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As she scanned the half-lit room for the fifth time, trying to find any immediate threats, Kate Bishop wondered if all missions were this damn disorienting.
It was hard to focus amid everything that was happening. Her team was in the middle of an operation that they had planned with little time and few resources, and her mother was in extremely real danger. So was Clint, given the misinformed but motivated assassin on his tail.
On top of that, she didn’t have her bow, which was stashed somewhere else on the floor. The comms unit in her ear itched like hell. Several people close to her were screaming. And her heart was racing with adrenaline.
Damn it. Concentrate.
Then, finally, Kate’s eyes landed on something meaningful as she saw a blond vision in a green coat following Clint to the service elevator, and she rapidly followed, escaping the noise and the chaos of the ruined party. Yet though she sidled up to Yelena as casually as she possibly could, her heartbeat stubbornly refused to calm.
It really didn’t help that the assassin was stunning. Or that her crooning Kate’s name with a sly smile affected Kate way more than she would like to admit.
But when Yelena placed a gloved hand on Kate’s chest to keep her out of the elevator, something actually happened. Kate knew that her blood was awash with hormones, some fight-or-flight and others perhaps just as base, but she had never felt the humming in her skin that surfaced under Yelena’s fingers.
As if it were noting her proximity.
Fortunately, the sensation left as soon as Yelena took her hand away, like an engine turning over without starting, and Kate collected herself enough to scoot into the elevator as the door closed.
She stayed still for a few seconds, appreciating the silence as she unsuccessfully tried to slow her heart and calm her brain. Hoping to beat Yelena’s reflexes, she then lunged to hit a button to stop the elevator’s descent. When Yelena dismissively swatted her hand, she tried again, twice, only to be wrestled in several directions.
Which led to Kate standing toe to toe with Yelena, wrist vibrating disconcertingly under her fingers.
She reflexively slapped her across the face.
For an instant, Kate wasn’t positive she was still conscious. Every one of her nerve endings felt as though they had exploded and imploded at the same time. She felt fundamentally different in a way that she couldn’t describe.
And she knew that the layers of irritation and anger and confusion settling in her chest were most certainly not her own.
“What was that?” Yelena whispered, releasing her wrist as if it burned, and a barbed spike of fear lanced through Kate like a harpoon.
Kate fell back against the elevator panel, haphazardly pushing buttons with her body as she tried to maintain her balance. Unable to break Yelena’s gaze, she mumbled back, “I don’t know.”
But she did. And based on the narrowing of her eyes as she cursed and ran through the now-open door and the bewilderment vanishing from her feelings, Yelena knew, too.
Still stunned, Kate could do little but sink to the floor. She muttered a warning to Clint about Yelena heading his way from above, but otherwise she couldn’t move, immobilized by the foreign emotions flooding her system and a single, all-consuming thought.
She’s my soulmate.
My soulmate.
Obviously, Kate had heard of soulmates. They were overrepresented in media and bandied about as fodder for jokes in middle and high school. Every so often, a news report would talk about soulmate research and how upon skin contact, specific pieces of soulmates’ brains somehow became quantum-linked. Subatomic particle spin states would align, and each person would then feel the other’s emotions, never diminishing with time or distance.
It had always been a bunch of irrelevant gobbledygook to Kate, who had set her sights on the small probabilities that she could control. National championships. Olympic gold. Avengerhood. She didn’t need a soulmate to know that she was special.
But as the elevator doors opened and closed from floor to floor, rhythmically and ineffectually, Kate was forced to conclude that she was special in a different way. It felt absolutely terrifying, regardless of Yelena’s fear and anger in her heart.
And mostly because of it.
As the elevator door closed on the ninth floor, Kate was startled back to reality by gunshots popping in her ear through her comms. “Clint?” she checked when the shots stopped, although she had no reason to be worried. There was no hint of satisfaction in Yelena’s ire.
“Just a graze. She’s on the ground, but I don’t know where,” Clint related, then muttered, “Shit -” and cut off. The curse was swiftly followed by a few clunks and several more gunshots.
Now somewhat refocused on her mission, Kate wrestled herself to standing and shed her dress, revealing the purple of her costume in the murky reflection of the elevator walls. Impatiently, she waited for the ground level, then sprinted outside, not sure whether to feel relieved or distressed when Yelena was nowhere in sight.
Then she had no time to wonder anymore, as she found herself toppling a tree and firing arrows at more tracksuits than she had ever seen in her life. The fight was exhilarating, and most of Kate’s brain was fixed on dodging hits and picking out targets.
Yet a part of her also couldn’t escape the roiling pool of Yelena’s anger.
