well,” Sam said, blinking. “Glad to see the team bonding. You good?” he asked Kate gently, approaching with something like amused concern.

“I’m incredible,” Kate mumbled, scooting further into the couch. “I live here now. This is my home.”

Bucky stared at Yelena, his expression flickering between amusement and concern. “And you?”

Yelena raised her glass lazily. “Apparently, you used to bend me over multiple surfaces. Often.”

Kate gave a thumbs-up. “She’s unsurprisingly very limber.”

“Okay, I don’t—” Bucky groaned, quickly giving up. “I don’t actually need to be told that, I was there.”

Sam just turned around and walked right back out, muttering, “Nope. I’m not sober enough for this.”

Yelena, laughing into her glass, suddenly felt the ache in her chest ease just a little more. The path ahead was still foggy, but she felt a little less lost in the dark with it.

#

Bucky ended up helping her back to the elevator and maneuvered her towards their apartment like she was a skittish cat. Instead of the couch, he steered her towards the bedroom where he tucked her underneath the blankets without much comment to the random mumblings she was muttering under her breath. He sat a bottle of water and some medication at the side table, and looked at her quietly.

“You sleep this off,” he told her, an order. “I’ll take the couch.”

“I feel better,” she declared.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m drunk and I feel better,” she insisted. “Kate told me things. Horrifying, wildly inappropriate things. But they helped.”

Bucky dropped down to crouch next to her bed, keeping them eye-level, quiet for a beat. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, voice softer now. “It helps to know. Even the mortifying stuff. It’s better than just... wondering.”

He studied her, his brow furrowing in that quiet thoughtful way of his.

“I want answers,” she said.

Bucky exhaled. “Yelena—not like this. Not when you’re this far gone.”

“Too bad,” she replied. “I’m drunk, not dead. You owe me one brutally honest memory. Just one. I pick the topic.”

He gave a dry huff of a laugh. “That’s not how this works.”

“Yes it is. It’s exactly how this works.” She leaned toward him. “Tell me the first time we had sex.”

Bucky blinked. “Jesus.”

“C’mon,” she pressed, eyes gleaming, voice half-serious, half-challenging. “I want to know what I forgot. I mean it. I need something real. Something that makes this feel like it happened. Like we happened.”

He exhaled slowly, his jaw clenched. “You’re drunk,” he muttered.

“And you’re stalling.”

He looked at her — really looked — and he must have seen that she meant it. Not just as a flirt or a joke, not just vodka-fueled bravado. She was chasing something with a little too much desperation. Maybe it was control. Maybe it was just a memory of when she’d been having a better time. Maybe it was bits of herself that she’d lost, that she had every right to reclaim.

He scrubbed a hand down his face. “You really want the truth?”

She nodded.

He gave a low breath, something dark flickering behind his eyes. Then, finally, he leaned in. “It was after you nearly died,” he said, voice low. “We were tracking a rogue Sokovian arms runner. Intel said he was holed up in an old city hospital — bombed out, half-collapsed. We knew it was a trap, but we went anyway.” He swallowed heavily, eyes shadowed by some grim memory. “You split off from me to flank the guy. I told you not to. You did it anyway.”

Yelena gave a small smile. That sounded right.

“Explosion hit when I was halfway up the stairs. The whole wing came down.” His voice shook now, just slightly, but he kept talking. “I thought you were dead, Yelena. I—I was screaming your name, digging through fucking concrete and fire, my hands bleeding—” He broke off, his breathing rough. “And then I saw you. Crushed under a beam. Barely conscious. Bleeding from your head and shoulder and still trying to reach for your gun.”

Yelena was completely still.

“You looked at me,” Bucky said, softer now, “and you said, ‘Took you long enough.’ And then you passed out.” He gave a hollow laugh that didn’t sound like humor at all. “I carried you six blocks to the safehouse. You coded once on the table while I was trying to stitch you up. You almost died, and I—” He cut himself off again. “I’ve been through a lot of death. Seen a lot of bodies. But nothing’s ever scared me like that.”

She couldn’t imagine it. Bucky, scared. It was a thing she’d never really seen before, not fully, not in the way he was describing.

He rubbed at his temple, the silence thick and choking. “When you woke up, you wouldn’t let anyone touch you but me.”

Yelena listened, rapt, suddenly a lot more sober than she’d been seconds before. She could almost picture it, like a vague impression just out of reach. The treachery of her running over a cobbled rooftop, the fear like a prickling sting at the back of her neck as the ground caved under her and atop her. As poignant as ever, she could picture herself in life-threatening scenarios a lot easier than she could picture herself finding comfort in someone else’s arms.

He stared down at her, his eyes fixed to her face at first. Then he let his gaze wander down her skin, her chest. She refused to shy away, to let the effects of his lingering gaze flummox her, even if she knew her skin pinkened with a flush that she hoped he’d blame on the booze. It finally landed on a faint scar at her collarbone, one she didn’t entirely recognize when she’d woken up in this future landscape. She kept silent as he looked at it. It could hardly be the first time he’d seen it, but the guilt on his face looked entirely too fresh. She almost startled, entirely spooked, when he reached out with a surprisingly warm hand, his touch light, fingertips trailing down from the top of the scar to the center of it.

He continued, lost to some dark memory, “Ultimately we had to use the regenerative cradle to get you to stabilize. Even afterwards, your hands were shaking. Mine were too. When you woke up, you didn’t want to talk. You were pale as hell, half out of it, and still trying to joke. That’s your way. But then you looked at me, really looked — and your face changed.”

Yelena was watching him like he was unraveling in front of her — because he was.

“You said, ‘I don’t want to be alone tonight.’ And you meant it. Not sex. Not yet. Just… closeness. You pulled me into bed with you. You held onto me like you thought you’d slip back into that rubble if you let go.”

He looked down at his hands.

“I didn’t sleep. I just kept watching you breathe.” His voice cracked there, but he forced himself forward. “The next night, when you felt stronger, that’s when we—”

“Bucky,” she said, faintly, voice trembling.

She’d heard enough. This was nothing like the sexy story she’d imagined when she’d first asked him the question.

This was real. Too real.

But Bucky wasn’t finished just yet. He had one more thing to say. “You pulled me down and said, ‘I need to feel alive again.’ And I said, ‘I’ll show you.’” Yelena’s eyes burned with the revelation, with the exact pitch she could hear in her head, her own desperate voice, the timber of his response. “You wanted it rough,” Bucky went on, a low rasp now, clenching his fist like he was right back there. “No soft touches. Just— need.”

Yelena’s breath trembled. This was enough. It was too much.

“You cried after,” he admitted softly. “You tried to hide it, but I held you through all of it. You said you didn’t know why you were crying. I said I did.”

Silence again. Then— “Why?” Yelena asked, her voice nearly inaudible.

“Because we both survived,” Bucky said. “And sometimes that’s the hardest part.”

The words floored her. It rattled the foundation of the earth beneath her feet, and she couldn’t find her voice. Bucky could maybe see her pitching into the darkness again, into that uncertain void that so often took her; in that moment he looked not unlike himself either, too intense, voice too strained and dark. He seemed to read her mounting emotions, the familiar feeling of being overcome, and he pulled back minutely, cursing to himself.

“I shouldn’t have told you any of this,” he muttered under his breath.

“Yes, you should have,” she countered, harshly, eyes ablazed. “I deserve to know all of this. Those are my memories, too.”

He nodded, and said nothing for a long beat. Then he lifted to his feet. “Get some rest,” he told her, clearing his throat. “When you’re sober, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. You just have to ask, Yelena. With me all you ever have to do is ask.”

He walked away before she could manage a response, and Yelena slumped back into the covers, deathly silent.

#

Chapter 10

#

The morning was too bright.

Yelena groaned and pulled the covers over her head, wincing at the dull, rhythmic pounding in her skull. Her mouth tasted like ashes of regret and something vaguely sour. Her body reached instinctively to the right side of the bed— clumsily fumbling for something, someone. To a place it clearly once expected another body to occupy. But her hand found only a cold absence. She blinked awake, more fully. The pillow next to hers was slightly indented, like someone used to sleep there regularly. But not last night. Turning over, she looked up at the ceiling and cursed softly in Russian, then rubbed her temples.

This bed. It was not hers. It was theirs.

Why had she reached for the space beside her? Muscle memory?

The flash of last night hit her in disjointed clips—Kate’s laughter, the bottle of vodka, Bucky’s hands steadying her as he put her to bed, his voice unsteady while telling her something dark. Something important. Her own voice, asking things she shouldn’t have. Heat in her cheeks. His hands, somewhere on her hips, or was that her imagination? No. No, it didn’t go that far. She’d remember that.

Right?

Yelena rose with a groan, moving slowly, everything heavy. She padded barefoot into the living room. Bucky was at the stove, flipping something in a pan. His hair was pulled back in a sloppy man bun that she knew she would’ve made fun of, if only her head wasn’t pounding like a rave. He looked over when she walked in, his gaze fixed on her for a beat.

“She lives,” he quipped.

“Barely,” she croaked out.

He gestured toward the counter. There was already water, aspirin, a glass of something green and vaguely menacing awaiting her. Hangover cures, some of which she had implemented long before she ever met Bucky Barnes, but the introduction of the noxious looking green liquid was new. She eyed it with suspicion.

Bucky didn’t look sympathetic to her sour face. “You drank half a bottle of vodka and demanded I tell you about the first time we had sex. You're lucky that's all you have to deal with this morning.”

She groaned and took the drink. “I thought you said you didn’t mind.”

“I didn’t,” he said, turning back to the eggs. “But I do mind the way you’re handling all of this by constantly getting three sheets to the wind.”

She paused mid-sip. “It’s not that bad.”

He turned off the burner, placing the pan on a trivet. “You’ve gotten drunk practically every night.” Silence hung between them, and Yelena couldn’t meet his eyes. “You can’t dive into a bottle every time the weight of the last five years hits you,” he said quietly, not unkind. “I get it. It’s a lot. But I can’t just sit and watch you spiral every time it becomes too much.”

“I’m not spiraling,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m—spiraling-adjacent,” she admitted.

Bucky slid the eggs onto two plates and brought them over. “I’m not judging you. And I’m sure you had Kate last night egging you on, but you have a history of getting blackout drunk. I know you used to do that a lot before."

She looked up. "I told you that?"

It wasn’t that she was entirely surprised, but a hint of shame trickled in as she remembered how — especially after Natasha died — she used to get so fucked up drunk in the hopes of erasing everything, she’d sometimes lose gaps of memory and consciousness. It wasn’t all the time. But when it got bad—when she felt out of control—she’d disappear into a bottle.

“Do you even remember half of what was said yesterday?” he asked her.

“Why? Did I do something stupid?”

“No,” he said, sighing. “We were just honest. I think that was the scary part.”

A pause, and then she admitted, “I remember everything you said.”

He looked, for a moment, weighted heavily down by her admission. If she had been overwhelmed last night, she wondered what he’d felt reliving the memories. For several simmering moments, Yelena only saw the way his face darkened talking about her neardeath experience, the way he’d spoken half-broken, the way his fist had clenched when he talked about fucking her roughly.

Another image resurfaced too, vague and indistinct around the edges — of his hands braced beside her head on a flat mattress, his face inches above hers, his overgrown hair hanging over her. Kisses that overtook her senses, a whispered taunt in her ear, “you can take it, Yelena.”

The memory slipped through her fingers—gossamer, gone—as she curled them into fists.

Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she came back to herself fully, realizing that she had just glimpsed a piece of those five years of memory that had been locked away. It wasn’t helpful with her growing headache, and she clenched her jaw and darted her look away, flustered, the first to break eye-contact with Bucky. The next second, a steadying steel rolled through her body, washing away the vulnerability of the moment, positing it into a corner only to review later, in private, when necessary. An unsteady breath rushed out from between her gritted teeth.

“You okay?” Bucky asked, acutely, because he seemed forever entirely too attuned to her vacillating emotions.

She didn’t want to know what he’d just witnessed from his perspective. Probably too much. He was watching her now like he was trying to figure out what just happened, and she— she wasn’t ready to tell him. Hypocritical, perhaps, to withhold her glimpse of a memory when she’d forced him to relive his so descriptively, but she wasn’t exactly at a place of advantage. He may have seen her at her worst these last few years, may have even lived through a thousand and one lessons of Living-With-Yelena, but she still felt stuck in molasses.

Yelena bit her lip. “Don’t worry,” she gestured vaguely toward herself, her bloodshot eyes, her oversized borrowed hoodie and the glass of radioactive-looking hangover cure, “I won’t regress.”

“It’d be understandable if you did,” Bucky admitted, still a flavor of concern in his voice. “Doesn’t mean it’s who you are now. It’s just where you are.”

Her mind wandered back to the night before, to the way his voice caught when he told her about the first time they’d been together. About the fear and urgency and relief and how close it all was to something ending. His voice had trembled—she could still hear the wavering pitch of it.

“You meant what you said, right?” she asks finally.

He raised an eyebrow, silent, questioning.

“About telling me the truth. About us.”

His expression softened, but it was laced with something heavier now—like he was holding back the truth behind his teeth, just waiting for her to ask for it. “Yeah,” he said. “I meant it. You ask, I’ll tell.”

She nodded. It was just easier to ask when she was drunk.

She stabbed at a piece of egg. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Then start small,” he suggested. “Ask me what our favorite movie was. Or what you used to cook for me? You don’t have to get it all back in one day.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Okay. Then—what did I cook for you?”

“Anything spicy,” he said, groaning. “I don’t know what you were trying to prove, but you had this thing with hot sauce. Like—an obsession.” He went back to a corner pantry cabinet, and opened it, revealing at least a dozen different bottles of varying hot sauces. “Labeled. Ranked. You carry one in your backpack. Like a lunatic.”

“Liking spice is not crazy,” she protested, offended.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Once you cooked me Indian food. Chicken vindaloo, homemade from scratch. I swear to God, I was in the bathroom for two days afterwards.”

Yelena laughed despite herself. “Yeah, but there’s no way I forced you to eat that.”

“I did it willingly, like an idiot. I cleared the plate. And then you offered seconds.”

“You were committed, huh?”

His answer came without hesitation. “You were so proud of yourself for making it, I couldn’t find it in me to complain. You heard me in the bathroom afterwards, though. Never asked me to taste/test your Indian food ever again. You use Kate for that now.”

“Oh, you poor whiteboy,” she cooed, laughing.

#

Dressed now in tactical blacks—worn combat boots, a fitted utility jacket, hair still damp and braided—Yelena popped in one wireless earbud. The opening notes of "American Pie" hummed to life, a childhood favorite. It was strange, comforting — it reminded her of sitting in the backseat of her parent’s minivan, back when they’d all been pretending to be the average American family living in Ohio. It reminded her of Nat, looking over at her, pink hair fluttering in the open window air. This was a song that lived in her bones now.

🎶 Bye-bye, Miss American Pie… drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry… 🎶

She tugged on her belt and knives with the rhythm of it. A quiet ritual, something grounding. Once again, muscle memory.

On another floor in the Tower, she found Bob in the rec room, standing awkwardly in front of the microwave waiting for popcorn that was already sounding like it was very done.

“You’re going to burn it,” she warned, sliding in next to him.

“I’m following the instructions exactly,” Bob said. “I even hit the popcorn button.”

“Yeah, that’s not how it works.” She reached past him. “Microwaves lie. You have to feel it.” She stopped it, and when she opened the bag, sure enough some of the popcorn was already burned. “Why are you eating popcorn anyway? It’s like ten o’clock in the morning?”

“It’s never too early for popcorn,” Bob answered.

She couldn’t really find a rational argument against that, so she joined him for a bowl of popcorn, picking out the burnt pieces absentmindedly. It had ruined the flavor, but Yelena didn’t complain.

She settled into a quiet rhythm with Bob, always had. Not a friendship full of aimless chatter and easy sharp banter like she apparently had with Kate, nor the simmering tension and history she had with Bucky. With Bob, it was coexistence. Peaceful. Sparse words. Simple gestures. She needed to continue training with him, but from what she understood he’d discovered a whole new aspect of his powers in hand-to-hand—no one could match him in strength, a single hit decimating anything in his way. He probably still needed to focus on control. Breathing. Grounding techniques. Ways to stay present when his own mind tried to rip itself out of his skull. But this new and improved Bob already felt loads more stable and grounded.

She was glad.

He deserved every inch of the peace he’d earned. She hoped he’d healed, and though she had no proof of it, she hoped she’d been a part of his healing process. Their bond wasn’t the kind that people noticed from the outside. Most of the public had, in fact, entirely ignored his presence, unsure what to make of the quiet man in the shadows on a team full of boisterous and powerful people. But inside the tower, more importantly in the quiet corners of her mind, Yelena had come to count on Bob in a way she hadn’t expected of anyone else. Even as the early days stretched out, she realized she didn’t feel so adrift with him anchoring her.

Nevertheless, it took her a bit to get up the courage to ask Bob what she wanted.

