Chapter 6 - Stupid Things, like Caring

Kate had every intention of sleeping.

She stared at the ceiling and tried very hard not to think, but this was, historically, not something she was good at.

She had returned to her room shortly after the panic attack, not being able to exist in the thick air that lingered in the room, as Yelena returned unceremoniously to the library nook like nothing had happened. 

She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and let out a slow breath.

It was just a panic attack. She'd had them before. They weren't a big deal, and more to the point, they weren't even caused by anything remotely interesting.

She'd faced down actual threats all the time, things with guns and high stakes, and her nervous system had stayed perfectly cooperative through all of it. It never happened on missions. Never in the field, never under pressure, never when the situation actually called for a reasonable amount of panic.

It was always this instead. The stuff she couldn't fix, couldn't aim at, couldn't resolve with the right trick arrow. 

Her brain moved too fast for its own good, it always has, it would start running and then keep running, one thought tripping into the next, and the faster it went the louder it got until the noise got too loud and her body made the executive decision to shut the whole operation down.

It was just first week jitters. New team, new expectations. Anyone would be overwhelmed.

The fact it had hit right when she was thinking about Yelena didn’t mean anything. That was just… timing, bad timing.

She was thankful that nobody had seen it except Yelena, but she couldn’t decide if that was the best, or worst case scenario; it depended on which way she looked at it.

Best because the alternative was Peter, who would’ve been kind about it in a way that would have given it much more significance. 

Worst, because Yelena seeing it meant Yelena saw her vulnerable, and Yelena knowing anything vulnerable about her felt premature, and disarming. 

She probably thinks I’m so weak now. 

But, she kept coming back to the hand on her knee.

It had been light. Barely there, really. Just a point of contact, warm and grounding, saying I'm here without either of them having to use words. No fuss, no questions, no performance of concern. Just Yelena, crouching beside her, staying.

That was the part she couldn't get past. Not just that Yelena had noticed, though that alone was more than she'd expected, but that she'd known exactly what to do with what she noticed. Kate hadn't asked for anything. Hadn't said anything. And somehow that hadn't mattered.

She'd been so deep inside her own head that it had taken a moment to register, and then it had registered all at once. And that had been the thing that pulled her back. Not the carpet she'd been staring at. Not the sounds of the room she'd been cataloguing. Not any of the tricks she'd spent years teaching herself for exactly this kind of moment.

Just Yelena’s hand.

She shook her head against the pillow.

Stop it, Kate.

She reached for her phone, essentially changing the subject on herself.

She opened the Avengers dashboard app out of habit, intending to double-check tomorrow's timetable, and found it exactly where she'd left it.

09:00 - Pre-Mission Brief. 19:00 - Departure. 

She was about to close the app when she noticed an icon in the top right corner. A speech bubble, with 25 notifications.

A group chat opened, called “The Newb Avengers” at the top with everyone in the team in it, she read through the messages, only having been added to it that night. 

Cassie: we made it into the group chat guys😎

Ava: don’t make it weird, you’ll be removed

Kamala: omg yaayyy! Hi guys 🥰xxxxx

Peter: newb avengers??🤣

Cassie: who named it newb avengers?? 🙄

Kamala: I kinda like it! 💁🏼‍♀️

Bob: I’m sure it’s meant like bc you’re new to the team! 

Yelena: incorrect

Ava: we meant it like they’re baby avengers, hope this helps 👍🏻

Kate chuckled along reading the chat but decided she wouldn’t get involved tonight, she’d received a message from Pete asking if she’d gone to bed, since she left the living room without saying a word.

She replied shortly explaining that she wanted to get an early night and thought about closing her phone, but her fingers had other plans. 

Almost absentmindedly, she clicked on Yelena's name, opening a private chat.

She stared at it for a moment longer than she needed to, thumb hovering over the keyboard in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar. The cursor blinked at her, patient and unhelpful, which was becoming a theme.

She finally typed.

Heyyyy I wanted to say about earlier, when you came over and sat with me when I was losing a fight with my own nervous system, you really didn't have to do that, and I know things between us are weird right now so I just wanted to say thank you. it actually helped a lot

She read it back. Too long. Too earnest. Way too much.

Deleted it.

Thank you for earlier. genuinely.

Too short. Too loaded. That one was somehow worse.

She put the phone face down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling for thirty seconds, having a very brief and very serious conversation with herself about not making it weird. 

Then she picked it up again.

Hey. this is really awkward but that's my speciality clearly, you didn't have to come over earlier and you did, so thank you. that's all 👍

She sent it before she could read it back. Then she put the phone face down, pulled the duvet up to her chin, and lay very still.

Why did she add an emoji. Why did she add a thumbs up emoji specifically. Of all the emojis available to her, of all the ways she could have ended that sentence, she had chosen the one that made her sound like she was confirming a dentist appointment.

She looked at Lucky, who was watching her from his spot on the bed with the patient expression of a dog who had seen her do worse.

"What did I do?" she said.

He huffed. It sounded almost sympathetic.

Fifteen painful minutes passed. She did not check the phone, she was exercising restraint. 

She was a composed, mature adult who had sent a perfectly reasonable message and was comfortable sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing how it had landed.

The phone buzzed.

She grabbed it immediately.

She waited a full minute before opening it, out of principle, and after the longest sixty seconds of her life:

Yelena: You are welcome.

Kate stared at it. Three words. Perfectly legible, correctly punctuated, and somehow still completely unreadable... which, she was beginning to understand, was Yelena's speciality. Then another buzz brought her out of her spiralling. 

Yelena: Are you feeling better?

Taken aback by the earnestness of the message, Kate typed back before she could stop herself.

Kate: Yeah totally! I’m totally fine, just a blip! 

Kate: Also if we could pretend it never happened, that would be great 👍🏻

Yelena: Pretend what happened?

Kate: when I had a panic attack in the middle of the living room

Kate: you totally were doing a bit weren't you…

Yelena: Yes 

Kate: You're a very blunt texter yanno

Yelena: As opposed to in real life when I'm very bubbly?

Kate: Exactly! Your sunshine and rainbows personality is being completely lost in text 😉

Yelena: Goodnight, Kate Bishop 😉

Kate read it twice with a smile plastered on her face and set the phone down on the nightstand.

She was slightly deflated that the conversation ended so quickly, but overall happy they had gotten the awkwardness out of the way by addressing the panic attack.

She stared at the ceiling and reflected on where she and Yelena stood.

They kept reaching some version of okay, and then something would tip it sideways again, and they'd have to start the whole negotiation over from scratch.

Civil colleagues, she'd said. Like a rule she could follow if she just repeated it enough times.

She huffed softly at the ceiling.

A beat, and then Lucky huffed too, slow and heavy, like he'd heard her and had thoughts on the matter.

Kate looked at him. He didn't look back, just resettled his chin on her leg with a sigh that somehow managed to feel pointed.

The smile that crossed her face was small and involuntary.

She reached over and scratched behind his ears, turned the lamp off, and let the dark settle around her.

—

Yelena woke with a sharp inhale, breath ragged at the edges, a ghost of a sound dying on her lips before she was fully conscious enough to be embarrassed by it.

For a moment, she just lay there, heart running faster than it had any reason to at 6:05 in the morning, staring at the ceiling with the particular disorientation of someone dragged reluctantly back to reality.

The room was dark and quiet, apart from her own breath. She blinked a few times, jaw slack, slowly regaining full consciousness.

She was used to waking up suddenly with ragged breath. Nightmares had been a fixture for long enough, the cold sweat, the hammering pulse, the few disorienting seconds of not knowing what was real, and finally the relief of finding herself nowhere near where the nightmare had put her. She knew the shape of that feeling intimately.

But this wasn't that.

Her skin was warm. Too warm. Her pulse was fast, but it wasn't fear. She became aware of her legs wound tight in the sheets, and a coiled warmth sitting low in her stomach that had absolutely no business being there at all.

Even with no distinct memory of the dream, every instinct was pulling her back toward it. To close her eyes. To find her way back to wherever she'd been and finish what was unfinished.

She lay very still while her brain caught up with her body and arrived at a conclusion she immediately didn't want to have.

Blue eyes.

She stopped that thought before it finished, untangled her legs from the sheets and got up.

She needed a shower. A cold one. She was across the room and into the bathroom before she'd fully registered moving, turning the tap to cold without ceremony and stepping under it before anything in her could change her mind.

The water hit her like a correction.

She stood under it, hands flat against the tile, and let it work. Her breathing slowed. Her pulse dropped. The warmth that had followed her out of sleep began, finally, to recede.

Good.

She closed her eyes.

That was a mistake.

Because the moment she did, something in her brain decided that the cold water and the quiet absence of anything else to focus on was an excellent opportunity to start filling in details. Not all of them. Just enough.

Hands trailing down her stomach, nails leaving a delicious burn in their wake.

Pale shoulders and the shift of back muscles draped in a sheen of sweat, brunette hair cascading in a pool over her lower stomach.

Warm breath caressing the delicate skin at the apex of her thighs. Blue eyes looking up at her, half-lidded, and a low familiar voice, just slightly undone, pleading her name.

"Yelena."

Kate.

Her eyes snapped open.

Despite the cold water clinging to her skin, she was burning.

She found herself biting her lip hard enough to almost draw blood, her fingers hovering over where she wanted them most, shaking slightly as she fought the urge to plunge them between her legs.

At the realisation of what she was close to doing, her other hand shot out and wrenched the tap colder, and she forced her head completely under the stream.

She pressed her forehead against the tile and focused on the cold.

She tried to be logical about it. Dreams didn't mean anything. They were neurological noise, just the brain filing things away in whatever order it chose, making connections that had nothing to do with anything. Just nonsensical noise.

The fact that the noise had taken a very specific shape. A shape with rippling back muscles and blue eyes and a voice she was still trying not to hear on a loop.

That meant nothing.

Right?

She turned the water off.

She stood in the middle of the bathroom, dripping, and looked at her reflection.

Are you broken? She asked herself, silently, because it genuinely felt like a reasonable question.

After the subjugation was over, after the Red Room, she had spent years mastering complete control of herself. Her reactions, her responses, her feelings… all of it managed, all of it filed, all of it kept in its correct place.