The rage didn’t leave after the tracksuits were all laid out. It ran with Kate as she rounded the corner to find her mom beset by Kingpin. It fought with her as she futilely threw trick after trick in his direction. And as she hit the floor yet again after being shoved like a cardboard cutout, the anger boiled over once more.
There was nothing Kate could do about it. Not until she had explosively incapacitated Kingpin and made sure her mother was alive, and by then Yelena’s fury had dimmed into something much more debilitating.
Grief and guilt engulfed her, and Kate couldn’t determine whose was whose as her mother stared accusingly at her through the rear window of a police car.
The feelings were all linked. Entwined.
Now that she had space to breathe, Kate’s fear came back in force.
When she found Clint, some minutes later, Kate was relieved that he was mostly okay. And she was completely unsurprised to learn that Yelena had disappeared into the night.
———
The next week was hard, despite the Bartons’ hospitality.
Almost every moment was a reminder of a massive change in her life, and more often than not Kate lurched between emotions like a drunken poet. It didn’t matter whether she was playing video games with Nate or wandering through the fields with Lucky or taking a hundredth whack at the punching bag that hung in the barn. There was an underlying volatility in her chest that she couldn’t restrain.
She supposed that was probably normal when a person suddenly started feeling for two.
Obviously, Kate tried to contact Yelena at her previous number, but given the lack of written or emotional response, she assumed that the phone had been tossed. And Clint confirmed that it would be almost impossible to track down a Black Widow who didn’t want to be found. So, at least for the time being, Kate could do little but try to understand their tangled link.
The easiest thread to unravel was the deep despair that Yelena radiated almost constantly. Harder were the nuances that occasionally punctuated it, like longing and anger and ever-so-brief flashes of amusement.
Kate was actually embarrassed at how long it took her to realize how often the two of them responded to each other. Her emotional landscape shifted as Yelena’s did, and she became increasingly aware that bursts of feeling from Yelena often directly related to her.
It was hard to ignore.
When she and Lila were watching a ridiculous reality show and Lila made a crack that had Kate laughing, a spurt of anger swiftly emerged. Before falling asleep, when her mother’s resentful face stained the insides of her eyelids, Kate was surprised by a flare of something close to understanding. The next night, around the dinner table, she sat back in her chair with a full belly, contentedly watching the Barton family antics as Lucky lay on her feet, and a powerful yearning wrapped around her heart.
That time, Kate tried deliberately to send something back. An offering of hope.
But her emotions couldn’t lie, and she was fairly certain that the only messages she sent were of worry and of want.
She wished Yelena would call.
———
January was hard.
It was logistically exhausting. Kate had decided the most sensible thing to do was to move everything salvageable from her burnt apartment up to her off-campus residence near school. And between packing, managing insurance claims, negotiating with the Bishop Security board of directors, and caring for a dog for the first time in her life, she felt almost constantly drained.
Yelena’s emotions littering her system didn’t help. Her misery never really eased and was all-too-frequently accompanied by anger. It was a perpetual assault that only subsided when Yelena was asleep.
Sometimes, when she was especially worn out, Kate desperately wished that she could expel the feelings from her chest, breathe them out, let them burn her airways as long as they would then dissipate into the air so that she could find some peace.
Other times, she just longed to be alone.
But alone was impossible. And gradually, after days of unrelenting and involuntary practice, she began to get used to it.
The weeks passed, and shortly before school started again, Kate fielded a phone call from her mother. What they said to each other, though strained, was mundane, and she felt numb during the entire interaction. Afterward, though, with Lucky’s head pressed against her thigh, she spent a long time crying tears of rage and guilt and loneliness.
Then she felt a spark traveling from her head to her heart. A small flicker of want and hope, coupled with an aching sincerity.
Cradling the tiny glow, Kate realized that for the first time, Yelena was trying to make her feel better. The thought was enough to thin her tears and kindle a gleam of gratitude in return.
To her surprise, Yelena’s emotional spectrum then transformed into something that Kate hadn’t yet felt from her. Contentment. And when some part of Kate began to feel the same, she finally understood that this connection was much more than not being alone.
It was fundamental.
Sometimes their emotions would intertwine, and sometimes they would burn, and sometimes they would squeeze, and sometimes they would fade. But no matter what they did, they were shaping Kate. They were shaping Yelena.
Two people, one soul.
At least for a moment, it didn’t seem so terrifying.
———
Spring was hard.
Kate threw herself headlong back into her classes, her friends, and her remaining archery competitions. It was all she could seem to do, even if she wasn’t quite the same person.
