Chapter Text
The cloudy winter afternoon was just dark enough that the lights should have been turned on. But they weren't. The librarian was updating the library's website on her computer and didn't need the light, and there was no one else in the library. There hadn't been for hours.
Gusts of wind off the Baltic Sea hissed against roof and windows. A breeze ruffled the stack of papers next to the computer.
She quickly put her empty coffee mug on the stack as a paperweight, then glanced toward the entrance, expecting that someone had opened the door.
It was firmly closed.
The only explanation she could think of was that a window somewhere had broken or been forced open. She hadn't heard anything, but the wind huffing under the doors and around the shelves told her something had happened.
She tracked the source to the crack under the door of the Rare Books room.
When she opened the door, a gust swirled around her, then sputtered out.
On the table, the page of an open book that had been lifted by the wind drifted down and fell still.
No one had used this room in days. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed the book on the table when she locked up last night.
The moment she recognized the book, her blood chilled.
This was the Book of Peregrinus, a 400-year-old illuminated manuscript attributed to an alchemist and mystic who was burned at the stake for heresy, written in symbols that had never been deciphered. It was one of the most valuable books in the library, and was usually locked in a climate-controlled case, only taken out when scholars or photographers got permission to access it.
No one had taken it out in weeks. She knew it had been in its case the last time she was in this room. No one had come in.
Some people said the library was haunted, but libraries were always said to be haunted. She would joke that ghosts liked to visit libraries because their unfinished earthly business was all the books on their tbr list. But she didn’t really believe in ghosts. She’d basically been dead for five years, just like half of everyone else in the universe, and it had just felt like getting weirdly dizzy and disoriented for a moment, and suddenly the car she’d been driving was gone and she was at the side of the road. She’d figured she'd been in an accident and had memory loss. It had felt like a blink. Everyone else she'd talked to who’d been Blipped described it pretty much the same way.
She didn't believe in ghosts. But the fact was the book was out.
The windows were closed. The air conditioner was off. Where had the wind come from?
With shaking hands, she took out her cell phone and called the police.
If the Hydra kept growing new heads each time one was cut off, Hercules should have attacked its body instead. Or captured it to provide an infinite food source.
Unfortunately, they weren’t fighting the Hydra of myth, but the nazi-offshoot cult that had named themselves after it. Yelena was perfectly happy to keep killing them, though.
This particular branch was hiding out in Madripoor doing some human experimentation. To that end, they'd kidnapped a doctor who specialized in cybernetic prosthetics.
“Keep going. I’ll catch up,” she called to the other Young Avengers before turning her attention back to the Hydra henchpeople.
Kamala, Kate, and Tommy followed her direction, trusting that if she said she could handle nine Hydra fighters, she could.
These thugs weren’t exactly amateurs. They had some obvious fighting training. But they had also not been molded into killing machines since their childhoods, and it showed.
Some of them still had backup guns that she hadn't relieved them of yet, but now that they were fighting in close quarters and it was down to eight seven five to one, they had given up trying to shoot her in favor of knives and unarmed combat—and that one guy with the nunchaku. He was actually pretty good with it, but still, kind of pretentious.
She was faster and more skilled than them. She just had to keep track of where all of them were. Give that one a back-kick and use the momentum to propel herself forward to slit this one’s throat with one hand while elbowing that one in the forehead and then kicking that one in the head.
Three.
The big lady tried to grab her head while the guy with the nunchaku struggled to regain his balance from tripping on the gun Yelena had strategically kicked so that it would roll exactly where he was putting his foot down.
And then she was shot in the back.
The bullet was a through-and-through. It had gone through her into the big lady. Pain began to register, her body reporting to Yelena’s brain that she had one or two broken ribs and it had perforated her spleen and stomach.
The big lady’s eyes widened as she realized she'd been shot.
Determining the big lady wasn’t a threat for at least the next two seconds, Yelena looked over her shoulder to figure out who had shot her. She hadn’t heard anyone else enter the room, and her back wasn’t to anyone still alive.
The guy whose throat she’d slit was struggling to his feet. He held his back-up gun, still aimed at her. He was bleeding out so fast. She’d made sure to get his jugular vein. She wasn’t new at this. How was he still alive? Much less conscious?
The person she’d elbowed in the forehead hard enough that there was a dent in it was also still standing, blinking, looking dazed. He touched his forehead, and then started screaming, a scream of pain and terror intermixed.
Realizing the implications of these thugs being uncommonly hard to kill, Yelena turned back toward the big lady just in time to block her fist.
She broke away, rolled on the floor, grabbed a knife out of the hand of the second Hydra goon she'd killed—who was, thankfully, lying with the stillness appropriate to a dead person—and cut off the thumb of one who had just dove at her and grabbed her wrist, then she threw the knife into the eye of the big lady.
Who pulled it out.
Yelena swore harshly in Russian.
“White Widow, You okay?” Kate asked over her earpiece.
“Nyet,” she managed to reply.
“Hold on. We'll be right there.”
The one with the nunchaku wrapped the chain around Yelena’s neck. She kicked her legs upward with enough force that her momentum flipped her over his head. She grabbed the nunchaku herself and pulled it around his own neck, using his body for leverage to kick the guy with the slit throat in the chest hard enough to knock him back into a wall, which gave her the torque to break the neck of the nunchaku guy.