Then Kate Bishop had arrived with her clumsy golden retriever charm and her inability to stay quiet for longer than forty-five seconds, and apparently that was all it took to dismantle years of hard-won discipline.

This was frankly embarrassing.

The mantra of this dream meant nothing, providing little to no solace. Which was the problem with relying on her own thoughts, they were the ones that had gotten her into this predicament in the first place. She couldn't trust them to get her out of it.

She needed someone to tell her this didn't mean anything.

She needed someone who would be honest with her, no matter what the conclusion was.

Annoyingly, she needed Ava.

She picked up her phone.

Yelena: Are you awake?

Ava: As always

Yelena: Run?

Ava: Give me ten minutes

Yelena put the phone down, finished getting dressed, and told herself she was going to approach this the way she approached everything, calmly, methodically, without emotion. 

She simply had a question of a neurological nature. Dreams and their significance, or lack thereof.

It was practically academic, of course.

—

They were around twenty minutes into their run when Yelena finally spoke. Ava had known she wanted to; she'd been waiting, keeping the silence comfortable, not pushing.

"When you dream," Yelena said, eyes forward, "do they mean anything?"

"Damn, finally." Ava exhaled with relief. "Don't get me wrong, silent runs are not unusual for you, but I could practically smell the fumes from how hard your brain was working."

Yelena shot her an incredulous look, though a smile poked through despite herself. She was quietly grateful that Ava was keeping it light.

"It depends on the dream," Ava said. "Like, when I had that dream about being a competitive dog groomer, but all the dogs were the size of horses, had human heads, and kept screaming at me for a short back and sides—" She huffed through a few strides, the sentence costing her some breath. "I don't think that one meant anything."

Yelena was quiet for a moment, processing this with the particular contemplative expression she reserved for things that genuinely required consideration.

"So… they don't mean anything?" She flicked her eyes toward Ava for the first time in twenty minutes.

"Nonsensical ones don't," Ava said, with a look that suggested she already knew this was going somewhere more specific. "Is this curiosity, or did you have a particularly weird dream?"

"Weird dream."

"If you were also a competitive dog groomer, I don't think our friendship will survive the competition. It's my passion, Yelena. I’ll show no mercy," She delivered this with complete seriousness.

"Do not worry, I was not competitively grooming dogs; lucky for you, because I would win.”

She overdramatically gasped, and they laughed. Ava let the lightness sit for a moment before bringing it back, gently.

"So what was it?"

Yelena huffed. "A dream."

"What kind of dream?" Ava glanced over, looking for clues.

"I do not want to say." The jaw tension was back.

"Oh, come on, we're adults." A smirk crept onto Ava’s face, and then slightly too loudly. "It was a sex dream, wasn’t it?"

Yelena's head snapped toward her, fire in her eyes.

Ava’s smirk widened into a full-blown smile, she kept her eyes fixed on Yelena hoping that if she stayed quiet long enough, Yelena would answer, and sure enough, after a few more strides, Yelena answered.

"Yes." Chin up, eyes straight forward, posture perfect.

"Was it about someone on the team?"

Yelena said nothing.

Which was an answer in itself.

"Wow, Walker will be so flattered."

Yelena let out a half-laugh, half-exhale of pure disgust. "Please, no. That would classify as nightmare." She shook her head firmly, as if physically dispelling the image. 

They reached the park, empty at this hour, and slowed, checking their wrists, catching their breath in the early morning quiet.

"So you're asking if the sex dream means anything?"

Yelena didn't answer out loud. She just nodded. Once, reluctantly.

Ava looked at her shoes for a moment, then looked up, shielding her eyes from the low morning sun. "You wanna know what I actually think?"

"Yes", Yelena said, with a small shrug, hands on her hips, "This is why I am asking, you do not coat with sugar."

"You need to get laid." Ava delivered flatly.

Yelena's leg swept out with precision and zero warning, but Ava recovered fast, hands up, laughing slightly now.

"Okay, okay—" She composed herself, letting the smile settle into something more genuine. "Dreams don't always mean something. But on this occasion, more than likely… It's your brain being more honest than you've been letting yourself be. If you're repressing shit, dreams are where it comes to the surface."

Yelena exhaled slowly, looked up at the sky, and let out a long sigh. "No, I do not like your answer. Give me a different one."

"Sorry, no can do." Ava didn't sound sorry. "But at least my answer has an action point?"

Yelena raised an eyebrow. "And what is that?"

The smirk crept back slowly. "Get laid."

Yelena lunged, but Ava had already phased behind her and out of harm's way, laughing like a child, and then took off into a sprint, putting distance between them before Yelena could close it.

They ran the rest of the way home like that, Ava throwing verbal jabs over her shoulder and Yelena throwing real ones, both of them laughing more than either would have admitted to.

They slowed as they reached the front doors, breath coming back to them in the quiet morning air.

Ava put a hand on Yelena's arm before she could reach for the handle, and she stopped. She recognised that touch. Ava only did it when she meant something.

"Right, I'm gonna be serious for a second." Ava kept her voice even. "And if I'm out of line, feel free to attempt to rock my shit."

She paused, choosing her words carefully; she knew exactly how quickly this particular person could close a door.

"You've got to stop being a control freak with yourself."

Yelena tilted her head slightly, but didn't shut it down. Which was, from her, essentially permission to continue.

"I think I know what's going on." She held her gaze, steady, not saying the name she didn't need to say. "And you've been clearly tying yourself in knots for the past week and a half… It's exhausting to watch, so I can only imagine how exhausting it feels."

Yelena's jaw flexed.

"You're fighting something, and you're not yourself." Ava's voice softened just slightly. "And not to be sappy about it, but I miss my best friend."

The morning sat quietly around them. A cab moved through the intersection. A shutter rolled up somewhere down the block.

"I'm not telling you to do anything," Ava said. "I'm just telling you that trying to control your way out of something that isn't controllable is going to wear you down eventually. And you deserve better than that."

A long beat passed. Yelena looked at the door handle, processing quietly. Not shutting down. Just thinking.

"Stop being a pussy, basically," Ava said, attempting to lighten the tone.

Yelena breathed out a brief laugh. Then she went quiet again, and when she spoke it was almost under her breath.

"She scares me."

Ava blinked. "Ok, I gotta make sure—”, shaking her head in confusion at someone scaring Yelena. ”Bishop!?"

Yelena met her with a look that was entirely sincere.

Ava, genuinely surprised but wanting to give her room, asked carefully. "What's scary?"

"How easy it is to—" Yelena cut herself off and tried again. "She is basically a stranger." She shook her head, jaw set, the words coming out with a frustration directed entirely inward. "But I put her on a wire. I went to her apartment to warn her out of the way. I sent a picture that could have compromised my mission. I pulled my punches." A beat. "I kept that burner phone"

She was pacing now, short and contained, the way she moved when something had too much energy and nowhere to go.

"She makes me do—" She stopped herself before the word. "Stupid things."

Her chest was rising and falling unevenly, breath coming in short huffs, and that particular downward set of her mouth was present on her face.

Ava watched her for a moment. "Is the scary part trying to answer why you did those things?"

Yelena didn't want to answer that. Not out loud, not even in her own head, because the answer was sitting right there, and it was too much.

"Stupid things lead to someone getting hurt," she said instead, delivering it like a fact, jaw set and posture stiff.

Stupid things like caring.

She knew what caring cost. The Red Room had shown her early that attachment was a liability, something to be found and used against you. People who knew what you loved had power over you. Caring openly was handing someone a map to everything that could hurt you.

And Natasha. The pain she felt when she lost her only reinforced this fact: Caring always leads to hurting.

It was vulnerable, it was stupid.

"You're already hurting."

The words landed quietly. And they stung, because Ava was right, and Yelena knew she was right, and knowing it didn't make it easier to sit with.

Every time she had forced distance between herself and Kate she had felt it, the warmth being ripped from her chest, the confusion on Kate's face after their arguments, open and unguarded in the way Kate always was. That had hurt. 

Which confirmed something worse.

She was hurting Kate too.

The Civil Colleague framework is crumbling around her, with no other framework to take its place; all she knows is that the distance isn't working. But she doesn't know what working would even look like.

"I don't know how to do this," she said. The confusion on her face was genuine, unguarded in a way she rarely let herself be. It was the most honest thing she'd said out loud in longer than she could remember.

Ava was quiet for a moment. Then, simply: "You don't have to have everything figured out. Ava said. "Just stop fighting it at a hundred per cent. You don't have to let her all the way in,  just stop slamming the door quite so hard. Stop fighting this so hard."

Yelena looked at the door.

"That is not as easy as you make it sound," she said.

"I know," Ava said. "But you've been doing the hard thing this whole time, fighting everything, and it's not working." She tilted her head slightly. "Maybe try the other thing."

Yelena said nothing. But she didn't argue, which from her was as close to agreement as Ava was likely to get.

Ava pulled the door open. "Like I said, stop being a pussy"

A small comedic huff exhaled past Yelenas' lips as she shook her head. "I hate that this was slightly helpful", she said finally.

"What can I say?" Ava said, with a cocky shrug. "I’m just so easy to open up to, look at you. Heart on your sleeve!" She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead with theatrical drama.

Yelena walked through the open door and shot her a pointed look. "Do not push it."

Ava followed, a quiet laugh slipping out.

She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to.

—

As the elevator dinged onto their residential floor, the smell hit them first.

Burnt eggs and something that might have been toast in a previous life, carried on a faint haze of smoke that had settled across the living area like a very domestic disaster.

Bob appeared beside them almost immediately, wide-eyed and quietly desperate. "He's making breakfast!” his voice then dropped to a whisper, “I can’t do this alone! Help me!?”

Kamala and Cassie were sitting on the stools at the kitchen island, Kamala trying to hide the fear on her face looking at the burnt eggs smiling and nodding, affirming Alexei’s questionable technique.

And Cassie span around in the chair, clearly enjoying the display, “I heard this is something he does every mission day? What a treat!” through gritted teeth.

Yelena groaned loudly at the ceiling with the petulance of a child who’s embarrassed by their Dad, and stomped towards him. 

