Widow Sisters and Friends (Restoring Our Broken Hearts)

Show Yourself

Summary: When Yelena comes home from a mission, she has bruises and scrapes from a rookie mistake she accidentally made. She is horribly humiliated, and therefore, she resolves not to tell Natasha about it. Unfortunately for her, Natasha knows her far too well for Yelena to succeed in keeping her from finding out.

   Yelena stumbled through the door of her and Natasha's house, trying to steady herself before Natasha came in and spotted her. She swallowed deeply, knowing that Natasha was surely somewhere nearby.

Steve had just dropped her off there from their most recent mission, and unbeknownst to him or anyone else, Yelena had earned herself a terrible series of bruises and scrapes all across her back. They were so sore that Yelena could hardly move without finding herself in deep pain.

Fortunately, since Steve did not know all of her small tells and indications of pain, he had not picked up on her injuries. She was honestly glad of it because the manner in which she acquired them was positively ridiculous.

She had fallen from a considerable distance but had managed to catch herself in time to fall onto her back and scrape along the busted-up sidewalk. It had been horribly embarrassing and fortunately, Steve had not caught sight of it.

Yelena hated it because it was such a ridiculous way to hurt herself and because it was such a stupid mistake. She had not pulled something like that since she was on one of her first field missions with the Red Room. She had been beaten and berated horridly for the blunder, and it was one of her greatest mishaps.

Until now, this sort of thing had only happened to her once, and it was absolutely humiliating that she had allowed it to happen again. It showed her lack of worthiness and her weakness. It made her feel so utterly incompetent.

Which was why she was going to do her best to at least act normal in front of Natasha to keep her from finding out. Yelena would positively die of embarrassment if Natasha knew that she had made such a rookie mistake.

She did not want her sister to realize that she was not worthy to be on the team. Weakness and mistakes were signs of a lack of worthiness. That was one of the primary belief systems within the Red Room, and Yelena had gotten her share of punishment for making such mistakes.

When she had been there, she had to push through and force herself to maintain perfection because if she were to allow herself to fall to any less than precise excellence, it would mean a startlingly soon retirement. And retirement of a widow in the Red Room when she was young enough to be out in the field generally consisted of execution unless she was one of Dreykov's personal favorites. Then the widow would move to his personal collection.

Honestly, Yelena would have preferred dying to moving to his collection of slaves.

Yelena stiffly moved over to the couch, Fanny moving carefully along at her heels as she reached her nose up to touch Yelena's hand gently. Fanny seemed to sense her pain, and Yelena allowed herself to drop her guard just enough to appreciatively run her hand through the thick fur coating Fanny's head.

She knew Natasha would likely pop up at any moment, so she just slumped on the couch heavily, trying to mentally pull together all of her resolve and strength to keep from cuing to Natasha that she had gotten hurt.

Fanny rested her chin on Yelena's knee, and Liho approached Yelena's side, aloofness in every movement. Yelena wrinkled her nose just a little at the cat, not particularly liking the creature, but she risked sticking her hand out to pet it.

Remarkably, the cat actually seemed to appreciate her affections, and Yelena was greatly surprised at the fact that a cat of all things liked her. Yelena knew that she was a hit with dogs, but that was because she was a dog-person, and she felt that dogs could easily sense that from her. Most cats she had interacted with did not seem to like her very much.