Clint is twisting his arms around clumsily in an attempt to fold a fitted sheet for his and Laura's bed when his phone begins ringing. He groans loudly in frustration as he gives up his futile efforts of trying to fold the sheet neatly and instead opts to ball it up and throw it into the nearby laundry basket. He pulls his phone from his pocket and frowns at the unknown number on the screen.

"Yeah?" he answers warily. He didn't tend to get a lot of calls from anyone besides Laura and the kids, and on occasion Kate, so the unknown number was a bit odd.

"Why did you let her defect?"

He blinks rapidly and furrows his brow as he tries to place where he knows the voice from. "Sorry, I think you might have the wrong number."

"No, I don't. You're Clint Barton and I want to know why you let my sister defect to SHIELD."

His brain finally identifies the voice as Yelena's — probably should have pieced that one together a little quicker, Clint — and he takes a quick moment to consider her question. The simple answer was that when he'd looked into her eyes he'd just known that her life wasn't one that she had wanted. He'd felt it in his gut that she could be something so much better.

But Yelena takes the silence of his thoughtful hesitation as a need for clarification. "My sister, Natasha. SHIELD sent you to kill her, yes? Why didn't you?"

He's not sure why she's asking this question, and why she's asking this question now, all of a sudden. Thankfully the one thing he's pretty sure of is that she doesn't actively want to kill him anymore. He debates for a moment whether he even owes her an answer, but her voice from that night in New York echoes so loudly in his ears — "You got so much time with her" — and he realizes he does owe it to her. She'd been right that he had gotten so long with Nat while she'd had to settle for a few years as kids and piecemeal moments as adults. Nat's brave act to save him and everyone they'd lost had robbed Yelena of more time with her sister. Time that they both should have had. So yeah, he can tell her why he decided not to kill Nat all those years ago.

"She looked so exhausted and so...done with everything. I could tell she wanted out. I could tell she wasn't living the way she wanted to, that someone else was holding the keys to her life. She wasn't the ruthless murderer that had been promised to me by my superiors and the available intelligence. So, when I stood there pointing an arrow at her, I decided not to take the shot. Instead, I offered her a chance to change her life and use her skills for good."

"Okay," she says simply and before Clint can say anything else he hears the call disconnect. He stares down at the phone in his hand with a puzzled frown on his face, which is where Laura finds him a short time later.

"You okay, hon?"

"Huh?" he replies distractedly as he looks up. "Oh, yeah. I just— Yelena called me."

Laura's eyebrows raise slightly in surprise. "Nat's Yelena?"

He nods and she tilts her head in a silent prompt for an explanation. "She wanted to know why I didn't kill Nat when they sent me to."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Laura is quiet for a beat as she considers things. "Probably her way of processing her grief," she offers with a brief, sad smile. "You said she was devastated when you talked to her in New York. She's probably trying to find closure."

"Yeah, maybe," he agrees distractedly. Truth be told, the call had rattled him a little. He wasn't sure the wound from losing Nat would ever fully heal and sometimes these little reminders made him disappear into his mind and let himself swim in the memories, good and bad.


He gets another call, weeks later. This time he's in the barn, fiddling with the engine of their riding mower when his phone begins ringing. He hastily wipes off some oil from his hands before he pulls his phone from his pocket. Huh, another unknown number.

"Yeah?" he answers, once again wary even if he had an inkling of who it would be.

"You said she talked about me. What else did she tell you about me?"

A smile flashes on Clint's face at Yelena's question. He'd wondered if she would call again. "Lots," he says as he leans up against the mower. "She said you used to crawl into bed with her when you were scared of thunderstorms and that you'd ask her to sing to you to calm her down."

Yelena remains silent, but the call doesn't disconnect so he continues.

"She told me about the time you were getting bullied at school and she knocked the kid flat on his ass. She said she was terrified that they'd send her back to the Red Room because of it and she knew she shouldn't have drawn attention to herself that way, but that it was just instinct to jump in."

