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“because freedom, i am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.” –ocean vuong
i’m praying that maybe you might get a try, in a world that is better than mine
The Red Rooms falls from the sky.
It crashes and burns into smoking wreckage and rubble.
Gone.
Dreykov, too, gone.
The mangled skeleton of his plane lies in an empty field, tangled with the remnants of the fortress that fell from the sky.
The air is thick with the acrid stench of jet fuel mixed with a choking cloud of debris, all that is left of the aerial facility.
Widows are not supposed to have happy endings.
Widows do not expect to live long lives.
Melina knows this.
It seems strange, unfair that fate has given her both of these things after all she has done.
She was made to be a weapon, crafted to fit snugly in the hands of man to use and discard afterwards. She is a puppet, only meant to dance the way the strings are pulled, never question, never rebel. She is Dreykov’s dog, only running as far as the chain around her neck allows her, and then to return back to her master with her tail between her legs, nothing more than his bitch.
She was made for all this, and nothing more, and she has known this ever since she was a child.
Widows were made to serve the Red Room’s purpose.
They were raised in the shadows, creeping through the night like phantoms. Always hidden, always trained to cover their tracks, erase any evidence that they were ever there. Only those in the Red Room knowing of their existence.
Even then, girls are buried in unmarked graves. None of them have passports, birth certificates, identifying documents that prove they even exist.
As far as the world is concerned, they do not.
Melina has nothing from before the Red Room—no hometown, no parents, no siblings. Even her name was assigned to her when she entered the gates of the academy. Everything about her existed solely to execute the orders of the Red Room.
Now that the Red Room is gone, Melina isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do.
She has no place in this world.
They return to the farm.
It is different now, with Alexei and Yelena and the other Widows. The constant noise and buzz is comforting at times, a respite from the long lonely years, and it reminds her of when the girls were little and always playing and tussling in Ohio.
Still, it is a relief when the Widows are gone. Yelena soon finds safehouses scattered across the country, in the hopes that they will not be found easily by any Red Room agents that were certainly still stationed around the world. The house is quiet, and Melina feels she can finally be in her own space, can finally breathe and process the events of the past few weeks.
She is still mostly confined to the home for now. Her broken leg has taken longer than anticipated to heal, and it is frustrating, almost embarrassing to have everything done for her. Yelena buys her a cane, which she reluctantly uses to get around. Alexei has mostly taken over all the work on the farm. After the years in prison, he wants all the time outdoors he can get, often working from sunup to sundown cleaning the pigsty, clearing out or fixing old equipment, and chopping firewood.
Yelena leaves to settle the Widows into their new homes, so they can learn to adjust to their lives outside of the Academy. Then she wants to make sure that all traces of the Red Room are gone, that there are no sleeper cells or hideaways left. Melina sees the same determination that Natasha has in her younger daughter, and it fills her with a sense of pride, that her girls have grown and are doing great things.
It also means that Melina is left with only herself and her thoughts for most of the day.
Between the rush of adrenaline and shock from the day her family turned up suddenly at her doorstep until now, she had never been able to fully process all the events that had happened.
Still cannot fully wrap her head around the fact that the Red Room is truly gone.
Even though she saw the Red Room crumble and crash, heard both her daughters swear that Dreykov was dead, truly dead in an explosion that took out his helicopter, she still wonders if it is all a dream.
The elation that the girls and Alexei feel, that she expected to feel, still eludes her.
For some reason, she almost grieves.
And she hates it. Loathes the fact that she mourns the place that stole her and her daughters’ childhoods and innocence. The place that murdered hundreds of people and ruined countless more lives. The place where she made decisions and committed crimes that keep her up at night.
She knows she should be happy, that she should celebrate its destruction.
But outside of the three years in Ohio, and the first two years of her life that she cannot remember, the Red Room has been all she has ever known.
Forty years is a long time to have spent there, she knows half the girls who enter its gates will die in a quarter of that time. She can count on one hand the Widows who have lived as long has she has.
There had always been a sense of pride. That she was a survivor, that she had made it this far, had accomplished so much. Accomplishments and accolades that only existed within the four walls of the Academy, that meant nothing and were unknown to everyone outside.
Within the Red Room, Melina had been almost legendary—one of the oldest Widows, Dreykov’s architect, the Iron Maiden, the one who had helped design and create the second Red Room, the sky fortress.
Outside the Red Room, Melina doesn’t exist.
“He’s gone. Tony said S.H.I.E.L.D. confirmed it. DNA analysis, dental records, everything. He’s really gone.”
Melina can’t respond, the words are strangled in her throat, leaving her gasping for breath. Alexei takes the phone gently from her hand, she hears him continuing the conversation with Natasha, on the other end of the line in Lebanon, but the words are muffled. Time seems to slow down, like she is moving through syrup.
He’s gone.
Dreykov. Gone.
Confirmed.
Actually, really, truly dead.
Alexei hangs up the phone.
Melina weeps.
It comes out at first as a strangled sob, but once it starts, there is no stopping.
Years, decades of bottled up emotions, fears, memories come pouring out, bubbling to the surface.
The relief, that they will never run from him again.
The years of fear, of disgust, of anger. At him. At herself. At the world and fate.
The way she can still feel his touch on her body, the kind that no amount of hot showers and scrubbing and stinging soap will ever remove. The way he gripped her hips, tangled his fingers through her hair, his breath in her ear, smelling of coffee and cigars and whiskey. The way he reminded her he owned not just her body but her mind and every single inch of her, pressed up against the desk in his office from the day she was thirteen to less than three months ago.
The realization that he would never do that to her, or anyone else ever again.
That finally, her daughters will get to live and grow up in a world without him, where they will not have to look over their shoulders all the time. They will not have that constant fear of him that follows her like a shadow even now.