There was always the more obvious option of just taking Bucky up on his word and outright asking him about their relationship; not just the simple stuff like they’d tried this morning, but the harder stuff — the deeper stuff. But she didn’t know where the line would be drawn between too little and too much. And there was a difference, anyway, to hearing a story and living it.

Hence, where Bob came in.

“So, you have a better grasp on most of your abilities?” she asked, casually.

“Well, yeah, mostly. Strength and speed were the easiest, once I figured it out. The other stuff was trickier, but a few years of practicing, a few years of therapy, a few years sober — it’s shocking what one meth-addict can do.”

“What about— what about that little mind palace trick of yours? Is it still a house of horrors?”

Bob half-grimaced, half-laughed. “Hit and miss. I’ve got more control, but I try not to use it on my bad days.”

A pause. “Is today a bad day?”

He stared at her with growing suspicion. “No. Why?”

“I need a favor,” Yelena confessed. “I want to access some of my missing memories, and I think you can deep dive into those.”

Bob froze, and looked up at her unsteadily, eyes widening. “You sure? I’ve stabilized a lot of my powers over the years, but—”

“I know,” Yelena cut in, quickly, assuring. “And if you feel you can’t do it — no harm, no foul. I won’t mention it again. But I wanted to know if you think it’s possible? Because I want to see for myself what everyone else keeps telling me I’m missing.”

Bob paused, and looked at her carefully. “We can— we can try.”

#

Ten minutes later, they were spread out on the gym’s black mats.

A second after that, Yelena was a flat shadow painted against the wall.

#

Yelena awoke—half woke, anyway, the world syrupy with shadows at the edge. Her vision had shifted around them— they were standing in a long corridor, and Yelena knew exactly how grim this place could get, the light darkened and dim, essentially a haunted library with a placard greeting them that said, “Welcome to your trauma.” She only hoped Bob had a better grasp on this place now, and that she could navigate through her missing memories without stumbling into one that wanted to actively kill her.

“Let’s start simple,” Bob recommended, creeping up beside her, trying not to jump at every shadow, “just try and conjure a simple small feeling. Let that be the guide — anything but fear or guilt.”

Yelena nodded. She knew the mind palace tended to draw on emotions, and she wanted to see— she wanted to see the warmth and that vulnerable sentiment that had developed between her and Bucky over the last five years. She wanted to see how it came about. She wanted—

The moment the light flickered overhead, Yelena knew they were tumbling into her past. Bob was still at her side, but her footfalls rang dissonant and alone. She followed the timber of this eerie place down, down, down, deep into the bowels. Past a stretch of endless hallways, she turned into the first door and found Bucky on the other side; it was their shared apartment. Bucky sat at the kitchen table, hair wet from a shower, mug in hand. Yelena snuck up behind him, stealing a piece of toast from his plate. He tried to look annoyed, but failed. She kissed the side of his neck before dropping into the seat beside him. There was no big event. Just peace. Comfort.

Yelena touched the edge of the table, tested it as if it were real.

“We really were happy together, weren’t we?” she whispered.

Bob didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

Then, the world shifted beneath her feet like quicksand. In the same space, but it was suddenly nighttime, grim. The apartment felt smaller and her things were half-packed in boxes—gear bags slung open, passports, burner phones, weapons. Yelena saw herself standing across the room, near the door, tension mounting in every stiff muscle. Bucky was nowhere at first, before he came barreling through from the bedroom.

“That was my contact at the embassy in Birnin Zana,” Bucky said, tossing his phone to the couch. “He’s cleaning up your mess.”

“It’s not my fault that ambassador turned out to be dirty—”

“You went rogue,” he interrupted, still unpacking things. “We had orders. We had a plan. I’m already on the shitlist with Shuri, and this latest incident isn’t going to help matters.”

“I improvised,” the other-Yelena spat back, defensive. “And it worked. You’re standing here breathing, aren’t you?”

“You killed a civilian,” he said, voice low and harsh. “More than that, you killed a diplomatic attache without evidence or due process. You didn’t check your intel. He had nothing to do with the weapons cache—”

“He had enough to do with it. He knew where it was and he was stalling. If I waited another hour—”

“You didn’t wait. You executed him. That’s not what we do anymore, Yelena.”

Yelena’s expression faltered for a split second. But then the armor slammed back into place. “I did what was necessary,” she told him. “He made the call the moment he met with those black market arms dealers in a locked room with a case full of tech. I didn’t need permission to stop that from escalating.”

“He was Wakandan. Do you have any idea what that means?”

“It means they train their diplomats better than that,” Yelena flung back. “It means he was more dangerous than he looked, and I did what I had to do to save your life.”

Bucky looked incredulous. “I can take care of myself,” he said dismissively, and walked back out of the room.

Beside her, the real her, Bob flinched. “This must’ve been around two years ago. You guys had a brief— spat, where things were escalating in a bad way between you two. Bucky can be touchy about—”

“Wakanda,” Yelena cut in, gathering enough.

“Shuri, specifically,” Bob explained. “He’s protective of her.”

Of course, Shuri was only the person who helped debug Bucky when he came out of Hydra’s brainwashing. Yelena knew this. Even if she had never — to her recollection — seen the Queen of Wakanda, she’d heard stories about Shuri from when her brother was still alive and the King. She knew how important Wakanda was to Bucky. How the people there called him the White Wolf. How he always felt indebted to them.

It was clearly important enough to have put a wedge between her and Bucky, apparently, at a time when they’d been newly moved in together.

Things obviously weren’t always as hunky-dory as everyone claimed about their relationship.

Then— she caught a reflection out of her corner of her eye, into another room. Yelena walked towards it, curious, and peered into another darkened room. It was pitchblack on the other side, but she could hear something muffled. Before she could stop herself, Yelena reached for the glass and touched it— and she was yanked through.

In the harsh light of the bathroom, Yelena watched as the other her lathered Bucky’s bloodied body with soap and gentle kisses; he’d been badly beaten somehow, and any mission that left him this badly bruised could only have been a nightmare. She cataloged the dents and scars in the half-light and tried not to make her fascination too obvious; Bob was right next to her and she didn’t want to make him more self-conscious about being a third wheel — but her eyes got lost tracing the faint snowflake of discolored skin on the back of his neck.

Then, another glance at the mirror again and—she was in another room.

Their bedroom.

The pieces come together with a bone-deep throb of shock. On the bed, Bucky had his head buried between her splayed legs—the weight of his hands pinning her at her thighs; the open greedy press of his mouth, the slip of his tongue, right over the center of her. Her cotton underwear dangled from one bent leg, and Yelena could hear herself — her other self — moaning in a way that sounded outright pornographic. She stroked a hand through Bucky’s hair, pleasured senseless, eyes squeezed shut, clearly enjoying his attention as he ate her out like a starving man finding his first full meal.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Bob said, right beside her, doing an abrupt turnaround to face the wall. “I really didn’t need that image seared into my mind.”

Yelena agreed, of course, but couldn’t make her eyes pull away. Bucky hummed into the soaked flesh of her spread thighs, and the vibration of it reverberated right through the entire room, warping the memory, making it pulse like an erratic heartbeat. Her blood stirred with the imagery, but she realized she couldn’t stay here — not with Bob looking like he was about to die of mortification.

“Can we—um,” Bob cleared his throat, “can we get out of here?”

“Yeah,” Yelena mumbled, half-distracted. Did Bucky even come up for air? “Yeah, sure.”

Still, Bob had to physically drag her by the arm into the next room, which—when the bedroom door creaked wide open and Yelena stepped through, it was into moonlight.

This “room” was a rooftop. Old, crumbling stone underfoot. A gothic spire in the distance. Sokovia at night, glittering below, quiet and impossibly far away. And smoke. Thick, choking, and acidic. Dust hung in the air like fog and sirens wailed somewhere far off, garbled by some mental static. The floor had crumbled, charred and pockmarked by gunfire. The stench was unmistakable: burned concrete, blood, and smoke.

Yelena stepped fully into the chaos.

“Yelena! Yelena!!” his voice, distant and frantic.

She moved through the destruction like a ghost retracing her own gravesite. A stairwell loomed ahead, blackened and shattered. Memory-Bucky flung himself on his knees at the edges, skin torn up and bleeding, digging with his bare hands—through rubble, ignoring the spreading flames near him. One hand was already scorched raw with burn marks, and it was only the vibranium arm that was doing any good at all. His face was smeared with ash, drenched in palpable fear.

“No—no— goddamnit, come on—Yelena!”

She knew what this was, the memory Bucky had described to her just the prior night: the day she had nearly died, the precipitating event that had led to them sleeping together for the first time.

Yelena heard the crack of a beam further collapsing, the roar of fire devouring oxygen. And beyond all of it— his voice, desperately calling for her. She watched herself be unearthed, slowly, a devastatingly slow reveal beneath rubble and ash. There she was — crushed under twisted steel and debris. Her left arm pinned beneath a concrete beam. Her suit was torn, shoulder slick with blood. There was a gash above her eyebrow, dried crimson trailing down the side of her face. One eye barely opened. And still— still —her right hand was twitching toward a fallen sidearm.

Bucky choked back a rough sound when he finally saw her. He dropped heavily beside her, hands scrambling. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

Memory-Yelena’s voice was hoarse, slurred. “Took you long enough.”

Her lips twitched in a half-smile—then her head slumped. Eyes rolled back into white, out cold.

“No—no, no—stay with me! Stay with me, Yelena!”

His voice broke on her name.

The image froze, and then restarted again, from the stairwell, from the moment Bucky’s voice first screamed, “ Yelena! Yelena!” Distant and frantic. Yelena stood watching, frozen, staring at her own broken body caught under the rubble again. She reached out, fingers brushing the edges of the ruined stairwell, the cracked tiles, the scorched wall where Bucky’s bloodied handprint still lingered.

A tremor ran through her. She hadn't remembered this, not before — but the panic in his voice, the desperation, the way she’d smiled, half-dead, just to make a joke — it stirred a trickle of another memory, this one of her own.

The wind bit widely, the air smelling like smoke and rain — and she remembered.

A gunshot echoed in the memory.

She turned—there was him. Another rooftop. Bucky, in tactical black, crouched behind an air duct, gritting his teeth and clutching his side.

She heard herself before she saw herself. “Are you out of your mind?!” Memory-Yelena screamed. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Memory-Yelena sprinted toward him. Her movements were sharp, purposeful, but there was real panic in her tone, masked by anger. She slid beside him, checked the wound on his side—not bad, not for a supersoldier. Still, she pressed a gloved hand to the wound. Bucky hissed.

“I thought I could cut him off before he hit the bell tower,” Bucky explained.

She knew what this was. The Rooftop in Prague. 2029. Bucky had told her about this under her mother’s EEG machine. “She covered me. I got careless. She yelled at me for being stupid.”

But now Yelena was remembering it all on her own.

Memory-Yelena was annoyed. “You thought? You thought?” She ripped open a small med kit from her belt. “You’re lucky I was watching your six or they would’ve picked you off like a rat.”

Bucky only replied, wryly, “You always watch my six.”

That quiet admission slowed her down. Her hands stilled. “Don’t keep giving me reasons to need to,” she returned.

He looked up at her then, like he was seeing something new for the first time, like he was trying to figure out why her voice trembled or why she cared so much — the angle of his face in the moonlight looked like he was going through a small revelation.

“I trust you,” he told her, quietly, no bullshit.

She didn’t answer right away. She finished bandaging him, cinching the wrap tight. “Next time you get yourself shot so stupidly, I’m leaving you there. You can bleed all over someone else.”

But she stayed kneeling beside him. The anger was fading now, giving way to something else. But Yelena remembered exactly what she’d felt in that moment: the worry, the exhaustion, but mostly the care.

“I’ve seen enough,” the real Yelena said, to Bob.

The memory began to fade at the edges, the colors dulling.

#

When she awoke, Bucky was staring at her with a frantic look of worry etched brutally into his features. His face was hovering over hers, but when he saw her blink awake, he straightened. Relief flashed through his expression, quickly masked behind something more neutral.

He said nothing—but obviously he’d figured out what she was doing with Bob if his expression was anything to go by. To his credit, he didn’t say anything, just let her come to him. Shoulders squared, her gait composed—but her face was probably pale, her eyes glassy with water. There was a slight tremble in her fingers that she clenched into a fist. She didn’t speak right away.

Bob followed a step behind, looking uncharacteristically subdued. He glanced toward them, and nodded once, in some sort of greeting, and then scrambled out of the area as quickly as he could manage.

“I remembered the rooftop on Prague,” she told Bucky, without preamble or ceremony. “2029.”

Bucky exhaled sharply, a weight landing against his chest like he’d been struck. “You remember?”

She nodded once, slow, still not blinking. “Not everything. Just that one memory came to me.” A pause. “But it was real. I felt it. Yelling at you, bandaging you up.” She paused again, throat tight. “I saw other memories too, but those I didn’t remember myself. It was like watching something outside me. I saw the hospital. Sokovia. The stairwell.”

She let that hang between them for a while, and didn’t try to explain further. She could hear Bob rustling around in the next room, but didn't break her gaze.

She mentioned nothing of the other memories she’d seen, especially the heated one of them in the bedroom.

For some reason, she held that one back.

It didn’t matter. Bucky still almost looked overwhelmed, and it was a mark of how well she was coming to read him that she could see how close to unraveling he was; the news of her recovering memory was weighted and promising. He took a slow step closer with a small flicker of hope touching his features, barely there. Yelena didn’t smile back, but she breathed it in, the fragile glimpse of promise that things would heal, that her memory would fully return with time. She held onto it, desperately.

She waited while he stewed over the conversation, part of her wanting to break the tension with a joke, and the rest of her knowing she couldn’t.

Then she breathed out slower, and looked up at him, steadier now. “It’s not much. Just remembered the one memory, but it’s more than I had this morning.”

“You could’ve just asked me, y’know? Going into Bob’s mind palace was— dangerous.”

“I know,” she returned, “but I had to try.”

“Well,” Bucky said, roughly, trying to infuse some lightness into the moment. “A guy can always hope you don’t take any more unnecessary risks, right?”

It was an admission, but not the one he really meant. It was the first crack in his armor she had from him that he had been anything but confident about her memory eventually returning, that he might still be unsettled by what she was missing, that he was just as afraid as she was about what could happen in the future if she never got it back.

#

Days passed and things settled or stagnated, she couldn’t quite say which.

Since the last mission briefing, the intensity in the hunt for Billy Maximoff had stagnated —simply because there were no leads. For now. A rare, quiet lull left the Tower buzzing with unspent energy, as her teammates weren’t known for idle hands. Yelena found herself not quite knowing what to do with the lull. It was strange. She’d never really become accustomed to being an Avenger, not fully, but something about being in the Tower now—with her team shacked up inside its halls like misfit royalty—made it feel like she was serving time.

But it wasn’t all bad.

Her team had grown up. Bob was still another big change, his massive powers now more controlled, wrapped in layers of growing stability. There was something new in the way he looked at the world now: cautious, withdrawn, but now he didn’t constantly look like he feared everything might collapse around him at any given moment. And Yelena knew what that meant, how big of a deal it was. Knew what it meant to live with the threat of yourself, and still overcome it.

Red Guardian had made himself at home at the Tower. Maybe too much home. He wore Tower-logo slippers and wandered around in a bathrobe singing Soviet-era folk songs in the mornings. Bucky rolled his eyes every time, grumbled about the noise, but never actually told him to stop.

Walker had taken over the gym and converted one corner into a shadowy jungle of training dummies, blunt knives, and sandbags. He didn’t talk much during training, but it was more than he used to talk to Yelena, his dry, caustic humor a little less assholish. Sometimes, he watched Yelena spar and gave her silent nods of approval—nothing else, but it felt like more than he would’ve granted her before.

Then, when she’d asked after his son, all pretense broke and his face livened up, and the next thing she knew she was strolling through a barrage of photos of his son — now seven years old with two missing front teeth.

“Olivia’s pregnant again,” Walker confessed, in a hushed tone. “We’re not telling people yet, but it’s— it’s yeah, going well. Four months along.”

Yelena smiled, genuinely happy for him. “Lets hope this one takes after her looks, too.”

Walker grinned back. “Preaching to the choir there.”

And she was getting used to sharing space again. Now and again, she bumped into everyone in the common space because they were all cooped up. Bumped elbows with Ava over coffee (who had a very specific tea-brewing ritual that could not be interrupted), and kept discovering her father’s half-eaten dumplings in the fridge with sticky notes that read “DO NOT TOUCH. MINE.”

And Bucky was just there. Always there.

In the quiet moments. In the margins of the noise.

But the tension? It didn’t go anywhere. It just simmered.

They didn’t make a thing of it. He’d wander past her in every room, but he’d also gravitate towards her inevitably, shoulders brushing hers. He’d bring her a plate during team dinners without being asked. Sometimes, they’d share a couch, no words exchanged, watching something dumb and comfortable, like old '80s rom-coms that Yelena swore she didn’t like—but never left the room during.

He told her more stories of their time together, but nothing ever as heavy or as deep as that first time. She felt like he was easing her into it, the lull and comfort of his painted picture. A relationship that had been built up from partnership, from friendship, into something more.