He pauses again to wait for an answer, but when one doesn't come he presses on.

"Yelena, I was thinking… You should—"

"I have to go," she interrupts suddenly and then the call disconnects.

He sighs and slips the phone back into his pocket. He looks up and whispers, "I don't know how to help her, Nat."


A month later he gets another call, this time while he's pouring himself some cereal for a late breakfast. He'd been up most of the night with Nate who'd been awake with a stomach ache, so Laura had told him to sleep in and she'd take care of the kids the next morning.

"Yes?" he answers, once again wary but this time having a strong suspicion of the identity of the unknown caller.

"What was she like?"

He frowns at her question as he puts down the jug of milk he'd just finished pouring some of into his bowl of cereal. She'd known Nat...why's she need to know what she's like? "What do you mean?"

"As a SHIELD agent, or Avenger, or whatever. What was she like?" she clarifies and Clint can hear a little exasperation in her tone.

He rubs the stubble on his chin as he thinks of how to answer her question. "She was... stubborn," he finally says with a chuckle. "When she first started training at SHIELD, they made her join the rookie class. You can probably guess how well that went." He pauses and waits for a chuckle because Kate had told him that Yelena, despite the obvious intimidating persona, had quite the sense of humour. But the line remains silent so he continues. "The instructors submitted their reports and demanded that she be removed from their classes because she wasn't going to learn anything useful and if anything would probably embarrass them because she was determined to always win. So instead they had some of us more senior agents provide training of SHIELD tactics, protocols, and the other sorts of things that she wouldn't have known from her former training. She hated those and much preferred the sparring and shooting exercises," he says with another chuckle. "She wiped the floor with me most of the time when we did hand-to-hand combat training, but she got real grumpy when we had shooting competitions. She was a hell of a shot with pistols and rifles too, but couldn't match me when I used my bow, and she took that personally."

He pauses again as he takes a seat at the kitchen table. "She was so stubborn and it was incredibly frustrating how she always needed to win, but she was also the most loyal person I've ever met. Once you earned her trust she would move heaven and earth for you, but that was something not a lot of people knew. I knew it, the rest of the Avengers knew it, and a handful of our colleagues at SHIELD knew it. But the world, not so much."

He blows out a breath before continuing. "In the early days, some people said the Avengers didn't need her. She was just a regular human being with a gun and some tasers, so what was she going to contribute? But what they didn't know was that Tasha was the heart of our team. She was careful and calculating with what she revealed to people, and yes, she played the cards based on the way she read the field, which sometimes meant operating in a grey area, but she was the one who kept us together."

His thoughts drift unbidden to the moments after he returned from Vormir without her. The rest of the team had been in shock. Once the realization had sunk in, their expressions had fallen and they'd been plunged into disarray. They had the stones and they had the gauntlet, they just needed to put them together and snap their fingers to fix what had broken five years before, but none of them could fathom the thought of doing it without the person who'd spent five long years holding what was left together — without the person who'd been the heart of their team.

"Hello?"

Yelena's voice startles him out of his memories. "Yeah, sorry," he says roughly.

"You really miss her."

He blows out another breath. "You might be the only person who understands just how much I miss her."

"She loved you."

She says it so plainly and like it was just a statement of fact rather than her offering him some blunt reassurance, and he smiles because Nat had been like that in the early days too. "Not as much as she loved you," he counters because, for as much as he knows Nat had loved him and cherished their friendship, he knows that the biggest piece of her heart had always been saved for her sister. He hears a faint, shaky breath on the other end of the phone. "I'm sorry," he says, echoing his words from that night in New York. They're not enough and yet they're all he can offer.

"I haven't forgiven you," she tells him slowly, "but I know she loved you and wouldn't have wanted me to hate you."

He doesn't know quite what to say to that but he's saved from having to say anything at all when the call disconnects.

