I've Got Red In My Ledger

Chapter Fifteen

When I walk back into the dining room, Wanda and Melina are talking quietly.
"What are you two talking about?" I ask, and Wanda smiles when she sees me.
"Oh, Wanda was just telling me about her time in Hydra before she met you." Melina answers.
I roll my eyes. "Please. You don't care. Why are you acting like you care?"
I left Yelena on the floor with Alexei, who said that he wanted to talk to her alone.
I've already made up my mind. I've had enough of this whole family thing. Yelena's fallen to pieces, Alexei won't shut up about his days as The Red Guardian, and Melina just revealed that she's behind all of it.
I've had enough of it. I walk past the dining table, and Wanda stands up, confused at where I'm going.
"I do care, Natasha. Where are you going?" Melina asks and I roll my eyes at her.
"To kill Dreykov." I walk towards her weapons room, and when I'm alone, allow myself a brief moment to take a deep breath.
It's been a very long day.
"Not alone, you're not." Melina tells me.
"Nat, you won't survive alone." Wanda comes behind me, her hand on my back.
"I won't be alone." I shrug. "I'll have Wanda." I turn around to face Melina. "And I truly wish that I could believe that you care. But you know, you're not even the first mother that abandoned me."
"You weren't abandoned." Melina tells me, and I feel my heart practically stop. "You were selected by a program that assessed the genetic potential in infants."
"I was... taken?" I ask her. I've never heard about that before. It feels like I've just fallen off of a skyscraper, or I've just had a grenade go off beside me.
"I believe that a bargain was struck, yes. You're family was paid off. But your mother... she never stopped looking for you. She was like you in that way. She was relentless." Melina tells me, and I feel like I might never be able to breathe again.
"What happened to her?" I know as soon as I've asked this question, that I wish I hadn't.
"Dreykov had her killed." Wanda takes her hand off of my back and takes my hand in hers instead. I glance over at her, still feeling like I can't breathe. My mother is dead. "Her existence threatened to uncover the Red Room. Normally, the actions of one curious civilian wouldn't warrant an execution... but as I said... she was relentless."
My mother is dead. I will never see her, never get to know if her hair was like mine, whether I got my nose from her. Whether I got my eyes from her.
"I... I thought about her every day of my life." I look down at the ground. Wanda's hand is planted firmly on my back, and I think I might have collapsed if she wasn't there. "Whether or not I admitted it to myself, I did."
And I truly did. I would think about her. Whether I was like her. I'd never tell Yelena this, but I'd imagined a life for my family too. I imagined everything. When I was lying in the Red Room, my back against the bed, my hand cuffed to the bed frame, I would think about her. About whether she had red hair like me, whether she had a normal job. I think I'd concluded, as a child, that she must have been an undercover spy and that's why she couldn't keep me. Ironic.
I thought about her every single day. While I was spinning for hours in pointe shoes, while I was fighting with the Avengers... I always thought about her. Whether there was a chance I might have seen her.
"I've always found it best not to look into the past." Melina tells me, and out of the corner of my eye, I see something.
A book covered in orange tulips. With blue skies and green grass. It used to sit on top of the draws behind the dining table.
I would know it anywhere. I reach out for it, and I remember exactly what Melina said to me as she told me to leave it.
I wanted to take these photos with me. Evidence of my happiness, evidence that I'd gotten to live at least three years as a normal kid.
"If you truly believe that, why did you save this?" I ask her, opening up the book.
I'm hit with memories. They feel like daggers, twisting deep into my skin.
"I remember this day. We shot Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and summer vacation all in one day." My fingers trace the photos of Yelena and I. Yelena's smile so genuine and happy. And even though I knew our family was fake... I was smiling too. Because I wasn't in the Red Room. I told Wanda about that day, when she was one of the only people who understood what it was truly like to lose the people you love. She understood me completely. She understood the pain and the anger. At a similar age, she'd lost everyone but her brother. She'd had it all ripped out from beneath her as quickly as I had. She understood.
"Different backdrops."
Melina just sighs. Both her and Alexei are in the photos too. We had to make sure that we had photos of our perfect little family, photos that proved we were an average household.
"I knew all of the presents under the tree we just empty boxes, but I didn't care. I wanted to open every single one, so that just for a second it would feel real." And it's true. I didn't care. I just wanted it to be real. I remember only being worried about Yelena. I remember wanting to make her happy. She was upset at the fact that we couldn't open any of them on camera.
I went home that day and I spent the whole evening making her handmade presents, wrapping up my old toys and clothes to give her.
It was five o'clock the next morning, and I'd jumped on her bed telling her that Santa had been. It wasn't Christmas Day.
I'll never forget the look on her face. She radiated happiness.
It was our little secret. I wanted her to be happy. Yelena's safety, Yelena's happiness mattered the most to me in the entire world.
"Let's stop this." Melina tells me, closing the book, taking it from my hands and putting it back on the shelf.
"Why are you doing this?" I ask her, my eyes burning as I try to hold back tears.
So many closed wounds have been torn open today.
"Why does a mouse born in a cage run on that little, tiny wheel?" Melina asks, her smile sad. "Do you know I was cycled through the Red Room four times before you were even born? Those walls are all I know. I was never given a choice." And she thinks I did have a choice?
"But you're not a mouse, Melina." I tell her. "And you don't have to let those parts of you define who you are. They don't have to win. You were just born in a cage, but that's not your fault."
I glance over at Wanda, smiling. She's told me many things like that. I got most of those words from her.
"Tell me," Melina asks, "How did you keep your heart?"
"Pain... pain only makes us stronger." I tell her. "Didn't you tell us that? What you taught me kept me alive. And I've got her to remind me to hold onto it. Luckily for me, I've got people I want to live for." I squeeze Wanda's hand. She reminds me to keep my heart. Reminds me that I am not my past, that I am not stained red.
Melina sighs, glancing from me to Wanda. "I'm sorry. I already alerted the Red Room. They'll be here any minute."