“I used to wake up during thunderstorms, half disoriented, most of the time waking up from bad memories — but you’d be snoring through it like a baby and it was— it was somehow comforting. You always liked the sound of rain. You said it makes your brain stop racing.”

She rolled her eyes. “But I do not snore.”

He didn’t argue. Just gave a low chuckle and stretched his legs out.

More snippets. Casual, but weighted:

“You made a list of every city you wanted to eat street food in. Indonesia was your number one.”

“You hated wet socks. Absolutely hated it. I’m pretty sure you considered it worse than torture. Always had two pairs of socks as backup every time we shipped out.”

“You tried to teach me how to make manti once.”

No more memories were prodded to return. She still only had that one memory, tiny and shiny, but it was hers. The conversations weren't dramatic. It was never a sobbing confession. It was something smaller, but still truthful. He was giving her her life back in tiny, manageable pieces, and Yelena was learning how to live inside it again.

He never pushed her. He never let his walls down again to let her see any of the turmoil he probably felt at the women he loved not remembering that she loved him back.

Her heart flipped over as realization slid into place. He expected something unnatural of himself, expected the emotional fallout from such an ordeal to be just another blow he silently absorbed. Everything focused on her, nothing left for him. Like it didn’t matter how much pain he felt, he could bear down on it and flatten it into something insignificant and not worthy of note. It wasn’t just stoic pride. Bucky had been hurt so many times, a part of him must’ve thought he should have been used to it by now. She hated that.

So she started spending more time with him, in the tower, at their apartment, in the gym, too. The last part was not intentional, not at first, but sparring for them was at least familiar—they’d done this plenty before.

And it was grounding, letting her body remember its strength, finding that surprising muscle memory that knew what to do without her consciously commanding it, again and again in every match she had against him. Her body knew, could recall without her mind fully consciously remembering — how to counter his attacks, sidestep his hits, anticipate his blows and land him on his ass. They circled each other like sharks. Light at first, easy. Testing each other’s footing, the way they always did.

Except this wasn’t like it had been five years ago.

Back then, they’d fought like soldiers—clean, brutal, efficient.

This— she quickly discovered, this was also full of heat, subtext, and a dangerous sense of everything unsaid between them.

If Yelena feinted left, spun right—he’d catch her wrist, twist, bringing them closer, his scent cloying and clogging up her senses. If she’d break free, come back at him harder, faster — he’d anticipate it, block with the metal arm, and the clang that would echo sharply in the open space not being nearly as loud as the unrestrained sexual tension.

Until one day, she found herself flat on her back, him pressing her into the ground with his heavy weight, their entire bodies one long bruising point of contact. His hair had come loose from his ridiculous man bun, a few strands falling into her face as he pinned her to the mat.

Faces inches apart, mouth close enough to—

The air between them tightened like an electrified wire. Her thighs bracketed his hips. His right hand ghosted up to her side, fingers curling—almost touching, not quite. She looked up at him—at the man who had laid himself bare in fragments these last few weeks, who had stood quietly beside her while her whole identity and world felt like it was cracking apart. And maybe it was stupid. Maybe it was reckless.

But at that moment, she didn’t care.

“I’m not glass,” she said, daring him. “Stop treating me like it.”

She wanted to scream this at him, in fact — at the injustice at the parts of him that seemed permanently off-limits to her, at how he kept her at arm’s length to placate and protect her both. Even if she appreciated his restraint most days, she didn’t want him to treat her like something broken.

He looked caught in indecision and didn’t move, looking torn between her and his clear self-provoked pledge to take things slow.

The decision, when he made it, was to press her back into the floor and kiss her.

#

Chapter 11

#

The kiss was quick at first, exploratory. Then sharper, sinking into her. As soon as she felt his mouth deepen on hers, her small gasp of breath captured between their lips, a sense of welcomed warmth flooded Yelena. Touch was a sin they had not indulged in, not either of them, not much at all in the last few weeks.

This moment shattered that restraint, something heady and instantly intoxicating.

When he moved to cover her body, she was delightfully confronted with the strength hidden in him, the overwhelming vitality displayed in more than just his firm flexing muscles or his vibranium arm; she could sense the strength of coiled tension in him winding up, and conversely the restraint in him dismantled like uncoupling discs down his spine with each successive kiss — time bled away, measured only in his warm lips returning to hers again and again. She found herself thankful that he’d finally given in to this pull between them rather than retreat like he’d respectfully done every other time it’d arisen in the last few weeks — and she’d wondered why they’d been resisting at all. She couldn’t remember any of the reasons for her prior restraint or hesitation, all of a sudden. The craving in her loosening up the fear that had haunted her, the promise of intimacy too large and overwhelming, a sensation she felt could affix itself to her down to the marrow in her bones.

“Buck,” she gasped, not even managing to make it to the small second syllable of his name.

His voice an answering groan, a pleased rumble of a hum. It ran molten hot through her veins. They met each other halfway, her rising up and him leaning down to capture her lips — and if his gaze had been hungry before, watching her for these last few days and weeks, his kiss belied the level of his starvation. It was like her kissing him back was a benediction and release, giving him permission to pour out all his pent-up appetite. He ran his fingers through her hair, giving it a firm tug to tilt her head back, using her sharp gasp as an opportunity to slip his tongue between her lips. She sank into the gym matt at her back, his touch melting her spine like butter. ​​

She found he demonstrated the same innate knowledge of her intimate vulnerabilities that he’d shown her in their first shared kiss weeks back. He knew exactly how to take over her senses, the perfect pressure at her mouth, the grind of their bodies at every heated contact point, the way he drove her into a slow frenzy with the competing interests of his tongue and his roving hands, up her flanks, threading into her hair. His touch felt maddening and yet not enough — Yelena forgot about the worries that had normally been suffocating her ever since she’d lost her memories, the frailty that stood entirely outside her control. She forgot everything else but the lines of his hard body covering her.

His fingers around her hair, a clenched fist, using the hold like one would a hilt of a sword, turning her head so that he could trail kisses down her throat, the wet suckle of his lips maddening, a galling suction of his mouth that would threaten to leave bruises — marks, she imagined, that would require explanation if the others ever saw it.

Instantly, she was entirely aware of the placement of one of his hands, inches from the waistband of her workout tights. She felt herself burning, but tried to force down the increasingly involuntary reactions she had to his proximity, trying to still her shifting hips that shamelessly sought out friction and heat where she needed it most between them. Already, she could feel herself growing wet between her thighs, an inexplicable torment that increased with the scent of his sweat mixing in the air with hers, something that shouldn't have been so intoxicating and arousing; it was if her body was remembering what her mind could not, readying itself even without a single conscious command from Yelena.

She tugged at his shirt, pulling him closer, while his metal hand gripped the back of her neck with deceptive gentleness. For a moment, the world narrowed to the heat of it, the sound of their breathing, the press of bodies still buzzing with adrenaline. Every thought in her head wiped clean except for desire, a consuming need that shocked her with its intensity—

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” a voice broke out, behind them. “Get a room.”

They broke apart, panting, Yelena’s lips swollen, Bucky’s hair a mess.

Standing in the doorway, arms crossed in disgust, was Walker. Behind him, Ava blinked at them with what could only be described as a riot of secondhand embarrassment and cringe.

“This is a public space,” Walker pointed out, gruffly. “I get that you guys are working through things, but can you not work through them where everyone else works out?”

Bucky was already climbing off her, holding out a hand for Yelena to take, yanking her to her feet with indecently appealing ease when she took it.

“At least they still have their clothes on,” Ava muttered.

Walker made a face. “Yeah, but this image is still going to be seared into my mind forever — thanks for that.”

“Alright, enough,” Bucky said, flustered, red crawling up his neck. “We get it, thanks.”

“Mel called a meeting,” Walker said. “We tried reaching you on comms, but clearly both of you were too busy to answer.”

“Just—” Yelena snapped, unable to defend herself. “Shut up. We’re coming.”

They collected themselves as best they could, and soon the elevator doors slid shut with a heavy thunk . Four bodies, too close together, too much left unsaid and hanging in the air. Yelena stood pressed into the corner, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the glowing numbers above the door as if sheer force of will could make them climb faster. Bucky was at her side, his jaw clenched, the muscle in it working like he was grinding down the urge to speak.

Across from them, Walker leaned casually against the railing, the picture of smug satisfaction, while Ava stood back straight and pretended not to be there at all—her usual trick when she didn’t want to be in a space that even she was physically trapped in. The silence was suffocating. Yelena’s braid was loose, a strand of hair clinging to her damp neck, and all she could think about was Bucky’s mouth on hers, the heat of his hand at her neck, the way she hadn’t wanted to stop. Not even close.

And then Walker’s voice—amused, judgemental—cutting through the moment like a blade. He broke the quiet with a low chuckle. “You two want us to give you some privacy? Maybe let you finish what you started?”

Yelena’s eyes narrowed. “Say one more word, Walker, and they’ll find that taco-shaped shield of yours rammed up your—”

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open.

Walker raised his hands in mock surrender, smirk still plastered on his face. “Touchy. Bucky clearly wasn’t using his best moves.”

Bucky shifted beside her, and Walker escaped out before any threatening maneuvers could be dealt out. Yelena was the second out, boots striking hard against the floor, her spine stiff as iron.

On the top floor, the rest of the team had gathered in the lounge. Mel stood at the center, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled back, looking older, sharper—like time had carved her face into something else other than her youthful appearance years ago. She glanced up when Yelena and Bucky walked in.

It had been a few days after Yelena returned to the Avengers Tower before the thought even crossed her mind— where the hell was Valentina Allegra de Fontaine? When she finally asked, the answer came not with hushed tones or guarded deflections, but with a kind of glee that was normally reserved for Christmas morning. Apparently, the spider had been caught in her own web. Valentina’s endless wheeling, dealing, and blackmailing—her smug sense of untouchability—had finally rebounded on her. The woman who once seemed bulletproof had wound up behind bars, her empire of favors and leverage collapsing around her like a house of cards.

Yelena hadn’t expected to care, but she found herself oddly satisfied. There had always been something about Valentina’s poisonous charm, the way she wielded secrets like knives, that set Yelena’s teeth on edge. The older woman thrived on manipulation, and now? She was just another inmate with no strings left to pull.

In her absence, Mel had stepped into the role of liaison—not with the same theatrics or coy superiority, nor with any of the authority, but it still accompanied a kind of raw competence that surprised Yelena. Mel, for her part, seemed to relish the freedom. No leash, no shadow pulling her strings. She carried herself like someone who had finally been allowed to stand in her own spotlight.

Mel immediately approached them, almost eager. “Hey,” she greeted them. “Cap gave me the freedom to do my own digging, and I got something to show you. I think the smart play is officially pulling the plug on the hunt for Billy Maximoff.” The room immediately stilled behind her, as everyone else overheard the woman’s declaration. Yelena tilted her head, incredulous, and even Bucky, who she knew had a soft spot for Mel, couldn’t hide his frown. “He covers his tracks too well,” Mel explained. “No magic signatures, no surveillance leads. For now? We have to accept he’s a ghost.”

“Ghost?” Alexie said, boisterously from the back. “We already have one of those.”

Ava, deadpan: “Hilarious.”

“Point is,” Mel continued, “Billy’s trail is cold. But his twin? Maybe not so much.” Mel whipped out her tablet and turned it over to Yelena, pointing to an east coast map highlighted in red dots, pinpoints across four cities: Baltimore. Cleveland. New York City. Chicago. “Tommy Maximoff. Speedster. Not as subtle.” She swiped through her tablet, showcasing security footage. Blurred figures racing through traffic. A car flipped and stopped mid-crash. A shop robbed in two seconds flat—with the camera catching only a ripple. “We weren’t looking for him before. All we knew was that Hydra briefly had their hands on him five years ago. Now, with all hands on deck being called in, I’ve gathered more reports — of a speedster being spotted four times in the last two years. Always moving faster than anything can get a glimpse of. Always working alone. But quick as hell and as cocky as you’d expect for a teenager.”

In the back, Bob made a face. “So what, we’re chasing the world’s angriest Uber Eats driver?”

“Cute,” Mel said. “But no—Tommy’s not just joyriding. He does robbery. Not your everyday smash-and-grabs, either. High-end stuff. A Klimt in Boston. Rare Wakandan sculpture in Baltimore. A Degas pastel in Chicago.”

“So,” Bucky replied, gloomily, “Wanda’s other kid turned into the world’s fastest art thief?”

Mel gave a half shrug. “I’m not saying it’s Tommy—not yet. But the energy signatures picked up at two of the scenes? Off the charts. Way above your average speedster.”

“Do we have a scale for that?” Bob asked, surprised.

“Yep,” Mel answered, “and unsurprisingly the last time we saw signatures like this, it was Wanda’s brother.”

Finally, a lead. The lounge had gone quiet, the air heavy with the weight of Mel’s revelation. For once, even Walker didn’t have a quip ready. Mel’s eyes flicked across the room, gauging them, before she tapped the tablet again. A new image came up: security stills blurred into streaks of red and blue, static fuzz from overloaded cameras, car alarms blaring in the background.

“But here’s the part that matters,” Mel said, her voice low, deliberate. “The energy spikes at two of these heists? They don’t just resemble speed signatures. They resonate with something else. Wanda.”

That snapped Yelena’s attention back. “Wanda?”

Mel hesitated—just a fraction—before pulling up a spectral analysis. Jagged lines of energy patterns spiking across a dark grid. “Her magic has a very distinct profile. And twice now, on the east coast, there’s been echoes that matched hers, following the speedster residue. Like—like he was running with something chasing him.”

“Or someone,” Bucky said grimly.

Alexei sat forward, squinting at the screen. “So, we get two birds with one stone. The Red Witch and her son.”

Bucky crossed her arms, unimpressed. “She’s not that easy to deal with.”

Yelena frowned, tilting her head, unease settling like a stone in her gut. So one son disappeared, the other left breadcrumbs across the east coast, and the Scarlet Witch herself was on the trail.

It was a recipe for a nightmare.

“Yeah,” Walker muttered. “I didn’t sign up to chase Maximoff family drama across state lines. You know how this ends, right? Red glowing hands, buildings collapsing—”

“We don’t have a choice,” Bucky said. He leaned against the table, staring at the glowing map. “If Wanda’s back—we can’t ignore that. We’ve all seen what she can do when she’s desperate.”

Bob stood up. “If she’s there, I can— I can keep her distracted again with my void?”

Yelena clenched her jaw, a rise of skepticism in her belly. “That may have worked last time, but she’ll be prepared for you this time. She’s too smart and resourceful to fall for the same trap twice.”

Bucky glanced at Mel. “Where’s the next mark?”

Mel zoomed the map closer, isolating one sector. “Here, New York City. Two sightings in the same month. The others—Baltimore, Chicago—they’re older, scattered. But here? It’s recent. Fresh. The algorithm even spat out a potential art heist Tommy will hit next. They’re holding a gallery fundraiser tonight—”

“Then we head there,” Yelena cut in.

Ava’s brow arched. “Am I the only one that thinks it’s a little too easy? The speedster’s sloppy enough to be noticed, and Wanda isn’t far behind. Feels like bait.”

“Maybe it is,” Mel admitted. Her eyes flicked briefly to Yelena, then Bucky. “But for the first time in weeks, it’s something.”

The room fell silent again. Even Alexei, usually so boisterous, looked uneasy at the thought of confronting the Scarlet Witch—even a trace of her.

Finally, Yelena broke the silence, her voice low and sharp. “Let’s check it out. I’m tired of hiding.”

#

The briefing had ended an hour ago, but the team hadn’t yet left. Yelena wasn’t expecting anyone when she turned the corner, but there he was: Bucky, lingering in the shadow of the glass-walled corridor. He stood like he’d been waiting there for a while for her, hands shoved deep into his pockets. His expression was carved from stone, hard and unreadable, but his eyes tracked her with that quiet intensity that always made her feel like she was under a microscope. His whole presence radiated unease. She slowed, instinctively wary.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“That’s never good,” she muttered, trying to keep her voice light. She brushed past him toward the elevator, already bracing for the inevitable lecture. But his hand shot out and caught her wrist—not rough, not the reflexive grip of a soldier subduing someone, but a careful hold.

“Don’t come with us,” Bucky said.

Yelena froze, pulse quickening. Slowly, she turned her head, narrowing her eyes at him. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said, his jaw tight, every word dragged out like it cost him. “This isn’t just another mission. Wanda’s not just any enemy. She’s after you. She’s already taken enough from you, Yelena—I don’t want to let her take more.”

“That’s not going to happen. We have Wong’s rings, remember? She can’t see us, she can’t even sense our presence.”

“Those things aren’t tested,” Bucky pointed out. “And I don’t want us finding out that Wanda’s got a workaround when we’re staring her right in the face. It’s too risky,”

Her chest constricted, heat rising to her face as anger flared. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“I’m not deciding,” he snapped back, louder now, the soldier’s bark edging into his tone. “I’m asking you to assess the risks and remove yourself. She stole five years of your life. Ripped your memory apart just to get closer to her sons. You think she won’t do it again if you hand her the chance?”