Laura finds him a few minutes later, his bowl of cereal soggy and untouched. "Yelena again?" she guesses, eyeing his gaze on his phone.

"Yeah."

"What'd she ask this time?"

"What Nat was like as a SHIELD agent and Avenger."

"Huh," Laura remarks thoughtfully. He can see the gears turning in her mind, trying to piece together what she'd been looking for with the question.

"Yeah. She's still hurting. I can hear it in her voice. She's desperate for anything about Natasha."

Laura's lips tip into a sad smile. "Well, she lost her big sister, the person she loved most in the world. And the world ripped Nat from her not once, but twice," she says gently.

"I know. I just wish there was something I could do to help her. I know Nat would want me to try."

"You are," she reminds him. "You're answering her questions. She's processing at her own speed and in her own way, the same way you are."

"Yeah," he replies with a heavy sigh.


The next call doesn't come for another couple of months. It's another new, unknown number, but this time he's almost certain of who the caller is before he picks up.

"Hello?"

"What was her favourite food?"

This time he doesn't hesitate to respond. He was getting better at identifying the voice — even if the Russian accent probably should have been tipping him off on the previous calls. "It varied. When she was here at my place with my family, it was my wife's apple pie. When we were at the Triskelion, it was Greek food from this little place she found. But overall, I think probably peanut butter sandwiches."

There's a strangled sort of noise on the other end of the phone that Clint knows is Yelena's grief rearing up. Nat had told him once that the two of them had eaten peanut butter sandwiches all the time as kids. It had become comfort food for Nat — she ate them when she wanted to feel close with her sister.

'"She ate a lot of those over those last five years, I'm told," he adds, hoping that on some level it brings something other than grief to Yelena to know her sister had thought about her often in those five years. "I think she did it to feel close to you."

He's surprised when Yelena responds. "She used to make them for us when we were small. We'd watch cartoons and eat peanut butter sandwiches."

"She told me," he confirms. "Animaniacs was her favourite."

Yelena chuckles despite the tears Clint knows are on her cheeks. "She loved that 'Nations of the World' song."

Clint grins because he knows exactly how much Nat had loved that song. "She performed it for me once from memory. She was a little drunk at the time but still nailed it." He hears a proper, genuine laugh from Yelena and can't help but smile in relief at the sound. It tells him that between the wedges of grief strangling her, Yelena had some things she could hold on to. "She was a little bummed when I pointed out that not only were there countries missing but that there were many that were just plain wrong. I think I broke her heart a little when I told her that," he adds.

Yelena laughs again, this time boisterously. "Oh, thank you, Clint Barton. I needed that."

"Anytime," he replies and hopes she takes him at his word.


The next time she calls — another new, unknown number — he can hear she's a bit distressed.

"Hey."

"What was she like as an aunt?" she asks, and he thinks that there's some sense of urgency in her tone.

Still, despite the worry and anxiousness in her tone, he smiles. "Hesitant at first, but took to it like a fish in water. And the kids loved her. She was—" he stops abruptly when he sees Cooper and Nate climbing up the tree in the front yard, but spots the fragility of the branch as it starts to wobble in a concerning way. "Oh shit. Hey! Boys!" he says, yelling and hoping they can hear him. "Hang on a sec," he says into the phone and then tosses it onto the couch before sprinting outside.

He comes back a few minutes later, boys in tow and sends them up to their rooms with a promise to speak to them in a moment. He's surprised to find Yelena still on the line when he picks it up from the couch. "Hello?"

"Hi," she replies.

"Sorry, boys got themselves into some trouble."

"Sounded like they're going to get... What is it you Americans call it? A 'talking to' I think it is?"

He chuckles. "Yeah, they definitely are. And I actually need to go do that now, do you mind if I give you a call back in half an hour or so?"

Yelena is quiet for a minute before she responds. "Yes, that is fine."

"Great, thanks."

