better angels
by Ninazadzia
"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
~ Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address - 1861
The first time we met, Yelena was hired to kill me.
Okay, fine—technically, it wasn't our first time meeting, not by a long-shot. HYDRA was in bed with Dreykov during the Cold War, and the Winter Soldier project and the Black Widow program went together like apple pie and fireworks on the fourth of July.
Those years were a blur—but I spent untold stretches of time in the Red Room. Or at least the Winter Soldier did.
"Turn around. Slowly."
Somewhere deep in the trenches of my subconscious, I placed her voice. I recognized the hints of Ohio in her Russian accent, the cadence with which she spoke.
She pressed the barrel of her gun harder into the back of my neck. I didn't need to turn around to know that it belonged to a wide-eyed blonde assassin named Yelena Belova.
Is she standing on her tip-toes?
It was a ludicrous thought, that that's where my mind went, as I was facing certain death. But the Yelena I knew was a good seven inches shorter than me—or at least she had been, in the time that I knew her. I couldn't help it. I had to look.
At her request, I turned around.
Slowly.
Widows were trained in the art of deception—if Yelena Belova ever needed a poker face, she had one readily available. But as her blue orbs locked with mine, it was as if something registered, however deep down. And for a moment—if only for a moment—her façade faltered.
The masked slipped, and I saw it. A glimpse of hesitation.
"Go ahead." The words barely escaped my throat. I nodded towards the barrel of her gun. "You're here to kill me, right?"
She didn't say anything for a moment. She didn't move, didn't breath, didn't drop her hands, not even slightly. We stood there, locked in a stalemate, while she stared into my soul.
And while she was looking at me, I was looking at her.
"It's okay," I whispered.
I'd heard rumors about Melina's project—how she'd adapted the same formula used in the Winter Soldier project to chemically subjugate Dreykov's Widows. But this was my first time seeing it up close, and in the eyes of someone I once knew, however many lifetimes ago.
Yelena wasn't entirely Yelena. While I didn't know her well, that much was obvious.
"You're not you," she strained. Her finger motioned as if she was going to squeeze the trigger. All the while, her face turned red, as if the mere action of forcing the words out of her mouth would cause her faint. "Are you, soldat?" she managed.
I shook my head. Whether she was pleading with me to give her permission to finish her job—or to let her off the hook—I couldn't tell.
"I'm not the Winter Soldier anymore." I took a step closer to her. I pressed my forehead against the trigger. "But you do what you have to do, vdova."
Widow.
Whatever it was—whether it was that I'd given her permission to do it, that I'd called her a Widow, that we used the pet-names we'd abandoned many years ago—it caused her to drop the gun from her hands. And before she could bend down to pick it up, before she could make another move—my host Vytenis burst through the front door.
"Sveiki, Taurai—"
Thankfully, for his sake, the front door was separated from the living room, and he couldn't see the two of us from where he stood. But the moment Vytenis started rattling off in Lithuanian, and it was clear that his back was turned to the front door—Yelena slipped out the window. And the only trace left behind that she'd ever been there in the first place was the indentation of her gun in my forehead.
The second time we met, Valentina sent me to recruit her.
I wasn't surprised when I found out her and Natasha were raised together, and I was even less surprised to see her name on the roster of potential Thunderbolts—but what caught me off guard was that even after I explained to Val my history with her, and how she'd tried to kill me, it only solidified that I would be the perfect candidate to pitch Yelena Belova the Thunderbolts initiative.
"Just do me a favor, James," Valentina asked, before I stepped off the plane to Ohio. "Don't mention your hiccup in Lithuania, with her. I think it's best let's leave the past in the past."
So, true to my word, and to Valentina's request—I didn't bring it up.
We kicked the can for a little over an hour. We talked about Natasha, and Steve, and our shared experience as Avengers-adjacent individuals; not quite heroes, but close enough to see what one looked like, to know why we could never be them.
It would be ten years before we talked about that night.
"Can't sleep?"
I'd snuck into Ona's living room hoping to find a semi-comfortable carpet to curl up on. Instead, I found Yelena, sitting in front of the fireplace—I book in one hand and a bottle of mead in the other.
She shook her glass. "The old lady of the house, Ramune—she was a raging bitch, which by Widow standards is saying something. But damn did she make good mead."
"Can I…?"
I didn't have to say another word—she outright handed me the bottle.
One sip, and it had none of the burn I remembered it to. My heart raced as I sat down on the couch next to Yelena, and I remembered for the first time in ages that my inability to get drunk could be a problem, in such situations.
"Yeah, this is some good stuff," I managed, as I handed the bottle back to her.
She snorted. "Convincing, James," she mused.
I shook my head. "No, seriously, it is. I just—I can't get drunk."
"Really?"
I nodded, and let out a long sigh. While I tried to keep my gaze trained on the fire in front of me, I caught a glimpse of her out of my peripheral vision.
Goddamn. Could I go for a light buzz right now.