Even if something always felt a little wrong.
She searched for Yelena, with some surreptitious help from Bishop Security as well as all of the resources that Clint could muster. In the process, she learned more than she could stomach about the Red Room and Yelena’s past. But Kate couldn’t find her.
The failure felt infinitely frustrating. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand that Yelena needed space and that she needed time. Kate knew that.
But the knowledge didn’t erase the anger and grief and heartache that poured from Yelena every damn day.
Occasionally, Kate just wanted to scream at her. Shout to the heavens that she could be right there, if only Yelena would reach out. At times, the impulse came from Kate’s desire to truly help Yelena instead of uselessly projecting calm or understanding.
In her more selfish moments, though, her motives were borne from a need to chase the distress from her own heart and an even more desperate yearning for a hug.
She knew that Yelena cared. She could feel it. Underneath the torment, there was a layer of tenderness that Kate knew was hers. Often, she would lay in bed, close her eyes, and reach out her hand, and Yelena’s subtle warmth would be almost tangible.
But as the months passed, it wasn’t enough that Kate could sense her. It was never enough. And the tension grew in her chest.
Until a day came when something snapped.
Kate was sitting in the middle of class, diligently focused on the lecture and rapidly typing notes, and suddenly a wave of bleakness almost knocked her out of her chair. Seconds later, she found herself standing, barely registering anything around her, stumbling awkwardly toward the door.
There were probably a number of eyes on her, but she didn’t care. She was drowning, and she needed to find somewhere she could breathe.
After a brief time, Kate ended up in a little-used stairwell at the back of the building, her head in her hands and her shoulders drawn forward so that her arms covered her heart. She tried to send calm and encouragement to Yelena, but every attempt only wove strands of self-hatred into her gloom. Eventually, Kate could do nothing but yield and see where the tempest would take them.
Then the anguish became more resolute, and the hate gained purchase. It was nothing Kate had ever felt before, and a profound fear settled in her stomach. In her bones. Something else cried out from her, as well, screaming as if in pain.
And somehow, that something seemed to give Yelena pause.
Confusion rang through her despair, and her anger and hatred still swirled menacingly. Gradually, though, like a note crescendoing from nothing, came a ray of hope.
Kate shakily inhaled. She sat on the stairs, and they hoped in their hearts, and at last it seemed that they had weathered the worst of the storm.
All of the harsh emotions were still there, of course. But their presence meant that Yelena was still there, too, and that was all that mattered.
Hours later, as Yelena slept and Kate cried into Lucky’s fur for comfort and catharsis, she realized what had called out into the darkness. The something that had burst forth.
Love. She loved Yelena.
It wasn’t clear how much that fact changed anything, practically speaking. From then onward, though, Kate tried to convey the feeling as often as she could. And whenever she did, it seemed to sand down the rough edges of Yelena’s heartache, and Kate’s chest would loosen just a little bit further.
She loved her.
———
Summer was easier.
School had ended, and Kate had graduated, leaving behind the many late nights and mental stress. In its place, she had new opportunities rushing her from every direction.
After her lease ended, she returned to New York City with Lucky in tow, renting an apartment in a new area of town with easy access to a dog park and an archery range. Several of her friends moved to the City at the same time, giving her a small support network and reasons to go out.
She also dove into work.
Earlier in the year, the Bishop Security board had voted to name an interim CEO with the agreement that Kate would intern with the company to learn the products and procedures. So four days a week, she immersed herself in technology and corporatism, still unsure if the place was truly her future, but unwilling to burn the bridge entirely.
After leaving the office, most evenings and nights she spent on a different kind of work. She patrolled her area of the city, winding her way along streets and rooftops to find situations where she could help. In doing her rounds, Kate learned on the fly - sometimes painfully - and she felt more fulfilled than she had in years.
And, though distant, Yelena was always with her.
Yelena was faring better, too. Her anger emerged in short spikes rather than constant rolling waves, and while she still had days when her grief swelled and her hope dwindled, just as frequently she experienced periods of excitement, or of calm.
There were exceptions, of course, and not just emotionally. On two separate occasions in a ten-week period, Yelena was wounded. The first time, Kate only felt pain and anger, and though she needed to stop and catch her breath, it didn’t take long for the feelings to abate. A week later, Yelena seemed completely better.
Then one night, as Kate was crossing a rooftop, her legs buckled and she fell to her knees. The pain erupting from Yelena was similar to the first incident, but it was joined by an intense fear that sent Kate’s heart rate sky-high. She sat heavily and raised her knees to her chest, clutching her shins and feeling their fear intertwine, huddled and raw.
