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🎶 We were out on a date in my daddy’s car.
We hadn’t driven very far. 🎶
“I should have known this was your idea of a date,” Kate chuckled, before holding on to the door for dear life as Yelena suddenly threw the enormous red stretch limousine in reverse.
“Who said anything about a date?” Yelena countered, as she whipped the car around and turned down an intersecting street.
“You asked me if I wanted to get dinner…”
“You were in town…”
“…and asked me to wear a dress, which I only do for you, by the way…”
“Can I help it if you look killer in that dress? Besides, it reminds me of the night in the elevator, at the Christmas party…”
“…and you pick me up in a limousine…” The show of sentimentality from the blonde surprised Kate, in a good way, but she continued probing nevertheless.
“My truck is in the shop, and Alexei owed me a favor,” Yelena countered, attempting to navigate the curves on the windy rural road in the enormous car. “Do you really think I wanted to drive this beast? I am a Black Widow; we are sleek and stealthy…”
“…and small,” Kate teased, interrupting.
Yelena took her eyes off the road for only a second to shoot her passenger a death glare. “Big, showy, and like a dumb beast, that is Red Guardian; that is Alexei’s style.”
“Haven’t you ever heard ‘good things come in small packages?’” Kate tried to defend—or redeem—herself after the death glare. She also wanted to say something about was this behemoth the best Alexei could find for his daughter, but she held her tongue on that.
Yelena chuckled. “Flattery will get you nothing, Kate Bishop.”
“So not a date?”
“Not a date,” the blonde answered as she threw the wheel hard to the left and turned onto another country road. “I just wanted to show you the best Russian restaurant in Baltimore-Washington region. See some pretty leaves, a bonus.”
It seemed awful date-like to Kate, but the archer was not going to argue while the other woman held her life in her hands—and they were being chased by a rather persistent pair of thugs.
It hadn’t started out like that, of course. It had started, like so many of their ‘dates,’ with a text from an unknown number. ‘Kate Bishop!’ it had read, and Kate instantly heard her name recited excitedly in that accent, the one she found so alluring. Kate was in DC—actually, at Fort Meade—for a security conference. Yelena knew this because, well, Yelena. Black Widow. Super-spy. (Also, Kate couldn’t help but have the feeling that the blonde had somehow embedded a tracker—that she had stillyet to find, despite her considerable resources—in her Hawkeye gear.)
Kate had texted back a ‘Yelena Belova! Hello!’ (and resisted the impulse to add an excited face emoji, but she was always excited to hear from the blonde.)
‘I also am here on business.’
Of course Yelena knew. Rather than feeling creepy, it was one of those things that helped Kate sleep better at night, that Yelena always knew where she was. If she ever got caught in a mess bigger than she could handle, she knew the Widow would know—and would somehow send reinforcements if she couldn’t make it herself. Every Hawk had their Widow.
Still, ‘business’ was always a worrisome term with Yelena’s line of work. The archer shot back a concerned face emoji and a ‘Be safe.’
‘Not that kind of business. Alexei.’ Then, after a pause that allowed Kate to exhale the breath she always held any time Yelena was on a mission, the blonde added, ‘Dinner. Tomorrow night?’
Kate could not reply quickly enough—and she was sure the other conference attendees were staring at her as though she were a lunatic, given how wide the smile was on her face. ‘It’s a date!’
‘Not a date. Just dinner.’ Kate could feel Yelena’s eye roll through the text.
The next day, when Kate had escaped the throngs of men of all ages who no doubt looked at her and saw a piece of meat, a raw, tender, juicy steak to devour, despite the raven-haired woman’s impeccably-tailored suit and pants, she returned to her hotel room to find a stunning red dress hanging on the outside of her bathroom door. Movie-premiere stunning. Or the Met Ball. Sparkly. Sequins and crystals. Shimmering when it moved. Plunging neckline, form-fitting. She wasn’t particularly a dress kind of gal, but, oh! Wow! For this dress and, crucially, for Yelena, she would be.
Affixed to the adjacent full-length mirror was a matching red post-it note. ‘I know purple is your color, but I saw this and knew you would look killer in it.’ And Kate knew Yelena was not wrong (she hardly ever was, which was annoying…ly adorable). The crime-fighting-vigilante-cum-CEO also knew she should be bothered by the sneaking in—and if it had been anyone else on the planet, she would have been. But this was Yelena; Kate had a feeling that the Widow was capable of sneaking into Fort Knox, stealing all of the gold, and replacing it with cheese puffs, all without ever being detected, much less apprehended.
