Fury: And Yelena goes back to Moscow. Back to the Red Room. Maybe now she knows it’s not a game. Maybe she’s grown up.
Answering Machine: Yelena, it’s your mother. Where have you been? We’ve been worried about you… why haven’t you called your Aunt Olga? She says Dmitri is dying to meet a girl like you… he says you sould like the woman he’s been looking for.
This is one of the most interesting pages about Yelena— the voiceover of Fury’s expectations and the reality Yelena returned to, all dialogue disembodied, Yelena herself silent. Natasha spends most of this storyline embodying Yelena, a person she has never been but thinks she understands. To Natasha, Yelena is a reckless adventurer, and escapist, and someone who brings too much passion, too much excitability to the game of espionage. But I don’t know if she considers why Yelena is all these things. It’s too foreign for her to consider.
Natasha was thrown out of a burning building as an infant and her whole life has been on fire since then. But Yelena has a family, a mother, an Aunt Olga trying to set her up with a boy named Dmitri. A season of cloudy skies. An ordinary, boring life to escape.
She wanted to be a spy, to be the best of them.
From Black Widow: Breakdown #3, by Devin Grayson, Greg Rucka and Scott Hampton.
