Chapter Text
Her gaze was fixed out the window as they drove along route 64. The sign for Chesapeake flew by. Eight miles. She knew this route by heart although she hadn’t been since she and Barton had come to terms with each other.
And she certainly hadn’t brought anyone with her before.
Alexei was strangely quiet as he drove them. He’d been boisterous all through New York and telling story after story all through Pennsylvania, especially after Bucky had yielded him the driver seat when they were about to cross into West Virginia. But he was quiet now and she wondered if he’d ever been to Natasha’s grave.
Bob gave her a gentle shoulder nudge and she cast him a small smile. “When’s the last time you were back here?” he wondered.
“Oh, it was like three years ago, basically,” Yelena explained. “Just right before I was going to go kill Clint Barton.”
That earned her a sharply raised eyebrow from Bucky and she shrugged. “It was a job for Val and I thought he killed Natasha but he didn’t so I didn’t kill him. Weren’t you in New York when that happened?”
“I was helping Sam mop up the Flag Smashers. We did Christmas in Delacroix.” And he met her shrug with his own, although she caught a slight smile at the mention of Delacroix.
“And you haven’t been back to Ohio at all since then?” Bob pressed, drawing the conversation back around.
She shook her head. “No, but I left my dog here. I called her Fanny.”
Bob looked at her so sad then that she almost couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t upset that she’d had to give up the dog that she’d so badly wanted. Being in black ops for Valentina hadn’t created the best environment for keeping a pet though, and Fanny was better off with the childless Millennial woman she’d found on Craigslist.
They were in Huntington now, and about to cross the Ohio River, on Route 52 – the Ohio River Scenic Byway. Chesapeake was just there, a sprawling little scab of a town in the Appalachian Plateau. It hugged the Ohio River and she once thought of it as small, but that was before Bucky introduced them to Delacroix. It was sprawling compared to that, at a hearty 730 residents.
“Dad, you want to take Tallow Ridge Road—”
“I remember, I remember,” Alexei insisted.
There was only one cemetery in Chesapeake – Union Hill. And she only remembered it from childhood because Nat had gone there on a dare once at Halloween and she remembered being terrified for her sister and telling their parents and getting her in trouble.
“Do you remember when your sister—”
“I was just thinking that! That’s crazy!”
“What happened?” Bob asked with a smirk.
“Natasha followed some boy to the cemetery on trick-or-treat night after I tell her not to leave the neighborhood,” Alexei said dramatically.
“No, it wasn’t just a boy,” Yelena corrected. “It was a whole group of kids – but with that guy Kyle.”
“Pah, Kyle.”
“Yeah, him. Kyle. He dared her to go there,” she went on.
“And she liked his eyes and the flirting—”
“She liked his hair,” Yelena insisted.
“I’m pretty sure it was his eyes. They were very blue like her hair,” Alexei countered.
Yelena’s face scrunched as she tried to remember who was right. “Whatever, the point is that Kyle made her go and she went but I was just so scared for her. So scared—”
“And you come running to your papa and you were crying and there was all this snot on your nice princess costume,” Alexei droned.
“It wasn’t that much snot.”
“It was a lot of snot. And Natasha was in so much trouble when she got home. Grounded for a whole week…”
He trailed off as he steered the SUV up Tallow Ridge Road, the glint leaving his eyes. It was just a short drive up the winding mountain road that was barely two lanes, heavily wooded on both sides and shot through, here and there, with homes.
The bright fall sunshine was lovely, but it belied the mood in the car as they pulled up to the Union Hill Cemetery. Sorrow did that. It blanked over them like a shroud, dampening the sunshine and the crisp fall air and the stunning foliage that would have otherwise delighted her.
Alexei let out a heaving sigh as he stopped the car and killed the engine.
She led the way down the gravel path. The headstone really was a very nice one – it wasn’t flashy, but it was nice. She learned, after failing to kill Barton, that Clint had made those arrangements and Stark Industries had paid for it. It was a top-of-the-line grave marker that presided over an empty grave.
