Work Text:
August 1995.
They are nearing the end of the mission. Alexei has made great progress over the past few months, they are so close to achieving what they are in Ohio for. Surely, they both agree, it will happen within the next week. And every morning, she gets the coffeepot ready, pins his badge to his uniform, and kisses him goodbye. Every evening, she waits for him to return, tell her that the mission is completed, that it is time for them to go.
It is almost maddening.
She feels like she is about to crack under the stress of waiting, not knowing whether Alexei is successful, when he is coming home, and if they have to flee. She itches to do something, instead of waiting around the house all day, pretending that everything is normal and fine when their lives could change that very night.
It is harder still to ensure the girls have no idea of this—Natasha is halfway trained as a spy, always wary and watchful. And Yelena, all of six years old, is surprisingly empathetic and observant behind her goofy demeanor.
She sends the two girls out to play most of the time, a valid excuse as it is the last days of summer. The new academic year starts in a week and a half, but Melina is not so sure they will still be here in Ohio when it begins.
She thinks wistfully that Yelena would be starting First Grade if they do.
The little girl has grown so fast, Melina can hardly believe her eyes. The toddler that joined them from Russia is now a six-year-old turning cartwheels in the backyard, with the carefreeness only a six-year-old can have.
Natasha, too, has grown, now all lanky limbs and her red hair dyed blue. She had suggested it at the beginning of summer, citing something different for a change, and Melina had acquiesced, what harm was a little hairdye? After all, she could understand the girl’s need to cling on to whatever freedom and choice they had.
And now they were so close to it all coming to an end. It almost hurt to think about it.
Of course, Melina knows that this was always temporary. This was never her life to live, the girls were never hers to keep. They all would one day have to leave this place, this idyllic life on an unimportant street where they were all only pretending to be normal.
After three years, playing house had slowly begun to feel like a reality. After three years of cooking, packing children’s lunchboxes, kissing her fake husband goodbye every morning, of picking the girls up from school and sending them for extracurricular activities—all this had begun to feel routine, and the life filled with violence and bloodshed to just feel like a distant nightmare.
After three years of lying to everyone around her, perhaps she had begun to lie to herself, too.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe her life before wasn’t the nightmare, it was simply reality. This life in Ohio, on the other hand, is a dream: a dream that they all have to wake up from soon enough.
She looks at the girls out the window, playing like there isn’t another care in the world. Her chest constricts at the thought of them being thrust back into the Red Room academy—Natasha forced back into the life that still haunts her even now in the nightmares that visit her after the lights are turned out at night. And perhaps even more cruelly, Yelena being thrown into the deep end with no knowledge of what awaits her and no one to rely on beside herself.
When Melina first read the mission brief, saw that it called for her to play the role of a mother, she had sworn that she would never raise her girls like the Americans—coddled, spoiled, and worse of all, soft. The mere thought of it had made her lip curl in disgust. The Red Room raised her to be marble—hardened under pressure. She was raised to be the best, and she would make sure these girls were, too. She would return them to the Red Room as well-trained assets for them to finish moulding into future Widows.
That had been before she laid eyes on them.
Somehow, she had no idea, their smiles, their hugs, their words had worked magic, some kind of healing on her shattered, aching heart. Before she knew it, she was referring to them as my girls without second thought, and the idea of having to return them to the Red Room sickened her.
She remembers meeting them for the first time at the Red Room, thinking what the hell she was supposed to do with them. The first time she tried to calm a wailing Yelena who couldn’t fall asleep, how hopeless she was at it until Alexei cuddled and soothed her so effortlessly. The first time Natasha called her Mama when they were at home, away from the prying eyes and ears of classmates and teachers, and the way it made her breath hitch in her throat. All the times she drove them back and forth from school, kindergarten, gymnastics, and sports, listening to Yelena sing along with the radio or Natasha telling them about her day.
These weren’t just any girls, they were her girls. Maybe not by flesh and blood, but she raised them to the best of her ability, tried her damnedest to give them the life and love that she never had.