Yelena yanked her wrist free. “And what about you, hm? You think you’re immune? Billy played you too, Barnes. He erased his memories in your head, and Wanda could pull at those threads whenever she wants.”

His mouth pressed into a thin line, but he didn’t look away. The flicker in his eyes gave him away, though—that old guilt, that bone-deep belief that he was already compromised, already broken, already expendable.

Yelena stepped closer, her voice dropping low, searing. “Don’t act like it’s only me at risk here. She can use both of us.”

“I don’t think she knows Billy erased my memory of him, too. I think she’s after you because she thinks you’re the only one that saw him.”

“Maybe, but don’t tell me you’re not taking on any risks.”

His jaw flexed, metal fingers twitching against his thigh. “She won’t ram through my brain like she would yours. Whatever’s between me and Wanda—she wouldn’t—”

“You really believe that?” Yelena stared at him, stunned. Then she barked a laugh, harsh and humorless. “After everything she’s done?”

Bucky’s eyes flashed. “She won’t be the same with me.”

“Yeah?” Yelena stepped closer, her voice low and cutting. “She tore through my head like it was hers to own. Not to mention the other times she’s demonstrated a remarkable lack of care in people’s sanity or safety. But no, sure—she’ll stop at the line with you.”

He held her gaze, unflinching, though his throat worked as if the words scraped coming out. “She won’t break me. Even if she tries, even if she wants Billy bad enough to rummage through my brain, fine. She can dig, she can take—doesn’t matter. I can handle it.”

Yelena’s stomach twisted. “You don’t even care what happens to you?”

“I’ve survived worse than her, worse than this,” he snapped, voice rough, echoing off the glass walls. “If I’m the price—fine.”

She heard the unspoken: But not her. Not again.

Her breath caught. For a moment, all she could do was stare at him—this man so ready to throw himself into the fire, so eager to burn if it meant sparing her. It infuriated her. It terrified her. Because underneath all his stubbornness and steel, there was no armor between them right now. She saw the rawness in his eyes, the truth he didn’t even bother hiding—that her pain mattered more to him than his own. And that was unbearable. Yelena had spent her life building walls, teaching herself to stand unshaken, to never need anyone. Yet here he was, this relic of a soldier who carried too many ghosts already, offering to carry hers too.

“Do you even hear yourself?” she whispered, voice frayed at the edges.

His jaw flexed, but he didn’t flinch.

And God, that broke something open in her—something fragile and dangerous. Because it wasn’t just fear she saw in him, not just the soldier’s instinct to shield. It was something deeper, something that mirrored the ache in her chest that she hadn’t had the courage to name, that nameless void that took and took. Her hands twitched, because for the first time, Yelena Belova realized she was more afraid of losing him than of facing Wanda Maximoff.

“You don’t get it,” he said, voice low and rough. “If something happens to you—if she takes you again—I won’t be able to live with it.”

“Then maybe that’s not your choice to make. Maybe I’m willing to take the risk.”

“And what’s left?” he said, cracked and raw, every wall stripped away. “Did you think about that? I can’t—” He cut himself off, biting hard on the words. But she saw it in his face—the fear, the guilt, the shadow of loss carved into him. “It’s not just you anymore, Yelena. You’re part of a team now, and I know you don’t remember it, but you’re part of us, too.”

“And you think keeping me locked out is saving me? It’s not. It’s just pushing me away. And if you do that, Buck—if you try to decide for me—I swear you’ll lose me for good.”

The words hung between them. Bucky’s chest rose and fell, heavy. He stared at her like he wanted to argue, like he wanted to tell her she was wrong, but the fight seemed to drain from him, leaving only that hollow, haunted look in his eyes. The memory of their kiss flared, sharp and hot in her mind, because it hadn’t been a mistake. She knew that now. But standing here, hearing him, Yelena felt her dread rising to match her confusion.

“I’m not afraid of her,” Yelena said, her voice firm. “I’m done letting her control me. I’d rather walk into a fight with her than sit on the sidelines. And because—” She bit the words back, her throat closing around them.

Bucky stepped in, too close, the air charged between them. “Because what?” he demanded, softer now but more dangerous for it.

Her chest heaved. She could see it in his face—that same heat, that same tension she’d felt when his mouth had crashed against hers earlier. For one breathless second, it would have been so easy to say it. Because I can’t watch you sacrifice yourself when I finally might have found something—someone—that feels real.

But Yelena clenched her fists, nails digging into her palms, and forced the words back down.

“Because I don’t leave my team behind,” she spat instead, sharp as a blade.

The disappointment in his eyes was fleeting, buried beneath something heavier, darker. He nodded once, curt, like he was sealing himself up again brick by brick.

“Fine,” Bucky said, his voice cold now. “But when she comes for you, don’t expect me to stand back and watch.”

He turned on his heel and stormed toward the end of the hall. Behind him, Yelena didn’t follow, but she was certain he could feel her eyes burning into his back.

#

The gallery gleamed like a jewel box, all glittering chandeliers and white wine laughter. On the surface, it was a fundraiser for the arts; in reality, it was bait, and the team was the hook.

Yelena should have hated the gown Mel had forced her into—it made her feel like a decoy swan—but it was hard to argue with the results when Bucky had taken one look at her and she caught the slight resulting dilation in his pupils. For a man that had once remained a stubborn mystery to her, she was getting surprisingly good at reading every flicker and emotion skittering across his face now.

​​The gown was midnight black satin, cut so it draped fluidly along her body, hugging her waist and hips before flowing into a slit that carved up her left thigh. The slit in her gown wasn’t just for show. A thigh holster was strapped tight beneath the satin, holding a matte-black compact pistol with a custom grip she could draw in under a second. A pair of slim, retractable knives sat flat against her ribcage in a discreet underarm sheath, the lines invisible beneath the gown’s structured bodice. Sewn into the clutch she carried—a simple black envelope bag—was a collapsible taser baton.

Even her jewelry was deadly. The Widow’s Bite was neatly incorporated into the delicate wristwatch she carried on her left arm. Around her throat lay a thin platinum chain, delicate at first glance—but in truth, it hid retractable reinforced garrote wire, polished to gleam like a frivolous necklace.

Bucky wasn’t exactly blending in, either. She caught herself staring at the line of his jaw, clean-shaven and severe, and the way the tuxedo pants sat just right along his frame. A part of her bristled at the thought—at how her pulse quickened simply watching him adjust his cufflink, or when he leaned in close enough for her to smell the faint trace of his cologne, dark and woodsy. For the first time, Yelena realized Bucky Barnes in a tuxedo wasn’t just the Congressman and her teammate. He was a man. A handsome one. And to her irritation, she liked seeing him this way more than she wanted to admit.

At her side, Bucky moved well in his fitted suit, his gloved hand brushing hers when the crowd pressed too close. Neither said a word. After their argument, silence was safer.

The comms buzzed with banter—Bob whining about his bowtie, Walker calling him unbearable—but Yelena tuned them out. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she wanted to slip into one of the quieter wings of the gallery. She needed space, especially away from Bucky’s unreadable stare, but before she could step fully away, Yelena sensed it before anyone else did.

Across the gallery’s glittering floor—among donors swirling champagne, jeweled women laughing too loudly, a quartet playing something delicate and forgettable—stood Wanda Maximoff.

The sight nearly stopped Yelena cold.

Wanda wore red. Not the deep burgundy of sophistication, not the muted shade that blended into high society’s palette, but a scarlet that fit well with her moniker. The dress cut close along her waist, the neckline daring without ever tipping into vulgar. It clung to her figure with the sort of elegance that Yelena envied—Wanda didn’t belong here, not really, not anymore than Yelena did, yet Wanda fit in perfectly. Guests shifted unconsciously to make room for her — men stared, women whispered, but nobody quite recognized the danger wrapped in silk and charm.

For a moment, every instinct screamed at Yelena to draw her knife, to attack, to run. Then she remembered. Her hand brushed the band on her finger—the ring Wong had pressed into her palm weeks ago. “ So long as you wear them, she will not see you,” he had promised. “Not through spells, not through dreams, not even through her eyes if she’s standing a foot away.” Yelena glanced sideways. Bucky was there, behind her, tense, hand flexing at his side. His paired ring glinted under the soft gallery light.

Wanda’s gaze drifted past them, searching, never landing.

It was working.

The Scarlet Witch didn’t see them.

Yelena’s heart hammered. She couldn’t look away. Here was the woman who had stolen five years from her, plucked memories like petals until nothing was left but emptiness. Now she was here, flesh and blood, less than twenty feet away, and Yelena could scream in her face—and Wanda would never know. Yelena’s jaw clenched, her fingers curling against her gown. To stand here invisible while Wanda prowled, unbothered, unpunished—it made her blood boil.

And then — the gala hum evaporated in an instant. The chandeliers rattled before anyone noticed the air shift. One second, the fundraiser was all glittering conversation and champagne; the next, the music curdled into silence, drowned out by a deep, crackling hum. The air seemed to thicken, electric, and every guest in the gallery turned toward the center of the room as the scarlet haze began to bloom.

Bucky leaned in close, his whisper brushing the shell of her ear. “Don’t move,” he warned.

Yelena stiffened as a wave of pressure rippled through the gallery, rattling the paintings on the walls. Wanda had turned. She was no longer pretending to admire art—her head was tilted back, eyes closed, as if tasting the air.

And then Wanda smiled. “They brought you here,” she murmured, her voice carrying unnaturally, weaving through the stunned silence of the crowd. “Sloppy of them.”

Yelena’s stomach dropped.

The protective ring burned cold against her finger, but Wanda still prowled closer, slow and deliberate, crimson energy unfurling from her fingertips like smoke. She wasn’t looking at them—she couldn’t—but she didn’t need to. Something in the rings was deficient, the wards somehow failing to account for everything Wanda was capable of.

Wanda wasn’t guessing. She knew. Her eyes burned with intensity, searching the empty air with certainty. “You’re here. I can feel you, Yelena. You can’t hide from me.”

“Don’t—” Bucky hissed under his breath, instinctively stepping forward to wrap his hand around Yelena’s arm, though Wanda’s gaze still slid past him.

Wanda didn’t hear Bucky’s warning, nor their frantic breaths.

“Where are you?” Wanda whispered, almost tender, as her magic snaked along the marble floors like searching tendrils. “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it needs to be. I’m not a monster. I just want the memories of my son. I’ll even restore your other stolen ones if you come with me willingly. No one else has to get hurt.”

Yelena didn’t hesitate, twisting out of Bucky’s tight hold. Her hand slid to her thigh, satin shifting just enough to reveal the tight strap hidden beneath. In a single fluid motion, she tugged free the matte-black compact pistol holstered there, grip molded to her hand from months of use. She drew in less than a second, raising the barrel and squeezing the trigger in one smooth motion.

Crack—crack—crack.

But Wanda whipped toward the sound, hands glowing hellfire red. The bullets never touched her. Scarlet energy flared around her in a shimmering, rippling barrier, catching the rounds mid-air. They hung there, suspended, inches from her skin. With a flick of her wrist, the bullets flattened and fell, clinking uselessly against the marble.

“You think bullets would stop me?” Wanda said, incredulous. “Very well. I’ll have to teach you this lesson the hard way.”

She lashed out. A sphere of scarlet magic burst outward, sending civilians crashing into the walls, shoving tables, glass, and bodies aside like toys. Screams erupted. Guests scrambled toward the exits, but the doors sealed with a flick of Wanda’s wrist.

“Bait,” Bucky whispered, yanking Yelena back.

Yelena’s pulse thundered. She could stay hidden, let the ring’s wards keep her invisible. But every second she didn’t move, Wanda’s wrath could fall on someone else—her team, the civilians, strangers.

Just then— the searching red tendrils struck out, one hitting Ava, who had been phasing through the wall behind Wanda’s spine in a sneak-attack; Ava was hurled across a table, trapping her form mid-phase so that she stayed immobile halfway into the floor. Another coil struck out, wrapping around Walker’s throat across the room, lifting him a foot from the floor before throwing him against the far wall.

Wanda’s magic whipped across the gallery and seized Alexei by the chest, forcing him to his knees, choking the air from his lungs. His face turned red, eyes bulging as he clawed at nothing.

“Don’t make me hurt your loved ones,” Wanda said, warning. “I take no pleasure in this.”

“Yelena, no,” Alexie gasped out.

Her father wheezed, his body convulsing against the grip of invisible fingers, and Yelena couldn’t stand still. But before she could do anything, Bob was coming in through the side door. “Sorry, sorry!” he shouted, entering the fray, sounding harried, fumbling to zip up his pants. “I was in the bathroom taking a leak—”

“Well,” Wanda cut in, mocking, head tilted. “if it isn’t Shadow-Boy.”

They collided in an instant. A ripple of panic tore through the crowd. Alexie dropped to the floor, gasping for breath. Scarlet energy lashed against Bob’s golden light, some new signature move that Yelena was still getting used to — they struck each other with a force that rattled the glass walls. Paintings tore from their wires, sculptures toppled, shards of glass rained from skylights. Yelena dove for cover, barely keeping track of the fight—she saw Ava and Walker grab Alexie’s prone body from either side and haul him towards the exit — while Bob moved faster than her eyes could follow, trading strikes that detonated like bombs, Wanda countering with shields and reality-warping flickers that made the room twist and fold. For a few frantic minutes, it looked like a chaotic dance of destruction.

But Wanda didn’t tire. Neither did Bob.

The gala had erupted into chaos. Screams. People scrambling, trampling each other to escape. Yelena climbed to her feet in the shifting crowd, invisible to her enemy under her ring, her breath hammering in her ears. With a shriek of energy, Wanda twisted her hands—and sent Bob crashing through the far wall, then every wall after that, until he was flung out of the entire building and pitched into some warped portal outside, a vibrant colorful gateway to who-knows-where, his ashen face flickering out of sight as soon as he was through. The magical portal closed behind him.

Wanda had just taken down Bob. The Sentry. Sent him careening through a portal that could have led anywhere.

Bucky whizzed past Yelena while she was still trying to wrap her head around things.The ring was still on his finger, so his form must have been entirely hidden to Wanda by protective magic. He moved quickly, efficiently, slipping through overturned chairs and broken glass, closing the distance like the Winter Soldier. Bucky surged forward, steel arm arcing down in a brutal blow aimed for the back of Wanda’s head. The kind of strike meant to end a fight before it began. His expression was pure calculation—cold, exacting, willing to do whatever it took.

But Wanda wasn’t defenseless.

The instant before his fist could connect, her body twisted —not in reaction, not because she saw him, but because she must have felt him. Her magic rippled and she pivoted, eyes still locked on Bucky’s descending mass, and sent out a burst of scarlet energy in every direction. Bucky’s blow glanced off her palpable red shield, only his fist clipping her shoulder hard enough to make her stagger—but the wave caught him mid-motion. The blast tore him off his feet, slamming him against the gallery’s marble pillar.

His ring still cloaked him from sight, but Wanda turned, head cocked, lips curving in a sharp smile. “I can’t see you,” she said, her voice a low, dangerous warning, “but I can feel you. Whatever magic cloaks you, it’s not strong enough to match me.”

From the floor, Bucky pushed himself up, teeth gritted, blood on his lip. He moved slow, circling, steps silent until he went across shards of glass.

Wanda pivoted quickly, eyes narrowing, hearing the crunch of glass. She lashed out with a sudden wave of force, cracking the air in a wide circle. Tables flew, chairs splintered, glass rained down—but her bolts struck empty space. Bucky darted out and across the field of destruction. His knife slashed, cutting close to Wanda’s side. At the same time Yelena slipped into motion, striking the same instant from the other flank, both of them moving in concert. Two invisible assassins hunting one sorceress; the odds weren’t exactly in their favor but they weren’t down and out yet. Wanda snarled as Bucky’s blade grazed her arm, drawing blood.

Her magic lashed out in wild, feral bursts, burning trails into the air.

“Cowards,” Wanda spat. “Hiding behind trinkets!”

Yelena didn’t waste time bemoaning the futility. Since her ring gave her an advantage, she ghosted into the fight with the next set of weapons she had, knives already in her hands, as she paced opposite Bucky, boxing Wanda into the center. Wanda’s fingers twitched, her magic humming in crimson arcs. She couldn’t see them—but she had good instincts.

Yelena darted low, swiping at Wanda’s legs, her knife biting deep enough to stagger her. Bucky followed up, a brutal strike from behind—his metal arm smashing into Wanda’s ribs with the kind of force that would have folded steel — but Wanda caught his momentum with a sudden cocoon of power, red light wrapping the air where she sensed impact. He was thrown back, body slamming into a sculpture that cracked under the force.

Wanda’s head snapped toward the crash. A terrible look of knowledge spread across her face. Her hand rose, scarlet coils sparking to life—zeroing in on Bucky’s crumpled body even though her eyes couldn’t see him. Bucky, still reeling, forced himself upright.

And across from him, Wanda readied what felt like a final blow.

“Wanda, don’t!” Bucky said, pulling off his ring abruptly.

