WHAT: Reunited in space (kinda sorta) WHERE: Mess hall, Starship V.A.L.L.O. WHEN: Backdated to the first day of space plot! WARNINGS: Nah STATUS: Complete
Lately, Kate felt like her fresh start had gone through a reboot. Losing Natasha had been a hurtle she could never have prepared herself to feel. They’d talked about it because that was the practical route, and her sister was nothing if not practical. She wanted Kate prepared for the possibility because it was always a possibility – people appeared and disappeared regularly. No matter how lucky they’d been, that could change at a moment’s notice, and it had always been important to Natasha that Kate realize that.
She had been prepared. It didn’t make losing the person who had been there for her for four full years on V.A.L.L.O., arriving barely a week after Kate herself, any less painful.
At this point, she had done the best she could to resign herself to the fact. She’d run away from her feelings on a lengthy scouting trip and returned in a better mental space. Her sister was gone. She could come back – people had before – but counting on it was a mistake. She had to be grateful for the time they’d had together, accept love from the people she still had (Daud, Violet, Kamala, Sam, Carol), and move forward.
Right now, she needed to keep her focus on the present, anyway. Because there were people on V.A.L.L.O – other people, from another universe, claiming some of their people had been brought here through a portal – and that demanded much more of her energy than grieving her sister, at least for now.
She was used to strange things happening. Magic and powers may not work here, but that didn’t mean the universe they were in wasn’t spectacularly weird. They’d traveled galaxies, dropped in on other planets, and other space stations, and seen other worlds and their people. It was something she could have only imagined back on Earth before she’d stumbled into this life. New people were hardly out of the norm.
One of the new people being Yelena Belova? That was an unexpected curveball. Kate hadn’t seen her since New York, four years ago for her. She had changed so much in that time. Though Natasha’s old memories and stories had kept the thought of Yelena alive in her head, she hadn’t expected to see her again, maybe ever.
But there they were – the new arrivals, gathered in the mess hall for dinner their first night in, and it was impossible not to recognize that face in the crowd.
So, she lifted her hand and waved with an awkward smile. Like a dork.
What followed that little handwave was a string of loud cursing in Russian. If anyone understood it around her, Yelena didn’t care. The second she spotted Kate, she stomped over, feeling a rush of varying emotions, some of which were probably clear on her face. And then she was speeding up and putting her arms around the girl, practically lifting her up from the ground.
She had just shown up in Vallo, yelled at Yelena for having left through a portal and then Vallo decides she needed to leave again. Yelena was just about ready to beat up the first person to say they even had an ounce of control over Vallo’s doings.
Kate understood every word she said. Russian curse words were the first words she had begged Natasha to teach her, much to her sister’s amusement, but Nat had rarely used them. She had much subtler, more devastating ways of expressing her disapproval when it was warranted.
But this was Yelena, and all Kate could do was smile, broader and more genuine. They had only just started getting to know each other back home, but she was still Yelena. She accepted the hug so tight that her feet did come off the ground for a moment, as expected; she knew better than to think Widows weren’t muscle-packed despite smaller frames.
“Hi,” she said. It was the only thing she could think to say, but she wrapped her arms around Yelena and squeezed back. “You, uh, just missed Tasha.”
“Of course, I did,” Yelena said before she let go of the girl. “Because Vallo likes to fucking pull this shit on me per usual.” She gave Kate a quick once-over, not sure what she was looking for exactly… make sure there weren’t any injuries or something? Any sign that this girl had surpassed her in age? Or maybe just drinking in her younger sister in case something happened and in the next second, she would stop seeing her before her. Yelena hated losing people so much more than she had before.
“How long have you been here?”
Well, that put a swift stop to any of Kate’s lingering hopes that Natasha was in this other universe’s version of the starship – Vallo seemed to be an actual planet there, and obviously some of the Outlanders were the same but some were different. She didn’t blame Yelena for coming here if Natasha and her Kate, whatever version of her that might be, were gone.
“Four years,” she said, gesturing for Yelena to join her in line for their evening meal. “Natasha was, too. She got here about a week after me, and she’s been gone… not even two months.” She pressed her lips together and lifted just one shoulder in a half-shrug. “You’ve never been here before, though. She’d be pissed she missed you.”
“Four years.” Yelena’s lips twisted down in her infamous frown, the one she always had when she wanted to cry. “You’ve been in my world for years. You and Natasha. And then you both left at the same time and then you came back and then you disappeared again and showed up here.”
The way Yelena’s mouth turned down made Kate’s heart quiver in this unexpected, nervous sort of way. She’d never seen that look on Yelena’s face before – she had been all confidence and arrogance and the grins to accompany it during their last encounter in New York – but she wasn’t stupid. She could read what it meant, and she was quick to try to assuage it with an arm around Yelena’s shoulder.
“I can promise you that neither of us meant to leave you. And I… don’t know if I can come back with you, but I hope you can get your Kate back. However that works.”
She’d felt that head pain and she knew she’d taken in memories from another world, but she hadn’t been able to hold on to a single one of them. She wasn’t Yelena’s Kate, but at that moment, she wished she was.
If this was anything like the previous portal trip, Yelena thought, Kate would eventually be back there. Or at least she hoped. It was hard to say what the hell Vallo was going to end up doing. But she didn’t voice that, nor did she argue and say that she was her Kate no matter what the hell she experienced and what world she was from.
Instead, she just leaned into her touch and allowed herself to calm down. And maybe change the topic for now. There would be time to tell her everything that happened, what she experienced, what they experienced together. “We don’t know how our universe functions, but I imagine it’s the same thing here.”
“Yeah, probably,” Kate agreed. Part of her wondered if she should pull away now that Yelena seemed be calmer, but she thought of Nat and she didn’t. She stayed close and simply said, “I’m happy you’re here, Yelena.”
Yelena managed a smile without having it turn into a grimace. Because space was not where she wanted to have a reunion with her younger sister. But this was her home, she realized, and she could deal with it for a bit until this whole damn mission was over. “Yeah. Show me around the place.”