Scarlet Widow

The quinjet smelled like gun oil and Yelena's cheap coffee, and I was three hours into a flight I didn't want to take when my phone buzzed against my thigh.

I knew it was her before I looked. That's the thing nobody tells you about loving someone for two years in secret. Your body learns their rhythm. The way they breathe before they speak. The exact weight of their silence when they're angry.

I looked anyway.

*Call me when you land.*

Four words. No question mark. No "please." Wanda didn't beg. She stated things like they were already true and waited for the world to agree.

I put the phone face-down on the console and stared at the clouds through the cockpit glass. Yelena was asleep in the jump seat behind me, her mouth open, a strand of blonde hair stuck to her cheek. She'd been up all night doing surveillance on a lead that turned out to be nothing. A dead end in a city that smelled like diesel and fried dough.

"You're doing the thing," Yelena mumbled without opening her eyes.

"What thing."

"The thing where you stare at nothing and pretend you're not thinking about her."

I didn't answer. Outside, the sky was doing that thing it does over the Atlantic at dawn, all bruised purple and gold, like something beautiful got hurt. I'd seen that sky a hundred times. It never used to mean anything.

"She called you, didn't she," Yelena said.

"She texted."

"Same difference." She sat up and stretched, her spine cracking in three places. "You should call her back."

"I will."

"When?"

"When I'm ready."

Yelena snorted. "That's what you said last time. And the time before that. And the time before that, when you spent four days in Budapest ignoring her calls because she went to dinner with the robot."

"He's not a robot."

"He's a synthezoid. A vibranium toaster with a British accent. Same thing."

I turned in my seat to look at her. She was eating a granola bar she'd found somewhere, crumbs falling onto her tactical vest like snow.

"You don't get to talk about him like that," I said. "He's good. He's decent. He's—"

"He's in love with your girlfriend."

The word hit me in the chest. Girlfriend. Like we were teenagers passing notes in class. Like we weren't two women who'd killed more people than most wars, sneaking around the Avengers compound like thieves, hiding something that should've been simple.

"She's not my girlfriend," I said.

Yelena raised an eyebrow. "Does she know that?"

I didn't answer that one either.

---

We landed in Lagos at 0600. The mission was simple. Extract a scientist from a HYDRA remnant cell operating out of an old textile factory near the harbor. In and out. Two hours, maybe three. Yelena had done the recon. I had the exfil route memorized. We'd done this dance a hundred times.

But something felt off. The air was too still. The streets too empty for a Tuesday morning.

"You feel that?" Yelena asked, checking her pistols for the third time.

"Yeah."

"Good. I thought maybe it was just me."

We moved through the factory's lower level, boots silent on concrete slick with something I didn't want to identify. The place smelled like rust and ammonia and old blood. My kind of place. The kind of place where I knew exactly who I was.

The scientist was in a room on the third floor, tied to a chair, his face swollen purple. He'd been beaten. Recently. The men guarding him were dead before they knew we were there. Yelena took the one on the left. I took the one on the right. Clean. Quiet. Professional.

"Dr. Adeyemi," I said, cutting his restraints. "We're here to get you out."

He looked up at me with eyes that had seen too much. "They know you're coming. It's a trap."

The floor exploded.

I don't remember the blast. I remember the sound, a roar that swallowed everything, and then I remember falling. Concrete and rebar and fire. Yelena's voice somewhere above me, screaming my name. I remember hitting the ground and feeling something in my side give way, a wet heat spreading through my suit.

And then I remember nothing at all.

---

I woke up in a hospital in Cairo. Don't ask me how I got there. Yelena would tell me later, in that flat voice she used when she was scared, that she'd carried me three miles through the city with a bullet in her shoulder and a fractured wrist. She'd stolen a car. She'd threatened a doctor at gunpoint. She'd done what we do.

But when I woke up, she wasn't there. The room was white and quiet and smelled like antiseptic. A machine beeped next to my head. My side felt like someone had tried to carve me open with a spoon.

And Wanda was sitting in the chair by the window.

She looked terrible. That's the first thing I noticed. Her hair was unwashed, pulled back in a ponytail that had given up hours ago. Her eyes were red, not from crying, from not sleeping. She was wearing one of my old sweatshirts, the gray one with the hole in the sleeve, and she was holding a cup of coffee that had gone cold.

"You're awake," she said.

Her voice cracked on the second word.

"How long?" I asked.

"Three days."

"Yelena?"

"Alive. In the next room. She won't leave until you're stable." Wanda set the coffee down. Her hands were shaking. "She carried you. She wouldn't let anyone else touch you."

That sounded like Yelena.

Wanda stood up. She crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed, and for a long moment she just looked at me. Her eyes were green in the fluorescent light, green like the sea before a storm. I'd loved those eyes for two years. I'd lied to everyone I knew for two years to keep loving them.

"I thought you were dead," she said.

"I'm not."

"I know. I can see that." She reached out and touched my face, her fingers cool against my cheek. "But I thought you were. For three days, I thought you were dead, and I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't call your sister. I couldn't ask for time off. I had to sit in meetings and pretend like my whole world wasn't falling apart."

"Wanda—"

"Vision asked me what was wrong." Her voice was flat now. Controlled. "He asked me if I was okay. He brought me tea. He sat with me for six hours because he didn't want me to be alone."

I closed my eyes. "I know."

"Do you? Do you know what that's like? To have someone be kind to you when the person you actually love is bleeding out in a hospital in another country, and you can't even tell them why you're crying?"

"I know," I said again.

"No, you don't." She pulled her hand back. "You don't know, because you're the one who gets to leave. You're the one who gets to go on missions and be a hero and not think about what it does to me. You just text me when you land and expect me to be waiting."

"That's not fair."

"None of this is fair, Natasha." She stood up. "I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you for two years, and I can't tell anyone. I can't tell my friends. I can't tell my brother. I can't even tell Vision, and he's the kindest person I've ever met, and he deserves to know that I'm not in love with him."

"Then tell him."

She laughed. It wasn't a nice laugh. "Tell him what? That I've been lying to him for months? That every time he touches my hand, I'm thinking about someone else? That the only reason I haven't ended things is because I'm scared of what happens when everyone finds out?"

"Wanda—"

"I can't do this anymore."

The words hung in the air between us. I felt them land, one by one, like bullets.

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"I'm saying I need time." She walked to the door. "I'm saying I need to figure out what I want. And I can't do that while I'm waiting for you to come home."

She opened the door.

"Wanda, wait."

She didn't wait. She walked out, and the door closed behind her, and I lay there in that hospital bed with a hole in my side and a bigger one somewhere else, listening to the machine beep and wondering if I'd just lost the only thing that ever mattered.

Outside the window, Cairo was waking up. The sun was rising over the minarets, gold and red and beautiful. I'd seen that sun a hundred times. It never used to mean anything.