He didn't go down.
Yelena's blood gushed out of her bullet wound. Only her years of intensive training allowed her to fight through the pain.
The door burst open. A spray of arrows connected with the goons who were still standing, then Tommy grabbed her and everything became a blur.
Moments later, they retreated to a secluded room. The guard room, full of screens showing security camera feeds. Billy, Teddy, and Kamala were there with the scientist they'd rescued.
“Those guys should be dead,” Kate said. “Does Hydra have zombies now?”
Something slammed into the locked door, hard. Kamala created a hardlight barrier over it.
The screen for the security camera view of that corridor showed three of the Hydra goons trying to break the door down.
Her eyes went from the screen to the blood soaking her clothes. “They're not the only ones who should be dead.”
Kate pulled off her vest, balled it up, and put pressure on the exit wound.
Yelena shook her head. “No good. Internal bleeding.”
“You’re not going to die!” Kate said. “I won't let you.”
Yelena didn't want to die, but she was used to the idea. Not only was she a trained assassin who had faced and meted out death hundreds of times, she was Russian.
“Can you heal her?” Tommy asked Billy.
“I’ll try.” He took a breath, and started whispering in that weird bubbly way of his. “The wounds heal. The wounds heal. The wounds heal.”
It wasn't so much that his voice was bubbly. It was more like the air around his voice was bubbly. Or maybe fizzy was a better word, like a newly opened can of pop.
Her body was starting to feel the same way. The pain receded, replaced by that same fizzy feeling.
“Even if your hocus pocus closes the bullet wound, I’ve lost too much blood. Hemorrhagic shock. Without a transfusion, I still die.”
“Yelena has enough blood,” he chanted. “Yelena has enough blood. Yelena has enough blood.”
She felt a little better, but that could have been placebo effect.
“Kate Bishop…”
Kate held her hand, not grossed out that it was covered in blood. Her eyes were so…
On the screen, all three of the zombie Hydra henchpeople suddenly collapsed, whatever force had been animating them abandoning their bodies at the same instant.
Yelena felt herself lose consciousness.
She fell into the dark. She kept falling until she was floating. Floating in a sky of strange stars, sunset colors fading from magenta to indigo. She looked up. She looked down. There was no up or down. There was no Earth, no horizon. Only sky, the heavens a sphere around her.
She floated alone with the strange stars. But she didn’t feel alone.
“Now we’re both upside-down,” she said.
He couldn't bear silence. It was as simple as that. Silence hurt. It physically hurt.
He also hated being around other people. He couldn't stand being looked at.
And so he worked alone, and filled the space with noise. Television shows, audiobooks, or podcasts when he was in the mood for them. Music when he wasn’t.
He remembered—of course he remembered—how when she was sunk in grief over the death of her brother she would always have the television on when she was alone in her room. She filled her silence with sitcoms, shows where everything was alright in the end and nobody died.
He honestly hadn’t understood at the time why she did that. He didn't say it to her, but he thought she'd been using television to avoid facing her feelings and processing her grief.
He hadn’t understood how much silence could hurt.
There was no processing this pain. No process for it. He shouldn’t be alive. He didn't want to be alive. He'd specifically asked not to be. But he was. And she wasn't. There was no way to fix it, nothing for him to do except fill his unwanted time and that awful silence.
He used to like instrumental music and vocal music equally—before—but now he preferred music with words, the better to muffle his own thoughts. Songs lyrics were poems set to music—or, more accurately (as singing was the original form, as evidenced by ethnographic and historical documentation) poems were lyrics divorced from music, and he could analyze a song just like a poem, with the added complexity of the interplay of the emotional valence of the music with the meanings of the words. It gave his brain something to do, a distraction from his dismal ruminations.
Even when every single song reminded him of her, it was better than the silence.
He worked late into the night, then made sure all the curtains were closed, turned off the lights, and closed his eyes, floating neutrally in the middle of the room to sleep.
Sometimes he dreamed, and sometimes his brain replayed memories. Some of those memories were nightmares. But some of them were good. In some of those dreams and memories, she wasn't gone.
As his mind entered sleep, he realized something was different tonight.
He was in a meadow of wildflowers and grasses, a forest of tall pines on one side, a rippling lakelet on the other. Snow floated down from the grey sky.
There was a body in the meadow.
He neared it slowly, more out of curiosity than any hope resuscitation was possible.
She wasn't moving. She wasn’t breathing. She had the same clothes she'd worn their last night in Edinburgh, the pretty shirt with the thumb holes in the extra-long sleeves.
Her eyes were closed as if she’d died in her sleep. Her skin was pale and blue-tinted.
The snowflakes didn’t melt as they landed on her cheek.
Time seemed to be passing at a normal rate, but perhaps his sense of time abandoned him, because he could only stare as the snow grew deeper around her and piled up on her clothes, her hair, the crook of her neck, the side of her nose, her eyelid.
He suddenly realized that this was the last time he’d ever see her. He was terrified that he’d forget her face. He tried to brush the snow off her face, but he had no hands. He had no physical body. He was helpless to stop the snow from erasing her.
He opened his eyes with a start.
It was still dark. He was still in the house.
He was still alone.