Wanda instantly froze, seeing Bucky’s face appear. Her expression faltered at seeing him, maybe because she’d been under the mistaken impression that it had been Yelena alone that had been attacking her with impunity; the first crack in her mask appeared when confronted with the fact that it had been Bucky, her old friend. Her magic flickered in her hands.

And for a heartbeat, Yelena saw it—the hesitation, the guilt, the grief, a part of Wanda that wasn’t a monster.

“You don’t have to do any of this,” Bucky said, pleading.

The Scarlet Witch’s expression wavered — small, tragic, and terrible. “Everything I love gets taken from me. You don’t know what I’ve lost, what I’ve done. There’s no turning back now.”

“The Darkhold changed you,” Bucky argued. “It warped you into this mad version of yourself, but you’re still in there. I know it.”

Wanda raised her hand, and her voice slid into the space between them—soft, velvet, yet thrumming with unshakable authority. “I’ve been patient,” Wanda explained, her accent curling faint around the syllables, the way it always did when emotion cracked her composure. “So patient. Do you know what it cost me, James? To wait? To let the world believe I had given up?” Her fingers twitched, and crimson energy pulsed, thrumming in the air like the beat of a war drum. “But she—” her tone sharpened, like a dagger honed on Yelena’s throat, “—your little girlfriend was hiding them from me. She kept me from my children, but not anymore. Not when you’re standing right in front of me.”

Bucky’s gaze flickered to Yelena as she reached the only decision she could make that would save him, even as his voice cut through the chaos, hoarse but commanding: “Yelena, no!”

But Yelena’s fingers were already reaching for the ring.

The silver band slid free from her finger.

And in an instant, Yelena was there—visible. Exposed. Bait. Too big for Wanda to ignore, too valuable that she forgot everything else. As soon as the ring was free, Wanda turned and let out a harsh exhale of relief. The chaos around them—the screaming guests, the shattered chandeliers raining down, the alarm blaring from somewhere deep in the gallery—all of it dimmed as Wanda fixed on her.

“There you are.”

Scarlet tendrils bled outward from her hands, curling across the marble like hungry roots, reaching, claiming — striking.

And Yelena knew no more.

#

Chapter 12

#

Yelena woke to the smell of incense—sweet, cloying, the kind that crawled down the throat and sat heavy in the chest. Her head throbbed. Her eyelids fluttered before finally opening to red shadows that swam up the walls and settled into nothing. Her hands were bound. Not by rope, not by metal. Scarlet light wound around her wrists in braided strands, glowing faintly. When she shifted, they tightened— pressing deeper, into muscle, into skin. The room was— wrong. At a glance, ordinary: a den, carpeted, dimly lit by table lamps with soft yellow shades. There were books stacked neatly on side tables, a teapot steaming faintly, even a worn armchair. But crawling across the walls and ceiling were sigils—patterns that writhed just out of focus.

At the center of the room sat Wanda.

She was not cloaked in the grand leather Yelena had seen on her while she tore through men and supersoldiers alike, nor dressed in her signature color. She was barefoot on the carpet, a plain dark sweater draped over her shoulders, hair loose in soft waves down her back. There was a cozy throw covering her legs and feet, and a cup of steaming tea in her hands.

“You’re awake,” Wanda murmured, her voice soft, careful, as if speaking to a scared child after a nightmare. “Good. I was worried I had pushed too far.”

Yelena’s eyes narrowed. She tugged against the bindings—testing them, cataloguing. The magic hummed back, unyielding. She forced a brittle exhale. “I don’t think you care how far you push, Maximoff.”

Wanda tilted her head, unbothered. Her gaze was patient, unflinching. “You think I’m cruel. Evil.”

“I think you’re dangerous,” Yelena shot back, voice sharp, flat.

“Dangerous, yes,” Wanda said, as though conceding a point in debate. “But not evil.” Her tone did not waver—it was calm, steady, almost frightening in its conviction. “Evil means choice. It means I want to hurt, that I delight in destruction. I don’t. I never have. Everything I’ve done, every life I’ve broken…” For a moment her voice faltered, splintered, then she gripped the cup in her hands hard and took a breath, suddenly wholly in control again. “It has all been to bring my boys back. Billy and Tommy. My family. My heart.”

Yelena’s chest twisted. She of all people knew the shape of that hunger—the chasing of a ghost, the endless clawing at shadows that never solidified. The ache of wanting family was not a clean wound; it was jagged, festering, reopened with every memory. She had carved herself hollow more times than she could count, scraping out pieces of herself just for a glimpse of belonging, for the fragile illusion of home. She thought of her family as a child, of the brief aching flicker of connection before it was stolen away from her at the tender age of six, her first cruel severing. Yelena had been shaped by sacrifice—not noble offerings, but brutal ones, torn from her bones without her consent by men who wanted to play master. Pieces of her had been burned on the altar of survival, of mission, of a world that demanded everything and gave nothing back.

She thought of Natasha—the tether that had anchored her, the sister who had been both shield and compass. Every memory was a piercing shard: the shared jokes, the rare softness in Natasha’s eyes when she called her, the simple peace of their last goodbye that neither sister had known would be their last. It was a loss that didn’t bleed dry all at once. It had leeched Yelena, day by day, until the emptiness became her entire perspective for a long time.

And now, she had only her father left. Alexei, flawed and ridiculous, but still hers. Yet even that bond felt fragile, a thread stretched too thin. She could feel the universe constantly poised like a predator, ready to snatch him away in a heartbeat. A single attack, a single mistake, and he too would be gone—another ghost for her to chase, another hunger that would gnaw until it hollowed her out completely.

And then, beyond that— there was her team.

Bucky.

When she looked at Wanda, she didn’t see those same threads of devotion and tender vulnerability. She saw obsession, fever. The tremor in her fingers, the shadows that coiled around her like smoke, the restless glow in her eyes—eyes that burned with something no mother should carry.

“Maybe Bucky was right,” Yelena said, her voice quiet but edged. “Maybe the Darkhold did this to you. Or maybe the madness was always there—waiting to crack you open in grief and solitude. I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.”

For the first time, Wanda’s face hardened. The softness vanished, replaced by steel. “The Darkhold gave me answers. It showed me what was possible. It freed me. It stripped away the lies—the lies that said I had to accept loss, that I had to grieve, that I wasn’t allowed to fight for what I love.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Tell me, Yelena—if Natasha could come back, if you had even the smallest chance, wouldn’t you burn everything in your path to hold her again?”

The words struck like a blade, too sharp to deflect. Yelena’s lips parted. No denial came. She wanted to say she wouldn’t damn the world for one person, but her heart betrayed her—throbbing with the painful truth that maybe she would.

Wanda saw it. She leaned forward, eyes sharp with recognition, as if she could smell the grief bleeding from Yelena’s pores. “You do understand,” Wanda whispered, her voice a gentle blade. “That’s why you can’t look away from me. Because we are the same.”

Yelena flinched despite herself.

She forced her jaw tight, fighting to smother the doubts that churned inside. When she met Wanda’s eyes, fever-bright and trembling with conviction, Yelena’s voice failed her until she forced it out. “No,” Yelena rasped at last, though the word shook. “We are not the same. I may be broken, but I don’t break the world with me.”

A faint smile touched Wanda’s lips, mournful and merciless. “Give me what I want, and I may be able to find a world where Natasha lost you, rather than the other way around. A world where she is the one grieving, not you. Where you may have her again.” Wanda’s gaze pierced her. “And tell me—is that evil? Is the pursuit of such a thing madness?”

Yelena’s mouth went dry. The dream was a knife pressed to her throat, exquisite and unbearable. She had spent nights begging silently for just one more moment with Natasha, one more laugh, one more hug. In the bitter drive of her grief, she’d even gone after Clint Barton.

For a heartbeat, Wanda looked wounded, almost human. “You tell yourself that you’re different now, but when your last thread snaps—when Alexei is gone, when Bucky falls—you’ll know. You’ll understand the choices I’ve made. And by then…” She tilted her head, almost tender, empathetic, “it will be too late to pretend you’re different from me.”

Yelena’s instinct was to snarl, to spit denials, to call Wanda a hypocrite and monster. But deep down she knew no words would ever convince Wanda otherwise. She believed every word. Every. Word. And that was worse than malice. That made her a zealot.

She lifted her chin, cold steel hardening in her eyes. “You’re wrong.”

Wanda’s head tilted, soft as a lullaby. “Am I? You’ve got heart, I’ll grant you that. Maybe that’s why I let you live when I could have crushed your mind into dust to get what I want. That, and—” Wanda’s eyes flickered with something almost human, almost kind. “—I didn’t want to be the reason Bucky lost someone else he loved. He’s lost enough.”

“Don’t pretend to care about him,” Yelena warned.

A pause, a cool assessment. “You speak so boldly,” Wanda murmured, her voice calm, coaxing. “But do you even know who you are without the gaps I carved out of you? Have you remembered yet what I took, Yelena?” She tilted her head, gaze sharp as a scalpel. “Have you recovered those years of memories and — him?”

Her stomach dropped.

Wanda’s eyes possessed too much knowledge. “It hasn’t been pleasant to be the one threatening Bucky and all he loves. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Do you know how many times I saw his face in your mind? How tightly you clung to his memories when I was ripping them away? Surely you do not want to experience that again.”

Yelena’s chest twisted painfully. Images flickered across the hollow space in her mind where memories should have been—shadows of hands, a voice low with laughter, the ghost of warmth pressed into her at night. Flashes that didn’t exist, not for her, but she could almost taste it. Almost imagine it again, with Bucky.

Wanda leaned forward, her tone soft, intimate. “He still looks at you that way, you know. I saw it, even at the gala. That ache and unbearable grief in his eyes when I took you.” Wanda’s expression softened, almost maternal. “It doesn't need to be lost, not forever. I could give those memories back to you. Every kiss. Every night spent in the quiet, every battle fought together, every secret whispered between you. All of it. Yours again.”

Yelena’s breath shuddered. “What game are you playing? Why even bother to get my cooperation?”

A pause. “Because the last time I took from you, and it didn’t work. I’m thinking that your cooperation will make all of this go much smoother.”

The bindings pulsed tighter around Yelena’s wrists, as though echoing her racing heart.

Yelena lifted her chin, jaw set tight despite the ache in her chest. “You can keep your deals, Maximoff. I don’t want what you’re offering.” Her voice trembled at the edges, but she forced steel into the words. “You’ll get nothing from me.”

For a long suspended moment, Wanda only stared. No fury, no snarling hex—just silence, broken only by a faint hum under her breath. Then Wanda nodded, slowly. “So be it.”

Her fingers flexed in the air, scarlet energy coiling like smoke. The sigils scrawled along the walls lit up, the room trembling faintly with the force of it. Yelena’s pulse spiked. The red threads binding her wrists surged, burrowing deeper, crawling across her arms like living veins.

Pain tore through her nerves, white-hot, as Wanda’s magic reached inward—not for her body, but for her mind.

“Stop—” Yelena gasped despite herself, instinctively, teeth gritted.

The sensation wasn’t just invasive—it was searing, like claws raking across the inside of her skull.

Fragments of memory shattered and tumbled into her fleeting awareness. Natasha’s laugh echoed in a hall she couldn’t place, warm and fleeting. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder, grounding and familiar, cut through the haze, only to be torn away instantly. She heard the sound of her own screams in the Red Room, sharp and raw, stabbing her chest with remembered fear. Bucky—the brush of his fingers, the press of his palm against her back, the heavy pleasurable weight of him in her and atop her, thrusting— fleeting memories, it all collided, jagged and confusing.

Wanda’s presence loomed over it all, probing, insistent, a predator hunting in the dark corridors of Yelena’s mind. Every thought, every image, every flicker of recollection was dragged into the light, twisted, teased, tested. The magical claws raked deeper, stripping away the fragile barriers Yelena had built over years of trauma, digging past her defenses, past her reasoning. Yelena wanted to fight, to claw back control, but the force was overwhelming, relentless. Each memory Wanda touched flared brighter, hotter, until it felt like her mind itself was burning. And through it all, Wanda’s voice—soft, coaxing, almost mournful—whispered from the edges of her consciousness, promising that all the answers lay just beneath, if Yelena would only yield. Wanda dug past them all, every memory — deeper, hunting.

Then— Billy.

The world shifted in Yelena’s head. A boy’s face, clear as day, even though she had never truly known him: dark hair, soft eyes, a kindness that radiated from him even in fragments. Wanda’s breath caught audibly, her hand tightening like a vise.

“Yes,” Wanda whispered, voice trembling. “Show me. My Billy.”

But the moment she tried to seize it, the memory fought back.

The air shuddered with invisible force. Yelena’s body arched, a scream ripped from her throat as the magic crackled—but it wasn’t Wanda’s this time. It was Billy’s power. A protective ward woven deep, clinging to the scraps of him that lingered in Yelena’s stolen memories. The boy’s magic flared like a shield, blinding and searing. Wanda cried out, snapping her hand back as if burned. Her scarlet energy recoiled, shredding apart midair. Yelena slumped forward, panting, blood trickling faintly from her nose.

For a beat, the room rang with silence.

Wanda staggered, clutching her wrist, eyes wide and wet with fury and something perilously close to grief. “No,” she whispered. “He’s mine. He’s mine.”

“He didn’t want you to see him,” Yelena whispered, broken. “He doesn’t trust you.” Yelena swallowed against the taste of iron, rasping out through her raw throat. “Maybe you should finally listen to your son.”

Wanda’s shoulders trembled, her breath ragged from the recoil of Billy’s magic. But when she lifted her head again, the grief in her eyes had hardened back into resolve. “No,” she whispered, shaking. Then louder, firmer: “No. He’s just afraid. He doesn’t understand—but I’ll make him understand. If I have to break through every wall, every ward in your mind, I will.”

Yelena spat blood onto the carpet, forcing a smile that was all teeth. “Do your worst.”

Wanda’s jaw clenched, but she turned away—toward the glowing sigils on the wall, muttering words in a language Yelena didn’t recognize. The room pulsed, shadows bending as her focus shifted, preparing to dig again.

And then—

A blur.

The air snapped around Yelena like glass shattering underwater, a violent pressure change that made her stomach lurch. Her vision smeared into streaks of color—scarlet, black, then a smear of silver-gray—and in less than a blink everything had changed. The bindings were gone. The walls were gone. The stifling incense that had clung to her lungs like smoke was gone. Instead— cold night air seared her throat as she dragged in a desperate breath. The scent of wet earth and pine needles hit her senses so sharply it made her cough. Grass crunched under her heels as her knees buckled, the ground shifting beneath her like she’d been thrown from a moving car.

She stumbled forward, catching herself with one palm in the dirt. The dizziness was worse than any parachute drop, worse than a flashbang. For a split terrifying moment, she thought maybe she was still trapped—that this was another illusion, another cage. But then the wind rushed across her bare arms, cool and biting, pulling at the hem of her ruined gown. Real. Too real to be conjured? Her eyes adjusted, and she saw the tree line, the scattered lamplight of some distant rural road, her own breath fogging in the cold.

Several yards away, leaning casually against a tree as though he hadn’t just ripped her from Wanda’s clutches, stood a boy. Early twenties maybe, lean build, his hair tousled wild from wind. His chest rose and fell in quick bursts, though his grin was irreverent.

“Man,” he said, hands propped on his hips, “you really don’t travel light.”

Yelena blinked, still trying to process the vertigo. And then she realized it: “Tommy Maximoff,” she murmured in realization.

“Yeah, yeah, the irony’s not lost on me.” His grin faltered, just for a heartbeat, and his eyes—bright, sharp, fast —flickered with something heavier. “I don’t exactly see eye to eye with Mom right now. Thought you could use a hand before she digs around in your head again.”

Yelena steadied herself, straightening, still on guard. Her instincts screamed not to trust any Maximoff, no matter how quick his feet or how young he looked. But her heart pounded with the memory of the red chains, of Wanda’s madness clawing for her skull, and she stumbled on wobbly feet.

“Easy,” he said, voice pitched low, almost cautious. “You’re safe now.”

She eyed him narrowly. “And what—what’s the catch? Why help me?”

“Yeah, that,” he supplied, like that should explain everything. And then, softer: “You know me. We share a history.”

The words hit her ears with the dull weight of something familiar, but distant — a feeling that she should have been used to, given how many times someone or another had claimed this exact thing or something similar lately. She studied him—a young man, almost a boy, the sharp jaw, the restless energy vibrating beneath his stillness, the way he couldn’t keep his weight balanced on both feet for more than a second. A speedster, no doubt, but he looked uncomfortable in his own skin and especially under the weight of her sudden scrutiny.

Her hand twitched toward where her holster should be, then froze as the memory of satin and bindings tangled her thoughts.

“I don’t know you,” Yelena said firmly.

Tommy only tilted his head, a sad smile ghosting over his face. “Yeah. Figures.”

Something in his voice—resigned, worn—set her teeth on edge. “What do you mean? I met your brother once. Billy. Five years ago, in New Jersey. That’s it.”

He shook his head slowly. “No. That’s not it.”

Yelena’s chest clenched. “What are you saying?”