"Yeah, Steve had the same problem." I kicked my feet up onto the ottoman in front of me, and sunk into the couch cushions. "One of the drawbacks of being injected with Super Soldier serum, apparently."
"Huh. So that explains why Walker is so uptight."
I couldn't help it—I laughed. It wasn't appropriate, given the fact that I was the de facto Thunderbolts leader (not to mention the closest thing Walker had to a friend, which was saying something), but it was funny. Hell, she was funny.
It was exactly how I remembered her, from all of those years ago.
I looked around the room. I thought of where we were. Sure, Ramune's safe house in Silute was a far cry from the capital city Yelena had ambushed me in a decade ago—but it was my first time back in Lithuania since the Blip. And the last time I had been there, Yelena Belova had been standing across from me with a gun to the back of my neck.
If there was ever a time to talk about it—this would be it.
It was as if Yelena sensed a change in the energy, before I could even get the words out of my mouth. "We don't need to talk about it, James," she whispered.
I shook my head. I turned to face her, and she kept her gaze trained firmly on the fire in front of her. Yellow and orange flames flickered in her blue irises.
"It's just—I never thanked you." My throat was dry from the smoke. I cleared it, and it was as if the words had gotten lodged somewhere in my cotton-mouth.
Yelena gave a slight shake of the head, and turned ever so slightly to look at me. "If anything, I should be thanking you. I still don't know how you managed to get through to me, with Dreykov's chemical subjugation. But it's one less death on my hands…"
She trailed off.
"…and one less person to make amends for, right?" I finished for her.
She finally turned, her glassy blue eyes meeting mine, for the first time since that day in Vilnius.
"Yeah," she managed. "I guess you would know all about that, wouldn't you?"
Her words hung in the air for a moment. Neither of us said anything, the sound of crackling fire filling the silence in the room.
"What do you think it was?" I asked, finally daring to say the words I'd been holding back for months, since Yelena Belova came back into my life.
"You mean, why didn't I pull the trigger?"
I nodded.
She shrugged, and reached for the mead. This time, she took a long, drawn out sip. "Honestly, James—I can't reconcile you two in my mind. You and the Winter Soldier, I mean," she explained. "I just—I don't know. I could tell it wasn't you. That this robot…this devoid killing machine, the one I was so scared of in the Red Room—he couldn't possibly be you."
As the words escaped her mouth, I thought of what Steve had said to me, a mere matter of months after Yelena almost killed me in Vilnius.
What you did all of those years—it wasn't you.
"You and I both know, though," I whispered. "Even if it wasn't me—not really, at least—I still did those things."
She nodded, tears threatened to spring from her eyes. "I know," she managed. "I guess… I guess the only way I can explain it, is that in that moment, I realized something."
She swallowed a lump in her throat. She knocked back a little more mead, and then set the bottle down on the ground in front of her.
"…I realized there was more." She motioned to the room around her—to the paintings, the elaborate tapestries, and all of the gorgeous material items Ramune's wealth as an assassin-for-hire afforded her. "There's more to life than this, than being a killer. I mean, if the Winter Soldier could break free—I had no excuse not to at least try, right?"
I couldn't help it—I smiled. "I think that's about the first positive experience someone's ever gotten out of me being the Winter Soldier, in the last seventy years."
And it was with that that we both started laughing.
We were loud—loud enough to wake up Walker and Ava, who were sleeping in the next room, and maybe even loud enough to wake up Ramune and Antonia—but we didn't care. It felt so good, so easy, to just sit there on the fluffy couch in front of the fire with Yelena, and laugh as if there was no one else in the world who could hear us, and drink mead as if it would actually be able to get me drunk, and snake my arm around Yelena's waist as if no one could walk into the room at any minute—
Oh.
I froze. I realized how dangerously close I was to her, how her mouth was positioned right below mine. That so much as a centimeter in one direction or the other, and I would melt into her.
"Why'd you stop?" she breathed against my lips.
I shook my head slightly. "I don't want us to get carried away…"
She wrapped her hands around the back of my neck. She pulled me down to kiss her. "For the love of God, James. Why not?"
And it was with those words—as I realized, fuck it, she's right, why the hell not—and I pressed my lips against hers, that I remembered what I always loved about Yelena.
Free-spirits, carefree young women—they didn't survive the Black Widow program. Dreykov say to that personally. He either squashed them like bugs or made sure that by the time he was through with them, there wouldn't be a single thing left on this goddamn earth for them to be carefree about. And even though I only ever saw her as a distant, and my memories as the Winter Soldier were fuzzy as all hell—I remembered her spirit. I remembered how her grit existed alongside the light that was inside of her—that no matter how hard Drekyov tried to stomp it out, no matter how many murder missions he sent her on or how many mind-altering chemical were at his disposal—Yelena Belova would never fully be his.
No matter what happened—assassin or not, Thunderbolt or not—Yelena Belova would always be my better angel.
"…light reflects from your shadow
It is more than I thought could exist
You move through the room
Like breathing was easy
If someone believed me…"
~angels, the xx