Until Yelena’s emotions dulled from unconsciousness.
Kate had never been so petrified.
She had no idea how long she sat on the rooftop in the dark, completely unaware of anything except for a thin trickle of pain and exhaustion, which she clutched like a lifeline. And she prayed.
It had been eight months since she had seen Yelena, and Kate could barely remember her face. Yet she still loved her. She still was her, in some inescapable way, with no embarrassment and no facade. They were just people, flawed and perfect, bound together.
Until one of their lives ended.
Somehow, eventually, she stumbled home. And when Yelena finally woke up hours later with her pain intact but her fear subdued, Kate knew that her relief and love must have been crushing.
Yelena echoed them back nonetheless.
———
Autumn was rough.
Early on, Kate had a string of bad patrols where people got hurt. Once, that included her, when she was shot in the thigh by a teenager with a gun. By the time she got to the hospital, she was more mad than scared, and Yelena’s worry and confusion did little to ease her anger.
Afterward, she more thoroughly understood the weeks of irritation that had poured from Yelena after her own injury. Kate was constantly annoyed at her forced convalescence, at the itchiness of her compresses, and at the pain involved in merely walking, even on crutches.
Clint was able to lend some assistance for her first few days out of the hospital, which was more helpful than Kate could express, but it didn’t truly ease her frustration.
Because Clint wasn’t who she wanted.
It was getting harder for her to justify Yelena’s absence. Kate understood the idea of sorting oneself out alone, since she also tended toward independence.
But Yelena had done that, and it seemed as though she had found some equilibrium along the way. On any given day, in fact, she seemed almost settled.
Is a text really so much to ask?
Sometimes Kate felt as though she was stretching, like having two people in one body was tearing at her muscles and her skin, more insidious and distressing than any bullet. And at those times, she wanted, and she raged.
She could tell that Yelena was perfectly aware when the fury was directed at her, since no curiosity or worry appeared. Just guilt with flecks of pain. And love. Always love. Which often served to make Kate even more livid.
But she could never be angry for long, as in addition to the love, she could always feel her own want reflecting back at her, deep and beautiful. Given its strength, she knew that there must be a reason that Yelena stayed away.
It was all Kate could hope. It was usually enough.
And then her mother’s trial happened.
Among the proceedings and the press, Kate held her head high, carefully regulating her expression as each new revelation surrounding her mother’s deeds was aired to world. She had spoken to her mom on occasion over the preceding ten months, but their discussions hadn’t prepared Kate for listening to the many details of how she had hurt people.
Her mother’s reasons were her own, and she had told Kate some of them. Occasionally, unsettlingly, a few even made sense. But her actions were another story entirely, and as the ten-day trial progressed, Kate’s muscles wound tighter and tighter until she was completely wrung out. Tapped of faith.
She felt herself losing her faith in people that her father had so beautifully instilled. Her faith that she could make a difference against the malicious powers at play.
Her faith that she might someday be happy.
By the middle of the second week of the trial, Kate was convinced that Yelena would never return.
It was clear that Yelena knew what was happening. Her love would sometimes swell, often in response to a new revelation that had sent Kate reeling. At times, though, Kate also caught a surge of longing in response to a video camera in her face. It only took a few such moments for her to realize what that actually meant.
Yelena was watching. She could see Kate on TV. She could see her, and she could feel her, and she still wouldn’t fucking come to her.
After that, Kate’s anger burned white-hot, and no amount of want or hope or reassurance from Yelena could soothe her.
The end of the trial arrived, and her mother was sentenced to forty years in prison with a possibility of parole after thirty. No matter the details or the reasons, it was devastating.
Kate waded through the cameras and the New York City traffic in a daze before finally reaching her apartment. Entering, she shut the door and slid down the wall near the entrance. Lucky trotted over and licked her face, then lay down beside her. And she sat, with a hole in her heart and hopelessness in her limbs, as the room darkened around her.
Eventually, Lucky rose and tried to nudge her into action, but Kate still couldn’t move. Her phone buzzed several times. Many, in fact. She ignored it.
Then one of the buzzes was accompanied by a burst of nerves from Yelena. And in the dark, a tiny spark of hope flared, from one or both of them. It didn’t really matter. What mattered is that Kate pulled out her phone.
I love you stared up at her.
Until that moment, Kate wouldn’t have thought it was possible to feel every emotion at the exact same time.
Her screen went black. She hastily tapped it again, and the words reappeared, like a hazy silhouette in the shadows. A profile that she could finally see but still couldn’t touch.
With shaking fingers, she unlocked her phone and managed to type out one word.
When?