Alexei stood at the stove with the focused energy of a man who believed completely in what he was doing, whisking a pan of eggs that had long since made peace with the bottom of the pan and were not coming back from it. He was humming something vaguely patriotic under his breath. 

“Daddy you can not cook, please, choose different mission day ritual.” She attempted to grab the pan handle, but he pulled it up and away out of her reach. 

"Lenaaaa, it is tradition." He whisked with renewed conviction. “I get better every time!”

He doesn’t get better every time; they just get better at making the actual breakfast around him. 

After sitting through the first of his mission day breakfasts, they forced down anything they could, hid any food that they couldn't, and vowed that next time they would not let it get to that point. 

So the tradition became that Alexei would “cook”, and the rest of the team would work around him in silence, saving different aspects of the meal. 

Turning down burners he'd left too high, starting fresh batches to swap out the casualties, and adding seasoning to bland foods. 

Nobody had ever announced what they were doing, but they all looked at each other with hidden triumphant smiles every time they managed to salvage a meal; that was the actual tradition, and Yelena would be lying if she said she didn’t love it.

It felt like a real family. 

“Blyat, wait!” Alexei stopped abruptly, throwing his hands into the air, a loud clank of the pan dropping onto the kitchen island echoed “The Hawk and the Spider! Integral to today's mission, they must enjoy the breakfast!”

Taking this as a brief win, Yelena, Bob and Ava shared a relieved sigh. 

“Ok dibs on Spider-boys wake up call, he seems like he would be a better morning person.”  Ava proclaimed and shot a smug smile Yelena’s way before exiting down the hallway towards Pete’s room. 

Yelena rolled her eyes, knowing what she was doing, but all she had to do was tell Kate to come for breakfast; she could do that without it being weird. 

Surely. 

—

Kate woke up to her alarm, groggy as always, pulling the covers over her face in retaliation, like under there existed some sort of time vortex where she could steal another hour in the warm dark with Lucky cuddled against her. Unfortunately, she and Pete hadn't gotten around to inventing that…yet.

Lucky stretched beside her, all four paws extending outward with the full commitment of a dog who had absolutely no concept of personal space, and jabbed her squarely in the stomach.

"Owww, dude." Her voice came out gravelly with morning husk.

He blinked at her sleepily, entirely unrepentant.

She ripped the covers from her face and reached for her phone.

The group chat had twenty-something notifications, loose plans being thrown around for tomorrow night, some kind of celebratory drink situation pending their mission success, which she appreciated in principle and would appreciate considerably more after today was done.

There was also a direct message from Pete asking if she wanted him to take Lucky on a walk so she could have a lie-in; he probably sensed something had happened last night. 

She replied, saying maybe they could go for a run together instead, set the phone down, and lay there for one more moment staring at the ceiling.

Today was the day. Her first official Avengers mission.

She'd expected to wake up nervous. Instead, she felt something closer to the clean, focused hum of someone who had something to prove and was ready to do so. Yelena had made sure they had a whole alphabet of backup plans, and there was another briefing this morning for a final run-through.

All should go according to plan, she just needs to focus on the mission, and not think about certain other things that have been running through her mind.

Certain short, blonde things.

She forced herself to roll out of bed, foregoing a shower, she would have one when she got back.

She pulled on old grey sweats and a black sports bra, and was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the bed, hair gathered in her hands and fingers still working the tie into place, when a knock came at the door.

"It's open!"

She kept working at the hair tie, back to the door, back muscles flexing with the strain. "Pete, do I need a jacket? It looks bright out there, but it could be that deceiving sun, yanno?"

Silence.

She turned around.

It wasn't Pete.

— Yelena’s POV —

Ok, stop fighting so hard. This should be easy.

She swung open the door before she'd fully prepared herself, which was her first mistake. Her second was letting her eyes land where they did, the line of Kate's shoulders, the flex of muscle beneath the skin of her back as she worked at her hair, and suddenly, unwillingly, a fragment of something she'd spent the entire morning trying to drown surfaced without permission.

Kate straddled Yelena’s lap, warm skin against warm skin, hips rolling slowly before Yelena’s hands closed around them firmly enough to still her.

A soft whine left Kate immediately in protest, breath catching as Yelena’s lips pressed against the side of her neck again, lower this time, teeth grazing lightly over sensitive skin. Yelena felt the reaction ripple through her instantly, the sharp inhale, the flex of muscle beneath her hands, the way Kate’s body seemed incapable of deciding whether to pull closer or fall apart entirely.

“Stay still,” Yelena had commanded against her throat, voice rough and low.

Kate absolutely did not stay still.

Yelena’s hands slid slowly up her bare thighs instead, thumbs pressing into soft skin just to feel the way Kate reacted. Her breathing kept hitching in these embarrassingly pretty little bursts, like she was trying very hard not to make noise and failing spectacularly at it.

Yelena moved her mouth lower, kissing along the line of Kate’s collarbone before biting gently enough to make Kate's back arch. She felt the muscles flex beneath her fingers as her hands slid higher, palms spanning across Kate’s back, nails scraping lightly over heated skin.

The memory snapped off violently there as reality slammed back into place.

She gripped the door frame.

—

Yelena stood just inside the doorway, one hand still gripping the frame seemingly very tightly, jaw fractionally slack, eyes somewhere they clearly hadn't intended to land, and slightly glazed over. 

She was dressed as if she'd just come back from a run herself, dark green leggings, a white tank top with the faint press of a sports bra visible beneath, a sheen of sweat still caught at her collarbone and temples, hair loose and slightly damp at the ends. 

Damn, she looked hot.

"Hot," Yelena said. There was a beat where Yelena's gaze hadn't quite made it to Kate's face yet. The word came out lower than it should have, rough at the edges, like she hadn't fully warmed up her voice yet. Or like something else entirely.

Another beat passed.

Kate blinked, scared she had said the thought out loud. "S-sorry?" stuttering a little over the word, having to force it out, cheeks turning red.

Yelena's eyes snapped upward, blinking. "The weather," she said, in a tone of complete calm. "It is hot outside. No jacket needed."

"Oh." Kate lowered her hands from her hair, which was now pulled into a tight ponytail, tighter than intended. "Right. That’s good, cool—great!"

Their eyes were locked, both with the demeanour of deer caught in headlights, before Yelena turned her head slightly toward the corridor, pulling her gaze away. "Are you—"

“Going for a run”, Kate said, all but too quickly, hands flailing and pointing in the general direction of Lucky and then his lead on the hook just above Yelena's head. 

The air felt thick between them all of a sudden, and Kate didn’t know what to do with it. Yelena looked different, spaced out almost; her eyes kept drifting to other places in the room, never settling in her direction. 

Kate made her way towards the door and reached for Lucky's lead. When she looked down at Yelena again, she realised she was standing far too close, but Yelena wasn’t pulling back, just looking up at her with an unreadable expression plastered on her face. 

Yelena was usually unreadable, but this was a distinct difference from her usual unreadable expression. 

The silence had settled longer than Kate could cope with, “Did erm, did—you want me for something?” she managed to get out, eyes still fixed on the blonde.

“Yes”, Yelena all but breathed out, matter-of-factly, then cleared her throat, seemingly remembering what she came for, “Breakfast…my Dad, he is making breakfast, it is silly tradition on mission days, and he asked me to come and get you so—”

“Oh my god, yes!” Kate blurted, the awkwardness lingering in the air dissipated, overtaken by the severity of her hunger “I’m starving!”

“Do not get too excited,” Yelena warned with a small smile. 

“Why not! I mean, if he cooks anything like you, this is going to taste amazing.”

The word taste dragged something up from her subconscious before she could stop it. Kate pushed Yelena against the pillows with surprising confidence, hovering over her for a second, both of them breathing hard. Hair falling forward, blue eyes dark and completely fixed on her mouth.

“I want to taste you,” Kate practically pleaded.

The words hit Yelena like a physical thing.

Dream-Kate moved down her body slowly, leaving open-mouthed kisses against her stomach while her hands followed after them, nails dragging burning scratches across skin in their wake. Yelena remembered the feeling with horrifying clarity, the heat of it, the way her body had reacted instantly and helplessly beneath her.

Kate pushed her own hair over one shoulder and pressed soft kisses against the inside of Yelena’s thighs.

Then she looked up at her.

Held eye contact.

Blue eyes blown dark and ruined around the edges.

And slowly Kate’s tongue slipped out as she lowered her head between Yelena’s legs.

“Yelena?”

The sound threaded strangely through the memory at first, distant and warped like it belonged to the dream too.

Kate’s mouth against her, Kate looking up at her through lowered lashes—

“Yelena?”

Reality slammed back into place, and her eyes snapped towards Kate.

Who was, unfortunately for Yelena, tying her shoe, looking up at her. 

Very close to the exact angle from the dream.

Yelena forgot how to breathe for a second.

Kate frowned slightly, still crouched near the floor with one knee bent beneath her. "You okay?" she asked slowly.

No, Yelena thought immediately. Catastrophically no.

"I am fine," she snapped, the words coming out sharper than she intended.

Kate's mouth opened, then closed, a little taken aback by the sudden edge in it. "I was just checking," she said, with a genuine smile that didn't quite hide what was underneath it.

The guilt landed immediately. That feeling again; warmth being pulled from her chest.

Stop fighting so hard.

Kate finished tying her lace and stood, brushing her hands against her sweats, and Yelena's eyes betrayed her before she could intervene, tracking the movement downward, catching on the waistband of Kate's joggers sitting low on her hips, the soft grey fabric hanging just enough to expose the stretch of her stomach above it.

And then, entirely without her permission, her brain supplied the rest.

Thumbs pressing into skin. Kate rocking against her. That breathless sound close to her ear.

Yelena blinked it away.

Pull yourself together. 

Every instinct she had said the same thing it always said: shut it down, force the distance, push her away before this gets any worse. But the conversation with Ava was still sitting somewhere just behind that instinct, quiet and annoyingly reasonable.

You're already hurting. And you're hurting her too.

Punishing Kate for what her own subconscious had decided to do in the middle of the night wasn't fair. She knew that. She just needed her nervous system to catch up.

This will get easier.

"I should go," she said, already stepping back into the hallway before the words were fully out. "My Dad is cooking unsupervised. It may start to look like your old apartment in there."

