Dancing in Her Webs | Yelena Belova [1]

Chapter 5

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  The 23rd of December, 2012 is still to this day, the most devastating event Irina's ever experienced. It was the day her childhood home was destroyed, but she could care less about the mansion and fancy technology her father built over the years. She cared about the only blood relative that was thought to be dead by the entire world.

  She witnessed the missiles the Mandarin's men shot from their chopper's crumble her entire home into the ocean, along with her father.

  Maybe it's the fear of more Black Widows tracking them down and the "what if's?" that follow her capture —if she, Natasha and Yelena are caught— that's talking. Why? Irene isn't particularly certain, but she has a hunch. The horrid memories of being kidnapped by Killian plagued her mind every waking moment, but she's learned to cope and ignore it most days. But when her eyes close for the night, that's when the worse starts. Nightmares of every possible outcome that could've happened that night on the Norco if her father and Rhodey hadn't shown up.

  Snapping at Natasha the way she did is unlike Irina, but she blamed her hormones for that one.

  She stopped in her tracks, dark brows knitting.

  Yelena slid close to the floor, bending forward some in front of the doorway inside the gas station. She placed her left hand out in front of her on the floor and, at a slight angle, kept her right arm out at her side. Her right let's straight like her arm, and left leg bent for balance.

  Yelena began whipping her head up and down, her double ponytails flying along. "This thing that you do when you whip your hair when you're fighting with the arm and the hair." Irina burst into hysterics. "And you do, like, a fighting," Yelena laughed, looking up at Natasha as she held her laughter. "It's a .  .  ." but she laughed again, and placed an elbow on her thigh and a hand on her knee. "It's a fighting pose. You're a total poser," Yelena shifted her gaze to Irene, who's still laughing, her spirits immediately lifting from the Widow's nonsense. "She's a poser."

Irina's too busy laughing to even use any part of her body for gestures to respond. Natasha's quick to disagree, keeping her entire face straight. "I'm not a poser." She wasn't amused.

"Hahaah!" Yelena laughed, "Oh, come on. I mean, they're great poses—" she grabbed ahold of Irene's forearm for stability and stood, "—but it does look like you think everyone's looking at you like, all the time."

"All that time that I spent posing, I was trying to actually do something good to make up for all the pain and suffering that we caused. Trying to be more than just a trained killer," Natasha replied, peeved by Yelena's mockery.

"Well, then you were fooling yourself," Yelena turned around, moving around Irina to looks at the shelf behind her, "because pain and suffering is everyday and we are both still a trained killer." She finished grabbing things off the shelf and turned back to look at Natasha, "Except I'm not the one that's on the cover of a magazine. I'm not the killer that little girls call their hero." And with that, Yelena strode out the gas station.

Irina's no longer laughing. She sighed, slowly stepping toward Nat, who's at the front counter. "I don't think you're bad, Nat," she said softly, grabbing Natasha's attention. "Maybe a little broken, but who isn't in this world? We all have our traumas and our flaws. Some just have it worse than others."