The ‘New and Improved Hawkeye,’ as the blonde had dubbed her, stripped off her suit and jumped into the shower to wash off the stale conference room air, paper dust, and men’s leers. As the warm water cascaded down her body, she could feel the grime rinsing off and disappearing down the drain. Afterwards, now cleaned, refreshed, and rejuvenated, Kate began her beauty routine before ultimately slipping into the gorgeous dress and a pair of heels. Yelena would no doubt grumble about the added height difference, but it was the blonde’s own fault; she chose the dress, and it demanded heels.
Kate had her hair down, styled in light waves with her left ear exposed. She’d found a shade of purple eye shadow that worked with the dress…and, of course, a red lip that matched. Turning around in front of the full-length mirror…whoa! She nearly took her own breath away. ‘Killer’ would perhaps be an understatement, and if the archer didn’t know better, she might have assumed she was the Black Widow spy-slash-assassin, sent to seduce some hapless bureaucrat, steal all his secrets, and then strangle him with his own shoelaces. Kate snapped a photo, and it took all of her willpower not to text it to Yelena; no, she wanted to see the woman’s reaction with her own eyes. (Also, less likely to cause a traffic accident and kill the blonde! She could see the headlines, ‘Black Widow assassin killed in car accident caused by eye-popping photo texted by Bishop heiress.’)
Grabbing her purse, Kate left her room to meet Yelena, turning heads of men and women alike the entire way…in the hallway, in the elevator, in the lobby, and under the porte-cochère. (In a fitting bit of revenge, she thought she saw some of the leering men from the conference wet themselves. They got off easy, all told; if Yelena had seen them leering at her, it would have been a very different bodily fluid, and there would be no guarantee that they would live through the night.)
“Fuck!” Yelena groaned in frustration. So much for ‘the best service in Baltimore’—her pickup truck still wasn’t ready. She swore that she and Alexei could have fixed it more quickly—and neither of them were particularly knowledgeable about cars. (Translation: they didn’t know shit…but apparently neither did these mechanics.)
“Beloved daughter? What angers you?”
“Those kozlý still have not fixed my truck, and I am going to dinner tonight with Kate Bishop.”
“Kate Bishop! A date!”
“Not a date, kozjól! Dinner.”
“Whatever you say, Lenusya. But you can take Red Guardian Limo to get your little hawk,” Alexei added, grinning widely and tossing her the keys.
When Yelena pulled the limousine out of the garage, she was appalled. “Oh my god! I cannot pick up Kate in this dump!” The inside was relatively clean, although there were many empty vodka bottles in the passenger seat footwell. How the man had not been picked up for an open container violation was beyond her. The real problem, though, was the exterior; it was dull red and dusty, and Yelena needed it to shine, to complement Kate’s dress, not clash with it.
The blonde went inside and changed into an old pair of cutoff blue jean shorts, an old white tank top, and some old low-cut white Converse before returning to the driveway with a bucket, sponge, soap, wax, and a garden hose. Yelena spent an hour in the warm autumn sun washing, rinsing, scrubbing, and finally waxing the limo. When she was finished, it not only shined but sparkled. She was certain it had never looked that good, not even the day Alexei had acquired it. As an added bonus (for her, for now, at least), the ‘Red Guardian Limo Service’ logo and ludicrous ‘Protecting You From Boring Evening’ tagline on the doors had come off; the ridiculous man still reliving his past must have found the cheapest detailer around. (He would give her grief about it later, she knew, but after a nice dinner with Kate Bishop, she could put up with it. And an evening with Kate Bishop would never be boring, in all the best ways.)
Back inside once more, she stripped off the drenched clothes and showered. As the water washed the sweat and car grime off of her body, she was glad the neighbor boys had come to help, or she might still be out there right now. They’d done an excellent job on the tires and the wheels. Even better, they’d treated her like she was one of them, just a slightly taller, older one of the boys—to the extent that she was supposed to join them for a game of soccer in the street tomorrow afternoon.
After the blonde finished in the shower, she combed her hair back from her forehead and over to the side slightly. She also applied subtle robin’s-egg blue eyeliner to her eyes, before finally dressing in a tuxedo. It would be a little cliché now that she was driving a limousine—but at least she wouldn’t be wearing that stupid hat. Just a really fancy suit. The red stripe on the pant legs and red accents around the cuffs and pockets of both the pants and coat reminded her of her Widow legacy. And if her dress boots had a bit of extra heel height to them, well, she didn’t think Kate Bishop would be complaining. Stupid three-inch height difference! One of those completely impractical little canes that gentlemen of the era carried would have been a nice accessory, but she didn’t have time to doctor one of her batons for the purpose. In fact, she needed to get on the road, because traffic on the B-W Parkway was likely going to suck.
