Chapter Text
Nat’s birthday has got to be the worst day of the year.
It’s well past midnight, as the green glow of the oven clock reminds her, and Yelena sits in the dark kitchen with a bottle of vodka. Her eyes burn as it goes down, and she tells herself it’s the drink. She’s less accustomed to it, lately, realizing how much alcohol affects her mood and sleep. Noticing how dependent she is on it to numb things, even if she’s trying to do it less after everything that happened with the Void. Watching Alexei self-medicate has put things into depressing perspective—they’re both about as stereotypical Russian as one could be, and he’s one bad mission away from liver failure.
Tonight, however, Yelena downs the vodka without care for how unhealthy a coping mechanism it is. Everyone’s in bed, and the building’s been silent for hours. Yelena’s too quiet to alert the team, even stifling her sobs with a clenched fist so she doesn’t disturb anyone.
Another year without her sister. God, it doesn’t feel real. Yelena wipes her eyes and tries to be thankful she had a sister at all, that she got to reunite with her before the Snap. Some people would kill to have a sister, especially one as kind and fiercely strong as Natasha. She should be grateful.
But all she can feel is the deep pit of grief, swallowing the air before she can fully suck it into her lungs. All she feels is a resentment that Natasha was taken from her, ripped away after being brought back; a taunt, a mockery, a bitterly cruel joke played on little Yelena who knew no better.
You’re so lucky.
She was the most amazing person.
She saved the world.
She doesn’t feel lucky. She feels alone.
Val’s team of broken anti-heroes has been cobbled together for three months now and it hasn’t healed Yelena—naive, to think she can ever heal—but she’s trying. She likes the feeling of living in an occupied building, of knowing there are five other people breathing and training and existing around her. It’s comforting.
It doesn’t fix it all. It doesn’t change everything, and it doesn’t change the fact that she currently is tempted to climb to the rooftop and jump. Natasha is still dead, and she is still alone when she should be celebrating her sister’s birthday with her sister, not a bottle of vodka and a tangled mess of memories haunting her.
Another sob escapes from her, and she fails to cover it properly with her palm. It echoes a bit in the empty kitchen, and she winces. Hopefully, the team will mind their business. Alexei sleeps like the dead, and the rest of them can’t possibly care enough to—
Yelena spins around at the sound of footsteps, drawing her gun with impressively steady hands despite her blood alcohol content. The click of the safety is deafening in the midnight silence.
“Jesus.” Bucky stands in the doorway of the kitchen, a disbelieving scowl etched on his permanently grouchy face. He holds his hands up in a mock surrender. “You’re gonna kill a man for getting a midnight snack? Other people live here, you know.”
Yelena lowers the gun, her heart rate calming. She hopes it’s too dark for him to notice how red her eyes are. He probably doesn’t care, even if he did see it, and she banks on this. Banks on him leaving so she can be miserable in peace. She still hardly knows him and suspects he half-hates her; he doesn’t need to see her like this.
She shrugs at him, aiming for nonchalance. That’s what everyone expects of her, right? Make enough jokes and no one notices you’re actually not even close to okay. “You snuck up on me, soldat.”
His eyes sharpen. “Don’t call me that.”
She takes another sip, absorbing his ire. It’s a welcome distraction, sparring with him, and the brief burst of satisfaction drowns out the cloud of grief. “Oh, zimniy soldat doesn’t like it? It’s one of the cooler hero names, you really should pitch it again to Valentina—”
Bucky slams his metal arm against the doorframe, making her jump. Taking a step forward, almost murderous, he hisses, “Call me that one more time, Belova, and I—have you been crying?”
He stops in his tracks, staring at her. Fully taking in the scene before him, his eyes tracing her red ones, the misery written across her face. Sees this argument for what it is, clocks her so easily she’s stunned.
“No,” she sniffs, no longer really caring. “Maybe.” It’s strange to her that this is one of their first full conversations without the others present. They keep each other at a distance, a tense truce between them. She’s torn constantly between hating him and wondering how much they truly have in common. The brainwashing, the mind control, the killing they’d both been forced to do…
If maybe…he understood.
“Should have known you were picking a fight on purpose,” Bucky says, sighing in irritation. “Stubborn.”
“Can you just leave me to drink in peace, then?” she asks, her fingers clenched around the glass. Her voice sounds small even to her own ears.
She expects him to leave, to throw a final insult over his shoulder as he does so. Why should he care? He’s the one who brought them together against Valentina, yes, but he’s not obligated to care for her on a personal level.
So when Bucky sighs and sits next to her at the kitchen bar, reaching for the bottle and pouring himself another glass, Yelena is perplexed. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t offer an explanation or force her to justify why she’s getting drunk at two A.M.. Now that his anger has passed, there’s no judgment in his face.
“What are you doing?” she says, frowning at him.
He takes a sip. “What does it look like?”
“No,” she shakes her head, “why are you here? With me?”
He shrugs. “Keeping you company. Kind of lame to drink alone, don’t you think?”
Tears unrelated to today’s date prick at her eyes. It’s so simple—sitting in silence beside her, but it’s everything at the same time. She doesn’t know why he’s chosen now to remember she exists, to pause from their strained team dynamic, but she’s grateful all the same.
“That’s nice,” she manages, scrubbing at her face. It’s more than nice.
He peers at her, something like concern flickering across his features. “What’s this really about, Belova?”
It takes suprisingly little effort for her to blurt out the truth.
“It’s Natasha’s birthday,” she says flatly. She can’t look at him, but she hears his sharp inhale, can practically hear the gears clicking in his head. Maybe he’d noticed how off she was this week, how insulting him didn’t give her the same rush of satisfaction that it usually did.
Maybe he’ll tell her to get over it. The zimniy soldat has lost people, too, maybe more than Yelena has. But someone who avoids her so intently, Bucky shows no indication of wanting to bolt. He just…sits there. With her.
“I’m sorry,” he says instead. “I feel the same on Steve’s birthday. And my family’s.”
The admission surprises her. Bucky’s a locked box, to her at least, and despite his growing comfort around the team (he’d left his vibranium arm off a few weeks ago to walk around the penthouse, a surprising vulnerability) he doesn’t talk about his feelings. She figures he reserves that for Sam, and maybe his therapist if he has one? The rest of the Avengers are gone, so he doesn’t have a lot of other options.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Yelena admits, tilting her head to look at him. “I thought it was supposed to get easier.”
“That,” Bucky says, tipping more vodka into his glass, “is absolute bullshit.”
She laughs, unexpectedly, a somewhat ragged sound. “Such bullshit.”
“Absolute fucking horseshit,” he offers, and she giggles again. “I think you learn to live with it, maybe. But easier? There’s no such thing.”
“And here I thought you had the magic fix,” she says dryly. “You’ve had it worse than me, after all.”
Bucky shakes his head. “Pain is pain, Belova. I’m not here to compare mine to yours. You’re allowed to hurt.”
Permission. It’s freeing, unexpectedly. Something breaks inside her and she starts crying again, really crying, the floodgates opening. She buries her face in her hands and sobs, the gaping chasm of loss striking again with full force.
Bucky doesn’t try and fix it. He doesn’t tell her to be strong, to be quiet so the team isn’t woken up, he doesn’t tell her that it’s okay because her sister was a hero and she saved the world so Yelena shouldn’t be so angry at her, at Thanos, at the world.
He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t leave. He sits with her in her grief, replacing her vodka with water once the bottle’s close to empty. He sits with her while she cries herself into a drunken sleep and drapes a blanket over her shoulders.
He doesn’t leave when she’s at her worst, and this is perhaps the first revelation she has about Bucky Barnes.