Kate tilted her head to one side, brow furrowed, like a golden retriever in confusion. "Purple?"

Yelena felt the smile before she decided to let it happen. She didn't fight it.

"Crispy," she said with a smirk, and turned down the hallway.

She walked away at a perfectly normal pace. Completely composed. Not at all aware of her own heartbeat.

—

Kate came down for breakfast, still wearing her workout clothes but wearing a baggy tank top over her sports bra, a little more appropriate for breakfast with the Avengers, she figured. 

She took a seat at the kitchen island, quietly stifling a laugh next to Kamala as Peter and Cassie joined the silent operation to salvage Alexei's breakfast.

Yelena stood at the counter, transferring salvageable eggs into a separate pan behind her father's back, passing it wordlessly to Ava. Cassie had turned down the back burner three separate times. Bob had started a fresh batch of pancake batter and swapped out Alexei's eggshell-filled bowl with his own, positioning himself strategically between Alexei and the hob so he couldn't see what was happening behind him. 

Yelena had taken the scrambled eggs off the heat just in time and was now seasoning them with the focused calm of a woman defusing a bomb.

Alexei was incredibly clumsy in the kitchen so Peter was on destruction watch, catching a ladle before it hit the floor, webbing the pepper grinder out of Alexei's reach before it made contact with Bob's fresh pancake batter, and intercepting a teetering plate with one hand without breaking stride. 

At one point he shot a web across the kitchen to catch a falling whisk, reeled it in, and set it quietly on the counter.

Bob looked at him with an impressed side smile.

Peter shrugged.

The operation continued in silence. 

Kate stood and drifted into the kitchen, wanting to help but acutely aware that she was arguably worse at cooking than him, and was promptly handed a plate of burnt sausages by Cassie.

Kate looked at her with a blank expression.

Cassie nodded toward Lucky.

Kate understood the assignment.

She began discreetly feeding Lucky sausages one by one under the island, and he accepted each one with barely a chew in his excitement.

A moment later, she felt a tug on the plate.

She looked up. Yelena had her hand on the other side of it, pulling with quiet, deliberate intent, her expression communicating everything the silence couldn't.

What followed was a conversation conducted entirely without words, which could be approximately transcribed as follows:

Yelena shook her head and gestured to Lucky, still pulling. This is bad for him.

Kate rolled her eyes and pulled back. Oh, come on. He can have a few sausages.

Yelena fixed her with a look that left no room for negotiation. No.

Kate lifted the plate out of her reach, then pointed at Lucky who was sitting between them with a very large smile on his face, completely unaware he was the subject of their silent argument, and aimed her best puppy dog eyes at Yelena, bottom lip fully deployed. Look at him. He deserves sausages.

Yelena jumped for the plate. Kate lifted it higher, eyebrow raised, a smirk settling onto her face at the realisation that Yelena was significantly shorter than her.

Yelena held her gaze flexed her jaw, and gave a slow nod that said very clearly: fine, you want to do this. Then she crouched down and gave Lucky a leisurely scratch behind the ears.

Kate smiled victoriously. She'd won.

Then Yelena reached out with two fingers and pressed a precise point just below Kate's knee.

Kate's leg buckled on reflex. Her grip on the plate slipped for exactly half a second and Yelena caught it on the way down with one hand, deposited the contents of the plate into the trash, smooth as anything, and turned back to the sink without a word.

Kate stood there, jaw slack.

In the reflection of the toaster, she could see Yelena's smirk.

—

The elevator dinged, and what emerged looked less like three super soldiers and more like the aftermath of a failed bachelor party. Sam, Bucky, and Walker shuffled out, clutching their heads, all squinting against the bright kitchen lights like they’d personally been betrayed by electricity.

Alexei appeared beside them immediately, patting Bucky and Walker heavily on the back and squeezing their shoulders far too hard. “You are feeling better, da?”

Walker made a sound that definitely wasn’t a word, and Bucky shrugged his hand off without ceremony.

The three of them found seats in silence and reached for the jug of water almost immediately.

Alexei, meanwhile, set the final items onto the table with great ceremony: a carton of milk and a cereal box featuring his own face, which he positioned proudly in the centre of the spread like a shrine.

“Okay,” Alexei announced loudly, rubbing his hands together. “We eat—”

“But first,” Yelena muttered flatly under her breath, already pre-empting him.

Alexei pointed triumphantly at her. “But first!”

Ava and Bob groaned in unison. Yelena dropped her head back dramatically.

“Daddy, please,” she sighed with the exhaustion of someone who had survived this exact moment many times before. “We do not need speech.”

“Big hero speech is part of tradition, Lena!”

He dragged a chair out from the table and climbed onto it. The wood creaked ominously beneath his weight. Several people watched it with immediate concern. Alexei ignored this completely.

At the other end of the table, Sam, Bucky, and Walker visibly winced at the scrape of the chair against the floor. Walker pressed two fingers against his temple like he was trying to hold his skull together manually.

“Today is big day!” Alexei boomed at a volume entirely unnecessary for the size of the room. “First mission with our new members!” He gestured broadly toward Kate, Peter, Cassie, and Kamala, who all straightened slightly in their seats on instinct. “On special days like this, I cook for team. I slave in kitchen to make fuel that carries us through battle—”

He paused dramatically.

“—and brings us victory!”

He placed a hand over his chest, genuinely emotional now.

“It is honour to use my culinary talents this way. I make this breakfast with my own hands—”

“Mostly,” Ava muttered without looking up from her plate.

The entire table went tense trying not to laugh.

Peter bit the inside of his cheek so hard his face twitched. Cassie stared fixedly at the ceiling. Bob suddenly became deeply invested in the contents of his orange juice. Kate pressed her lips together until they disappeared entirely.

Kamala, meanwhile, looked genuinely moved.

Alexei either didn’t hear Ava or chose not to. He lifted his orange juice glass high like a Viking giving a battlefield toast, sloshing a concerning amount over the side.

“—with love!” He beamed around the table warmly. “And although not all of us are there today in body, we are there in spirit. Together we are strong.” He jabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Like bear!”

He climbed back down from the chair, which groaned audibly with relief, and started circling the table.

“We are with you in every shot of your arrow—” He stopped beside Kate and squeezed her shoulder with enough force to nearly dislocate it.

Kate winced visibly.

Yelena glanced down at her plate, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her.

Kate caught it immediately and rubbed her shoulder with exaggerated offence.

“—and in every…” Alexei paused beside Peter, brow furrowing deeply as he searched for the correct term. He made two aggressive thwip motions with his wrists. “Every wrist rope.”

Peter looked genuinely touched. “Honestly? Close enough.”

“We go now with full stomachs and full hearts!” Alexei raised his glass once more, orange juice sloshing dangerously close to the edge. “Bon apple teeth!”

He stood proudly at full height, chest puffed out with absolute confidence in what he’d just said.

There was a beat of silence.

Then the entire table broke.

Cassie folded over laughing first. “What is bon apple teeth?!”

“It means eat,” Alexei replied solemnly, as though educating children.

Kate was laughing so hard she had to wipe under her eyes. “It’s, it’s bon appétit.”

Alexei waved a dismissive hand. “Apple is food. Teeth are what you eat with. This makes perfect sense.”

“American sayings are ridiculous,” Yelena added dryly, siding with him on principle alone.

“It’s French!” Kate laughed.

Yelena blinked once. “Apples are not French.”

That nearly killed the table completely.

As Kate tried and failed to explain through laughter, she caught the slight curve at the corner of Yelena’s mouth and realised instantly she was doing it on purpose now.

Alexei finally waved both hands with authority. “Kushayte na zdorov’ye.”

The table stared blankly for a moment, not understanding. 

Yelena translated helpfully. “Everyone eat”

The laughter slowly settled into quiet chatter as everyone finally started eating properly.

About halfway through breakfast, Alexei leaned down under the table with a sausage pinched between two fingers. “Sausage for Lucky!”

Lucky lifted his head from his bed on the opposite side of the table, looked directly at the sausage, and then deliberately turned his head away.

Kate and Yelena looked up at exactly the same moment.

Their eyes met across the table, Kate ducked her head toward her plate, shoulders shaking. Yelena picked up her fork with the ghost of a smile still lingering at the corner of her mouth and continued eating like nothing had happened.

Alexei stared down at the rejected sausage, visibly offended.

“Picky dog,” he muttered before eating it himself.

—

Chapter 5 - Left On Read

Yelena just lay there, staring at the ceiling, letting the dark settle around her like something familiar. Her alarm was set for six, but she'd been awake since four thirty-three.

Sleep had never come easily. Sleeping too deeply meant not hearing a door creak open or the footsteps that followed. It was an old habit, a useless one, but she'd stopped fighting it years ago.

The room was quiet and mostly dark, save for the thin bleed of light beneath the corridor door. Functional, the way she'd always kept her spaces, a king-size bed, a dresser, boots lined up with precision against the wall. A small brass hook by the door held a single vest, olive green, soft from years of wash.

Out of habit, she'd always kept her places like this. Sparse and unsentimental. Her life had a way of imploding in on itself, and she'd learned early that treating somewhere like home only made the leaving harder. But here, there were cracks in the stoicism of the room, much like Yelena herself, if you knew where to look.

Two succulents on the windowsill. Small and uncomplicated, she didn't name them. She watered them on Tuesdays, and that was all.

On the dresser, a candid photograph that was slightly overexposed of Natasha mid-laugh, caught off guard, her head turned like she'd just heard something she hadn't expected to find funny. Yelena had taken it without her noticing.

Beside it, resting on a small square of folded cloth so it didn't scratch the wood, was a necklace. A delicate chain, with a small silver arrow. Clint had given it to Natasha years ago, and she’d worn it so often that it became part of her. She'd taken it off just before Vormir, left it behind like she'd known the outcome. Like she'd chosen what to leave and for whom.

Yelena didn't wear it, she couldn't. But she couldn't put it away either, so there it sat, catching the thin light from the corridor in a quiet, silver line.

On the nightstand was a glass of water, her watch, and a worn paperback she read the same three pages of when sleep refused to come. She'd never replaced it. There was something steadying about already knowing how it ended.