Tommy’s gaze dropped, hands digging into the pocket of his hoodie like he couldn’t trust himself to stay still. “You think Wanda’s only been chasing one memory? One night? But she’s been tearing at you because there’s more. Way more.” He looked up, and his green eyes held something too raw to be a lie. “You weren’t just someone who stumbled across Billy. You—you’ve been a part of our lives. For years.”

The words hit like a punch. Yelena’s throat tightened. “That’s not possible.”

“It is.” His voice sharpened, the dam of patience breaking. “You kept us safe. Off the radar. Every time Wanda got close, every time someone started asking questions— you were the one who covered for us. You used your spot with the Avengers, your clearance, your connections. You even kept us a secret from Barnes. From everyone.”

Yelena staggered a step back. She wanted to dismiss it as manipulation—but the ache in her skull pulsed at the edges of his words, like her brain was trying to drag something long-buried into the light.

“Billy put in a safeguarding ward in your mind,” Tommy said. “And Mother Dearest triggered it when she tried to strip those memories out of you piece by piece until all you were left with was the first thread. That first night in New Jersey. That’s why she couldn’t get what she wanted from you tonight—and why your memories have such a huge gap. It wasn’t just one memory.”

Yelena’s lips parted, but nothing came out. Her chest felt too tight, her ribs like a vice.

Tommy took a step closer, and she flinched.

He frowned, softer now, as if trying not to spook her. “I know you don’t know me from a stranger, but you don’t have to fear anything from me. You taught me how to shoot, how to defend myself in hand to hand combat even though you said I’d probably never need it — so I’m not about to go testing your physical strength because I don’t have a death wish.”

Yelena paused.

He continued, cautiously, “You kept us protected when no one else could. It’s why we trusted you. We’ve thought of you like— like a big annoying sister, like Agatha.”

“Who?” Yelena asked, confused.

Tommy just shook his head. “That’s a longer story.”

Her knees weakened. Wanda’s torture had done on number on her body, not just her mind. She braced herself against a tree, nails digging into the bark. Images flickered—too quick, too fractured: her hand ruffling brown hair affectionately, laughter echoing in some cramped safehouse kitchen, Tommy grinning with a stolen soda in hand, Billy poring over a book while she leaned against the table, arms folded, pretending to follow his ramblings.

But the harder she reached, the quicker the fragments slipped away.

“I—” Her voice shook, raw. “I don’t remember. I can’t.”

She was tired of saying that.

Tommy ran a hand through his tousled hair, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I’ll try to reach out to Billy,” he said, voice low, cautious. “See if he can help, maybe untangle some of what Wanda stole from you. But he’s hard to get a hold of. You know how he is—always moving, always disappearing. It’s— not easy.”

Yelena swallowed hard, still leaning against the tree, chest heaving. “And if we don’t reach him?”

Tommy’s jaw tightened, eyes scanning the dark tree line as if Wanda might spring out at any second. “Then you run. You hide. But, Yelena—” His tone dropped, serious, urgent. “You’re not safe. Not out here, not anywhere. She’ll find us, especially if we stay exposed and together.”

Her fingers curled into fists at her sides.

He pulled something from the folds of his hoodie, a small familiar glint of circular metal catching the moonlight. Her ring—sleek, subtle, with a faint magic pulse. “I lifted this off Wanda when she wasn’t looking,” Tommy said. “Don’t take it off this time. Not even for a second.”

Yelena stared at it, her mind racing. “You’re a good pickpocket.”

He shrugged. “Comes with the territory of being a speedster,” Tommy replied, smirking briefly, but his eyes remained sharp, no humor there. “I’m serious, Yelena. Don’t take it off this time. It might be the only thing between you and her now, because I can’t protect you from her. I don’t even think Billy can do that, and he’s powerful as fuck.”

Yelena slid the ring onto her finger, the pulse of faint magic settling against her skin like a heartbeat. Relief didn’t come, only a cautious awareness. Every muscle in her body screamed to run, but she forced herself to breathe.

Tommy’s voice softened. “You need to get back to Barnes. Contact him. Get somewhere safe. I’ll reach out soon with Billy in tow. We’ll help you sort everything out if we can. But you have to be careful. Actually careful, Lena — not your usual type.”

Yelena nodded, jaw tight, not sure what to make of his familiarity with that fact that she was casually reckless. He spoke to her like he knew her well, which she supposed he did if everything he was saying was true. The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Yelena’s heart pounded with the sick certainty that he wasn’t lying—and that the hollow ache in her chest wasn’t just from Wanda’s spellwork. It was another thing she lost, another connection she didn’t understand and couldn’t even remember losing.

Then Tommy added, “Go. Now. You’ll need every second headstart on her that you can get.”

Yelena flexed her fingers, feeling the subtle hum of the ring beneath her skin. She squared her shoulders and began sprinting into the shadows, every step taking her farther away. Behind her, Tommy stood watching the night swallow her figure, lips pressed in a thin line.

#

Yelena ducked into the shadows of a quiet street, the damp concrete underfoot slick with rain that had fallen earlier. Her fingers closed around the cold metal of a payphone, the chill biting through the thin layers of the sweatshirt she’d scavenged. She pulled the hood over her head, the fabric hiding her face from any passing eyes. She’d changed out of the ruined gala gown at the first chance she’d gotten. Satin and silk were too eyecatching — hardly practical for hiding, for running. Her only alternative had been a pair of laundered sweatpants and a loose sweatshirt she found tossed in the back of an unlocked pickup truck. It was too big and awkward, but it meant she wouldn’t be a beacon for nosy pedestrians.

The coins felt slippery in her trembling fingers as she dropped them into the slot. The line clicked. Silence stretched on, until she heard his voice on the other end — and relief shot through her.

“Bucky?” Her voice was low, threaded with urgency.

The pause on the other end made her stomach twist. Then—a sharp, ragged inhale. “Yelena?” Bucky’s voice broke slightly, taut with disbelief and barely contained worry. “Oh, thank God. Fuck, I thought—” His words died off as he swallowed hard, grounding himself. “Where are you? Are you safe?”

“I’m okay,” she said, eyes darting along the street, checking for shadows, cars, anyone or anything that might see her. The chill of the night bit through her sweatshirt, but she barely noticed. “But I need you here. Now.”

Bucky’s tone shifted instantly. Gone was the measured, careful restraint he normally carried. Gone was the steady calm she had grown used to. “Stay right there,” he commanded. “I’m coming. Don’t move.”

Within twenty minutes, the low hum of a Quinjet cut through the night sky, a streak of silver descending from the clouds. Yelena ducked deeper into the shadow of the payphone booth as the jet touched down. The door dropped open. Bucky stepped out, tux still slightly rumpled from the gala, collar loose and tie askew, hair mussed but eyes sharp and unrelenting. Relief and something darker swirled in his gaze when he spotted her, and without hesitation, he strode toward her, each step measured, deliberate, radiating purpose.

She still felt annoyingly infirm. Her legs could barely hold her weight under her, but before she could falter under her weakening limbs suddenly he was there quick as a blink. His hand shot out, gripping her forearm to steady her, and this time she didn’t flinch. Instead, she leaned into him, the tension of the past hours finally spilling into something she couldn’t hold back. His grip was firm, grounding. Protective. Real. A hand around her waist, another supporting her back; he tucked his arm around her and pulled her to his chest, and suddenly, she was wrapped up in his embrace.

“Bucky—”

“Just a moment,” he pleaded, breathing heavily near her ear. “Just give me a moment, Yelena. I thought— Jesus, I thought—”

He never finished the thought. He didn’t need to. She found herself inexplicably submitting to his embrace, closing her eyes and allowing herself the weakness of this single moment. She pressed into his chest, her fingers splayed over his chest, right over a pounding heart she could feel beneath the spread of her fingertips. There was an unnameable relief in his arms, and Yelena admitted to herself that this whole Wanda ordeal had left her more shaken than she wanted to admit, even to him, even to herself.

Finally, she drew away. “How is everyone else? Bob—”

“They’re fine, he’s fine,” Bucky cut in, quickly. “Don’t actually know where Wanda sent him, but he was back within an hour. Everyone was more worried about you.”

She frowned. “There’s a lot I need to tell you.”

Bucky nodded. “First, let’s get out of here,” he told her, hushed. His hand stayed firm around her, thumb brushing lightly across her hip. “I’ve got a safe place set up.”

“Not the Tower?”

“No,” he said, evenly. “It’s time to ask favors from an old friend. We need a good place to lay low.”

She had no idea what he meant by that, but she trusted him.

Together, they climbed up the ramp of the Quinjet and disappeared inside.

#

Chapter 13

Notes:

Posting this quickly, and may need some edits, but figured I'd throw it up because —FINALLY.

#

The Quinjet cut silently across the night sky, the city shrinking into a sprawl of glittering lights below them and behind them. Yelena sat buckled in, arms crossed tightly over her chest, hood pulled low. Bucky was at the controls, jaw clenched in a way that warned her not to interrupt his focus. He hadn’t said where they were going, only that it was safe— a place secured by “the oldest friend I know.” She hadn’t thought much of the phrase, and that had been her oversight. She blamed it on her headache. Her entire body still ached, Wanda’s clawing touch lingering like phantom burns across her skull and skin.

The ring Tommy had pressed into her palm sat unobtrusively against her finger again. Yelena stared down at it, thumb brushing its band, and tried not to feel the weight of everything it represented.

The Quinjet finally angled down, breaking through clouds to reveal a quiet stretch of woods, moonlight spilling across an old country road. Nestled at the end of a gravel path sat a modest house—quaint, white-painted, wrapped in the hush of stillness. Porch light glowing. Curtains drawn. It looked impossibly ordinary, the kind of place where danger couldn’t reach. Which, in Yelena’s experience, meant it was anything but a place that fortified itself against threats.

“Bucky,” she said slowly, “if you brought me out here to some farmhouse retirement fantasy—”

But then the Quinjet’s ramp lowered, and she saw him.

A figure stood waiting on the porch. Old, yes—white-haired, broad-shouldered, but standing tall with a posture that was all discipline, all command. His face was weathered with age, lined by years, but the eyes—clear blue eyes—were sharp, watchful, kind.

She didn’t recognize him, but something about him was familiar anyway. “Who—?” she asked, trailing off.

Bucky only glanced at her, something like a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I told you,” he said quietly, guiding her down the ramp, “my oldest friend.” Her boots hit the gravel, crunching loud in the quiet night, but all she could hear was the flood of shock overcoming her as Bucky said, “You’ve met him before — several times over the last few years — but let me introduce you once again to Steve Rogers.”

“Yelena,” the old man said. “It’s good to see you again. Buck filled me in on what’s been happening.”

Yelena stared, a lot longer than what was probably polite.

“Steve Rogers is dead,” she said flatly, as though the words themselves made it true. “I saw the funeral. The entire world mourned. Everyone—everyone knows—”

“Everyone knows what they needed to know,” came Steve’s voice, steady and warm, cutting clean through her disbelief. He stepped forward into the porch light, and the years hadn’t dimmed the grace of him. “The world needed closure. Needed a symbol that could rest in peace.” His gaze softened as it landed on her, recognition flickering there, a familiarity she couldn’t place. “You knew the truth, Yelena. You’ve known it before.”

Her stomach flipped. Something inside her lurched, a gap yawning wide where memory should have been. She shook her head. “Yeah, I’ve been getting that a lot lately.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Bucky said quietly beside her. “But we needed a place to lie low and Steve has this place secured.”

She turned to Bucky, a little accusing. “Your famous best friend is alive and geriatric old, and you didn’t think to mention that to me in the last few weeks?”

“You had a lot on your plate already,” Bucky answered, simply.

Yelena turned back to stare at Steve, caught between astonishment and the gnawing emptiness of not knowing what the fuck was going on. Her voice wavered when she finally managed: “How many times? How many times have I been here before?”

Steve’s eyes crinkled. “Enough that you and Buck have your own guest room that I think of as yours.”

“But—you’re old,” she said, confused.

Steve laughed, sharing a smile with Bucky. “Yeah, it’s a long story that involves time travel and the Infinity Stones.”

The words struck her harder than she expected, hollowing her chest. Those stones had been the reason Natasha had died. She wanted to demand more. Instead she could only walk beside him towards the house — this pillar of a figure, the original Captain America himself — caught in the cruel dissonance of being known by someone she couldn’t remember knowing. When Bucky had said he was calling in a favor from an old friend, she hadn’t realized he meant his oldest friend.

Inside, the house smelled faintly of coffee and old books, a soft, lived-in warmth. Family photographs lined the mantel—Steve Roger’s familiar smile preserved in frames through decades of moments caught in black-and-white and faded color. Yelena hovered near the doorway, hands shoved deep in the sweatshirt pocket, while Bucky and Steve moved with an ease that spoke of countless late-night talks like this.

“So,” Yelena finally said, eyes narrowing at the photographs lining the mantel. Some were dulled-toned, worn at the edges, others framed in neat black borders that looked decades newer. They didn’t belong in the same room together, much like Steve Rogers himself—out of time, but somehow right at home. “You’re telling me —what? You just decided to go back in time?”

Steve chuckled, rubbing at the back of his neck, his posture carrying that same sheepish charm she remembered from news reels and Natasha’s rare anecdotes. “Not exactly a decision made lightly. But, yeah. After the fight with Thanos, we had a way to put the Stones back. I had a choice—come back, or stay in the past. And I stayed.”

“Why?” Yelena pressed.

Steve’s gaze softened as he pulled a compass off the ledge of the mantle, the photograph inside opening to a face of a woman—his hand brushing the edge of the frame like it was instinct. The woman in the picture wore a military uniform, hair pinned perfectly, her looks a real knockout. Even Yelena, who hadn’t grown up revering S.H.I.E.L.D. history, now came to recognize her face from files and whispers. Peggy Carter, former Director of S.H.I.E.L.D, a fabled folklore of a bygone era among the Russians.

“Because she was my home,” Steve said quietly. His voice was so steady it made the honesty sting. “Peggy Carter. I’d promised her a date a long time ago, and I finally got to cash that in.” His smile dimmed, eyes creasing with grief that was still tender despite the years. “She passed some time back. Peacefully. But the years I spent with her was everything I could have hoped for.”

A beat of silence. “He was always a hopeless romantic,” Bucky ribbed him, quietly. He looked over, clearly trying to pull the older man out of his soft grief, playing it off as a joke as he continued, “Emphasis on hopeless, at least until he met Peggy.”

Steve made a face. “Even some years after that, in fact.”

For a long moment, Yelena stared at the older man, trying to piece it together. Captain America, the man every propaganda poster had painted larger than life, had walked away from the world to keep a single promise. To build a home for himself in the past. Peggy Carter must have been something special to have a man like him give up everything for her.

Yelena cleared her throat, before letting the words slip out: “So the world thinks you’re dead, but really you’ve been living out here like— like some retired grandpa?”

“Pretty much,” Bucky cut in, shooting Steve a sideways look. “Only difference is, this one still lifts refrigerators for fun.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Steve muttered, though his mouth quirked upward. “He’s just bitter that I can still challenge him to a bench press contest if I really wanted.”

The easy banter left her adrift. Steve Rogers, alive. Steve Rogers knowing her, knowing pieces of her life she herself couldn’t recall. More secrets layered onto the ones already burning holes in her mind. It was too much for one night.

Wanda’s invasion still haunted her—claws dragging through her skull, fragments of memory spliced open, bleeding. Even in the quiet crackle of the fireplace, the echoes of it lingered, leaving her raw and brittle.

She crossed her arms over her chest, forcing her voice steady even as her shoulders tensed. “Forgive me if I don’t come up with more questions until tomorrow. Right now, I’m too fried to think. It’s been a long day.”

Steve nodded, unoffended. He pushed himself up from the armchair, that old soldier’s presence returning with quiet authority. “Alright,” he said, the softness gone from his tone. “But before you retire, we need to know what happened with Wanda. She’s already found you once, and if she’s determined enough, she’ll find you again. We need to think like her—and stay one step ahead of her.”

Yelena remained near the mantle, arms still crossed. Then anxiety made her move to sit down on the couch, her hands clasped tight between her knees, knuckles white. Bucky was across from her, leaning forward with his forearms braced on his thighs, eyes never leaving her — but she couldn’t quite meet his stare.

“I need to tell you something,” Yelena said finally, voice low. “Something Tommy Maximoff told me today.”

Bucky’s brow furrowed, but he stayed silent.

She pressed forward, quick. “I thought the only time I’d ever met Billy was five years ago, when you and I tracked him to New Jersey. I thought that was the memory Wanda was after.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “But it wasn’t just once. It was… years. I knew them, Buck. Both of them. Billy and Tommy. I kept them off the radar. I covered for them, made sure no one—no government, no Avenger—knew where they were.” She looked up, finally meeting Bucky’s eyes, some phantom shame flickering in her over the the deceit she didn’t even remember perpetrating. “Even you. I lied to you. Over and over again. I don’t remember how, or why, but—apparently, I did.”