Daughter Sister Avenger.
There was a noisy snuffle as Alexei sidled up, his eyes red and wet.
“After the snap,” he started, “Natasha and I, we spoke often. We were all looking for you, Yelena, tried your phone, your email. She searched for answers until one of your colleagues told her what happened – that you had turned to dust. And we mourned together.”
Yelena felt tears prickle in her eyes – that someone would mourn her, that her absence had bothered them – wasn’t something she’d ever really considered before. “I didn’t know that,” she murmured.
She felt Bob step closer to her, felt the gentle heat of him just a half step behind. She appreciated him there, like having a solid wall at your back – dependable, safe.
Yelena looked at Alexei more seriously. She and her father hadn’t really spoken of those times during the Blip. He didn’t like to discuss it unless he had a case of vodka at his disposal and that was never a pleasant thing to be around.
“I was her Eastern Europe contact for the Avengers. Melina and me and some of your Widows, Lena,” Alexei went on.
“My Widows?”
“Some of those you saved,” he clarified. He gave her an abashed grin and looked down at the headstone. “We were her Former Soviet Avengers. She give us missions sometimes – ones that she couldn’t handle with her real Avengers. I offer to come to America to help her but she say no. She say stay in Eastern Europe to help keep the peace. There was lot of unrest. So I stayed until everyone came back. And one daughter is returned to me, but the other…”
Alexei went quiet again and she could imagine the memories that were playing out in his mind.
Yelena almost asked him if he’d been at that final Battle for Earth – if he’d been summoned by the wizards, if any of the Widows had been there – but then she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye.
Bucky Barnes looked like he wanted to cry.
Well, in as much as Bucky showed any emotion at all, he looked like he wanted to cry. A deep sadness had etched itself into his frown and his eyes were fixed on Natasha’s grave. He held himself back from them, by about ten feet, as if he didn’t dare get any closer.
“Bucky,” she started, and he flinched back to the present, his stare broken as he looked over at her, “you knew Natasha, didn’t you?”
He blinked, delaying just a moment too long. “Y-yeah. Yeah, she helped me – us, Steve and I – get to a jet in Berlin.”
Dubious. She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “And that’s…that’s it?”
He shrugged a little too casually. “I guess she tried to kick my ass when Zemo triggered the Winter Soldier but I don’t remember that too well. And I shot her once. Mm…twice. Once when Steve and her went on the run and the other time was…well, a long time ago.”
“What?” Alexei hissed, glaring over at Barnes.
“I wasn’t trying to kill her,” he said with a deepening frown. “She was getting in the way of a mission so I shot through her.”
Alexei held his scrunch-mouthed glare and Bucky sighed through his nose and Yelena kept squinting at him.
“Why?” she asked.
“The Winter Soldier had a command to—”
“No, why didn’t you just kill her? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
Bucky’s lips pressed together in a thin line as he looked at Yelena, then the grave, then Alexei, and then he stared off into nothing like he was contemplating something foolish. “I’m…not sure how to answer that question,” he started.
“Hey guys?”
“What do you mean you don’t know how to answer that question? It’s a really very easy question,” Yelena insisted, taking a step towards him. “Didn’t the Winter Soldier just kill all witnesses? Wasn’t that a thing? Why not my sister?’
“…guys…”
Bucky let out an uncomfortable scoff. “I-I guess killing witnesses wasn’t a part of my directive that particular day.”
“Why—”
“Guys!” Bob had come to stand on the other side of the grave, by the big tree, and he was pointing at the headstone. “Sorry. Sorry, but uh…I think there’s a message here…Or maybe it’s just graffiti, I dunno.”
