Katya stayed a few steps back as they walked to the gas station where they decided to make a stop. Ever since they got out of the vents, the atmosphere between them was rather tense. Even if the girl's origin and her story with Natasha were still kept under wraps, the comment about them needing an out was enough for Yelena to realize some things. Especially there being much more to Katya than Natasha let on.
Katya looked around, not paying much attention to the women's conversation, hearing just bits and pieces about the Red Room location, the Avengers, and Yelena's grudge against Natasha for never looking for her. Katya stepped outside and when turning her head to shield her eyes from the blinding rays of sunset, out of the corner of her eye saw the blonde mimicking the 'pose'.
"All that time I spent posing," Romanoff's expression tensed, "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."
"Well, then you were fooling yourself because pain and suffering is every day and we are both still a trained killer," Belova replied, the previous amusement was suddenly gone. "Except I'm not the one that's on the cover of the magazine. I'm not the killer little girls call their hero."
Something snapped inside Katya when she heard Yelena's words. She was wrong. Natasha was good. She was a hero. Her hero. Protect. When the blonde walked out of the door, Katya caught her by the arm, something between a silent threat and a challenge in her eyes. At first, Yelena was rather confused, but then she noticed the look on the girl's face and tried to free her arm. Katya didn't budge.
As soon as Natasha realized what was going on, she joined them outside "Katya, stop."
"She's wrong." the girl said, her voice steady and plain, almost emotionless. Aside from her lips moving, no other muscle even twitched, her face seemed like carved in marble. Yelena looked between them, still not sure what she was supposed to do and trying to judge whether the girl was starting to become a threat.
Romanoff touched the girl's shoulder. "That doesn't matter."
The touch finally made Katya snap out of it enough to make her shake her head, trying to push that away but her gaze remained rather unpleasant and once again fixed on Yelena. "You..."
"Katyusha, don't," Natasha asked, keeping her hand on the girl's shoulder to ground her. "It's not worth it."
"Oh, no, I'm actually curious about what your guard dog has to say." Yelena protested, her eyebrows still raised, but in the back of her mind, she regretted her words, as she managed to make some connections based on what she saw throughout the day, and deep down she knew she couldn't have been more wrong.
"What, so you could mock her too?" Natasha snapped, leading the girl away to one of the outdoor tables placed on the station's side. Belova quietly followed them, staying a few steps behind.
For a long while there was an awkward silence between them, the only sounds coming from a group of kids playing football nearby. Yelena started to take care of the wound on her arm. Natasha focused on changing the dressing on Katya's burnt hand. It was healing nicely, much faster than it would on an average person. She couldn't do much about the finger aside from bandaging it too and hoping that the girl didn't make it worse by setting the joint by herself.
Then Romanoff left for a moment, to get something to drink, leaving Katya and Yelena alone and crossing her fingers she won't find her daughter at Belova's throat once again. The atmosphere tensed up even more, but there were no casualties by the time Natasha returned. Quite the opposite, as finding the girl helping Yelena wrap a bandage around her arm was one of the last things she expected. The blonde herself seemed quite surprised.
Romanoff set two bottles of beer and a can of soda on a table before taking place opposite them.
"That gas, the counteragent," Yelena started when Katya went back to her previous place on Natasha's side. "It was synthesized in secret by an older Widow from Melina's generation. I was on a mission to retrieve it and she exposed me and I killed the widow that freed me."
"Did you have a choice?" Natasha asked, looking away from what Katya was sketching on some leaflet.
"What you experienced was psychological conditioning," Yelena explained. "I'm talking about chemically altering brain functions. You're fully conscious, but you don't know which part is you." that statement made Natasha think about someone else, currently waiting for her hundreds of miles away. Yelena shrugged. "I'm still not sure."
Katya tried not to listen when the blonde started talking about Dreykov taking more every day, about all of these defenseless kids. She grimaced when she heard the numbers. One in twenty. She pressed the pencil harder to the thin page, almost through it.
"To him, we are just things. Weapons with no face that he just throw away. Because there's always more."
The pencil cracked in Katya's pale hand, surprisingly loud, bringing Natasha and Yelena's attention back to her. The girl didn't meet their eyes. Neither Romanoff's worried ones nor Belova's confused ones. She looked away instead, to the playing kids. Something in her wanted to join them. It was only a few days but she already missed playing with Cooper. This wasn't as fun as she thought it would be.