The words hung heavy, twisting in her throat as soon as they left it. The flames in the fireplace popped faintly, a coal splitting in two, and the sound was sharper than the silence that followed. Bucky stared at her like she’d just stepped out of someone else’s skin. His jaw ticked once, blue eyes unreadable in the flicker of firelight. For a second she thought she saw a crack there, some flash of hurt, but then he leaned back into the armchair, exhaling slowly through his nose.

He didn’t look angry. Didn’t look betrayed. Just—steady. Like a mountain weathering another storm. “You don’t need to apologize for something you don’t even remember.”

Yelena’s lips pressed tight, her shoulders rigid. “But I still did it.”

“Yeah,” he said, voice low, softer than she expected. A faint shrug rolled through him, as if he were deliberately stripping weight from the moment. “And if you did, I trust you had your reasons.” His gaze caught hers, sharp and unwavering. “You don’t lie easy, Yelena. At least not to me. It’s not in your nature. If you kept something from me, it wasn’t for you. It was to protect them—” his chin tilted, the ghost of a gesture toward the world outside their little circle—“or me.”

Her throat tightened at that. She wanted to argue. Wanted to push him until he admitted some part of him was angry, because she would have been. But Bucky didn’t move like a man betrayed. He moved like a man who’d already carried too many secrets himself, who understood that sometimes survival meant silence.

Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. “I don’t like being someone who lies to the people I—” She cut herself off, biting down hard, realizing what she almost said.

Bucky noticed. His eyes flickered, softening, but he didn’t push. Instead, he leaned forward again, elbows on his knees, one hand hanging loose while the metal one flexed in the glow of the fire. “You’ve done enough to earn my trust ten times over. Whatever this was, whatever you had to hide— it was important. I know you. That’s all I need.”

For the first time in hours, her chest eased—just barely.

Steve finally spoke, voice even, thoughtful. “Billy and Tommy are key. Wanda’s chasing them through you for a reason. But if you had that bond with them, her hunt for you may not just be about memories. It may be about family. About connection. Wanda’s always been looking for that.”

Yelena’s head snapped toward him, offended. “She nearly ripped my mind in half tonight. She’s not a lost little girl.”

Steve’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not saying what she’s doing is right. I’m saying I’ve seen Wanda at her best, and I’ve seen her at her worst—”

“With due respect,” Yelena cut in. “No, you haven’t.”

He paused. “When she’s lost, she clings to what little she thinks she has left. Sometimes that makes people dangerous.”

Bucky shook his head, muttering, “You always want to believe the best in people, but I saw her myself, Steve. She isn’t the girl we knew.”

Steve gave a small nod. “Call me an old fool, then, but I have to believe there’s some part of her still in there.” His voice carried the kind of quiet conviction that didn’t need to be raised to command the room. He straightened in his chair, the lines of age and grief etched deep into his features, but beneath them something sharper stirred—a glimmer of the man who once carried that infamous shield. “If Wanda’s spiraling like this, I won’t sit on the sidelines anymore. I made an oath before to keep myself out of the fight now. Whether I put up the shield or not, maybe I can still reach her.”

Yelena studied him, eyes narrowing, torn between disbelief and something darker. To her, Steve looked like a man who should’ve been long past this fight, someone whose war was decades behind him. “You think she’ll listen to you? After all this?”

Steve’s expression softened. “If there’s even a chance—I have to try. Because if we don’t at least try, then we’re not giving her a way back. And I can’t accept that—not with her.”

Bucky shifted, his chair creaking under the subtle tension of his frame. His gaze flicked from Yelena to Steve, then settled forward, jaw tight, eyes hardening. “Steve—” He hesitated, swallowing, before the words ground out of him like gravel. “We do what we have to.”

Steve leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I know what she’s done, Buck. I know how bad it is. But she’s been lost in grief, in anger. That doesn’t mean she’s beyond saving.”

Bucky’s jaw was tight, his metal fingers flexing against his thigh. “She’s crossed the line, Steve. More than once. You didn’t see what she did to Yelena.”

Steve didn’t flinch, but his eyes softened, almost pleading. “And if someone had said that about you? Back when I pulled you out of Hydra’s clutches? You think anyone could have made me give up on you?”

The words hit something in the air between them, but Bucky only shook his head, resolute. “This isn’t the same. I didn’t choose to be that person. Wanda’s making choices—and people keep paying the price. I can’t keep making excuses for her anymore.”

Yelena straightened. The change in him was abrupt, but unmistakable. For as long as she’d known him, Bucky had carried a cautious sympathy for Wanda, even when it baffled her. He’d recognized the grief gnawing at her edges, the pain that warped her, and more than once he’d spoken in her defense when no one else would. To him, Wanda had been a friend lost in her own battlefield—someone worth saving if only she could be reached.

But this time was different.

Yelena saw it as plain as the firelight on his face—the shift in his voice, the taut line of his jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders. The gentler reasoning, the willingness to look for excuses, had burned away. What remained was stripped bare, sharp-edged.

That realization pressed against Yelena’s chest, a heavy aching weight. For all the gaps in her memory, for all the secrets she was only just beginning to piece together, she couldn’t mistake the way he was looking at her now—like she was the line he refused to let be crossed again. He wasn’t speaking like a soldier weighing options anymore. Seeing Wanda take her, twist her memories—not once, but twice —had shaken something in him loose.

He was speaking now like a man unwilling to risk losing Yelena again.

Shadows stretched long across the room, and the air between them grew heavier with all of them beginning to discuss options. Yelena flexed her fingers against her knees, thumb brushing over the band of the ring still snug on her finger. Its presence was a quiet weight, a reminder that her past—her missing years—wasn’t finished with her.

Eventually Yelena sat back in the armchair, legs tucked beneath her, grabbing the mug of tea that Steve had prepared for her earlier — it was already cool in her hands. She wasn’t really drinking it—it was just something to occupy her fingers while she listened. Across the room, Steve and Bucky were deep in conversation, their voices low but sharp in contrast to the stillness of the cabin. She could see there was a line of demarcation forming between the two in the subtle shift in their physical mannerisms towards each other, and the line was about Wanda. It always came back to Wanda.

Watching them was like watching two halves of a coin argue about which side was right—one steeped in faith, the other hardened by reality. The two of them shared a kind of bond only decades of war, loss, love, and survival could forge. The bond between them was palpable, the warmth threading between their words tugging at something unsteady in Yelena’s chest. More than friends, more than blood. She could see it, feel it, even without all her memories intact.

She’d always heard rumors and stories about Steve’s eternal belief that redemption was always within reach; Bucky, now, met him with a subdued contrast, a new unflinching clarity. But Steve’s hope sounded entirely too naïve, perhaps even dangerous. Salvation? Wanda? The woman who had tried to break Yelena’s mind, played her like a puppet— twice. No. Wanda wasn’t some tragic figure waiting to be pulled back from the edge of madness. The madness was firmly in control.

Her grip on the mug tightened, knuckles whitening. And as she listened, something settled in her chest with a cold kind of certainty.

She suddenly understood.

If she had once truly thought of Billy and Tommy as her little brothers—if she had loved them, protected them—then of course she would’ve hidden them. Not just from Wanda. Not just from the world. But even from Bucky. From anyone who might have believed they could “fix” Wanda. Because if it had taken Bucky this long to admit what Wanda really was, how could she have trusted him back then? His good intentions would have been a danger to themselves.

If she had seen those boys as hers to protect, then she would have done whatever it took. Even keeping secrets from the one person she trusted most. The realization ached—sharp, undeniable—but it also clicked into place like a puzzle piece she hadn’t known was missing.

Steve and Bucky kept talking, voices weaving back and forth, conviction against pragmatism. But Yelena barely heard them now. She sat with the knowledge pressing down on her, with the bitter clarity that maybe, once upon a time, she had more family than anyone else realized. She had been someone’s sister. It made her think of Natasha all over again, and something deep pierced through Yelena.

“If Billy’s magic is protecting those memories,” Steve was saying, “Wanda’s going to keep coming back until she finds a way through. Which means our priority is twofold: protecting Yelena, and getting Billy involved before she escalates.”

Yelena leaned forward against the table, jaw tight, reluctant. “Tommy’s working on that. He’ll find his brother. But we can’t just sit around waiting for them to show up—”

“You need shielding,” Bucky cut in, agreeing. “And we both know Wanda’s more than willing to rip through anyone who gets in her way.”

Steve folded his arms, gaze flicking between them. “The rings you have—they’re good. It’ll keep her from seeing you, from zeroing in. But it won’t be enough forever. We’ll need layers. Safe houses, false trails, backup.” His voice took on that unmistakable cadence, the one that had once led armies. “You two stay here tonight. Rest. In the morning, I’ll reach out to some old allies—people who know how to stay off the radar.”

Yelena’s thumb brushed over the ring, the weight of it both comforting and unnerving. “Suddenly feels like I’ve been living someone else’s life for five years again,” she muttered. “And here I thought I was getting my feet finally under me.”

Steve’s gaze softened again, but his words stayed steady. “It’ll come back to you. Memories don’t disappear, not completely. They leave imprints. The more time you give it, the better your mind will have a chance to mend itself. Until then—you trust your instincts. They’re sharper than you think.”

Bucky’s hand brushed hers atop the table, subtle but steady, his metal fingertips cold against her skin. A simple touch, but it anchored her more than any words could. “You’ve always been good at protecting people, Yelena,” he said, his voice low, certain. “Even when it’s messy.”

She didn’t pull away. Instead, she drew a slow breath and let her shoulders drop fractionally, the knot in her chest loosening just enough to breathe. The cold touch of his hand over hers lingered, a quiet reminder that whatever she couldn’t remember, whatever had been taken from her, something between them remained solid. For a fleeting moment, the chaos in her mind dulled. The fire crackled, Steve’s steady presence filled the room, but all she could feel was that point of contact—Bucky’s unspoken promise that she wasn’t alone in this, not now, not anymore.

And though she wouldn’t say it out loud, not yet, she let herself lean into the steadiness Bucky offered, just for a heartbeat longer.

#

She took an absurdly long shower, letting the hot water wash over her until it turned tepid, and still she couldn’t quite convince herself that she’d scrubbed every trace of the night—or of Wanda’s assault—away. Every drop felt like it should carry something off her skin, some invisible residue of fear and violation, but the mirror at the end of the hall reflected the truth: she still felt raw, hollowed in ways soap couldn’t reach.

She had already accepted another pair of old sweatpants and a tattered shirt Steve had lent her, muttering something about fresh linens and leaving them folded neatly on the guest bed. He’d given her a polite, almost formal, “Good night,” and retreated, leaving the two of them in the quiet of the old house. The guestroom had been simple—wood floors that creaked slightly under her boots, an old dresser against the wall, a patchwork quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

When she reemerged to that bedroom, hair still damp and curling loosely around her jaw, she found Bucky waiting. He hadn’t moved much from where she had last glimpsed him. The door clicked softly behind her, and the sudden hush made her tense. The dim light from the bedside lamp threw angles across his face, sharpening the planes of his cheekbones, the tension in his jaw, the shadowed glint of his eyes. He sat impossibly still, arms hanging loosely at his sides but radiating that subtle, contained strength she knew all too well. He wasn’t just waiting—he was trying to be patient.

“You’ve had a long night,” he said, voice low, almost hesitant. “I’ll take the couch.”

Yelena felt a strange twinge—annoyance, relief, something closer to vulnerability—curling through her. She wasn’t used to needing anything, much less needing someone to watch over her. And yet, the way he said it, the careful lilt of concern threaded through his words, made her stomach tighten in a way she wasn’t prepared for.

Her eyes swept the room again, landing on the bed. She felt a surge of both exhaustion and stubbornness.

“Don’t,” she said.

Bucky’s brow furrowed, the tension in his shoulders shifting. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, just— stay,” she said, her fingers brushing against the quilt almost absentmindedly.

The weight of the night pressed against her ribs, and for the first time, she admitted to herself that she wanted him close, that she wanted comfort—even if the admission made her uneasy.

He took a careful step forward, removing his boots without a sound, letting his presence fill the space without imposing. “Alright,” he murmured, almost as if testing the waters. “I’ll stay.”

For a long beat, neither of them moved. Yelena felt a heat crawl up the back of her neck — uncharacteristic, unsettling. She wasn’t one for needing people. Not like this. Not for comfort. And yet, tonight, after everything Wanda had done, after the hours of fear, confusion, and exposure, something inside her felt cracked and worn thin. She couldn’t pretend otherwise.

She got into bed. Bucky slipped in beside her, careful to leave space between them, giving her room to retreat if she needed. His presence was solid, grounding, the kind of certainty she hadn’t allowed herself to trust in years. She realized, with a start, that she had been holding herself back, bracing against him, against the possibility of letting anyone in. But now, laying there, hair still damp, exposed in more than just body, she could feel the pull to let go.

This vulnerability was more foreign than anything in her prior relationships, a laughable line of one-night stands and fleeting relationships. Still, she wondered if this had felt just as strange for him at the onset, or if he’d been more familiar with it? She’d known he’d kept himself celibate for a number of years, some form of self-imposed punishment while he sorted out his trauma and PTSD. And she’d known, intellectually, that he had been a bit of a playboy in his youth back in the 40s. Bucky had never been inexperienced, and his kisses had damn sure proven his skill, dissolving every last bit of those calamitous voices in her head, silencing the dreaded doubts and fears. He’d overtaken her senses on the few occasions it’d gone that far. The reminder of it made her skin buzz, but she was too exhausted, had been through too much, to do much of anything about the feeling.

The silence stretched long enough that her mind raced, buzzing with fragments of memory she couldn’t piece together, reminders of Wanda, of Billy, Tommy, and the avalanche of secrets she’d carried. And beneath it all, a softer current whispered at the edges of her awareness—a pull toward the warmth at her back, the steadiness.

Slowly, cautiously, she shifted a fraction closer, just enough that their arms brushed. His initial stillness was deliberate, like he feared pushing too far. Then, tentatively, almost reverently, he slid an arm around her, waiting for her to flinch, to push away.

She didn’t.

Instead, she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and leaned into him, letting the solid weight of him anchor her. His chest pressed against her shoulder, warm and steady, heartbeat thudding in rhythm with her own ragged pulse. The sensation was foreign—acceptance of touch, surrender to comfort—but not wrong. Not with him. Not now. Bucky’s presence didn’t waver; it anchored her. His was careful, protective, and there was a softness lurking behind that watchful, battle-hardened exterior—something that called out to the part of her that had been craving comfort without knowing it.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Bucky whispered.

His words were so soft it was almost lost in the quiet, but Yelena felt it resonate through her, through the tension in her muscles, through the turmoil that had gripped her all day. Her fingers flexed against the sheet, relaxing fractionally, and she closed her eyes. Letting the room shrink to this moment, letting the weight of his arm, the warmth, the safety, seep into her bones.

For the first time in days—maybe years—she allowed herself to rest, allowed herself to be held, to be unguarded.

#

But sometime in the middle of the night, the dreams came.

Wanda’s face—too close, too sharp—pain cutting through Yelena like fire. The sensation of strings wrapping around her limbs, pulling, yanking, until she wasn’t herself anymore. She tried to scream but no sound came out. Tried to move but her body wouldn’t obey. Voices and screams echoed faintly, calling out from somewhere she couldn’t reach—

Yelena jerked awake, breath tearing from her chest like she’d surfaced from deep underwater.

Bucky, sitting up now, his hair mussed from sleep, eyes sharp and worried in the half-light. “Hey—hey,” his voice was there instantly, low and steady, his hand already at her shoulder. “It’s alright. You’re here. It’s me.”

She blinked wildly, trying to separate dream from reality. The room was dully illuminated by the dim glow of the bedside lamp they hadn’t bothered turning off. The quilt tangled around her legs.

Her throat was tight, words caught somewhere between a sob and a snarl. “She—she was in my head again.”

“You’re safe,” he murmured, pulling her gently against him when she didn’t resist. “It’s just a dream. She can’t touch you here.”

The solidity of him was the only thing that felt real. His arm wrapped around her, the warmth of his chest, the calm rhythm of his breathing against her temple. She clutched at his shirt, shaking harder than she wanted to admit.

“I hate this,” she whispered, the words raw. “I hate that she’s still getting to me, fucking with my head.”

His metal hand brushed her hair back from her face with surprising gentleness. “You’re human. She hurt you. That doesn’t make you weak.”

Something in her chest broke at that, at the quiet conviction in his voice. She tilted her head back, eyes meeting his. He was so close, close enough that she could feel the heat of his breath, close enough that she could see the flecks of silver in his irises.

For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

Then his hand cupped her cheek, careful, giving her every chance to pull away. She didn’t. Instead, she leaned in, closing the space between them until their lips met. The kiss was hesitant at first—soft, testing—like they both weren’t sure if it was allowed. But the moment her lips pressed to his, some of that raw, jagged fear inside her eased. His warmth, his steadiness, the grounding weight of him—she sank into it like she hadn’t let herself sink into anything ever before.

His metal thumb traced along her jaw, surprisingly warm, while his other hand slid fingers through her hair where it had dried in messy waves, she felt his palm settle against the nape of her neck. He tipped her head up — a careful kiss, an unfamiliar and startling benediction in his touch.