Melina looks around the house that has over the years started to finally feel like a home.
She doesn’t want to leave.
It is Thursday when everything falls apart.
It starts unremarkable, just like everything about their house, their street, their life. Melina prepares breakfast, Alexei leaves early for work, she cleans the house and prepares lunch, the girls head down to a neighbor’s house to play, leaving her some time to collate research and translate notes.
The information they have gathered from S.H.I.E.L.D. at the North Institute is incredible. The way they have managed to dissect the human brain, mapped the networks in each hemisphere and lobe and cortex, to localize the center of free will in humans. It is terrifying, the idea of what could be done with this kind of research, but it is also fascinating and brilliant.
Melina files away the research, spread out in different boxes in nondescript places around the house for safekeeping. There are other fake documents, also scattered through the house, to misinform and mislead. One can never be too careful.
She clears the dining table, gets dinner prepared and in the oven. She looks at the clock, Alexei is late, should have been home half an hour ago. It makes her anxious. Perhaps today is the day, but she thought that too, yesterday and the day before. It is making her feel on edge, and she hates it, loathes the feeling of not being in control of her emotions. She is a Widow, the Iron Maiden, she should be better than this.
Natasha dumps her bike in the driveway, scampers up the path to the backyard where Yelena has been entertaining herself on the swing sets for the past fifteen minutes. Melina steps out of the backyard door, as the two girls fall out of their backbends and chase each other around the yard. Natasha is too fast, too agile for Yelena, and the younger girl trips over her own feet and tumbles to the ground.
“Mama!” she wails out, and Melina is by her side in an instant, but Natasha gets to her first, wraps an arm around her protectively.
“You bumped your knee?” Melina asks, bending down to soothe the little girl. Yelena nods, sniffling.
Melina plants a kiss on the bruised knee. “Kiss it better, there we go.” Normally she is not so indulgent, it is only a scratch—not even a bead of blood, but if these are their last days together, perhaps it is alright to be a little soft. She knows that they will not have these little mercies in the Red Room.
Yelena’s tears have stopped, and Melina gently tugs her to her feet with one hand. “Come on, little one, get up, you’re a brave girl. Pain only makes you stronger.” The words that kept her going, when she thought she would collapse from the training, when every muscle screamed in protest, on days she thought she might just die. A phrase just innocent enough that the girls could recite without concerned looks from other parents or teachers, but were lifesaving in those dark nights she had cried herself to sleep while shackled to her cot.
She hates that she has to teach such things to Natasha and Yelena, instead of those motivational quotes American parents preach, reach for the stars, follow your dreams. But what dreams does she have? She’s never had a choice. Her future was always in the hands of men, higher-ups who dictated what missions she went on next, where they would take place, what she was ordered to do. Soon, too, will the girls have their choices taken away from there. She can only hope her teachings, her words are not stolen away like their innocence will be.
“Look, forest stars!” Yelena exclaims in delight, at the fireflies that twinkle in the trees.
“You know what?” Melina asks, in an overdramatic stage whisper, “Those are actually part of the Lampyridae family. And the glow that you see? Comes from a chemical reaction called bioluminescence.”
She’s always loved science, devouring those textbooks during her time in the academy, acing her exams and spending her little free time in the labs. It didn’t take long for her handlers to take notice. They channelled her brilliance into the subject, and she had spent hours experimenting with chemical compounds or creating new alloys and materials. It is this knowledge that allows her to decode the information Alexei brings back from work, helps her sift out what is relevant and useful, to translate and send them to Dreykov.
“Bio-goomin-feasants?” Yelena giggles. She loves the random fun facts Melina shares, although Melina is not sure how much she actually understands. At her age, half of the wonders of the world can still be explained by magic.
“Bio-gooming-feasants,” Melina repeats, chuckling, then calls over her shoulder to Natasha who is still gazing at the fireflies, “Dinner! Come on, big girl!”
