A week passes and finds Yelena and Kate hanging out at home. She's been feeling a bit better now that it's been a week since her last dosage of chemo and she's seen Isabel, but she's fully dreading being back in the hospital on Monday.
At least she'll be able to go home at night. (Unless she has an adverse reaction, apparently.)
Kate's been oddly quiet recently, seemingly adapting Yelena's style of being a quiet onlooker, and while Yelena thinks it'd be helpful for missions (if she ever gets back to that), as her not-girlfriend-but-not-friend-either, she finds it unnerving. It's not the Kate Bishop she knows.
But she doesn't press, knowing that Kate's probably tired as Yelena is, and focuses instead on the fact that Peter's coming home for spring break this week. Yelena likes Peter. He's the purer side of the Avengers and a welcomed breath of fresh air in the otherwise heavy atmosphere of their current life.
He's supposed to arrive tonight and come to visit tomorrow, which is great, but Yelena's bored now.
At least Natasha's coming over with Anya soon. They're going to order something for dinner, apparently.
(She doesn't exactly know where Wanda is or what she's doing, but she's learned that sometimes she doesn't need the answers to everything.)
It's when the TV goes silent that Yelena hears Kate's voice in the other room.
Slowly, she turns down the volume and listens carefully.
"That's not what I meant when I said job, Clint," her hushed voice reaches Yelena's ears and she furrows her eyebrows. She's not used to that tone from Kate.
"I was looking for something to get me out of the house. And that was also weeks ago before I was living with Yelena," Kate says, tone clipped and pissed off, "I can't do that right now."
It goes quiet for a few minutes and Yelena ticks the volume back up on the TV. Not her business, not her business, not her business.
"Hey."
Yelena looks over, seeing Kate finally emerge from Yelena's room (which, to be fair, is practically theirs now, but whatever). Her hair's put up and she's wearing a sweatshirt with her college's emblem on it. She looks so beautiful.
"Hi," Yelena smiles softly at her, smiling when Lucky looks up from his spot on the couch and lazily flops over, exposing his belly for rubs. Yelena can't stop looking at her, a feeling in her chest that's so comfortable there that it's almost strange, "I have something to ask."
"What's that?" Kate asks, walking over to the other side of the couch and scratching at Lucky's chest.
Yelena's words suddenly get caught in her throat and she almost chokes, the feeling completely unnatural.
She plays it off, biting her lip and recalibrating, "What are we?"
"Like, relationship-wise?" Kate asks, and Yelena nods. Kate shrugs, "I dunno."
Yelena scowls, "That's not a good answer, Kate Bishop."
"What do you want me to say?" Kate asks, "I mean, like, I know how I feel about you and you know how I feel about you. I'm not picky about labels, whatever you want us to be I'm good with. Except marriage. I'm not signing something that endows me to someone forever, even if I do know I'm never going to break up with them."
Yelena presses her lips together, digesting all of the information that Kate just gave her. She doesn't want to get married - okay. One. She's not picky about labels, two. She knows how she feels about Yelena and seems pretty certain that Yelena knows how she feels as well, three.
YOU ARE READING
till forever falls apart
Fanfictionyelena never expected to hate being right as much as she hates it now. she knew something was wrong, she told isabel, she insisted. she knew it. she just didn't expect that something to be cancer.