When they finally broke apart, his forehead rested against hers, both of them breathing a little harder than before.

“You okay?” he murmured, voice rough.

She was tired of him asking her that.

She was tired of being unsure of the answer.

She broke for him, hand shooting out to grasp at him, her mouth wet and demanding against his. In an instant, it was intoxicating and cloying like a hit of adrenaline. She poured everything she couldn't say into the kiss, all the words that would have felt too awkward on her tongue, all the confessions that felt too laborious and weighted. She didn’t need words, not now, not like this.

Once he seemed sure she wanted it, once he felt her enthusiasm in such uncontested intensity, he kissed her back like he was drowning for her, taking over her mouth, cutting through her spiralling thoughts with a slash of lust. It was confident, his kiss, and it made perfect sense for him to be so sure of how to kiss her — how to drive her mad — given he had years of history to discover every way to break her apart and dismantle her defenses. Especially when he sucked on her bottom lip between his teeth, making her shudder at the small sting. He was a man that could wreck a nation, a single soldier better than a whole army, but he had somehow also mastered the perfect balance of force and pressure to drive her senseless.

His hands felt obscenely large on her waist where he held her. Well-defined hands, square palms and wide long fingers that shifted down her body, fingers gripping the ample flesh of her ass. His mouth tasted like devotion at first, until she licked it away so she could feel the frantic pull of desire instead. He kissed her until her heart beat hard enough to hear it thud in her own ears, until she was flushed and breathless.

When he pulled away, the pupils in his eyes were blown so wide she could hardly see the color in them anymore. “You don’t have to hold yourself back, Yelena,” he said, his murmured advisement a low voice, before he was kissing her again. “Not with me. Just let go.”

I got you.

Her eyes fluttered shut. Those words — she knew those words; had he said those words to her, a lifetime ago? Was she remembering him even subconsciously? A memory flitted just out of reach — another time he’d held her, another intimate moment in the dark. Her eyes opened in shock only to see him kissing her, brows slanted and expression raw with a type of desire that almost looked like it hurt. Yelena wondered if this all really meant as much to him as it seemed. That he handled her both with a delicate care and craven appetite that should have been two competing interests, but they merged into a singular focus that wiped out everything else reasonable and sensible.

Yelena let go of her protesting and stumbling fleeting memories, closing her eyes again, losing herself to the building slaking lust, something that ignited every part of her.

“I’d like to make you come, Yelena,” he murmured, and she was nodding before he had even finished the sentence. He stroked her hair again while she caught her breath, feeling his thigh slot between her own, giving her pressure, friction, right where she needed it most. “Do you want my mouth? Or do you want to ride my fingers while I suck a fresh bruise into your neck?”

Yelena’s throat worked for an answer. This was messy and chaotic, a strike at her emotions, everything he inspired in her, but it was a reunion she determined would banish all her qualms to the distant ends of the earth, because holy fuck— “All of that,” she told him.

She kissed him back, relenting only when he gripped her sweatpants and tugged it down until her legs were bare and he could reach the center of her. Not stopping his assault on her mouth, his hand wove its way to her apex and he stroked her through her underwear, testing, teasing, before his fingers slipped underneath the elastic waistband and found her utterly soaked.

He groaned. "Fuck, Yelena," he panted.

His probing fingers glided back along her folds, parting flesh that was already drenched beyond reason. He circled her entrance with the pad of his forefinger, but he stopped just short of her clit with each stroke, denying her the touch she was sure she would go mad without.

“Stop fucking teasing me, Barnes,” she warned him, a threat, “and start fucking me.”

He let out a pleased, gruff noise against her lips. His free metal arm dropped to her middle and pulled her more firmly underneath him. Bucky licked at her lips and opened her mouth eagerly, and Yelena was momentarily jolted when his metal palm slid down and grabbed her ass, gripping her to him as he sought relief for the growing arousal between them, grinding their bodies together in a mere phantomine of fucking that ignited every nerve ending alongside her body. Yelena could not suppress the satisfied whimper at the (familiar?) feeling of being engulfed by him, under him, even if her mind could not fully remember the moments where such a thing was common.

“Someone’s needy,” he murmured, pleased at a noise that escaped her lips she couldn’t even describe as entirely human.

She sneaked her hand between their bodies, drawing a deep groan from his lips as she stroked the hardness pressed against her stomach. “Someone is,” she agreed, raising an eyebrow.

Then she lost all thought as his fingers began a mission. He explored her body at his own pace, teasing her clit, tracing circles into that bud of nerves that buckled her legs. Every time his lips caught hers, he made sure that his fingers were pressing into it with just the perfect sense of pressure that Yelena felt flashes of colors hit behind her closed eyelids. When he finally pushed two fingers into her, warm and venturing, her mouth dropped open into a slack jaw at the delicious burn of invasion.

He fucked her like that, with pumping fingers, thumb at her clit, until he finally dragged her body over the edge of a cliff so far down she couldn’t feel the floor of it. A shuddering gasp, some pathetic attempt at saying his name that was aborted entirely as she fought her way through spasms and aftershocks.

He was watching her, afterwards. So intently that she almost felt a trickle of self-consciousness flood in. “What?” she asked him, brushing hair out of her face.

“I just like how you sound, is all,” he confessed, softly. “I’ve missed it.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she settled on, “Why don’t you get naked already?”

He laughed, abrupt and short, but splintered down the center with genuine warmth. She watched him pull back, first stopping to slide her damp underwear down her legs and letting them get lost in the sheets. Yelena went about stripping off her top. She didn’t have a bra underneath — hadn’t, since the Gala where she’d chosen a dress that really couldn’t accommodate one — and it was quicker than she expected before she was completely nude. All the more time to devote to watching him as he stripped off his pants, the sound of his belt and zipper quick and fraught in the dark, as he pulled his t-shirt off overhead — exposing entirely the hard lines of his body to her.

A fucking Michelangelo would have been less cut.

He kissed her again, harder, with more heat behind it, too quick for her to get a full look at him, and her frustrated whine would have been embarrassing if he hadn’t looked too eager himself to settle back over her. She could feel him, hard and erect, between her parted sticky thighs. Heat pooled in her stomach as he kissed down the center of her; her throat, the valley of her chest, one hand already kneading a breast and tweaking her nipple with the perfect pressure of a pinch that sent a zip of pleasure down her spine.

“Do you want my mouth now?” he asked, drawing his fingers over the wet curls.

She groaned, a little concerned about her oversensitivity, twitching under his touch and cunt clenching around empty air.

He dragged her up the bed a little, positioned her just so he could settle his face between her thighs. She was helpless to stop him — not that she would have. He was no longer hiding who he was, the strength of him, easily hauling her up like she weighed a negligible amount. Yelena had spent her entire life around men and women, all kinds of soldiers, all various levels of scary efficiency and strength. The Winter Soldier had always stood apart, separate, a category unto himself. She knew he could bend and break her if he wanted, and it said too much about her that it only heightened her anticipation, the thought of his overwhelming strength, as he looked down at her damp curls and circled a finger around her clit again.

“Is any of this feeling familiar yet?” he asked her, low.

She almost stopped breathing. Almost told him about the fleeting sensations that felt familiar, but nothing concrete. Almost told him about Bob’s void where she’d seen him do exactly what he was about to do right now, slotting his broad shoulders between her splayed thighs. The sight of him was utterly indecent, unkept hair flying in every direction from her roaming fingers, the darkening stare of him as he drank in the sight of that thatch of hair that covered her mound, naked and spread out for him.

Thankfully, he didn’t wait for an answer. Just hunkered down and delved deep, his tongue meeting her slick, bending her knees up to open her fully to him.

After that, Yelena lost all thought, all reason, all self-restraint as her voice pitched high enough that she knew she’d have a hard time meeting old man Steve’s stare in the morning.

“Please,” she gasped, widening her knees, her body lit up and nerves frayed. “I need—”

She jerked as he stroked his tongue down the seam of her, and she had another sudden flash of him like that, how good he had felt with his mouth. It was too much, the memory and the sensation mixing, a toxic heady cocktail. She couldn’t see all of him beyond the bob of his head in the darkness, but he sent a jolt of nerves to her stomach with every flicker and flick of his tongue.

“Shhh, I’ll get you there,” he murmured, when she whined. “I promise I will. Just give me a moment to savor this.”

She had no idea what that meant. Men, in her experience, weren’t the type to like going down on a woman. Half the time, she’d been with partners who’d refused it entirely or only done the perfunctory bare minimum to get her wet enough before sliding their dick inside of her. It was why she usually preferred the company of women, who knew a thing or two about the virtues of foreplay.

Bucky, it seemed, ate like a man starving for his last meal. No two which ways about it, he kept his tongue persistent, deviously preoccupied with all the parts of her until she lit up like a firecracker, knees drawn up, him stroking against her sex with the pad of his tongue and the combination of his slippery fingers; enough to threaten her sanity, not given her a moment to overthink herself or the moment — she just let the feeling of him wash over her, taking her through it until she was coming again in a long drawn-out orgasm that curled her toes and left her gasping.

Afterwards, she was sensitive, almost overly so, but it didn’t stop her from moving her sweaty limbs with purpose.

She kept her gaze on his face as she pushed him back, his spine flat to the mattress as she climbed over him. He seemed to have no protests to the change in positions, groaning once in a weak pitch when he felt her wet center slide over him. Seconds ticked by with the two of them grinding against each other, getting him wet with her juices. The muscles of his neck corded, face flooding red, unabashedly erect where their bodies converged; her, determinedly looking down, watching every sensation ripple across his face and wanting to memorize each one.

Because this would not be a memory she would forget, like the rest.

Finally, gradually, she lowered herself, gravity doing a lot of the work, but it wasn’t as if she did nothing, taking him inside, all breathy pants earned as she eased him deeper and deeper inside of her, not even bothering to muffle herself. His mouth parted soundlessly as every inch of him slipped inside her.

“There you go,” he breathed, hard, “ride me just like this, take control all you want—”

She did, and yet, she thought neither of them felt entirely in charge.

She moved atop him, hips swaying, taking him inside and bouncing on his cock, quick agile jolts, her body used to intense workouts but usually not this kind. "Fuck," he murmured, sounding wrecked, "Yelena, fuck, fuck, fuck ," and when she kissed him she knew he was just as lost in this as her, a livewire current of want, an intense bombardment of sensations; pleasure spiked in waves to make room for something explosive, something too powerful blooming inside of her.

Her vision tunneled, her whole chest expanding to make room for breath that barely made it in before it was being fucked back out of her by the drive of his upward hips.

“Knew it,” he groaned, “look at you, knew we would be back here.” He smoothed away a strand of her hair caught in the sweat on her neck, the filth coming from his mouth less dirty talk than it seemed his desire to express everything he was thinking. “Look how good you look riding me, taking what you want.”

Her hips burned from the strain, but it is a delicious kind that heated her up from the inside.

Yelena almost wanted to close her eyes, riding out the sensation of her clenching around him, an inevitable pitch into the darkness again. Except she couldn’t — not with how pretty he looked beneath her, throat exposed, long clean lines of his neck corded with tension and stretched muscles, the bob of his Adam’s apple somehow sinfully alluring. Yelena couldn’t help but lean down and lick a long line up his throat, then suck hard enough it should have left a bruise if not for the fact that he was a supersoldier. She nipped him, teeth catching lightly against his neck as another one of those velvety moans spilled from his kiss-bruised lips, and her hips worked steadily against the counterthrust of his. The suckle at his throat made his metal fingers curl, tangling deeper in her hair, and she let out a soft sound—a quiet noise that another man might have mistaken as pain, but he only looked at her, knowing.

In the next second, he took control — she lost her grip entirely as when he flipped her over like a ragdoll, until she was flat with her back against the sheets, his weight settling over her thighs, his free hand warm as he palmed her asscheeks again.

Apparently, Bucky Barnes was unrepentantly an ass man.

His metal fingers clenched hard around her hair, and something jittery skated across her scalp alongside the sensation of him forcing her head back so he could return the favor, ply her throat with kisses and the rough scratch of his stubble. She already felt pent up again. Restless. Jittery. But then without warning he positioned himself at her entrance to slide inside in a single rough thrust, then began a pistoning pace that built too quickly, a brutal tempo; Yelena closed her eyes and thought she saw god in how good it made her feel. To be pinned down and fucked hard enough to bruise, hard enough that the gutteral sounds scraping along her throat made it seem like she might be dying.

It was everything she wanted, even if she hadn’t known she needed it so badly. He knew.

“That’s it,” he murmured, talking her through it, “that’s a girl, just take it. Let me scratch that itch, the fucking you need—”

A bead of sweat at the very edge of his collarbone worked down his body and fell onto her, and she almost lamented the fact that she hadn’t been able to lick it off his skin.

“I want it—I want it, dammit, harder,” she told him.

Twisting in his grip and wrapping her ankles across his back, she forced him to pick up his jagged pace, his thrusts going choppy while he rearranged them better so they wouldn’t go careening off the mattress. It was a smaller bed than she was used to, something smaller than a king, barely big enough for both of them — but Bucky made due. And then his mouth was on her again, making promises with his tongue that she felt ricochet through her entire body down to the other point where he was entering her, all while his hands pushed her thighs high up and open; he found a better angle to hit inside her, forcing her thighs splayed and making her take it, fucked raw and hard until she could feel another orgasm rising to the surface.

There was no more room in her mind for anything else as he swiped his tongue up her throat, tasted her lips, and she bit down on his lip hard enough that the noise he made matched her own feral sounds. She moved her hips in concert with his, needing to do something to push her closer to the rising tide of a peak she could feel just beneath her skin, threatening to shatter something loose in her.

“So pretty like this,” he groaned, “fucking yourself back onto my cock like you can’t help yourself, coming for me whenever I want.” His voice was a fractured whisper, strained and cut raw from a strangled throat. He forced a hand around the base of her throat, not squeezing or choking, but she arched into the touch all the same, delirious with that extra point of contact and all it could threaten and imply. “You’ll come for me again, won’t you, Yelena— come again on my cock just so I can feel you clench around me. Good, keep those eyes open for me — on me. I want to watch you come.”

He brought her to the edge almost too quickly, her breath stuttering out in time with his staccato thrusts, the pleasure sharp as a knife.

“Tell me you’re close,” he breathed, snapping his hips quickly, drawing out short, guttural sounds from her. “One more,” he says, demanding and rough. “One more and you can rest, you’ll sleep like a baby, just give me one more, one more—”

She didn’t understand how he was still talking when she couldn’t form thoughts to save her soul, much less words, much less commands. So she just nodded and moaned desperately, and hoped he knew how to take her over that final edge before he came himself.

He fucked her just that little bit harder, and suddenly everything careened out of her control, sensations ricocheting all the way down to her body. The pleasure raking down her spine to her toes, all-consuming, blooming again with each stuttered thrust he drove into her.

His rhythm faltered, went choppy again before one hand clamped onto her shoulder and he pushed in as deep as he could manage, spilling into her with a loud low groan; a stuttered thrust followed, then a weaker third stroke as he spent himself completely.

“Fuck,” Yelena groaned.

Unable to process anything else while he pulled out of her, Yelena just tried to catch her breath. He dropped to the side so she wouldn’t be forced to take his full weight, panting just as heavily.

“Did you come?” he asked her.

She blinked at him. “Which time?”

“The last.”

“Yeah, didn’t you feel me?”

“Sorry, got a little swept up at the end.”

He was apologizing for a fucking that had made her come three times. Yelena almost giggled. “Yeah, that was a poor showing,” she told him, deadpan. “Do better next time.”

He laughed, so hard his body shook with the force of it, and she found herself joining it. He settled down beside her, skin still tacky with sweat, the cold air hitting their heated bodies now that they were coming down from the high.

After a long beat, his voice went careful. “You okay?” he asked her.

That question again.

There were a whole host of other ones underpinning it. It wasn’t just about her physical or emotional wellbeing, she could tell there was a whole landmine of questions beneath those two words. She could tell he wanted to know he hadn’t screwed everything up by sleeping with her, and she appreciated it — really, she did. But he also didn’t need to look at her like she was a fragile little flower after fucking her so hard she was sure his fingerprints were going to bruise purple on her thighs come morning.

“I’m okay,” she told him, honestly. “I still— don’t get me wrong, you rocked me world etcetera etcetera, but if you were hoping fucking me would dislodge my memories loose somehow, I’m sorry to report I still don’t have those back.”

“I’m not worried about that,” he told her, seriously. “You don’t get your memories back, we make new ones. I just want to make sure you’re okay. You’ve been through a lot.”

In the last day? In the last few weeks? In her lifetime? She could’ve taken her pick, and every answer would likely have gotten worse than the last. Instead, her hand snaked between them and he was already so close, he went easily at her tug, kissing her on command just because she wanted it again. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling her own wetness and his come leaking out of her already, and ignored the mess for the moment. He kissed her open mouthed, curling his tongue around hers, but it bled out into something softer at the end.

“I’m fine,” she told him.

And this time, she meant it.

#

Notes:

I am on bluesky, twitter.