To Go Unseen (A Natasha Romanoff Story)

46 [the previous night, on the street]

Yelena used to love music boxes. They were cute, she had thought, and when she was a child, she’d begun to collect them. She wasn’t supposed to be collecting things, however, so whenever she managed to get her hands a new one, she’d hide it under her bed at the complex. She kept them for years, piling the little paper boxes where no one could see them and being proud of every single one.

It was stupid, she told herself now, but relatively harmless. Right? Her father, the man, he had not had the right to do what he’d done.

Yelena leaned up against a shop window in the rain, her hands in her pockets and her hat pulled down over her head, having given up the chase for Romanova because it was raining so hard she couldn’t see, and she stared in at the little decorative boxes on the display. She’d been standing there for a while, staring wistfully and remembering her collection.

She’d had one with a mirror and a horse figurine inside that turned with the music. She’d had one without a cover, only the little metal parts that turned to make the tinkling sounds. She’d had one that had a little display with a drawer that played when the drawer was pulled out. And, more importantly, they were hers.

The man had destroyed them. He’d found them and taken them years ago and Yelena made a face thinking about it. They’d been in pieces, smashed to bits to drive home a point and she’d sobbed when she saw them. It hurt now, trying to remember why it had meant so much to her then.

“Natalia Romanova was not distracted by this nonsense when she became Black Widow,” the man had spat at her.

It was always about Romanova. It always had been. Yelena mused on this, her hands in her pockets and her eyes on the ground as she turned around, away from the shop, and began to walk back to her safe house. The rain hit her like hail and each heavy drop hurt on his head and her shoulders. She had to go back quickly, pack up her things, move as fast as possible. She had to find Romanova again and finish the job, before the man made good on his threat to send someone else. Yelena kicked at the rain and it splashed over the toe of her boot and she frowned.

She missed those music boxes.

It seemed as though everything in Yelena’s life was about Natalia Romanova, the Black Widow, and becoming better. But for once, this isn’t about her. Not then , not what ran through Yelena’s head when she’d stopped in the street in front of a store window in the rain and stared, suddenly bombarded with memory. That was about Pyotr Belova. And music boxes.