Yelena frowned and strode over to peer at the back of the headstone. “Who would graffiti an Avengers grave, that’s so rude…”
And it did almost look like graffiti. It was a vibrant acid green spray paint scrawled over the whole back of the headstone. The symbol was a circle with an arrow inside that broke the top of the circle as it pointed up, almost like a compass. And then, outlined in red, was a star. And while the overt vandalism was galling, it was the quiet part, in black sharpie, that caught their attention the loudest. It was scrawled near the bottom, in neat, small letters.
From the ashes of your incompetence, we will meet again.
And I will wait for you there, so that you can return what you stole.
With Hate, B.B. to R.G., forever.
And they all four stared at it for a long moment.
“B.B. to R.G,” Bob finally spoke out.
“None of this was here the last time I visited,” Yelena observed.
“But that was three years ago,” Bob pointed out.
She nodded. “True. And maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s just some stupid kids like Kyle leaving messages.”
“That symbol looks familiar,” Bucky injected, pointing at the arrow in the circle. “I know that from somewhere.”
“What’s the star mean?” Bob wondered.
“The star means me,” came Alexei, finally. He held a deeply dramatic gravity in his tone. “This is a message for me.”
Yelena rolled her eyes. “Not every star means the Red Guardian, dad. I’m sure it’s just punk kids—”
“R.G.” Bucky pointed out.
“Yes. Red Guardian. That is my star. And that…” He gestured to the arrow, his expression going dark. “That is the North Institute.”
Yelena threw up her hands and spun away from the stone. He did this. He always did this. He always made it into a story about his glory days. And all she wanted was to share nice quiet time at Natasha’s grave and then go to Jim’s Spaghetti House or Cam’s Ham for a nice lunch.
“I’m not doing this with you, Alexei,” she insisted, eyes rolling yet again. Her eyes were going to get wedged in her head one day, at the rate she was going.
“I’m not lying,” Alexei insisted hotly. “From the Ashes…That’s because I burn it to the ground!”
“He’s right,” Bob said quietly. He held out his phone screen where a sign for the North Institute was outlined by a blaze behind it. And on the sign was a logo – a circle, with an arrow pointing up.
She scowled at it. “Who would bother sending you a message this way? It’s not like you’re hard to get a hold of these days. We have a whole PR team now.”
“B.B. would,” Bucky offered, lamely.
“We should go to the North Institute,” Alexei said with a gleam in his eyes.
“No…”
“Yes! See if that is the message!”
Machismo. Was that the word for what was now oozing from his very core? No, that wasn’t quite right. Maybe a delusional machismo. Attention-seeking, grandiose…Histrionic? Moronic, more likely.
“I mean,” Bucky started, “we’re already in Ohio.”
Yelena turned her ire on the super soldier who was looking perfectly innocent from where he stood. “You just don’t want to go back because Val says we have to do the interview with The New York Times first thing tomorrow and if we stay overnight here on a wild goose chase then you don’t have to do it and then Sam Wilson will have less things to be upset about.”
“Well… Yeah.” He shrugged at her.
Okay, he had a point. She didn’t want to go back either.
“But then Walker and Ava will have to do it all on their own,” Bob pointed out.
“And they will do a wonderful job,” Alexei insisted.
“You do realize that Walker will probably make himself to be the leader though. And Ava will let him because we abandoned her,” Yelena fired back.
They all four of them rolled this possibility around - both the risks and the rewards - for a moment or two before she finally sighed.
“Fine—”
“Yes!” Alexei pumped his fist into the air. “We will investigate a mystery for the ages! An old foe has come back to hunt the Red Guardian – will he get revenge?!”
Yelena rolled her eyes yet again and gently patted the top of the gravestone. “We’ll be back to say goodbye,” she murmured softly to it.
Bob thoughtfully took a picture of the back of the gravestone before he threw Yelena a smirk. “It does sound kinda fun,” he admitted.
She dramatically looped her arm through his as they walked back to the car. “I guess so. But if my father insists on wearing the suit…” She shook her head.