One of the boys run to his father, calling out to him before jumping into his arms. "Did you ever look for your parents? Your real ones?" Yelena asked, the broken pencil quickly forgotten.
"Well, my mom abandoned me in street like garbage." Natasha shrugged and took a sip out of her bottle, letting that one sentence speak for itself. That Katya did know. Remembering the look on Mama's face when she first asked about her parents made her regret doing so to this day. "What about you?"
"They destroyed my birth certificate, so I reinvented it," Yelena admitted, tipping the bottle and touching the tip of her nose with it. "My parents still live in Ohio. My sister moved out west. You're a science teacher. You're working part-time, though, especially after you had your son. Your husband, he renovates houses."
"That is not my story." Natasha shook her head with a smile tugging on the corner of her lips.
Yelena let out a laugh. "Yeah, I guess I should change some things. Swap the son for a daughter, for instance," she said, cocking an eyebrow at Katya.
The girl's forehead scrunched and she looked at Natasha. She smiled at her with a sigh.
"Yeah, I was waiting for you to tell me yourself, but that would take too much time." Belova shrugged. "I wanted to ask if you ever wished for kids but I guess I have the answer in front of me."
"You have any idea what she's talking about?" Romanoff jokingly asked Katya.
The girl shook her head, stifling a laugh but not a grin "None."
"Come on, maybe I had a mother for three years only, but I'm not that dumb." Yelena protested. "The way you keep looking at each other, how you protect her, that constant worry. And the matching necklaces? That's so cute it's disgusting. And that also explains why you are such a mom. Because you are one."
With the secret out, Natasha embraced the girl, pulling her closer. Katya scrunched her nose and kept her head on Romanoff's shoulder even when she let her arm fall down.
"So what's the story here?" Yelena propped her elbows on the table and then her chin on a closed fist. "She was in the Red Room too, right?"
"She was born there." Natasha sighed, her smile faltering a bit. "It's a long and complicated story for another time. Most of it at least ."
"Then give me a shortened version." the blonde suggested.
Romanoff hesitated at first. "I made a promise to someone. Then there was a mission, some luck, I got us out when I thought I took it all down, and couldn't bring myself to let her go, since we started to like each other along the way, I guess."
"From cargo to family, huh?" Belova concluded.
"Something like that."
"So what about the rest of my story?" Yelena asked after a moment of silence. "Was I close with anything else? The husband part maybe?" she teased, tilting her head. "What, I want to know if she has a daddy somewhere that's going to come after me for endangering her or something!"
"No, you are definitely off with that part," Natasha admitted with a laugh.
"Okay, but seriously. What about her biological parents? You know anything?"
Romanoff shrugged, glancing at Katya. "No idea about the mother and the father... Well, it's mostly him who makes it all so complicated."
"Oh, so there's a daddy. Only hers?" Yelena snorted at Natasha's offended face, dodging the sway of her hand with a smirk. She eyed Katya for a moment. The girl looked between them with confusion, not quite sure what the fuss after that last question was about. "You're not an ordinary neighborhood kid, aren't you?"
The girl shook her head with a slight smile.
"Sorry about the guard dog thing earlier," Belova said, a glimpse of shame on her face
"It's okay," Katya assured. "I started it."
"So what can you do? Aside from being strong and everything, that I already know. And where does that even come from?"
The girl glanced at Natasha, looking for consent. A nice change after all the stunts she pulled lately, she thought. Romanoff shrugged, leaving the choice to her.
Katya put her arms on the table and leaned over it like she was about to share a secret. "I'm half super soldier."
"Is that the daddy's influence?" Yelena asked, glancing at the redhead and teasing her once again.
Natasha rolled her eyes "Say Daddy one more time and I swear I'll hurt you." she threatened, trying to get her attention away from Katya's father.
She had no idea if Yelena ever encountered Soldat back in the Red Room. There was a chance she was amongst the girls from which they wanted to choose more trainees for him. He was around for a few years, she could've been old enough to be given a chance or rather to be tested, Romanoff doubted that even if she did, she would make the connection so quickly, yet she preferred to be safe than sorry. She didn't feel the need to bring Winter Soldier into this mess, big enough as it was. Maybe she'll tell her the truth sometime, share their whole story one day. But that wasn't that day.
