We Are Defined By What We Do

Three

After a dinner of gyros and falafel, the girls take one last look at Sonya, making sure she isn't going anywhere, and when she goes to bed the two of them do too.

Only Kate is wide awake. Too excited for tomorrow.

"Yelena? Are you awake?"

"No."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"No."

"What was it like in the Red Room?"

Yelena doesn't answer at first, and Kate thinks she might have actually fallen asleep, but then she answers, "Hell. Now go to bed."

"But what made it hell? What did they do to you?"

"You really don't know when to quit it, do you, malen'kaya ptichka?"

"I just want to know. This widow... I want to know what she went through so I can get it right. So I don't say anything stupid. I have the tendency to not think before I open my mouth."

"I gathered that." Yelena sighs, turning over so she's on her back, looking up at the ceiling. "We were taken from our biological families when we were children. As young as babies. But of course, we wouldn't know that because they wash our brains. They performed psychological testing on us with the use of the Snow White cartoon, I'm sure you watched it growing up."

"I did. I loved all those cartoons."

"Instill. Fear. Pain. That was the subliminal message. And it worked like a charm. Handcuffed to our beds at night so we wouldn't escape, that same voice droning on and on as we sleep. Combat training with the other widows. Once a day, two were chosen and it was a fight to the death. I killed 32 potential Black Widows in my time there. Target practice was on real people, sometimes members of your family. I killed three mothers, four fathers, eight sisters, and five brothers of other widows because they couldn't do it. Then I killed them."

Kate watches her, tears in her eyes. A woman who had lived through so much, who remembered so much. Tortured. Brutal. Broken.

"Of course, I didn't know at the time I had done it. I was being controlled. My mind was screaming at me. It was like an out-of-body experience but I was still inside. I still can't tell the difference sometimes. Whether I'm in control or not. If Dreykov is still in my head."

Yelena closes her eyes, grounding herself.

"When I got the antidote from an older widow, everything I had done came flooding back. It was always there, just buried. All the people I killed, the faces I'd seen, the souls I took... They surfaced."

Yelena turns then, to see Kate. The girl watches her with red eyes, her tears streaming into her pillow.

"That is what is going to happen to this widow. That is what she went through. The Red Room may be gone, but it is not finished. It takes, and it takes, and it takes. And you are forced to live with the memory. That you are who you are because of the Room. It's what made you. There's no escaping it."

They stare at each other until finally Yelena breaks eye contact and turns over, her back to Kate. Kate is frozen, comprehending everything Yelena just said.

She barely sleeps.

In the morning, Kate can't help but look at Yelena in a different light since she revealed her past. She steps a little softer, pushes fewer buttons. Yelena stands at the window, a piece of avocado toast in her hand. She holds back the curtain, chewing as she looks through the scope.

"She's starting to pack her go-bag. She's getting ready to take her mark. We should get going."

Yelena turns to find Kate standing in the middle of the room, staring at her blankly.