The house is dim and quiet when they enter—still no sign of Alexei. He is almost never this late, not without some valid reason. Maybe it is really going to be today.
“I want mac and cheese,” Yelena announces. They just had mac and cheese yesterday, but Melina is sure the kid would eat it every day if she had any say.
“And I want caviar and champagne,” she teases. “Grab the napkins,” she instructs, picking up the salad bowl and setting it on the table. She’s tense, trying to distract herself with the busy dinnertime routine, getting everything set out properly, making sure the children don’t pick up on her unease.
“Green beans are my favorite vegetables!” Yelena says, as the front door slams and Melina hears the thudding of Alexei’s heavy footsteps before he enters the dining room.
“Dad’s home!” she calls, managing to keep her voice even.
Natasha greets him as he strides into the kitchen to grab a cold bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Melina busies herself with ladling food onto the girls’ plates, invites him to sit down and join them. But he stares wordlessly out into the driveway, the bottle in his hand, as if waiting for something or someone.
“Everything okay?” she asks, worried, now she is sure that something is wrong. He is never this quiet, he is always boisterous, loud, and excited to be back home with his girls.
Alexei sighs, turning to face her. Their eyes meet, and she instantly knows.
It is done.
They have finished what they were sent here to do.
“How was everybody’s day?” he asks instead, out of habit, and Yelena prattles on about the fireflies and her knee, but he’s not listening to her response.
Melina gets up from her chair, joins him in the next room, out of the children’s earshot. She can already see Natasha eyeing them suspiciously. She is worried too, probably has sensed something is just not quite right these past few days.
“No,” Melina doesn’t want to believe it’s over. He simply nods.
“How long do we have?” she asks, needing to know so that she can formulate a plan of action.
“I don’t know,” Alexei is subdued, almost regretful. “Like, an hour, maybe.” He looks over at Natasha and Yelena, still eating and chatting. There’s no time to finish their dinner. They have to leave now.
Melina feels her stomach drop. Everything they have discussed and planned and rehearsed for has happened, the mission has been completed, the information successfully obtained. All they have to do now is to get out and deliver it. She should be proud, it was not an easy undercover operation, but they have managed to pull it off, remain undetected, and stolen the information required from under the noses of American scientists who never suspected a thing. But instead she’s filled with dread and disappointment that their time in Ohio has come to an end. That this life she has spent the past three years building is falling down all around her. The hope that their ruse was something more is now completely and utterly destroyed.
After three years of playing pretend, reality hits her like a semi-truck—they were never the Wolf family with their two beautiful daughters living life in this cozy house in an unremarkable Ohio suburb. They are Russia’s best soldier and spy, with two assassins-in-training. Their cover is now blown, they are nothing more than criminals being hunted by the law here. There is nothing left for them here in America.
“I don’t want to go,” she whispers, as Alexei reaches a hand up to tenderly cup her cheek. It doesn’t make a difference, whether she says it or not, but it makes her feel rebellious. In any other circumstance, that statement would have resulted in a bullet straight through her head. The rage that she contains toward the Red Room for stealing her childhood and soon her daughters’ could never be adequately expressed, but disagreeing aloud for one last time will do.
“Don’t say that,” he murmurs. He knows that what she says rings true for both of them. That despite his grumblings about how boring the whole mission was, how it lacked the excitement and adrenaline he craved from the battlefield, he had begun to feel at home here, too.
They have no choice, they have come this far, and with the burning of the Ohio North Institute so do they burn every other bridge behind them that could have contained the possibility of them staying on.
She and Alexei had briefly entertained the idea of staying on, even going so far as to say it aloud to each other. Imagined running away to another state, or dragging the mission out so they could spend more time here. But she knows any such plan would be futile, Dreykov has agents stationed around the globe, ready to hunt down deserters without any mercy. Running away would be a death sentence for all of them.
And trying to fool their handlers would be absurd as well. The Red Room has spies to spy on them. Even the Iron Maiden and the Red Guardian cannot be trusted. Their handlers demand monthly reports, and they check-in every four to six months. The tracker in her leg provides them her real-time whereabouts. There is no escape.