Her alarm blared.

She smacked it silent before the first second was out, exhaled slowly through her nose, and lay still for one more moment.

Then she ran through the day the way she always ran through things, methodically. Physical conditioning at nine. Then, mission prep for the remainder, which was usually her element. But something told her that trying to build a plan with someone like Kate Bishop was going to make it considerably more difficult than usual.

Her main objective for today was simple: get through it. Don't let Kate get too close, not physically, and not in any other way that mattered. She didn't need any more friends. She didn't need any more anything.

She stood at the sink, tap running cold, and looked at her own reflection. The thought from the night before surfaced like it had been waiting, quiet but insistent. 

If she doesn't care, she doesn't hurt.

She would treat Kate Bishop exactly like the colleague she was. Nothing more.

She held her own gaze until she believed it.

Then, uninvited, something else crept forward. The drunk text, sitting at the back of her mind like a stone in her shoe, small enough to endure, impossible to ignore.

She had almost forgotten about it altogether.

But that was the thing about almost.

— Flashback —

Yelena had been lying on the sofa of a sublet she was renting by the month in the Lower East Side, a paperback open across her chest, not really reading it.

Outside, the city was doing what it always did in late December, pressing cold against the glass, neon bleeding up from the street below in blurred streaks of red and amber. She could hear the distant complaint of a taxi horn, the low murmur of the city that never fully quieted. It was just past eight. She wasn't tired; she rarely was until the early hours.

It had been two weeks since she'd almost killed Clint Barton at Rockefeller Centre. Two weeks of time off that she didn't quite know how to fill, spent deciding to stay in New York a while longer, to try to enjoy the Christmas season. She had almost stopped thinking about the archer girl with the one-eyed dog entirely.

Almost.

A buzz came from the other room. The burner she'd meant to destroy weeks ago was sitting on the kitchen counter. She ignored it for a moment, turning a page she hadn't actually read. But something in her chest moved in a way she didn't examine, and she set the book down and went to look at it.

The number she recognised immediately, though she'd never saved it under a name.

She read it once, standing at the counter in the dark kitchen with the city light coming pale through the window.

"okay so. remember when you agreed to get a drink with me while we were busy throwing each other through windows? i've been wondering if that was a joke. and if it wasn't, would you potentially, maybe, possibly still want to? like, get a drink with me. tonight?"

"this is kate by the way"

"kate bishop**"

She read it again.

The apartment was very quiet around her, only the hum of the refrigerator breaking the silence. She was aware that she had been standing at the counter for longer than the message warranted, and that she had not yet put the phone down.

There was something in her chest that she didn't name. She looked at it briefly, the way you might look at something unfamiliar on the floor before deciding whether to pick it up, and then she looked away from it just as quickly.

Kate Bishop had sent her a text asking her to get a drink. Kate Bishop, who was too loud and too earnest and too much, and who had still, apparently, thought about her enough to type those words out and hit send. Three times.

Yelena set the phone face down on the counter. Then she picked it back up.

She read the message a third time, and this time she opened the keyboard and stared at the blank field beneath Kate's words. The cursor blinked at her, patient and unhelpful. She had no idea what she would have written even if she'd let herself. 

She was aware only that her thumb was hovering, and that she was still standing in the dark kitchen at eight fifteen at night holding a burner phone, her heart beating considerably harder than the situation called for.

She closed the app and locked the phone.

She stood there a moment longer, hands gripping the counter, then crossed to the window and looked out at the city. When she turned back, her expression had settled into something flatter and more familiar.

She took the phone to the bathroom, ran it under the cold tap until the screen went dark and stayed dark, then wrapped it in a hand towel, set it on the tile floor, and brought her heel down on it once, and then again, until it stopped being a phone and started being pieces. She dropped them in the bin on her way back to the sofa.

She picked up her book, found her page, and resolved not to think about the brunette on the other side of the city awaiting a reply that would never come.

—

She arrived 15 minutes early to the prep room, setting her coffee on the table and pulling up the mission file on the wall display to try and get some work done in silence. 

The door swung open a little too aggressively 10 minutes later. She didn't look up, but she could already tell by the awkwardness that flooded the room who it was.

Yelena was slightly surprised that Kate was early, to be honest. She was kind of hoping she would get a good bout of silent work done before anyone else arrived, but alas, the one incapable of silence had arrived.

"Morning," Kate said after clearing her throat, trying to mask how out of breath she was.

Yelena could hear from the quality of her voice alone that she was trying to pitch it somewhere neutral. Friendly but not too friendly. Easy but not performative. Which meant she was as aware of the awkwardness caused by the previous night as much as Yelena was.

"Good morning," Yelena replied flatly, eyes on the display.

Kate set a notebook down on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat. The silence that followed was the kind that had weight to it. Yelena kept reading.

Clearly pained by the silence, she couldn't even last a full minute before she had to fill it “Soooo, how was Phys Con?” Kate enunciated like she was attempting to be nonchalant or cool. 

Yelena looked up then with an exasperated expression.

“Like physical conditioning but…umm shorter”, there was a short silence again, and Kate had to fill it, ”Like abbreviated, yanno cause phys—” 

Yelena cut her off before the painful explanation that wasn’t needed “This would have been shorter if you just said physical conditioning, no?”

Kate was rocking in her chair now, hands clasped together, twiddling her thumbs with her feet up on the table, “I mean, I guess after the explanation, but next time, it’ll be way quicker!” she finished with a snap and a finger gun.

“I agree, I would like our conversations to be over quicker,” Yelena responded flippantly as she kept her eyes fixed on the information she was reading, as if Kate was mere background noise. 

Kate opened her mouth to speak again, but was cut off by the door bursting open. 

Peter stumbled in, both hands flying up in an instinctive apology toward the inanimate object he'd just slammed into the wall. In the same motion, his coffee slipped from his grip, his foot catching it before it hit the floor and launching it back into the air. 

The liquid followed a split second behind, the whole column of coffee falling from the air in one dark arc before Peter's hand was there to meet it, the cup catching every last drop as it fell. 

He turned to the table, chest still heaving slightly from what was clearly a jog down the corridor, and found both of them watching him. 

Kate’s mouth was agape but smiling, clearly more impressed than anything. Yelena’s eyebrow was raised, and Ava poked her head around the door, having witnessed the whole thing at a different angle.

“Good start, getting an idea of how today’s going to go already,” Ava delivered flatly, walking past Peter.

"I, uh—" He set the coffee down carefully and pointed towards the door. "Was a little too eager…with the door there, I—" He stopped himself before the rambling could properly take hold. "Mornin', guys."

Ava settled into the chair beside Yelena and set her mug down on the coaster in front of her. As per routine, she was about to set the second coffee down in front of Yelena, but noticed that she still had a full cup of coffee sitting in front of her…untouched. 

In the years they'd worked together, Yelena's coffee was a reliable constant. She’d arrive early, consume the first mug before the first person had even arrived, and Ava always brought her a replacement coffee in her favourite mug when she’d arrive.

But the mug was not only full, it was practically untouched, and to Ava, this was roughly as notable as Yelena forgetting to breathe.

She didn't say anything immediately. Just let her eyes move from the full cup to Yelena's face and back again, filing it away.

Then she had a theory she wanted to test, so she looked across the table. "You want coffee, Bishop?"

Kate blinked in disbelief at first, but swung her feet off the table and practically lurched forward. "Y-Yeah.. I absolutely do, thank you."

Ava waited for Yelena to object, and when she didn’t, turned her head fully towards her, catching Yelena looking at the mug of coffee for a moment, then quickly shifting her eyes back to the wall display. No objection, not even a sign of stifled annoyance...

Yelena didn’t let anyone drink from her mug. Ever. 

Interesting.

Kate wrapped both hands around the mug and took an eager sip; her face did something involuntary. Not quite a grimace, more the expression of someone recalibrating their expectations in real time.

Yelena caught it immediately. "You do not like."

"No, no… It's great," Kate said, a little too quickly. "It's just…" She turned the mug slightly, as if checking it for hidden sugar. "Not even one? Like, not a single grain of sugar?"

From beside Kate, Peter let out a quiet laugh. “Even if she had three in there, it wouldn’t be enough for you. You take, like, six.”

Kate turned, offended. “It is not six.”

“My bad, seven.” Pete retorted with a nod.

“It is not seven! But Yelena, not even one is—”

Ava leaned back in her chair, watching her over the rim of her own cup, cutting Kate off. “What, Bishop, you don’t think she’s sweet enough?” she said, teasing as ever. 

Peter made a sound into his own coffee, and Yelena’s mouth curved slightly despite herself, still keeping her eyes fixed on the display.

Kate opened her mouth, closed it, then gestured vaguely across the table. "I… no, I just— that's not—" She stopped, reset, cleared her throat, and picked the mug back up. 

"I've got no complaints about the level of sweetness," she said, and took a long sip, holding eye contact with Ava the entire time, like they were in on the same game.

Ava's smile practically reached her ears. Kate's answer could very easily have been about the coffee. But they both knew it wasn't.

Bold, Bishop. Bold.

Yelena, who had been watching the exchange with the air of someone doing absolutely nothing of the sort, was tapping her pen against the table, eyes still fixed concretely on the wall display.

The tips of her ears were very slightly pink.

Peter, who noticed but was not quite in on the non-verbal conversation Kate and Ava were having, cut them off, "Anyyywayyy, I was doing some reading last night," he said, leaning down and pulling his tablet out of his bag. 

“Their publicly available patents are interesting. Like, genuinely interesting, not interesting in a bad way necessarily, but interesting in a way that raises questions, which I guess could go either way depending on—"

"Pete”, Kate delivered with a smile, having had experience with him when he gets excited about his findings, and knowing he needs to be reigned in before he starts having conversations with himself.

He stopped. "Right. My bad." He tapped his tablet. "The neural interface in the crate. Their patents describe it as a therapeutic device, but the filament architecture in that thing is way more sophisticated than anything they've published. Whoever designed it gave it way more scope than it needed."

Kate leaned forward, pulling the tablet toward her to look. "So either they're developing something they haven't disclosed publicly, or someone else has adapted their technology and is using their casing."

"Both are bad," Yelena said.