Right on time—6:00 on the nose, as Kate walked out of the lobby doors—Yelena pulled up in a shiny red limousine. This posed two questions for the archer: what?! and had Yelena implanted a tracker in her body? How was she always right there? The Bishop heiress hadn’t thought about whether there might be one in the dress—with all the crystals and sequins, it would be a nightmare to check—a more likely scenario. Or that Yelena was that good. As for the limo…this was totally a date!
The blonde was standing next to the open passenger door, dressed to the nines in a tuxedo, and, oh, wow, were they going to turn heads wherever they went for dinner. Before that, though, Kate would have to deal with one last set of eyes raking up and down her body—those of her driver-slash-date. After closing the door behind the archer, the poised, deadly assassin nearly tripped on the front of the car making her way back to the driver’s side, as her eyes were fixed upon the dark-haired woman in the passenger seat the entire time. Once Yelena was seated again, Kate pressed her hand to the woman’s lower jaw and raised it. “Careful, you’re drooling,” she teased. Mission accomplished.
They hadn’t been driving outside the city for long before Yelena pointed out a pair of nondescript cars she was certain were following them. Kate clocked them in the side mirror and agreed, something seemed off about them. Yelena hastily exited the Parkway at the next exit and headed for the countryside…and both cars continued to tail them. Fuck.
They were now so far down windy country roads that Kate wouldn’t have been surprised if they encountered a cow in the road. Unfortunately, they were also far enough away from watchful eyes that their pursuers had decided to end the game of cat and mouse, as a stream of bullets shattered the evening calm and the rear window of the stretch limo.
Kate reached inside her purse and pulled out what appeared to be a long, narrow makeup compact and a tube of lipstick. She rolled down her window, stuck her arm outside, and after a few thumb presses, the compact unfolded into a bow and the lipstick into a quiver.
“You brought a bow on our date?!”
“See! I knew it was a date.”
“No, no! You just tripped me up with all your talk of a date. Do not avoid the question, Kate Bishop—you brought a bow to dinner?!”
“As if you don’t have your Widow Bites, at least one gun, and no fewer than five knives on you right now,” Kate teased as she unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Kate, no!” Yelena exclaimed in fear as the archer began to shimmy her sparkly-red-clad upper body out of the window, all the while bullets continued to whizz by the limo. (Say what you will about their tails, but they were exceedingly poor marksmen compared to the Widow’s evasive driving abilities.)
“You drive, I shoot; that’s how we work, remember?” Kate was now perched half outside the limo, sitting on the door where the window had retracted. Bow in hand, quiver slipped over her exposed shoulder, and legs bracing her against the seat, she nocked an arrow and returned fire.
It was something of a minor miracle that none of the bullets hit Kate; these low-budget goons were really bad shots, and they picked on the wrong pair of women. Between Kate’s arrows suppressing what was now return fire and Yelena’s expert evasive driving, the two cars of adversaries stood little chance. For a moment, one of the cars seemed like it was going to try to pull alongside the giant limousine and push them off the road, or to ram them from behind, but a couple of well-placed arrows soon dissuaded them—and Kate hadn’t even packed any trick arrows (the whole collapsable thing didn’t mix well with trick arrows, she had found…and she had the scars to prove it!).
But then everything went wrong so quickly…it all happened so fast.
🎶 There in the road, straight ahead,
The car was stalled, the engine was dead. 🎶
As Yelena roared around a blind curve, she saw a car in the road barely three limo-lengths ahead of them. The hood was popped, steam and smoke pouring from it. A dark-haired mother was holding tight to her two young girls, a small blonde in her arms and an older one with pastel hair pulled to her waist. The Widow’s heart split open, and in an instant she reacted, swerving to the right, sending Alexei’s pride and joy careening off the road. The front of the vehicle got stuck in a drainage ditch alongside the road, but the momentum attached to the limo kept propelling it forward, causing it to flip end-over-end before smashing into a tree. The last thing Yelena remembered was hearing a horrible scream, which was mirrored by one escaping from her own mouth, “Kate…!”
🎶 I couldn’t stop, so I swerved to the right.
Never forget the sound that night…
The cryin’ tires, the bustin’ glass,
The painful scream that I heard last. 🎶
When Yelena came to, everything hurt. She was disoriented. Her vision was blurry and her ears were ringing. She smelled blood. Then she felt it. Then she tasted it.