Melina has never cried so hard before. It almost feels like dying.
She cries for the girls, her daughters, the lives that were stolen by people who saw them as objects and weapons and nothing more.
She cries for herself. The childhood and family she never had, the innocence lost, the girl she never knew but could have been.
Alexei holds her until it is over. He does not say anything.
Yelena only comes back twice in three months. Melina misses her, but knows that she is busy getting the freed Widows settled into safe houses, and spends her free time looking for those still chemically subjugated.
Yelena tells her about the Widows and their new lives. What they want to do. It is easier for some compared to others, but overall most are adjusting relatively well, given their circumstances. Arina wants to travel to the seaside, Tatiana is learning the piano, Anzhelika wants to have a little cabin in the forest. A couple of them have joined Yelena in tracking down other Widows. Yelena still talks about getting the dog she’s dreamt about her whole life.
It is heartening to listen to Yelena tell her about these girls discovering what they want.
It also makes Melina realize she doesn’t know what she wants to do.
It is the first time she has had any true autonomy in her life. The first time she has no one to report back to, no higher-up giving her a command to follow. No one for her to deflect blame for the wrongs she has done.
The weight of this new responsibility feels too heavy.
There had been something almost… easier about simply following orders.
She’s not sure she will ever be used to this new life.
“Mama, what do you want to do now?”
Yelena is sprawled across the sofa, eating out of a family pack of gummies.
“Hm?” Melina looks up from her calculations, pen hovering in mid-air, halfway through a formula. “You know I am working on the Red Dust, how to replicate it as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
“No, Mama,” Yelena sits up straight, more serious. “ I mean, what do you want to do? Not for work. Now that we have time.”
Now that we are free, is what she means.
Melina pauses. She has not considered this, has not allowed herself to.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, have you thought about it?”
“Not really, no.” She admits.
“Why not?” Yelena waves her hand, a gummy worm between thumb and index finger. “We can do anything we want now, you know.”
Melina smiles sadly. “You can do anything you want. Not me. I am old. You cannot teach an old dog new tricks.”
Yelena snorts. “Mama, you are not old.” Then, more quietly, “We are not there anymore. Maybe we will live to ninety, a hundred years old.” She flashes a cheeky smile.
“Maybe.” It is a strange thought. To see herself living that long. Yet another testament to how not normal their lives had been.
“So, what are you going to do?” Yelena forges ahead, headstrong as ever, always demanding a proper answer, just as she had been in Ohio. “Learn to paint? Ride a horse? Become divorce lawyer?”
“I already know how to ride a horse.”
“Never knew that!”
“Mm-hm.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I will think about it. But I will finish my work on the Red Dust first.”
“You can do both, you know,” Yelena points out.
“When did my daughter become so wise?” Melina teases.
Yelena snorts. Crams more candy into her mouth. “Have always been genius. You just never noticed.”
They lapse back into silence. Melina pondering what Yelena said.
She had always been goal-orientated—even from young she knew it was something the Red Room instructors had noticed and liked.
And now, her goal is to help her daughters in their mission to free the subjugated Widows, ensure all traces of the Academy were gone. She has been so caught up with it, that she sometimes forgets that she, too, is actually free.
This new freedom, the idea that she can do anything she wants, that she does not need to live in the shadows anymore, feels strange and foreign.
She cannot decide if it is a relief, or paralyzing. She feels like a bird that has lived in a cage all its life, only to be freed and not know where it should go.
Despite dreaming of being free ever since Ohio, she doesn’t know what to do now, now that it has actually happened to her.
It still feels like a gift that only others can receive, but she doesn’t deserve.
“You don’t have to… punish yourself, you know.”
Alexei is standing in the doorway of her study. Melina glances at the clock. It is almost two in the morning.
She presses her hands against her tired eyes, can feel a headache beginning to build.
“It is not punishment. Is… is making right. For everything. For our girls.”
“It was not your fault, you know.”
She looks at him soberly. “It was. And you know it.”
“No, they forced you—”
“I made a choice. The wrong one. And now I have to make it right.”
“You were always the one to say the world is not so black and white.”
“This time it is. I have to make the world a better place for them, it is my responsibility.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder, comforting. “It should not be just your responsibility. We are all in this together.”
“I made the mind control, it is my job now to fix it. That is only fair.”
“Melina—"
She sighs, cutting him off. “You know, there is a legend among the ancient Egyptians. The weighing of the heart when one dies. To see whether their good deeds outweigh the bad.”
“Ah,” Alexei chuckles. “Lucky we are not ancient Egyptians then.”
Despite her exhaustion, she cracks a smile.
He reaches over to switch off the lights, says softly, “It’s late, let’s go to bed, Melina.”
Too exhausted to argue anymore, she follows him back to the bedroom and falls asleep in his arms.
Natasha says she is working on getting the Avengers back together again, and is hopeful it will be soon. Yelena plans a family trip to New York City for when that day comes.
They free more Widows, Melina finally finding a way to replicate the Red Dust efficiently.
In the meantime, Melina gets used to this concept of freedom.
It is strange, to finally hold something in your hand after dreaming of it for so long.
There are habits born from trauma that she can never forget, scars she will carry forever, but Melina learns.
Alexei builds her a boat to explore the nearby rivers, he takes her ice fishing, she learns to sew teddy bears. Makes one each for Natasha, Yelena, and Alexei. Makes them for the Widows, if they should like one. She also makes one for herself, for the ghost of the girl that she could have been, if she had grown up in a world surrounded by toys and stuffed animals instead of guns and knives.
It feels right at last, to finally create something beautiful with her hands, instead of using them for destruction and death.
There are still many bad days. But even more good ones.
And time stretches out, the years and decades for her to explore. They have all the time in the world now.
Perhaps, finally, it is a world she can finally be a part of.