He settles onto the couch with Laura a little over thirty minutes later. "I told Yelena I would call her back," he says, holding up his phone.

Laura gestures for him to go ahead and then lays back down and rests her head on his thigh before opening up her book. "What'd she ask?"

"She wanted to know what Nat was like as an aunt."

"Interesting," she says and Clint shakes his head at her vague comment. Laura was like that sometimes, often coming to some conclusion of her own that she didn't feel the need to share with him.

He redials the last number that had called his phone and waits as it rings.

"Hello again," she answers. There's a hint of amusement in her tone, Clint thinks.

"Sorry about earlier. Probably would have ended with a visit to the hospital if I hadn't gotten out there in time."

"What happened?"

He blinks in surprise at her question. Their conversations so far had only ever centred on Natasha. Most of the time she never even said a greeting to him before asking her question of the day, but this time she appeared to be genuinely curious. "Uh, the boys started climbing the tree out front, which is usually fine, but we told them to stay off of it yesterday so I can go in and cut the mostly dead, weaker branches off. Haven't gotten a chance to do that yet, so it could've ended badly."

"Natasha sprained her wrist once when she fell out of a tree."

"Oh?" This was a story he didn't know.

"Yes. She was trying to save a cat. She fell out of the tree when one of the branches snapped. The cat climbed down shortly after and nuzzled her injured arm."

Clint grins widely and chuckles. "She always did like cats. If we weren't away so much for work she probably would've gotten one." He sees Laura smile at his comment.

"I have a dog."

He blinks in shock again. Not only was the declaration abrupt but it was an admission of something personal. They were really forging ahead onto brand new territory today, it seemed. "Oh yeah? What kind?"

"The shelter said they weren't sure. She's very fluffy and very smart."

"She got a name?"

"Fanny."

"That's...unique."

"It's after Natasha."

He frowns in confusion. "After Nat? She got a non-Russian name I don't know about?"

"It was one of her aliases," Yelena clarifies. "Fanny Longbottom. She was very annoyed with Mason when he gave her that one."

Clint laughs. "Oh, what I would give to have seen her face for that one."

"Me too." They're quiet for a second before Yelena speaks. "So, your kids loved her as an aunt?"

"Oh yeah, definitely. And she went all in. Took them shopping, brought them gifts, fingerpainted with them, taught them things she knew we didn't necessarily approve of, attended ballet recitals and baseball games, helped them with homework, played in the snow with them…"

"So she liked being an aunt," she summarizes.

"Yeah," Clint agrees. The smile Nat reserved for his kids was a special one that had warmed both his and Laura's hearts. Her joy and love were always clear in her expressions around them.

"I asked her once if she had ever wanted kids."

"What'd she say?" he asks. He'd asked her once too and she'd told him it wasn't in the cards for her thanks to the Red Room. He'd been horrified and had spent a good portion of that night staring at the ceiling of his bedroom wondering if there was a way to bring the bastards back to life so he could kill them again.

"She didn't answer but I think she did. I think being an aunt to your kids taught her that she could have been a good mom."

"She would have been an awesome mom," he agrees, feeling his heart clench just a little at the image of Natasha as a mother. Just another opportunity she never got to even think about he thinks darkly. "I'm so grateful my kids got to have her in their lives." Yelena remains quiet and Clint decides to gamble. "Rough day?"

He hears Yelena blow out a sigh that's clearly tinged with the heaviness of grief. "I miss her a lot today." He knows that feeling well. Some days the grief is overwhelming and others it's small enough to remember her fondly without the pain. "But this helped. Your answers, they help."

"I'm glad," he says honestly. Nat had never asked him to look after Yelena should anything happen to her, but he'd never asked her to look after Laura and the kids if something happened to him either. It was an implicit understanding between them. If his answers can bring any sense of peace to Yelena, he'll happily take her calls at any time of day.

"I have to go, but...I will call you again."

"Yeah, alright."