They return to their seats at the table, resigned to their fate.
Alexei puts on a smile, tries to sound excited. “Girls, you remember when I told you that one day we would have that big adventure?”
Natasha seems to deflate that instant, her shoulders slump as the full weight of his words catch on.
“Well, today’s the day.”
“Yay!” Yelena exclaims in glee, her mouth still half-full of buttery corn.
“All right, let’s go!” The scraping of his chair as he gets up from the table startling both Natasha and Melina. Yelena scrambles after him in excitement, the promise of an adventure tantalizing and fascinating. The innocence in her wide brown eyes is almost too painful for Melina to look at.
She meets Natasha’s eyes, and sees all the fear, worry, and terror that she is feeling reflected back at her.
What kind of mother willingly delivers their children into the lion’s lair? She knows everything that will befall them, the way their childhood and innocence will be snatched away. The way they will be forced to kill or be killed. The way they cannot stop looking over their shoulders at any moment or risk it being their last. The way they will be shackled to their beds at night with no one to comfort them when the night terrors come. The way Dreykov and his cronies will put their hands on them and leave marks that no amount of scrubbing and soap can clean off. The way they will made into weapons for powerful men to control, and then discarded when they no longer of any use.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. She has nothing better to say. She knows that the two words don’t even come close to what she wants to express right now, the regret that fills every part of her.
She knows they don’t deserve this, not Natasha, not Yelena. They deserve to grow up like the other children on the block, to ride their bicycles down the street without a care in the world, go to sleepovers with their classmates where they stay up late talking about crushes, and have the choice to go to college, get married, and have children of their own.
They deserve all the world has to offer.
But it is not hers to give.
And she wants to scream, shatter the plates on the dining table in fury, grab them in her arms and tell them how sorry she is that she couldn’t give them the happy ending like those in the stories they read about in the books borrowed from the library. Tell them how helpless she feels when every movement of hers is tracked and scrutinized, and that she has no choice but to subject them to the same tortures she, too, was a victim of. Let them know with every fiber of her being that she does not want this to happen, that she would cycle through the Red Room all over again if it meant that they would be spared.
But she cannot.
She’s never had a choice.
Natasha stares back at her, stony-faced and silent.
She, too, is resigned to their fate.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Alexei gesturing at her, we don’t have much time left. She gets up, leaving Natasha sitting, alone at the table, their plates still piled high with uneaten food. Yelena is complaining that she is still hungry, and Alexei placates her with the promise of Fruit Roll-ups later.
Melina knows what she has to do, and it triggers her into mission mode, what she has trained and practiced for all of her life. She grabs the most important documents, stuffing them into her bag. Secures the handgun from its hiding place on top of the kitchen cabinet, ensuring it is fully loaded.
Natasha runs back in, having forgotten something. She grabs the photo album from the coffee table, and Melina’s breath hitches. It’s not going to survive the trip in Natasha’s hands, they will not be allowed to keep anything they take with them other than the research.
“No, leave it, leave it,” she snaps, the words coming out more sharply than she intended in her panic. “Go wait in the car.”
Natasha reluctantly obeys, racing out to join Alexei and Yelena in the car, and Melina is left alone in the house. It is suddenly too quiet. It’s almost hard to believe this will be their last time here.
The show is over, the curtain has fallen onstage, and as actors they have taken their final bows. This part of her life is over, it will never return, and no amount of mourning or wishing could ever bring it back. It is overwhelming, and she suddenly feels very young, very lost, and very vulnerable.
The other mothers on the block used to always compliment her, you look so young, I wish I could look as good as you after two kids, and she would always smile, quip that they are going to give me grey hairs soon. There are older women who look at Natasha, do the maths, and assume she must have been a teen mother—she sees the disgust and pity in their eyes. Alexei finds it hilarious, tells her she should be flattered, but they don’t know the real reason.