She had so many questions for Yelena, and many of them were deep and difficult. But this was the one for which Kate most needed an answer. The one that no amount of emotion could convey. The one that mattered more in this moment than anything else in her life.
Soon came back to her, like a sigh.
It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
Kate clutched the phone to her chest as tears rolled down her cheeks.
And ultimately, it was everything.
———
Winter came, and life kept moving.
Kate did her work, and she kept learning, waiting, and hoping. She spoke to her mother, and she hung out with friends. Nothing remarkable happened, and eventually, Christmas approached.
Well, nothing remarkable happened to her, at least.
Based on a number of slight instances of pain that Kate had felt for the six weeks after her mother’s trial, she had assumed that Yelena had been busy with missions. None of them seemed to involve guilt or more than passing anger, so Kate doubted that they were hits. Or maybe she just hoped they weren’t. But she was ever in the dark.
Then, one Friday evening in mid-December, she was relaxing at a bar with a couple of friends, casually drinking and commiserating about the week. As a sip of beer slid down her throat, she felt a little pain from Yelena, followed by some gentle sadness and hope. It was nothing out of the ordinary, and Kate paid it little mind.
A minute later, though, Kate was frozen by a flood of something she could only describe as elation. Mixed in were satisfaction and relief and love, as well, but it was the genuine joy that punched her in the diaphragm, leaving her to struggle to suck in air.
She knew that she was grinning like an idiot after cutting herself off mid-sentence, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered when Yelena was feeling like this. She was glowing, and Kate felt herself basking as her love poured into Yelena and her soulmate responded in turn.
And, like a whisper in her ear, Kate swore that she could hear a word.
Soon.
If she were honest, it still wasn’t soon enough. Kate anxiously waited for another week, even as all of the input from Yelena indicated that everything was okay. She walked for hours among the throngs of New Yorkers, doing her best to breath in the cold air and feed off of the holiday spirit surrounding her. It didn’t truly help. Her nerves settled into a constant buzz of anticipation.
As a small comfort, Yelena didn’t seem to be doing much better.
Christmas Eve arrived, and suddenly the humming grew stronger. Nervousness and excitement circulated in her chest at a fever pitch, and Kate couldn’t sort out which of them had escalated it.
She felt incapable of sitting still. Around midday, she took Lucky for a long walk, then brought him home and set back out into the cold.
It wasn’t that she needed to go there. She could have gone anywhere, and she had no doubt that Yelena would be able to find her. But Kate’s feet led her to the Rockefeller Center, out of sentimentality or perhaps blind optimism.
Part of her didn’t feel like she could let herself believe something would happen today. That maybe she might become whole.
Yet it seemed she had found her faith.
As the sun set, the massive tree stood before her in its shining glory, and Kate closed her eyes and sent an earnest wish outward. Wishing on a star, or on the spirit of Christmas, or on the whims of quantum realities.
In response, she felt a trill of joy, a drumming of want, and a blazing burst of love.
And when she opened her eyes, Yelena was there.
Kate blinked several times, truly afraid that she might be seeing things. But her heart, and Yelena’s heart buried inside of it, told her otherwise.
Unspeaking, Yelena just smiled at her, beautifully, magnificently. They stared at each other for a long moment until Kate couldn’t stand it anymore. She needed to know if Yelena was real.
Blithely bumping into several people, Kate crossed the twenty feet between them in a single breath, and even as she came toe to toe with Yelena, her hand rose to her cheek. She almost cried as she felt Yelena’s skin under her fingertips, warm and smooth and there.
Then Kate kissed her. Their lips danced as their hearts sang, and by the time Kate pulled back, the tears had begun to escape from under her eyelids.
Gazing into Yelena’s eyes, which were also not completely dry, Kate brokenly professed, “You’re here.”
Yelena brought her own hands up to cradle Kate’s face, tracing the lines of her tears with her thumbs. Some guilt eased into her joy as she responded, “I’m sorry it took me so long, Kate Bishop.”
There were so many conversations to be had, and that particular one was at the top of the list, but Kate relegated it to another time. She couldn’t bear to stifle their current happiness.
They deserved it. They had earned it.
So she shook her head, leaned her forehead against Yelena’s, and repeated, “You’re here.”
Yelena kissed her again, hard and long, moving a hand around to clutch the back of Kate’s neck to her. Then she drew away slightly, lowering her other fingers to rest lightly over Kate’s heart.
“Always.”
And as she wrapped her arms around Yelena, pulling her close, then closer, Kate bent her head and sighed against her neck. For a year, her heart had held two people, devotedly and delicately.
Now it finally felt completely full.