Eventually, her eyes managed to focus enough for her to see that there was, in fact, blood running over them. She tried to move her hands to wipe them clear, but the sudden movement triggered a sharp pain in her chest and in her left arm.
“Fuck!”
Where was she? What had happened?
Slowly it came back to her. The tails. The car in the road, the woman and her two daughters standing there, like a haunting mirror. Kate. Oh, god, Kate!
The Widow turned her head to the other side of the car…and saw nothing. Only a seatbelt hanging…up towards the ceiling? It was only then that the assassin realized she was upside down, still strapped into her seat. As a small mercy, the frame of the limo was like Alexei himself, sturdy. The glass of the windows had all shattered, but the driver cabin had not collapsed and flattened her into a jellyfish.
With her one ‘good’ arm, the blonde reached for the buckle of her seatbelt to free herself. With Kate missing, her heart rate began to rise, which didn’t help. Neither did the blood, which made everything slippery, as the Widow realized when her fingers struggled to find purchase on the plastic button that would free her. When she finally was able to depress the button on the buckle, nothing happened. Again…still nothing. Moving her left arm painfully into position, the blonde tried again, pressing the buckle button with the injured arm while yanking on the latch with the right. It was officially stuck.
Fortunately for Yelena, she always had an alternative available, one of her many knives. Pulling one from a pocket of her tux, she began sawing through the belt. After a minute or so, the restraint gave way, sending her crashing head-first to the roof of the car resting on the ground. A second good arm would have been helpful.
After a few moments to recover from what was essentially a blow to the head—she likely had a concussion, but there were more important things right now—Yelena began crawling through the busted driver’s window. Once she pushed her head through, she felt her skull being pelted from above, and that was when she realized the other sound she had been hearing while trapped inside was rain, pouring down from the sky.
🎶 Well, when I woke up, the rain was pourin’ down.
There were people standing all around. 🎶
Pulling herself to her feet, the Widow looked around, taking in the situation as best she could with the rain and blood running down her face and vision that had yet to clear up from the impact. The sky was dark, dark enough that it was not just the storm, but also the passage of time. How long had she been out? And where…god, where was Kate?
Yelena’s pulse quickened, and she could feel the blood throbbing in her head. There were people standing all around, doing…nothing? Nothing?! No one had come to check on the limo, to free her? That meant no one was looking for Kate. “Kate! Kate Bishop!” the blonde screamed, panicked. She surveyed the area to the right of the car, looking for any signs of her archer, trying to model the physics of the crash in her head. The hot blood continued to run into her eyes along with the cold rain as she frantically trampled through the field to the right of the smashed limousine and the tree it was resting against. Finally, somehow she caught sight of a sliver of red in the field.
🎶 Something warm running in my eyes,
But I found my baby somehow that night. 🎶
Darting off in that direction, continuing to call for Kate, Yelena’s heart was thumping in her chest. All the things she had seen and experienced in her life, as an assassin for the Red Room and an operative who used many of the same skills for Valentina, and all of the horrors she had perpetrated with her own hands…none of it prepared her for what she found in that rural Maryland field that rainy night.
Kate Bishop was splayed out on the ground, limbs bent in ways human limbs were not meant to be bent. And she was red. The tangy, metallic scent stopped the Widow in her tracks; she was familiar, even numb, to the smell, from her days in the Red Room, where it was just another feature of daily life, but here…whether it was the startling combination with sweet petrichor, or the specific person responsible for the scent…here it shook the hardened assassin to her core.
She was used to seeing Kate a little battered, even bleeding, but this…no, this was a whole new level of bodily distress. This was one she couldn’t handle. Kate looked so frail, so broken, so pale, the red blood staining her hands and head in sharp contrast with her deathly-white skin. Her hair, even while matted from blood, rain, and earth, had been spread out around her head from impact, almost like an obsidian halo. It was hard to tell where the archer was bleeding on her torso, as the blood matched the fabric of the dress with alarming precision.
When Yelena finally willed her body to move once more, she dashed to Kate’s side and dropped to her knees, pulling off her tuxedo jacket to allow her greater range of motion. “Kate…Kate Bishop…stay with me please, solnishko,” she pleaded, as her hands and eyes moved over the New and Improved Hawkeye’s battered body, trying to assess injuries.
Kate’s eyes fluttered open, and they struggled to focus before finally coming to rest on the blonde. “Ye…lena,” she forced out, her breathing labored and painful.
“Kate Bishop, do not speak; it will only make things worse. I…medics will be on the way…we will get you to hospital…” The Widow’s voice was frantic, and tears began to well in those usually-stoic eyes.