Yes, she’s young, she was only twenty-two when she arrived here in Ohio, and she is only twenty-five now. Only fourteen years Natasha’s senior. Of course, her Nebraska birth certificate has it amended to a much more appropriate age: she’s born in 1964, now thirty-one. Older widows are more valuable, it is rare for one to survive so long, so Dreykov would not waste them on an undercover mission like this, as important as it is.
But no matter how old she is now, no matter how old her forged birth certificate claims she is, no matter how many missions she has completed in the Iron Maiden suit, she still feels like a little girl. The little girl who aches to be loved, the little girl who wept for a mother she never knew before her cries were beaten out of her, a child just wants someone to sweep her up and away from this nightmare and bring her to a safe place where no one can ever hurt her again.
Standing alone in the living room of the house that was assigned to them three years ago, the house that has begun to feel more like a home than anywhere has ever felt, she feels lost. Wants to curl up in a ball and cry and scream that she doesn’t want to go, she wants to stay here forever and ever.
She surveys the empty living room where Yelena and Natasha would curl up with coloring books and jigsaw puzzles during the cold winter nights, the dining room where they had shared dinners as a family every night, the garden outside the window that she faithfully watered every morning and grew flowers and herbs, the firewood that had been split and stacked neatly by Alexei in preparation for a winter they will no longer be around for.
There are so many memories in the walls of this unassuming house. The doorframe where Alexei marked Natasha and Yelena’s height in pencil every year on their birthdays. Yelena’s stuffed toy collection sitting on her bed. Natasha’s bookshelf, where she also displayed the rocks Yelena painted for her. The fireplace where she would read to the girls on rainy days. The plants she potted and decorated the walls and counter with. The first place that had ever felt like a home to her. A place she had turned from a house into a home with her own hands, based on her own choices. Where she felt she had some semblance of control and agency.
It feels like a knife has been driven into her, it hurts so much to leave it all behind and know that she can never return.
She forces herself to move, pulls herself away from being rooted to the floor. They need to go, now. She grabs the photo album, tucks it into one of the boxes where she keeps her notes and research stolen from the North Institute, all the way at the false bottom of the box. At first, she is tempted to bring it with her in the bag, but she knows that if the Red Room found out, they would burn it instantly. Her handlers know where every box of research has been stashed, she has outlined it for them in her notes and they will retrieve them afterwards. She can only hope they do not find the album hidden underneath all the data.
If she can’t have this life, at least she can try to cling on to the memories.
She goes through the mental checklist of the items in her bag once again, double-checks the safety of the handgun, and adjusts the knife is strapped to the inside of her jeans. The two girls are waiting in the back of the car, already buckled in. She takes a deep breath. They will be alright, they have practiced this routine multiple times, the girls know what to do, she and Alexei have discussed various exit strategies and escape routes.
“You have it?” she asks Alexei.
“Yeah.”
“It’s the only copy?” she confirms. They cannot afford to mess it up at this point, not when they’re so close.
“It’s the only one not on fire,” he assures her, tucking the floppy disk into his backpack. The disk containing everything they had set out to obtain, that contains codes for controlling humanity on a scale that has never been seen before. It is hard to believe the power that lies in something so small. But they have said similar things about Widows, too.
She and Alexei climb into the car, he flips the headlights on and they pull out of the driveway, racing down the street, down to the old airstrip where their getaway plane waits for them.
Melina takes one last, long look at the house, then squares her jaw and sets her shoulders, looking resolutely forward as the familiar neighborhood disappears behind them.
“Where are we going?” Yelena asks from the backseat.
“Home.” Melina finds herself saying.
Madame B was right.
Melina has no place in this world. Her hands are stained with blood, her ledger is gushing red, she only belongs in the Red Room. No matter what Dreykov does to her, she always comes back to him, tail tucked between her legs—she has been trained so well, cowed and beaten down.
Her home was never here in Ohio.
It is finished.
There is no use looking back.
Dinner is still warm by the time the SWAT team swarms the house.