From Russia with Begrudging Acceptance

Makeover Monday

102 days. Broken. Green eyes stared into the mirror. There were no more tears left to be shed. 102 days. Desperate. A shell of the person she once was stared back at her. There were no more leads. She has been to every known whereabouts, all the hot spots, all the hideouts and nothing surfaced. She tortured every track suit fucker she came across. Killed some. It didn't matter anymore. Being a good person did not matter at all. She found all of the old freed Widows she could and interrogated them. Nobody knew anything. At least nothing they were willing to share without the fear of retribution. 102 days. Nothing. She was out of options. On day 58 she turned her phone off and threw it into the Atlantic Ocean. She was tired of all of the concerned messages from her family and the Avengers who weasled their way into her life. She didn't need anyone to help her find Kate. 102 days. Hopeless. Could she even save Kate at this point? It sure as fuck didn't seem like it. She had been back to Kate's loft a few times still holding onto hope. There were no signs that her girlfriend had even returned but the closet and drawers were cleared out. The new Kate had been by and a post it with the note Stop Looking was the only indication that she even acknowledged her past life.

It only took a few short weeks for it to become apparent why they wanted Kate.

*Days 1-13*

Yelena was still being held at the Avenger compound. They told her that her broken ribs were healing but the stab wound was infected. They insisted that she needed to stay and heal. She told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to go fuck themselves. Unfortunately for her, Melina was there in the bed next to her and refused to let her leave. "Just because I am worse off than you, does not mean that I won't kick your ass, Yelena." The blonde just rolled her eyes and went back into herself, letting the mission play on repeat in her mind and clearly focusing on everything that went wrong. "I should've never let Kate come with us," was her reoccurring thought as she let the pain medication force her into the abyss. If she was asleep then she didn't have to overthink. That logic only went so far, her dreams consisted only of the brunette. On day 13 when the doctor finally let her out of the bed she went straight to Jen, "what do we know? Where is she? Nobody has told me anything. Do you know how hard it's been for me to not kill anyone?" She sat down carefully, not to disturb her wound that was still healing. "Well?" When she looked up she saw Jen just staring back at her, a solemn look on her face. "Say something. Anything."

"I don't think I'm the best person. Should we wait for Fury? Or somebody more equipped for this then me?"

"Don't fuck with me, Jen. Tell me straight like you would tell a friend."

Jen sighed, flipped the computer screen on. It was the tracking map they recovered from the scene. Every couple of minutes, one of the blips would disappear. The number of trackers was half of what it was when they infiltrated. Yelena wasn't stupid. She knew they hadn't rescued all of those women, "Kate," was all she said quietly.

Jen nodded, "we think they wanted Kate for her connections and intelligence with technology. It seems they have her making untraceable trackers. She is really quite adept at this. We've been trying to track them down the past two weeks but we always seem to just miss them. And now... well." She turned her eyes back to the screen.

"Now, Kate is so efficient that it's impossible to predict their next step when you can not find out where they've been?" Yelena's hand washed down her face, "fuck. This is not good." She sat for a moment, watching as the blips disappeared from the map. "She's working her way around the United States. They could be working from anywhere. Do we know if they are even still in the US?"

"We've been following up with the missing persons reports as well as any and all high profile crime scenes. They seem to be moving in the opposite direction of which she's hiding the trackers. It's making it very hard to keep track of everything."