“Nuh-uh,” the archer countered. “Can’t…feel…legs. Can…feel…boulder on chest.” Her expression briefly morphed to one of sadness and resignation.
“No, Kate Bishop…no…”The tears fell freely, washing over the Widow’s cheeks like the raindrops that accompanied them. “I…I can fix this.” She shook her head, the drenched hair flinging drops of water in an arc as she moved.
“Yelena…” Kate looked the blonde square in the eyes, trying to convey what she knew to be the truth.
“I am sorry, Kate Bishop…this…this is all my fault. I…I never should have…”
“Hey, hey, no. Don’t. Just…hold me, yeah?” Kate’s left hand, which somehow was still clenched around her bow, opened, letting the weapon fall to the side. The Widow helped the mortally injured archer move her hands near her chest, where the blonde took them in hers, tears still streaming from her shell-shocked green eyes.
Kate forced a weak smile across her bloody lips. She began to speak, fighting against the pain. “It was a date…every time with you, Yelena, it was a date. They were the happiest moments of my life. I looked forward to the next time with you, every time, like some people look forward to the first bloom of spring, or Opening Day, or the first snow, or Christmas…you were my Christmas, every time.”
“Kate…”
“I don’t regret a single thing; I knew what I was signing up for, and it was worth it. For every moment I had with you, it was worth it.” She gasped from the exertion before continuing, “I know you’re going to blame yourself, but don’t; it’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known what would happen…and I chose you. In every lifetime, I’ll always choose you…”
“Kate Bishop…”
“I’m not going to try to stop you from grieving, but promise me you won’t stop living, my beautiful, sassy, vodka-breath, Russian darling.” When the assassin failed to respond this time, she met the sad green eyes and stared as forcefully as possible.
“I cannot…”
“Yelena…promise me…don’t let grief consume you…”
“Kate Bishop, how can I promise that? How can I promise to live without you here to make living mean something…?”
“You’ll find a way…you’ll find a reason. You’re strong and brave…the bravest person I know. I have faith in you.”
“I…” the blonde began but faltered. Kate’s eyes, too, were beginning to wet, but they still met the Widow’s flooded ones with a look of determination. “I promise…” she relented.
“I love you, Yelena Belova, and I know, whether it’s biology or the Red Room, you’re not sure whether you can love. That’s OK; whatever it was that we shared, you and me, it was the greatest thing in my life. It was enough. You were enough, just as you are, moya lyubovʹ.”
🎶 I raised her head, and when she smiled and said,
“Hold me darling for a little while,”
I held her close, I kissed her our last kiss.
I found the love that I knew I would miss. 🎶
They both were crying now, rivers of tears escaping their banks. Kate smiled up at the Widow, the woman she was destined to love and then to leave behind. “Hold me, darling?” she asked sweetly, in that way only Kate Bishop could; from anyone else it would have sounded silly, but from her it was earnest and sincere.
Yelena would have carried Kate on her back all the way back to Fort Meade, barefoot, if she had asked her to; this was nothing in comparison, but at the same time, it was everything. So the blonde released the other woman’s hands and scooted closer to her head, dropping from her knees to her thighs, sitting somewhat sideways. She carefully raised the archer’s upper torso and pulled her into her arms, holding Kate Bishop close.
When the archer’s breaths became more ragged, Yelena lowered her head to meet Kate’s, pressing their lips together one final time, one last kiss that had to endure a lifetime, no matter how short or long that was.
On that rainy night in a muddy field in the rural Maryland countryside, Kate Bishop drew her last breath, in the arms of the woman she loved, lips pressed gently to the lips of the woman who hadn’t known love before she met Kate but who now could not imagine a world without it…without her. Fate, alas, would now force Yelena Belova to do just that.
In the calm of the falling rain, a guttural wail pierced the night.
🎶 But now she’s gone, even though I hold her tight.
I lost my love…my life, that night. 🎶
First her childhood, then Natasha, and now Kate…the world had taken everything from Yelena, leaving her with nothing more than muddy pants and bloody hands. She had finally experienced what it felt like to be loved—unconditionally—and was learning how to share her life with someone—and enjoying it, loving it. In an instant, it had all been ripped away. Her happiness, her hope, her dreams…her future. Kate Bishop was dead.
And it was Yelena’s fault for letting the sweet, funny, playful, enchanting archer fall in love with her. No—Kate had made her promise that she wouldn’t blame herself. There was one person responsible for what happened tonight, and it wasn’t her.
