Yelena has favorites when it comes to her scars. They all have stories and only some of them, she says, are worth telling.
Some she recounts the same way someone might recite a grocery list; here she got grazed by a bullet in Moldova, here some roofing tiles gave way in Odessa and the iron finials partially impaled her, here she was grazed by a lucky son of a bitch with a butterfly knife in Gdańsk. He knows that for most of them, that means the story ends the same way – ‘and then I killed them. Target neutralized, mission complete.’ Nothing otherwise noteworthy about the marks or the encounter, to her.
Some, she… avoids.
She tells him when he asks, but he learns how to recognize which ones will fall into this category – if not from the similarities between some of them, the neatness, the precision of marks deliberately made, then from the way her shoulders tense, or her breath hitches when his fingers ghost over them.
Thin lines across her back, her knuckles, the backs of her hand; evidence of punishments from the Madam or some other nameless teacher; a face barely remembered, a presence utterly forgettable but for the fact that they had the audacity to inflict their will on her in this way. Or, sometimes, from another potential Widow she was pitted against, or who tried to curry favor by taking out the competition.
(“Stupid,” she huffs. “Anything done outside of the lessons was considered a waste, or too independent, so it never helped them, anyway.”)
And the neat surgical scars on her abdomen – those get a tense, one word answer: “graduation.” The slant of her mouth lets him know that there’s no joy to be found in pressing further.
It doesn’t… help to tell her that he hates that she went through this pain. That though he does not know those who marked her, he loathes them all the same. That it was even hard to look at Alexei for a week after she merely mentioned his role in that first mission she remembers and Bob put the pieces together; that even now, sometimes his hands clench into fists at the thought of Alexei being among the tally of those who have wronged her.
This is not useful. Yelena does not mourn in this way. She has taken out those who have posed real threats to her. She has forgotten, if not forgiven, much of the rest. And she still seeks comfort in Alexei’s presence and in bickering with him, and in occasionally allowing him to pull her into a hug and act that part he was assigned so long ago.
So. Dwelling on how he feels about all this isn’t what soothes her. What does, he finds, is asking about her other scars. These ones – these rare few – she’s entirely happy to share with him. She gets a far-off look in her eye and a faint smile when he asks about them.
Yelena sits with her back against his chest after a particularly grueling mission and follows the path his fingers make as he traces over a wide, flat scar on her knee.
“Scraped it when I fell off my bike,” she says. “Nat told me I was too young to take the training wheels off, but I was stubborn. She was right, though – and I've never seen her run faster than she did that day, trying to catch me. She’s the reason I don’t have scars on both knees.”
Or, she catches his hand and has him press his thumb over a small, circular scar on her palm, just below her middle finger. “Burned it,” she said, “trying to bake with mama. It was a new recipe, and she didn’t like to bake, usually. Just did it for me. Got too caught up looking at the next steps to realize I was trying to move the tray without oven mitts.” She laughs at the memory, an airy sound. “She let me eat as many of them as I wanted, to make me feel better. So I did, and I felt sick all night, but I’d have done it again in a heartbeat.”
Or, she bumps her hip against him and nestles into his side when they’re waiting for pick-up after one of the few public relation stunts Bucky had agreed to and shows him an uneven scar just above her elbow.
“Was helping dad fix something in the car. It kept stalling when it started up, and it was driving him crazy. The hood closed too quick, pinched the skin.” She snorts. “We both thought it was way worse than it was, from the amount of blood. Before either of us had realized it wasn't that bad, he’d already promised me anything, if I didn’t tell Mama how it happened.” Yelena grins. “I got a whole day at the splash pad out of that.”
Nearly all of her favorite scars are like that – from her childhood; from those three happy years where she thought she had a normal life. There’s only one exception – a scar on her arm that he has to squint to see.
“It used to be longer,” she laments. “Now, most of it has faded. Used to go alllll the way down here.” He watches the line she makes on her arm, and follows suit, imagining it. “Natasha stitched me up. It was – I was… mad at her still, then. But still glad to see her. And this felt like… old times.” Yelena sighs, and when she speaks, she sounds distant. “Now it’s the last thing I have from her.”
It’s bittersweet – but remembering still seems to help.
She carries her sister with her that way, her parents – the version of them that she believed cared for her without expectation. Evidence that she was loved. That Yelena Belova can be loved. That she could be loved again now.
None of his marks carry the same nostalgia, but he knows she’d do the same for him, if she could; if he had any nice stories connected to his scars.
She does ask him, once, though. He tells her – as many as he remembers, though she has him beat by both number and intrigue. Still, he could never deny her anything.
The clearest are from his father, from those times he hadn’t felt the need to hide the evidence of what a piece of shit he was. That resulted in the circular cigarette burns that dot across a few spots on his skin, and in the faint line on the underside of his jaw, where his father’s wedding ring had left one hell of a welt. Some don’t have stories, really; the track marks on his arms sort of speak for themselves, anyway. And others… he really can’t recall. Is that spot on his foot from where he’d scraped it in a pool as a kid and it had taken weeks to heal because the scab kept rubbing off, or from a fight he’d been caught in without realizing why it was happening at all? Much as he tries, he can’t recall.
She’d traced over them all, regardless, her touch feather light. Carefully, slowly, like she was memorizing them – and then she’d looked him in the eye and said, “you want me to kill your dad for you? Florida’s not that far, especially if we take one of the jets.”
Bob hadn’t laughed that hard in a long while. “Probably not,” he’d said when he could breathe again. “We have enough legal issues as it is, and I’d rather you stay here with us than away in court.” And then he’d tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, wrapped his arms around her, and said, “but it means a lot that you want to.”
“‘Kay,” she’d said, voice muffled against his chest, “but if you ever change your mind… it’s a standing offer.”
He knows she meant it.
That’s all they can give each other – no way to turn the clock back and prevent the scars, no way to make them fade any more than they already have, just… comfort, in their own way. It’s such a small thing, and yet – so much.
When she’s feeling faraway and distant and Bob wraps her up in his arms, places his palm on her knee, murmuring, “tell me again how you got this one” – he’s also saying you should have been loved all your life. And though he knows it won’t make up for it – you can have mine forever, now.
And when Yelena brushes her lips over a stray mark on his skin, or curls against him to blink a butterfly kiss against the scar on his jaw – I would have done something, if I could have, he feels her say. You’re safe with me now.
It’s dizzying, knowing that. And he swears he’ll trace her scars forever and listen to the same stories, over and over again, for as long as she’ll let him, to be worthy of it.