"Both are bad," Peter agreed. “But one leads to Neurosphere being the bad guys, and the other leads to someone unknown being the bad guys.”

“Am I the only one hoping it is Neurosphere that are the bad guys? So we don’t have to track down an unknown,” Ava added. 

Yelena looked at the schematic Peter had pulled up, studying it for a moment. "Our priority on the weekend should be confirmation. We need information that will tell us definitively if they are related to the weapons shipment"

"The event is held at their headquarters," Kate said, leaning forward. "Maybe they have local files we can hack? Initial concept designs, trial logs, participant files. If we're in the building, we might as well use that to our advantage."

Peter nodded, already pulling up a new window on his tablet. “Yeah, I tried getting in remotely last night…well, this morning, technically…but everything public-facing is annoyingly clean. Filings, patents, clinical disclosures, all of it lines up perfectly." He turned the tablet toward the table. "If anything shady does exist, it'll be on an internal network”

Ava and Yelena nodded along, now standing to look at the tablet more closely.

Kate was pacing back and forth for a second and then came to the table herself “Local servers, probably air-gapped from anything external, the kind of system you can only touch if you're physically inside the building."

"Which we will be," Pete said with a smile. 

Kate pulled the tablet toward her and scanned Peter's notes, then continued. "Events like this are weak points. They'll have a guest network running for the night, a separate SSID, supposed to be isolated, but in a building this size, with IT setting up for a public event, someone will have the internal network physically nearby. If I can find an unsecured Ethernet port, a misconfigured access point, anything hardwired that's been left open during setup—"

Pete continued her train of thought in understanding, "—we can attempt a lateral move from the guest network onto their internal systems.”

Kate nodded, “It's not guaranteed, but companies running large events get sloppy. Too many temporary staff, too many devices being plugged in and out. Someone always leaves a port active that shouldn't be."

Ava chimed in next, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but won't all that take a long ass time?”

"I mean…yeah, but—", he said, looking towards Kate like they shared the same brain cell. 

Kate nodded slightly as if hearing his thoughts, "We can write a script in advance that will pull anything flagged as restricted or encrypted. We won't have long before their system notices unexpected traffic, so we'd need to be surgical about it. Make a copy of their files, and then we can decrypt them when we get back to the tower?"

Ava set her coffee down. "I understood about forty per cent of that," she said, looking between them with an expression of genuine assessment rather than complaint. "But the forty per cent I understood sounds like it could actually work."

Yelena had been watching Kate across the table with an expression that gave nothing away, the particular stillness she defaulted to when something had caught her attention, and she had no intention of showing it. 

Her eyes moved to the tablet once, then back to Kate. "How long will this take?"

Kate looked up for a moment, almost as if she was shocked to hear Yelena’s voice. "Depends, if we can get credentials from a logged-in terminal, we won’t need to brute force anything." 

Not wanting to disappoint Yelena by not answering, she continued. "We can get a clean copy, ten minutes, tops, depending on file size, but we will get what we can during that time.”

Ava picked her coffee back up and looked at Kate with something that sat between approval and amusement. "Damn, can’t even lie that was impressive."

Kate and Pete shared a look of pride and then sat down, Kate continuing on while she had momentum “Also, I may or may not have hacked into their emails and found the guest list last night, it's mainly security companies though,” she said flippantly, like it was boring. 

Yelena spoke next, “Were there any guests that are tied to the health sector?”

Kate’s eyebrows furrowed for a second, leaning forward, “Actually…no”

“That’s weird, considering basically all of their tech is aimed at health support, right?” Pete chimed in, understanding their train of thought.

“Ok, so we’re gonna need you guys to shmooze a little too, find out why they’ve been invited”, Ava said. 

“The rich love to talk. I’m sure we can get some level of information out of them,” Kate responded.

“Don’t we know it,” Yelena muttered under her breath.

“What was that?” Kate bristled,

“I was agreeing”, Yelena painted a fake smile on her face. 

Before things blew up, Pete chimed in, “Okayyy so we know what Kate and I are doing, where are you two going to be in case things go Neur-oh-no?”

"There is a mezzanine level," Yelena continued, pulling up the internal layout. "Overlooking the main floor. Ava and I will take a position there once you're inside. We have line of sight to the entrance, the showcase floor, and the corridor leading to the private offices."

"Can you get up there without being flagged?" Kate asked.

"We will be in uniform," Yelena said. "Staff access."

"Okay, but think about how these events actually run," Kate said, leaning forward hesitantly. "Catering and security staff don't float. They're assigned. If you're standing on a mezzanine for two hours and no one's seen you carry a single tray or check a single door, someone will notice." 

She pulled the floor plan toward her and pointed to a service corridor running along the east side of the building. "This runs parallel to the main hall the whole length of the venue. You can move without being in eyeline of the floor, and there are access points here and here that put you within thirty seconds of the showcase, the private offices, and the rear exit."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Yelena looked at the corridor. Then at the access points. Then, with the particular economy of someone who would not be making a performance of this, she reached over and moved her position marker from the mezzanine to the service corridor without a word.

Kate sat back, almost annoyed that there was no protest…

Peter made a very small sound that he immediately converted into a cough.

They held eye contact for precisely one second longer than necessary before both looked back at the display.

"Since we’re in the service corridor," Yelena said, before anyone could move on. She pulled the building schematic back up alongside the floor plan. "The service corridor has a network switch here. We can keep a closer eye on you." She tapped a point roughly a third of the way along the east wall. 

"Physical patch panel, the kind buildings this size run their camera infrastructure through to keep it off the main network. We can tap directly into their security camera feed. No network entry on their end, so nothing for their system to detect."

Kate's eyes moved from the schematic to Yelena, she didn’t hear anything after keep a closer eye on you, like they needed babysitting or something? Her shackles were raised. "We're already running one hack on the night. If something flags—"

"I just said that this does not touch their network…" Yelena cut her off.

"It's still an additional point of interference," Kate said. “It’s not worth the risk. If something goes wrong on your end while we're mid-copy—"

"Nothing will go wrong on my end." Yelena cut in again, annoyed at the insinuation.

Kate looked at her. "You don't know that."

"I know that I have bypassed more sophisticated infrastructure than a physical patch panel in conditions considerably less controlled than a service corridor during a catered event," Yelena said, with the particular evenness of someone exercising considerable restraint. 

"This takes me four minutes. It does not affect your timeline. It does not affect your hack. What it does is give us eyes on exactly where every member of their staff is at any given moment while you are in that office."

"We have comms—"

"Comms tell me something is already happening," Yelena said. "I would like to know before that."

Kate opened her mouth.

"Kate," Peter said it gently, in the tone of someone who had done the maths.

She turned to him.

He gave her a very small, apologetic look that said: she's right, and we both know it.

Kate exhaled through her nose and looked back at Yelena. "If it goes wrong—"

"It will not."

"If it does—"

"It will not," Yelena repeated, with a patience that was starting to develop its own gravitational pull. 

Kate sat back. Not gracefully, but she sat back. "Fine. Cameras. Fine."

They kept working. The plan took shape as they figured out timelines, exit points, and contingencies. 

The frustration in the room didn't dissipate so much as redistribute. After the slight blow-up, Yelena seemed to get more guarded and less argumentative, letting Kate ‘win’ more points, but that only annoyed Kate all the more. Why was she not arguing back now? Was it pity? 

Kate tapped her pen against the table in frustration for the remainder of the meeting.

Right before the end of the prep slot on their timetables, Ava brought up the outfits, "We should sort what everyone's wearing tomorrow. The chauffeur uniforms and staff uniforms need to be sourced, and Kate, you'll want something that your mother would wear to one of these things."

Kate's expression flickered. "I own things."

Ava rolled her eyes "I'm sure you own a lot of things."

Kate narrowed her eyes. "Was that a compliment or an insult?"

"It was an observation,” Ava stated with a slight smirk on her face.

Peter straightened up. "I have a suit. In like, the back of my closet, I think?"

"It will need pressing," Yelena said, without having seen it.

Peter opened his mouth to protest slightly but decided better of it, “Yeah, no, of course!”

"We should get everything sorted tomorrow since we’ve done the bulk of the planning today," Ava continued. "Kate, you and Peter sort yours. Yelena and I will handle the uniforms." She said it cleanly, efficiently, as though it were the most logical division in the world, which it was, and which also happened to separate the four of them into exactly the pairing the room had been quietly negotiating around all day.

Kate glanced at Yelena briefly. Yelena was already writing something in the margin of the floor plan.

"Works for me," Kate said.

"Great," Ava said, and took a sip of her coffee, while she directed her gaze towards Yelena, who continued to stay looking down.

—- The next day —-

The walk to Kate's apartment took twenty minutes on a good day. With Lucky, it took thirty-five, because Lucky took an interest in every lamppost between the tower and the Upper East Side, and he investigated each one with the thoroughness of a federal agent.

"So," Peter started, sheepish but committed. "How’d you find this morning?”

"Fine," Kate said.

Peter and even Lucky looked up sceptically.

"It was fine," she repeated, slightly differently.

"Right," he said. "You tapped your pen on the table twenty-seven times in one minute when she was talking, and I counted, so."

Kate exhaled through her nose. "I didn't say it was easy. I said it was fine."

"Distinction noted." He took a sip of his coffee. "What made it hard?"

"She's just—" Kate made a gesture with one hand that wasn't quite a word. "She has this way of saying things. Like she's already decided, and she's telling you, not asking. And half the time she's right, which is actually the infuriating part." She frowned. "Like the mezzanine thing! My service corridor was better and she—"

"And she agreed," Peter said, his tone genuinely questioning, like he couldn't locate the problem.

"Without a word," Kate said, something complicated in her voice. "Just… agreed. No big deal about it."

Peter stopped mid-stride. "And that bothers you because…?"

Kate thought about it for a second, then started walking faster, frustration leaking into her feet. "Because she never agrees! Why did she agree with me?"

"Because the service corridor was better? Like you said?"

"No." She turned around and fixed him with a look. "No no no. It was pity. She pitied me because of the text."

"Or," Peter said, with the careful tone of someone defusing something, "she just agreed about the service corridor?"