Yelena could have broken—she should have broken—in the face of such enormous loss, the latest in a long line of tragedies that had befallen her. She could have laid down in the mud next to Kate and let the earth swallow her up. She could have used one of the many guns and knives on her person, for a more immediate resolution. She could have drowned herself in the bottom of a bottle of vodka. She could have walked into traffic on I-95 or plummeted off a skyscraper—or any of a number of other ways to break. But not this time. She had made a promise to Kate, and she intended to keep it, because that was all that she had left of the purple-obsessed woman…a last wish.
Yelena wouldn’t let Kate’s death be in vain.
🎶 Well, where, oh where can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me.
She’s gone to heaven, so I got to be good,
So I can see my baby when I leave this world. 🎶
If there was an afterlife…Yelena knew she wasn’t going to the good place, she wasn’t going to see Kate Bishop again. Her ledger was dripping with red. In that moment, Yelena finally understood what must have been in her sister’s mind when she hurled herself off that cliff on Vormir. Natasha knew she wasn’t going to get a happy ending, but at least she could give others one through her sacrifice. It wouldn’t wipe the ledger clean, but it was, in some way, atonement.
For Yelena, however, there was no Soul Stone to secure, no grand plan to restore half of all life in the universe to existence. She was not an Avenger, not a hero. All the Widow knew was killing.
She let Kate Bishop’s body slide from her hands, slipping off the archer’s quiver before gently laying her to rest in the muddy field. The younger woman’s eyes had been closed when she went, so at least Yelena had been spared the trauma of looking into those bright blue orbs staring off lifelessly. The Widow almost wished that they had been open, so she could have had one last look, as haunting as that would have been, because now she had to search her memories for the last time she had seen them. No memory surfaced.
The Widow leaned over one last time and pressed her lips to Kate Bishop’s bloodstained forehead, holding for a count of two.
In Yelena’s life, only four people had ever loved her. With three of them—her family—she was never sure how much of it was organic and how much their love was entangled with the Ohio mission, how much felt like an obligation because of what they had been through together—those three years of her childhood, their traumatic escape and separation in Cuba, and then their brief, belated reunion two decades later. But Kate…Kate Bishop loved her—had loved her—for her, unconditionally, not for or because of any mission, and despite all of her baggage, as the American expression went, from her traumatic past. Kate didn’t want anything in return, wasn’t working an angle or an op, wasn’t driven off by Yelena’s struggles to understand and express love…all the archer wanted was to love the assassin…and the Widow had let her. The younger woman saw her and didn’t cower in fear or flinch in revulsion; she smiled—and if there ever were such a thing as ‘heart eyes,’ then that was how Kate Bishop looked at her. Had. With Kate, it was real. It had been real. And now it was gone.
And that was the tragedy. Because Yelena knew that what Kate had told her was true…she would have chosen her in any life, in every world. Nothing the Widow could have done would have changed that, changed the archer’s love for her—but if she had not loved the assassin, if Yelena could have kept the taller woman at bay, then Kate Bishop would still be alive tonight. But there was no changing her mind. There was no changing fate. And now Yelena had to face hers—alone.
The blonde struggled to her feet, grabbing her tuxedo jacket and slinging the quiver and bow over her shoulder. As much as she wanted to remain by the side of the woman she had come to cherish until the far-too-late help arrived, she knew it would be the end of her if she did. With one final, brief glance at the World’s Greatest Archer, the blonde turned and headed back towards the twisted remains of her daddy’s car.
Yelena approached the mangled hunk of steel; it was, in that moment, a metaphor for her life: twisted, shattered, upside down in a muddy Maryland field. The steady drizzle had drenched her through, her skin cold and damp, her shirt and pants clinging to it like a waterlogged paper towel, and water cascaded down her matted hair and grief-stricken face like waterfalls—but none of it could wash the blood from her hands. What was that English play they had made them learn in the Red Room, with the blood that could not be cleansed? ‘Out, damned spot! out, I say!’ Kate had tried to absolve her…made her promise not to drown in guilt, and she intended to honor that promise as best she could…but no matter how much time passed, the Widow was certain that her hands would always bear the crimson stains of this night.
As she gazed upon the crumpled hulk of steel, glass, and rubber that had once been her daddy’s pride and joy—well, one of them, after her sestra and her—the Widow knew her father had now lost it, too. After tonight, he had lost all three of his pride and joys. She could only hope that Mama handled this better than the last time, because he would need her. He would be every bit as broken as the younger Widow was, and unlike her, he would have no purpose.
