Yelena knew what she had decided on for that morning was probably akin to torture for her sister. When the girl liked to sleep, she definitely slept. But she was still walking next to her and had not gone back to the house just yet. Yelena could give her kudos for that.
“Come on, Kate Bishop,” she said, letting her voice be as loud as possible. It was mostly to be obnoxious but also helped when you walked around in the forest area where anything could be lurking. It was Vallo, after all. Maybe the giant ants this month could hear them and scurry away, remembering how fiercely she had hit one with her baton a while ago.
“Look lively! We’re not on a stealth mission here!”
“I’m lively,” Kate grumbled. She popped up the straw on her water bottle and took a sip but didn’t stop walking beside Yelena. She was admittedly a little grumpy – she hadn’t been up so early since she’d returned to Vallo. Nat had always been her training partner, and she was gone. So instead, she chose to sleep in and put her training (outside of required Defense sessions) on the back burner. She wasn’t happy about it, but without her big sister, she wasn’t motivated to get up on her own. It almost felt disrespectful.
Until Yelena pounced on her this morning, and she hadn’t been able to say no to her either. At least she wasn’t making her run this early. She was too out of practice to do much more than a slightly-rapid walk.
“Remind me again what inspired you to wake up before dawn?”
“I always wake up early when I don’t have to work.” Though not usually before dawn. She couldn’t explain why she felt like she had to be up this time. Mostly, she let her internal clock choose when she woke up. “Plus, we have to get our asses in gear. I’ve gotten lazy during the holiday months.”
Kate nodded in acknowledgment. Both her sisters had always been early risers, that wasn’t new. But Natasha was the one typically up with the sun and dragging Kate along with her. Yelena always seemed a little more eager to soak up the extra vestiges of sleep while Natasha was pegging Kate with pens and plying her with coffee to wake her up before training.
She didn’t do that anymore. She should, she knew that. It was the only reason she’d agreed to get up and come out here.
“Well, I’m here. Ass in gear.” She pushed the straw down and pulled up the water bottle’s handle, tightening two fingers around it. “I expect breakfast for my trouble.”
“A whole protein breakfast,” Yelena said with a nod, continuing her trek ahead. “We can even go TV shopping later if you want. Get something bigger even. I wonder if Vallo has that one that looks like a huge frame and cycles through photos.” She too often had Natasha on her mind especially when she went on walks like this, mostly the ones she had taken back in their world.
Here, when both Kate and Natasha had initially disappeared, she opted to just lie in bed and cry until Leon and Chris moved in. Then she forced herself to get up and make something suitably healthy for a growing kid. She had felt like they were doing her more of a favor anyway by moving in with her. Now that she had at least one sister back, it was time to get back into that routine. She’d just torture Kate a little just this once.
“Yeah,” Kate agreed, “we should do that. I think just about any smart TV will cycle through photos now, by the way.”
Sometimes, Yelena was just a bit out of touch, which she understood. She’d spent a lot of her life chemically brainwashed, not living anything near a normal life and TV shopping. Vallo was probably the most settled Yelena had been ever. Kate knew it was, honestly. She’d seen enough of teen Yelena when Vallo decided to play games with them to know that her teen years had been hellish. And she’d been stuck like that for most of her life.
“The wall’s supposed to be finished today,” she added after a moment. She’d hired a local contractor to come in and take care of it after the incident with Violet and Carol’s powers. None of them were equipped to fix it themselves. “So, really good timing for TV shopping.”
“Thank god. I don’t know anything about the structure of the house but if that was some kind of weight-bearing wall of sorts, I would not have wanted to worry about a bedroom suddenly being in the living room.” She knew a lot of things, but construction and architecture of a house wasn’t one of them.
“By the way, remember to keep an ear out of those giant ant things. I haven’t seen any too close to the house but still. Those things are nasty.”
“Lena, I’m on Defense,” Kate huffed, shoving her shoulder into her sister’s. “I know what to look out for, and I can handle it. I’ve got, like, seven black belts and Black Widow training. Relax.”
None of this meant the giant ants didn’t seriously freak her out, but she could handle it. She’d even brought her bow and quiver with her just in case. Those things didn’t discriminate between Defense days and regular days.
Yelena knew this, but she was the eldest sister now, and that meant reiterating staying safe no matter how much Kate already knew. She didn’t bother voicing that though, going with “I’m just saying” instead, her eyes trained ahead of her, scanning everything in her vision.
“Plus, if it’s not ants, then it’s something out here. I think I see something lying down over there.” She paused to point.
Kate frowned, eyes following Yelena’s hand to where she was pointing. It did look like something was sprawled out on the path ahead of them. A raccoon, maybe? Something about that size, maybe a little bigger – she couldn’t tell from this far back. But now her curiosity was peaked, and she grabbed Yelena’s hand with the one that remained free to pull her forward.
“It looks like a hurt animal,” she muttered.
As they approached the animal further, Yelena’s heart sank just a teeny bit. Dead humans, she could deal with. Unfortunately, a lot of them were her own fault. “A deer to be specific and definitely not just hurt.” It was the way nature worked, and Yelena knew this from her own world but also, Vallo sometimes sucked and often did not follow natural world rules.