She does call again and Clint is surprised when it isn't a brand new number. He wonders if this means she doesn't feel the need to hide details from him, and therefore he's truly been taken off her shitlist. "Hello."

"Hi," she greets warmly, much to Clint's surprise.

"Someone sounds chipper."

"Kate Bishop took me around New York today."

He blinks several times as he processes this news. The two of them teaming up in any way, shape, or form was a recipe for a headache for him. He just knew it. "Oh yeah?"

"Yes. She showed me everything I had on my list, and she took me to the plaque for the Avengers, and to some tributes to Natasha. I...didn't realize other people cared so much."

"Uh, yeah. I mean, she was one of the original Avengers and the only woman, so she naturally had a fan base from the get-go."

"Yes, but these tributes were more than just from little girls. She inspired people."

"Yes," he agrees. She inspired me, he thinks and feels his heart clench with a pang of grief. But the pain fades quickly this time.

"She was really a hero."

"Yes. She was the best of us."

"I still miss her, and I'm still not totally done being angry with you, but...if it's okay, I would like us to keep talking."

"Yeah, that's fine. I'd like that too. Maybe you can tell me more about Nat as a kid. I'm sure she only gave me the flattering stories. I'll bet you have a few embarrassing ones."

"Oh, yes. She was a— what do you Americans call it? A dork?"

He laughs. "Yeah, that sounds right," he says with a laugh. "Hey, do you wanna come by the farm sometime? Laura, that's my wife…" he trails off as he comes to a realization. "Which now that I'm saying it out loud, I'm sure you already know exactly who she is. Anyway, she really wants to meet you."

"I will think about it," she says after a moment of silence. I'll take it, he thinks.

"Okay."

"Okay. I have to go, Kate Bishop is taking me to get pizza. She says New York pizza is better than pizza from Italy. I tell her this is not possible, but you know how she is."

"Yeah," he chuckles, "I do. Enjoy. And tell her to have a slice for Lucky."

"Goodbye, Clint Barton."

"Wait," he says suddenly.

"What?"

"You didn't ask a question."

Yelena is quiet for a moment before she speaks. "Was she happy? With you and your family and the Avengers?"

His answer comes more quickly to him than he'd thought it would. "Not as happy as she was when she told me you two had reunited. She was bruised to shit, ridiculously stiff, and sore to the point where getting up from a chair made her wince and groan — which for her was a big deal because she was stubborn with being tough all the time — but she was so happy. She told me about grown-up you while we piloted the jet away from the Raft and I could hear it in her voice how happy and relieved she was to know you were okay. I didn't get all the details, but she was so happy. I'd never seen her that happy before. Ever. She loved you so much, Yelena."

He hears a quiet whimper and then some concerned whispering in the background which he assumes is Kate. He feels a little guilty for bringing down her mood, but he hopes his point has been driven home. Natasha had loved Yelena so damn much.

"I have to go," Yelena says eventually.

"Take care of yourself, okay? And let Kate— Well, let her help if she can."

"Goodbye, Clint Barton."

"Bye."


The next time she calls, he's partially through reassembling a light fixture he'd taken apart to fix when Laura nudges him. He watches as she signs "Your phone is ringing" to him and then pulls his phone out of his pocket — apparently he'd forgotten to set it to vibrate as well as ring — and sees Yelena's number flashing on the screen. He hands Laura the phone and signs"Can you talk to her?"

Laura nods without hesitation and then swipes her finger over the screen to accept the call. He watches and does his best to lip-read as she answers. "Hi….Yes, I'm his wife, Laura. His hearing aid is being fixed so he asked me to answer for him. I hope that's alright."

She's quiet then as she listens to whatever it is Yelena is saying and he raises his eyebrows to ask for a hint but she just grins mischievously. "He dropped it down the stairs, alongside some books which landed on it." Laura laughs then. "Yes, sometimes he is."