Yelena shot a glance around the scene of the crash; the crowd milling around uselessly had begun to dissipate, and there was no sign of the goons who had been pursuing them…trying to kill them. Worthless cowards! They had hightailed it out of there without even verifying that she was dead! It had become too public, perhaps, so thank that useless crowd for that small favor while they sat on their hands and let…. She shook her head, not wanting to go there again quite yet, not when she would live there for the rest of her life. Still, that figured; the quality of ‘hired help’—particularly for assassinations—had gone downhill ever since Yelena had been burned and forced out of the business.
She strode over to the wrecked limo, reaching inside that cursed front passenger window and trying to pull her batons from the glove compartment. Pizdets! One was fine, but the other had somehow gotten lodged in such a way that the impact had snapped it in half. As the blonde pulled her upper body back out of the ruined vehicle, her left shoulder caught on a jagged piece of metal that she had missed. It ripped through her dress shirt and the skin beneath it, leaving a bloody gash in its wake. Žópa!
Yelena winced in pain, but this was far from the worst injury she had experienced in her life—and she had the scars to prove it. What was one more? Her body was a tapestry of trauma, a visible record of everything she had endured throughout her damnable life. This one, though…this scar would be a reminder that would fuel her vengeance.
As one more part of her attire became soaked in blood, the Widow noticed a thin, sturdy strip of metal, between two and three feet in length, that had mostly ripped free from the body of the limo. One edge seemed for the most part to have been severed cleanly and was razor sharp, whereas its opposite was jagged. She wrenched it loose from the point where it was still attached to the wrecked embodiment of dreams of a father and daughter. She didn’t need super-soldier serum; she was a Black Widow, and they were trained to take everything…even this.
As the jagged edge ripped through her palms, the blonde paid the destruction no mind; she knew the damage could never be properly repaired, but she no longer cared. Yelena no longer needed smooth, soft, skin without Kate Bishop to touch. The Widow no longer had a Hawk.
With her hands now bloodied twice over, her own blood currently mixing with that of the woman she had now lost forever, Yelena impaled the sharp strip of red metal on one of the broken pieces of her baton. Electricity sizzled down her new blade. It burnt her mutilated hands in the process.
Ignoring the pain, the Widow pulled her tuxedo jacket over her head like a hood, roughly tying the sleeves in front of her lower face and forming a sort of mask. It provided a modicum of protection from the rain, not that it mattered at this point. More importantly, it looked foreboding. She slid her new sword and the remaining baton pieces into the quiver on her back; for now, that would do.
The blonde fished her phone from her pocked and dialed a number she knew by heart—one she now wished she had never known. After a ring, the person on the other end picked up.
“Suka!” the Widow cursed, but efore she could say more, she was interrupted by the person she had called.
“Oh, Yelena. You’re still alive; how unfortunate. It’s so difficult to find good help these days,” Valentina tutted. “But this is what happens when you don’t do as you’re told.”
“You will regret the day you walked into my life, Valentina. I will not stop until your blood stains your floors, and the blood of everyone who helped you stains theirs.” There was fury in the blonde’s voice, a rage born of loss, only the latest in a long line since the loss of her innocence and her freedom at age six. She wouldn’t let Valentina win; she would end the woman’s shady, Dreykov-like empire, even if it cost her her own life. “There is nowhere that you can hide, no one that you can bribe, to keep you safe.”
The line went dead at that point, and the blonde let her phone slip from her bloody fingers to the muddy ground below. She smashed it under the heel of her boot as she pulled her hood tighter. The Black Widow was gone.
The Ronin had returned.
In the end—one final ‘gift’ from Valentina, as if burning Yelena and then killing her girlfriend were not enough already—the headlines the next morning read ‘Bishop heiress kidnapped, killed by notorious Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova,’ but the blonde didn’t care. Yelena Belova had died the moment Kate Bishop drew her last breath; she’d lost her life, or any chance of having one, that night. Now all that was left was The Ronin.
Kate Bishop’s dream had always been to become an Avenger, to help people like her idol Clint Barton. Now Yelena was poised to become a very different kind of avenger, one who let blood on a massive scale, an angel of death seeking vengeance for Kate Bishop’s death.
The world’s greatest assassin was nothing without the world’s greatest archer by her side…but ‘the world’s greatest serial killer’…now that had a nice ring to it.
Epilogue
The next week, Lucky and Fanny—it seemed cruel to separate them now—appeared at the Bartons’ door on a chilly morning just before dawn. There was a red post-it note attached to the retriever’s collar, with but eight words: ‘I am sorry I could not protect her.’
Shortly thereafter, authorities in Baltimore found four washed-up private security contractors whose hands and feet had been removed roughly; the men had been pinned to the wall with purple arrows. Grainy surveillance footage revealed a samurai-style hooded figure wielding a sword had been in the vicinity.