Like the way it turned all birds into their much worse forms. She would officially quit if Vallo decided to send giant murder parakeets after them.
“Aw, buddy,” she said, kneeling down to the still body. “Think one of those ants got to him.” She reached out and pressed a hand on its neck, briefly wondering if that’s where you would check its pulse too.
Moving closer proved that the creature was not, in fact, the raccoon Kate had suspected. Her heart dropped into her stomach when they came across the deer. The poor thing wasn’t breathing. She hated to leave it, but such was the way of nature. Some predator would come for it, and the cycle of life would go on – but she didn’t want to be here to witness it.
“We should go, сестренка,” she encouraged, tugging at their still-joined hands. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Yelena knew she was right but she couldn’t get herself to move away. She pulled away, actually, squatting down right next to the creature with both hands on the neck. She noted its injuries and was easily able to determine that it didn’t die the Earth-natural way. Just the Vallo-natural. “Poor thing only got munched on by those ant things. I think it would have been badass if this guy came back and kicked their asses afterwards.”
It wasn’t a wish or anything like that, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t meant for it to really happen even though she was thinking it. But in the next second, the deer had suddenly lifted its head and Yelena cried out, falling back onto her behind.
Kate’s eyes immediately went wide and she took several steps backward when what had once been a very-dead deer came was suddenly much less dead than it had been twenty seconds before. Her mouth fell open and her voice shook briefly when she uttered an incredulous, “Holy shit.”
“What the hell was that?” Yelena was still on her butt on the forest floor, watching as the deer got up and bound away like nothing had ever happened! Even the wounds had suddenly disappeared! She scrambled to her feet then and grabbed at Kate’s arm, turning toward her and yelling, “What just happened?”
Kate blinked in astonishment as the deer took off like it had never been dead at all. It was almost like it had just fallen asleep and Yelena touching it had finally woken it up. But there was no way that animal had been alive. At least she didn’t think so, but she was no wild animal health expert by any means.
“Are you sure it was dead?” she asked. Yelena was the one who had put hands on it, she would be better able to judge than Kate. Probably.
“It was cold, Kate Bishop.” Yelena only ever used her first and last name when she was intentionally trying to be a shit or getting a little scoldy. This was a new category for the full name called Nearly Had A Heart Attack And Annoyed That Someone Was Doubting Her. “There were injuries!”
“I’m not doubting you!” Kate was tempted to do a little scolding herself; assuming that deer had been dead and cold, Yelena really shouldn’t have been touching it, since dead animals could carry risky diseases. But since she hadn’t been fast enough to pull her back in the moment, it didn’t feel right to call her out. “So, what are you saying? It just… resurrected? On its own?”
“I don’t know!” Yelena took a moment to look down at her hands, and then realized that if it had something she had done, maybe she shouldn’t have been touching Kate with the other hand as well. She immediately pulled away and held up her hands. “Does… Vallo just resurrect dead animals? Maybe it was an immortal animal. Maybe it just died and was waiting to come back to life and I happened to stumble upon it during its… metaphorical burning phoenix phase.”
“Maybe,” Kate agreed with a slow nod. This was Vallo. Things that would sound like complete bullshit to her back home could be an absolute truth in this universe. But she’d been here over two years, patrolling the forest for most of it, and immortal, self-resurrecting deer were new for her. “Or…”
She reached back out to snag Yelena’s hand and turned it over to examine her palm like it might hold the answers. Her sister had touched the deer and it had come alive again. It was reasonable to think she might have something to do with it.
Yelena tried to shake her off. “Stop staring so hard at my hands.” Never mind that she had just been doing that a short second ago.
“Well, how do we know you didn’t do it?” Kate questioned. She didn’t release Yelena’s hand, but she did meet her eyes instead. “With all the power swappy stuff going on, it’s a possibility?”
Yelena stopped squirming long enough to look at her and force herself to use her rational mind to think. Imagine being so out of practice being a spy you find yourself thinking like a normal human being with emotions rather than cold logic. Kate would have loved to hear that thought process. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You… are right. We can… let’s see who has the power to bring animals back to life or something.”
“Easy,” Kate responded. “Syd. She literally brought that ancient coven guy back to life for the first big portal, remember?” She hadn’t personally witnessed any of that or participated in it, mostly because she’d been gone at the time. She’d come back at the tail end of it all, but she’d been quick to read back over the past two weeks and that part had stood out to her. Sydney’s powers were common knowledge, but Kate didn’t think she’d ever heard of her using it for such a big resurrection.
It did make her the perfect candidate for accidental resurrection problems when people’s powers were flipping around, though. Sure, she probably wasn’t the only person with that power, but she was a good first call to make.
“Alright, okay,” Yelena said, giving herself a nod. “We go find Syd like as soon as possible and figure out how I keep from accidentally resurrecting anything else.” She gave her hands a look again. There had to be some sort of natural law, wasn’t there? That she would potentially be breaking? She remembered some TV show about this about a pie-maker who had the ability.
“We go find Syd,” Kate agreed. She took hold of Yelena’s arm, hand in the crook of her elbow and turned her around on the path to steer her back toward home. “Come on, let’s get home and get change. Maybe get you some gloves or something, too, just in case.”