He scowls at his wife and signs that she isn't allowed to gang up on him with her, which she just smirks at.

"Clint tells me you usually have a question about Natasha. I may be able to answer for you if you have one. Otherwise I can ask him and translate."

Clint watches as Laura listens and then balances the phone between her shoulder and ear as she frees her hands up to relay Yelena's question to him. "She wants to know what Natasha was like when we first brought her here to the farm."

Clint shrugs. "You can answer that," he signs to her, and she nods.

"Well, for me, it was a little nerve-wracking, knowing my husband was bringing home an assassin who'd defected not all that long before. But I trusted him and I trusted his judgment, so when he told me he wanted to bring her home with him on his next visit, I didn't disagree.

"Natasha was nothing like I expected. She was...uncertain and obviously trying very hard to be polite and a good house guest. Clint had told me she was a good person and I'd believed him, and when he'd told me that she was still rough around the edges and not totally acclimatized to Western culture, I'd believed him too. But this Natasha that walked through the door...she was polite, and kind, and thoughtful in ways I hadn't expected.

"It took a long time for her to be comfortable with us here, but once she had that...it was like finding a sister I never knew I had." Laura pauses when he winces at her choice of words. "Sorry," she apologizes immediately."That was thoughtless of me. I just meant that Nat and I eventually grew quite close."

Laura is quiet again as she listens. She signs to Clint quickly, telling him Yelena isn't bothered by her comment. "Yes, she was closed off and held things close to the vest. But eventually, she began to open up and share little snippets about herself. It was little things, the food she had discovered that she liked, her favourite colour, funny stories about Clint and Phil — sorry, that was another colleague of hers at SHIELD — and other things like that.

"We used to sit out on the porch sometimes after dinner when the kids were with Clint, drinking wine and watching the fireflies or the stars while chatting. It was during one of those sit-downs that she first told me about you."

Laura signs to him again as she goes quiet to listen to Yelena. "She wants to know what Natasha told me about her."

Clint nods in understanding and then watches Laura carefully, also curious as to her answer. "She told me she had a sister she hadn't seen in years, and explained how those years in Ohio were the best of her life. She sounded bittersweet as she explained it all and told me about her little sister who had been a fireball of energy and a force of nature when it came to her loving her family. She told me that she loved you and thought about you often. I asked if she knew where you were and she said she had no idea.

"It was years later after you two had reconciled that we got a chance to chat on the phone for a few minutes on a secure line. She was so happy, almost bursting at the seams that she'd reunited with you. It was like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, despite the situation she was in as a global fugitive."

Laura pauses again and Clint waits for her to explain Yelena's reaction to Laura's answer. "She has to go," she signs quickly, but he sees her frown deepen. "But she sounds upset."

He quickly begins signing to Laura, "Ask her if she wants to visit. We have photos and videos of Nat we can show her. I don't know if she has anything like that."

Laura's eyebrows rise at his impulsive offer, but he can see she begins to relay the message to Yelena. "Are you near Iowa by chance? You could come to visit. We have lots of pictures and even some videos of her with the kids. Plus you can ask Clint and me all the questions you want about Natasha. We...we haven't been talking about her as much as we should be. It would be nice to share some stories with someone else who loved her."

Clint watches as Laura waits for a response patiently. Finally, she nods hesitantly and begins to sign. "She says she might come next week. She has a job she needs to finish up first, but if she can wrap it up quickly enough, she'll come."

Clint sits back in his chair and nods as he blows out a light sigh. We're not leaving her alone, Nat, he thinks. We may not be family to her, but as your sister, she's family to us. We'll help her any way that we can, he promises.


This one grew out of a random thought of 'I wonder what cartoons Nat and Yelena watched in Ohio' and the mental image of an adult Natasha, slightly tipsy, eagerly reciting the Nations of the World song (which if you have not seen...I strongly recommend watching!).

Comments and thoughts are always welcomed. ❤️