After news reports of a rash of brutal murders of low-level criminals in New York, especially a massacre of Tracksuit Mafia members by a so-called ‘knockoff Ronin,’ Clint Barton managed to track Yelena down. It wasn’t hard for someone who knew anything about the woman, which made the retired Avenger wonder how she was even still alive. In Kate Bishop’s loft, a drawn-back bow faced off against a homemade sword.
“Yelena, you don’t want to do this…you are headed down a dark path.”
“Rich words coming from you, Barton,” the assassin spat.
“It didn’t bring them back. It didn’t bring me relief. You don’t want to do this, Yelena. Kate wouldn’t want you to do this, to lose yourself….” He paused for a beat before painfully offering one more reason. “Natasha wouldn’t want you to do this.”
“Neither of them are here, are they? And you know whose fault that is? Ours. You could not save my sister, and I could not save Kate. A Widow without a Hawk is like a life without living…a torment, a never-ending pit of blackness.”
Before the old Hawkeye could offer a rebuttal, the new Ronin turned to leave. Clint, in spite of his age, was faster in this moment, reaching out and grabbing Yelena’s arm to stop her. In an instant, however, the old Hawkeye found himself on his back. The former Widow had used his momentum against him and flipped him onto the floor of the loft. The pair fought, struggling against each other for the upper hand. Clint was bigger yet older; Yelena was smaller but younger. Each strength was offset by a weakness, so they were effectively equally matched.
The original Hawkeye could still leverage his size, and he managed to roll the pair of struggling vigilantes so that he was on top of The Ronin Widow, holding her down. “Yelena, I will not let you destroy yourself.” It was half-threat, half-promise, sworn like an oath.
Yelena could not be held, however; as Clint stared into her stormy green eyes, she shot him with her Widow Bites. She rolled the stunned retired Avenger off of her and stood up. “Yelena is dead; she died when Kate Bishop took her last breath in her arms.” Meeting the man’s eyes, the vengeful blonde swore her own oath. “You cannot stop me. And you will not. You have a family to go home to, Barton. Go home to them. And do not get in my way again, or the next encounter will not just leave you stunned.” Her warning and threat delivered, Yelena stepped over the prone man and walked off into the darkness.
Later that year, in the midst of a prison riot targeting the rich, famous, and other white-collar criminals, when a hooded stranger wielding a homemade sword sprung Eleanor Bishop, the words were clear. “The only reason you aren’t dead right now is because she loved you. I am giving you the rest of your life to live up to that love. But I am warning you, do not fall back into old habits—and do not get in my way.”
Wilson Fisk was found one day in his penthouse. The corpulent crime lord’s tongue had been cut out of his mouth, his fingers sliced off, and he had been stabbed a thousand times and left to bleed out all over his sixteenth-century Persian rug. His right hand had been pinned to the floor by a purple arrow. His safe had been blown open, and proof of all his misdeeds was scattered around him. A red post-it note with the words ’I can tell no more lies’ was stuck to the floor near a pile of the removed body parts.
Sometime later, CIA Director Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine was found similarly murdered in her own penthouse. Her throat had been partially crushed as well, but otherwise the methods of her execution appeared exactly the same, including the purple arrow driven through her digit-less right hand, pinning it to the floor. Likewise, her safe—several of them—had been blown open, and the details of all her nefarious dealings surrounded her fingerless, tongueless corpse. The same red post-it accompanied the severed body parts. The scandals that ensued brought down multiple governments.
Around the world, tyrants, demagogues, and corrupt politicians, warlords, crime bosses, and human traffickers all suffered the same fate. A global string of killings where the victims were left to bleed out slowly and where their crimes were exposed, all marked with red post-it notes. A serial killer of the greatest skill was active—one who had become a hero to the downtrodden and dispossessed.
In a forest in Ohio, the solitary headstone marking an empty grave was joined by another.
In the Bishop Family Cemetery, every year in October, fresh flowers—a dozen rare purple roses—appeared on the grave of Kate Bishop.
No matter where in the world the black-hooded vigilante with the homemade sword was, she always stopped to admire the first bloom of spring, to catch Opening Day, to marvel at the first snowfall of the season, and to sit on a rooftop on Christmas. That night, as she sat in the bitter cold, legs dangling over the edge, drinking vodka, was the only time the hood came down, revealing closely buzzed jet-black hair with a faint purple stripe above the right eye, coal-black eyeliner, and a head embellished with a surfeit of piercings, now almost more metal than flesh.
A single tear trickled from her eye.