"Wait, what's your name? Like the full name." Belova turned back to Katya and continued quizzing her.
"Ekaterina Yakovlyevna Romanova." the girl recited. "Or just Katya."
"Sounds fancy. I like it." Yelena nodded, pouting. "At the last name even, I see you're all in," she added, eyeing Natasha and earning a scoff from her.
They continued their talk, Katya showing Yelena all about herself that she could without attracting additional attention. She put on a similar show as she did for the Avengers the year before. She skipped the math part and couldn't really show her the mimic skills, aside from going back to that look Yelena noticed between Natasha and the girl back in the vents and explaining that in a way, Katya was the same as Taskmaster.
Then she gave Belova a glimpse of her seer abilities, by making her choose a pocket of her vest and then proceeding to list all the items in it before Yelena took everything out to check if Katya was right. She was and in the blonde's eyes, it was so cool that they repeated it three additional times with different pockets.
Next in line was the lack of ability to feel pain. She had already seen a bit of that but at first, Yelena just thought that the girl had an unusually high pain threshold, yet she realized how wrong she was when Katya started pinching and poking the burn on her hand, much to Natasha's displeasure because she would be the one to fix the dressing on it.
The last part of the show was the hyperpolyglot version of Katya, which ended up with Yelena trying to find a language the girl wouldn't understand her in. She gave up after the seventh one and an attempt to fool the girl with some made-up gibberish.
After Katya's giggle caused by the blonde's defeat died down, Yelena watched Natashas and the girl on her left with curiosity. At the same time, it felt weird and completely right to know that Natasha defeated the odds and became a mother, taking back the choice that the Red Room so desperately tried to take away from every girl it got its claws on.
They haven't seen each other in over two decades but somehow it felt right. That role somehow seemed to suit her. It would take her a while to get used to how she was called mama by Katya, but that tiny sparkle in Natasha's eyes and a slight tug on the corner of her lips made it easier for some reason.
Yelena once heard or read somewhere that adopted kids often adapt to their parents, and tend to resemble them even without kinship. But with each minute she spend next to them, it was harder to wrap her mind around the fact that they were not related.
When looking at Katya, sometimes Yelena saw that blue-haired girl with a single gun in her shaking hand that was willing to take on a group of trained armed soldiers just to protect her little sister. Especially when Katya snapped at her outside of the gas station, that fire in her eyes before they went blank. It was the same drive, the same dedication, so strangely familiar yet at that moment almost disturbing.
Later when Yelena had a chance to observe Natasha some more, she started to notice more and more similarities. It was mostly mannerisms, small things, and quirks, like often-used gestures, or facial expressions. The slightly crooked smile, tugging at their fingers, when lost in thoughts, that forced mask of calmness in situations that were a complete opposite, invisible for an average human, but noticeable for someone trained, like they all were.
What made Katya much different from the girl she remembered, was her composure when she saw her first, as the girl shot at the bookshelf back in the apartment, breaking up a fight between two trained assassins like it was something she did daily, just as her actions while they were running away from the safe house, especially the part when she took off on her own. Yelena saw a lot over the years but there was something eerie in the way that scrawny twelve-year-old handled a gun and the surrounding danger, enhanced or not.
She sometimes saw the young Red Room adepts, around the girl's age but she could swear she never saw one like her. Most of them still resembled deers caught in headlights, the biggest change would come in the next year or so, and if it didn't, then it would be the end of the road for them. Katya on the other hand, somehow brought to mind a poised, lurking predator in disguise. It was almost impossible to comprehend how someone so young and delicate at first sight, could at the same time seem like they had everything under control. Yelena wondered how much of it was only on the outside and what would she see inside the girl's head. Was she a wolf in sheep's clothing all the way through or maybe the complete opposite?
Yelena knew that it was not only Katya's doing. Whatever remains of the Red Room were still in her, it all affected her. But seeing that girl now, sitting in front of her, even when she seemed like an ordinary kid, leaning on Natasha's shoulder with her head tilted back, staring at the dark sky, humming some random song under her breath, and far from all of it, she was a force to be reckoned with, only now contained, probably by being held on a short leash by Natasha herself.
Yelena still had everything that she saw that day in the back of her mind, mostly her resemblance to Taskmaster, and couldn't help but wonder how more complicated everything would be if that girl was never taken away and if the Red Room was still pulling at her strings.