"Pete." Kate stopped walking entirely. "This woman corrects me when I breathe wrong. She takes every opportunity to mock me, to wind me up, and then she gets handed the ultimate ammunition and does nothing?" She exhaled hard. "I'd rather endure the mocking than the pity."

Peter was quiet for a moment. "I mean. There is also the possibility that you had a good idea, she had no argument, and she didn’t want to argue for the sake of it?"

Kate looked at him for one long, unimpressed second, then pushed open the door to her old building with her shoulder, the particular lean of someone who'd done it ten thousand times, and stepped into the elevator.

Inside, the quiet settled around her differently. She looked at the brushed-metal walls, the worn button panel, and something in her expression shifted, not quite a smile, but the edges of one. The foul mood softened by a degree, the way it always did when a place knew you back.

The doors dinged open, and she stepped out, already reaching for her keys.

"We're grabbing pizza from Herman's before we leave," she said, by way of closure on the previous conversation.

Peter's hands came up immediately. "I will never say no to that."

Lucky looked up, head tilted, tail starting its slow pre-excitement wag at the word pizza.

Kate unlocked the apartment and pushed the door open, and the familiar stillness of the place settled around her like something she'd forgotten she'd missed. Furniture in place. The purple throw still on the sofa arm, and the mug she hadn't put away since she was last here.

Lucky walked in with a happy trot and immediately located a sock under the coffee table. He picked it up with great delicacy, tail going like a metronome, and jumped onto the sofa.

Kate looked at him sprawled across the cushions, sock in his mouth, completely at home, and didn't say anything for a moment. Just rested her hand on his head as she passed.

I miss this place too, buddy.

She made her way up the stairs and flopped down onto her bed with a sigh, mostly by force of habit.

Pete followed, then paused in the doorway, gripping the frame and rocking back and forth with a restless, awkward energy, like standing still just wasn’t an option. “By the way… I’m really sorry about the text thing last night. I kind of spoke before I thought, which, you know, not exactly a new issue.”

Kate exhaled something that was almost a laugh. "Don't worry about it. I know you didn't mean it." She'd been briefly annoyed, but she understood the affliction entirely too well to hold it against him.

She stared at the ceiling for a moment. "It's just… I spent a long time thinking I'd been left on read. Like she saw it and decided I wasn't worth a reply." She paused. "Which, fine. It was a weird message. I asked out someone who actively tried to assassinate my mentor."

"It was a little weird," Peter confirmed gently.

"So weird!" Kate agreed. "But the point is, I made peace with it." She sat up, pulling her knees to her chest.

"And now?" Peter said

She sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. "And now she didn't see it. It never got to her. Which means she never rejected me, she just—"

"Never knew."

"Never knew," Kate echoed. The words had a different weight than she expected, and she felt it land somewhere in her chest and stay there.

Peter made his way toward her and sat at the end of the bed. "Does that change anything?"

Kate laughed, short and dry. "I mean no, we’re colleagues and she doesn’t—" She stopped, recalibrated, started again. "It’s very clear from her reaction that it would’ve been a no anyway.”

Peter was quiet for a beat. "I mean… she's a trained Black Widow. There's no way you'd be able to tell from her reaction. Right?"

Kate looked at him.

He held her gaze with the particular patience of someone who had made a point and was going to let it do its own work.

Lucky chose that moment to emerge from under the bed with a purple hair tie in his mouth, enormously pleased with himself.

"Lucky, not yours! Drop it." Kate crouched down and retrieved it from him with minimal resistance; he'd clearly already decided it wasn't worth defending. She straightened, hair tie around her wrist, and took a breath.

Peter's point sat in the room like a third person.

She didn't address it. She crossed to the wardrobe instead, pulled it open, and began flipping through the rail with decisive hands, letting the familiar motion steady her. After a moment, she drew out two dresses and draped them over her arm.

"These are Bishopy enough," she said, her voice back to something lighter, not quite real, but functional. "Fashion show time, help me choose which one to wear."

"Bold of you to assume I’ll be any help," Peter said, already flopping back against the pillows.

She exhaled a laugh and made her way to the bathroom before pausing in the doorway and glancing back at him "Oh, also we need to remember to press your suit when we get back."

"I know, I know, Yelena already said." 

Kate could practically hear the roll of his eyes in his tone of voice.

—-

Across the city, the uniform supplier was the kind of place with no sign above the door and a specific knock, which Ava delivered without ceremony. 

A woman in her sixties with the bearing of someone who had kitted out half of New York's private security sector, let them in, looked them both up and down once, and disappeared into the back.

Yelena moved through the racks with the efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that it no longer required thought. She checked seams, secret pockets, and fabric weight. Lifted one jacket, set it back without comment.

Ava watched her for approximately thirty seconds. "You were quiet on the way over."

"I am usually soooo talkative", she replied sarcastically

She saw right through Yelena’s attitude and continued on, "Today was the kind of quiet that means you're running something on a loop." Ava said.

Yelena lifted a second jacket. "I was running through the mission plan."

"Sure," Ava said.

A pause.

"The planning session was surprisingly productive," Ava didn’t let the conversation fully die.

"It was," Yelena agreed with finality.

Ava pushed on, "You two actually work well together when you're not making it painful."

"We work adequately together," Yelena corrected, setting the jacket back. "We want the same outcome. We approach it differently. These things can be managed."

"She had a good point about the corridor."

"Yes," hoping that if she switched to one-word answers, this would die quicker.

"You agreed pretty fast."

Yelena sighed, here we go. "It was the better position."

Ava acknowledged what Yelena was doing, but she wasn’t getting out of this conversation that easily. "Peter really put his foot in it last night," she said lightly, still examining a jacket.

Yelena said nothing. She moved to the next rack.

"The drunk text thing." Ava turned the jacket over, checking the lining. "I'd pay to see Kate Bishop try to ask someone out over text, honestly. Shame you never got to see it." She kept her voice easy, almost bored. "Tragic that the phone was already gone."

"Yes," Yelena said. A beat too late.

Ava looked up.

Yelena had her back to her, fingers moving along the rack with the same precise efficiency as before. Her posture hadn't changed. But her head was a fraction higher, and the set of her jaw had shifted in a way that Ava had spent enough years learning to read.

"You saw it didn’t you," Ava said. Not a question.

"No."

Too fast. And paired with eyes that were very slightly too wide when she whipped her head around to look back at her.

Ava stared at her. "You saw it." She lowered the jacket. "You literally told the room you destroyed the phone—"

"I did destroy it."

"After you read the message."

Yelena's jaw flexed. She pulled a jacket from the rail, checked the lining with great attention, and held it out. "Here. Try this one."

Ava took it and didn't move. "Why did you lie?"

"I was sparing her the embarrassment," Yelena said, already turning back to the rack.

"Since when do you spare her anything?" Ava said, incredulous. "We jump at every opportunity—"

"Try the jacket, Ava."

"—Yelena."

"What, you do not like the colour?"

Ava looked at her, really looked at her, the way she usually had the grace not to, and held the stare until Yelena's gaze finally slid sideways. Then she softened, just slightly. "Okay. I won't push." She paused. "But will you at least tell me what it said?"

A long silence. Yelena moved to the next rack, gripping the rail.

Then, in the tone of someone making a calculated concession: "She wanted to know if I'd meant it. When I agreed to get a drink with her during our fight. And if so, whether I wanted to go that night." A beat. "She also told me her name. Twice."

Ava pressed her lips together very hard.

"Don't," Yelena said.

Ava pressed them harder.

"Don't, Ava—"

"Why didn't you just go?" Ava said, voice admirably steady.

"I didn't want to," Yelena said flatly.

"But you did when you agreed to drinks mid-fight?"

"Lesser of two evils. Alcohol or getting kicked in the ribs." She shrugged. "It was situational."

"Right," Ava said. "And why not just reply no?"

Yelena's hand gripped the rail of the rack tightly.

The silence stretched just long enough to be its own answer.

"You gay panicked," Ava said, with a slow curl of a smile making its way onto her face.

Yelena's foot connected with Ava's shin with precision and zero remorse.

Ava yelped and retreated further into the nearest changing cubicle, pulling the curtain across, leaving just her head out of it. "I'm just saying—"

"You say nothing," Yelena said, "We need to get back to the tower."

"Of course, of course…can't keep Kate Bishop waiting too long, can we?" Ava's voice was warm with amusement as she slammed the curtain closed as if it were enough of a physical barrier to stop Yelena from attacking.

Yelena turned back to the rack. Her hand found the matching jacket, closed around the hanger, and stayed there a moment longer than necessary.

Then she pulled it free, moved to the adjacent cubicle, and drew the curtain behind her with more force than necessary.

She hung the jacket on the hook, and looked at her own reflection in the narrow mirror, saw the fire in her eyes before taking a deep breath in and closing her eyes.

She could practically feel Ava’s smile through the wall.

—-

By the time the four of them were back in the tower, it was the end of the day. The living room had that loose energy, shoes off, low light, the TV on somewhere in the background that nobody was really watching.

Peter was ironing his suit at the kitchen counter with the focused intensity of a man who hadn’t successfully ironed something in months. 

Lucky sat at his feet and watched with great patience. A human. In the room where food lives. These were all the ingredients. Maybe he would get a second dinner. He just had to wait.

Kamala and Cassie had claimed the big couch and were debriefing Bob on the boring research they did into the weapons crates today, annoyed that they found nothing.

Kate came out of her room in a worn black hoodie and shorts that could barely be seen under the oversized fabric. Her hair was still slightly damp from her shower, and she dropped onto the smaller couch beside a mug she'd clearly already made and forgotten. She picked it up. Cold. She held it anyway.

She heard soft footsteps approaching from her corridor and didn't look up.

She knew the sound of Yelena's footsteps without meaning to. Light, even, unhurried. She'd catalogued them at some point without making a decision about it.

Yelena came to a stop at the edge of the kitchen to give Lucky a gentle pat on the head before moving to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of water.

The room was occupied in the way that felt easy rather than crowded, and for a moment, Yelena just stood there while she sipped, the faint noise of the TV, the hiss of Peter's iron, Cassie's voice threading through the background.

Then her gaze moved to Kate, already looking back at her.

Neither of them said anything. It wasn't uncomfortable exactly. They'd spent the whole day not being in the same room. Now they were, and neither of them quite knew what to do with that.

The text sat between them like something neither had agreed to carry and neither could put down.

Kate held the cold mug, stroking the handle absentmindedly, and stared at nothing in particular.

She's a trained Black Widow. There's no way you'd be able to tell either way.

Peter had said it so casually. Like it was a throwaway observation, something to fill the space between the hair tie and the dresses. Like he hadn't just quietly detonated something in her chest and then gone back to sitting on her bed as if nothing had happened.

She turned the mug in her hands.

The thing was, he wasn't wrong. That was the problem. He was completely, infuriatingly not wrong, and she had known it the second he said it, which was precisely why she had grabbed the dresses and changed the subject and put on the faux smile and pretended it had landed like nothing, because the alternative was admitting that it had landed like everything.

She snuck a glance toward the library nook. Yelena had her book open, eyes down, expression unreadable in the way it always was, in the way it had always been, in the way that Kate had spent an embarrassing amount of time over the past week trying to read and consistently failing at.

Which was the whole point, wasn't it?

She looked back into her mug, because honestly, the tea leaves might have more answers than Yelena’s unreadable demeanour. 

The only way she was ever going to know what her reaction to that text was was if she asked. Which she absolutely, under no circumstances, could do. Right?

I mean, she technically could; she’s already been rejected twice. What's a third time at this point? Is it worse than this mental torture of trying to read the unreadable for the foreseeable future? 

Just ask.

No.

Because if she brought it up, it was immediately, obviously, undeniably clear that it had meant something. 

And then Yelena would know that.

And then there would be this moment, this horrible, irreversible moment, where Yelena knew, and Kate would have to stand there in the full exposure of it and wait for what would feel like an eternity for the actual, tangible rejection, not just an unread text, or a non-reaction to finding out. But a real rejection. 

Then they’d have to work together every day after that, torture.

She took a sip of the cold coffee without thinking and immediately regretted it, grimacing at the taste.

And then there was the other option, the 0.0001% chance. The part that was somehow worse than the rejection itself.

What if Yelena would’ve said yes? 

Then what? Then Kate would be standing there with everything she'd spent four years tidying away, suddenly untidied, looking at Yelena across whatever distance was left between them.

And what?

They went for a drink? They talked about it? They—

What did they do with it? What was the version of this that didn't end with one of them getting hurt? They lived on the same floor. They worked on the same team. They were going to a gala together on Saturday, where Kate needed to be focused and professional and not—

Not this. Whatever this was.

Panic started to set in.

Which was insane, by the way, completely insane, because the scary option was the good option, the scary option was the one where Yelena said yes, and Kate was apparently more frightened of that than she was of the rejection, which meant something she absolutely refused to look at directly right now.

Her thumb had stopped moving on the handle of the mug. Panic had taken over her at this point. Why was this even more fear-inducing? Am I breathing?

Am I breathing?

She checked.

She wasn't, really. Not properly. Her chest was doing something shallow and unconvincing that her lungs were technically accepting but not thriving on.

Her hands were shaking around the cold mug in her hands. Not dramatically, just a fine, persistent tremor that she could feel in her fingers and her wrists and somewhere behind her sternum where her heart was doing something it wasn't supposed to be doing at this volume.

Okay.

She pressed her fingers into the ceramic of the mug. The texture was smooth and cold on her hands. She focused on that. Just that.

In.

Her lungs pushed back. Like something was sitting on her chest, not heavy enough to name but present enough to make every breath a negotiation.

Out.

The room felt like it had gotten smaller. Not dramatically, not in a way anyone would notice, just closer at the edges. Like the walls had taken one quiet step inward while she wasn't looking.

She stared at the carpet.

There was a specific patch of it, about two feet in front of her, that she fixed her eyes on and didn't move from. An old trick. You find something real, and you look at it, and you breathe, and you wait for the aperture to widen back out.

In.

Her chest stuttered on it.

Out.

Better. Barely, but better.

She was distantly aware of the television. Peter's iron hissing somewhere behind her. Giggles from down the hall indicating that Kamala, Bob, and Cassie had left the room. Normal sounds. Real sounds. She catalogued them without looking up from the carpet, building the room back out from the centre.

TV. Iron. The low hum of the refrigerator.

Her hands were still shaking.

—--

Yelena was leaning on the fridge, sipping her water and just observing the room, not Kate, definitely not Kate. 

Because Yelena had made herself a promise. Distance. Colleague. Nothing more. It was a simple enough instruction, and she had followed considerably more difficult ones without breaking stride.

And yet there was this…gravity.

Even though it was years ago, she suddenly wasn't able to push it to the back of her mind anymore. She had thought about it on the way to the uniform supplier. On the way back. In the forty minutes she'd spent in her room after, staring at the ceiling with a book open across her chest that she hadn't read a single word of.

Normally, the only way she could get something out of her system was to run through all the logic and explain things away, stripping it down to what was useful and discarding the rest.

The problem was that none of the logic was useful. Because the logic kept arriving at the same terrifying place. 

Kate Bishop had sent her a message four years ago that she had read and destroyed without answering, and the reason wasn’t that she hadn't wanted to, but if she’s honest with herself, it's because she had wanted to, and that fact frightened her in a way that very few things did anymore.

The other thing she couldn’t quite figure out was why. Why did she want to meet her that night, and why did that fact make her drown her phone and smash it to pieces… a drink is just a drink.

Yelena took a slow sip of water again and looked at the far wall.

She didn't want to be in her room. She had tried that. Her room had a particular silence of a space that knew her too well, and she had lasted forty minutes before she needed to be somewhere with other noise in it.

She simply had to be in the same room as Kate Bishop without letting Kate Bishop become the only thing in the room. Easy.  

She watched the side of Kate's face in the low light, the small furrow between her brows that meant she was thinking, the way her thumb was moving slowly back and forth along the handle of the cold mug, a gesture that looked like nervousness and probably was. 

Kate wasn't good at hiding things. She had never been good at hiding things. It was one of the more exhausting things about her, and also, if Yelena was being precise about it, one of the things she found most—

She stopped that thought before it finished.

This was the problem. This was exactly the problem. Ever since the text came up, this has gotten so much harder! She could hold the line for an hour, for a day maybe, and then Kate would sit in low light with damp hair and a cold mug she'd forgotten to drink, looking like she was thinking extremely hard about something, and whatever careful architecture Yelena had spent the day constructing would develop a crack she couldn't locate.

It felt like a trance. She was aware of it the way you were aware of stepping onto ice, the moment just before the surface registered under your weight, where you still had the choice to step back.

She always stepped back.

She pushed off the fridge with more force than necessary and made her way toward the library nook, the elevated corner just behind the TV, far enough to be separate and close enough to not be in the terrifying silence of her room.

It wasn't distance. But it was the best she was going to manage tonight, and she had decided that was acceptable.

Most people had left the room, she noticed now it was only Pete left in the Kitchen and Kate on the small sofa. 

She settled into the armchair, pulled her book from the shelf beside it,  the same worn paperback from her nightstand, the same three pages she'd read a hundred times, and opened it and vowed to herself not to look up from these pages.

Or she tried not to.

She heard a shaky breath from about 7 feet away; she couldn’t help but glance up from the page.

The breath had come from Kate, who was staring wide-eyed at a distant patch of carpet, thumb stilled against her mug now, but fingers slightly shaking around the ceramic, her chest rising and falling in an irregular pattern.

“Kate”, the name escaped her lips softly before she could catch it, her book falling from her grasp.

Kate’s eyes didn't move; she stayed in the same position, but her hands were gripping the mug in her lap tighter now. 

Worry started to wash over her as her body rose from the chair and started to make its way over to Kate. 

She crouched down beside her, and Kate didn’t react, like she couldn't see anything except the patch of carpet she was glued to. 

“Kate”, Yelena repeated, placing a gentle hand on her knee. 

Kate blinked. Slowly, like coming back from somewhere far away. Her eyes dropped to the hand on her knee before travelling up to Yelena's face, and something in her expression shifted, not quite embarrassment, not quite relief. Somewhere between the two.

"Hey," Kate said, her voice coming out shakier than she intended.

"Hey," Yelena said back, quietly.

She didn't move her hand.

Kate's grip on the mug loosened slightly. She became aware of how tightly she'd been holding it and set it down on the cushion beside her, then seemed to change her mind and held it again, like she needed something to do with her hands.

"Sorry," Kate said. "I just—" She stopped. Tried again. "I'm fine."

Yelena said nothing. She just stayed crouched beside her, close enough that Kate could have reached out and touched her without fully extending her arm, and waited with the particular patience of someone who knew that fine was almost never the word people meant when they said it.

Kate looked at her for a moment, then away. Her breathing was still uneven at the edges, catching slightly on every third breath in the way that meant she was trying to manage it and mostly succeeding.

"You don't have to—" Kate started.

"I know," Yelena said.

She stayed anyway.

The television murmured. Peter's iron hissed from the kitchen. Somewhere down the hall, a door closed softly.

Yelena watched Kate's chest rise and fall, watching the rhythm of it slowly even out, and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say and she had learned long ago that the most valuable thing you could offer someone in the middle of something like this was simply to not leave.

After a moment, Kate let out a long, slow breath. The last of the shaking went with it.

"I'm okay," she said. This time it was closer to true.

Yelena nodded once. Her hand was still on Kate's knee. She became aware of this and didn't move it.

"Do you want water?" she asked instead, because it was practical, and practical was safe, and it was something she could actually do.

Kate almost smiled. It didn't quite make it all the way, but it got close. "I'm already holding a drink."

Yelena glanced at the mug then back up to Kate's eyes, holding her gaze meaningfully, "It is cold."

Their eyes were locked, and a few beats passed before Kate managed to remember she needed to reply. "Yeah," Kate said softly. "It is."

Yelena stood slowly, taking her hand back. She crossed to the kitchen without a word, filled a glass with cold water, and set it on the coffee table in front of Kate on her way back to the armchair.

She picked up her book.

She did not read it.

-

A lil bit of broken Kate in this one as a treat😂 Let me know what you think of Yelena's POV of the whole text situation, i'm dying to hear your opinions!