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Mama loves you. They are hiding in the attic as the men come through the house. Never forget, Natalia, Mama loves you, Mama loves you so much, precious girl, Mama loves you. The frantic whispers frighten her because she knows Mama loves her, why is Mama saying it so much, why is Mama scared.
She smells the smoke before she sees the flames, and then Mama is running with her.
Out the window, malyutka, Mama says. Out the window, Mama loves you. And then she is jumping, and someone catches her, and Mama is not there. As the fireman carries her away, she watches the burning building collapse, and wonders where Mama is.
Men come to see her. They say they are from the ballet. They are nice. They give her chocolates and say that she is a sweet girl, a strong girl, a brave girl. They call her malyutka, just like Mama did.
The men ask if she would like to come with them to the ballet to train. She knows Aunt Yelena is patient, but she does not like children and she does not like her, and she has put up with her for a year. She will go to the ballet. Mama loved the ballet and she will make her proud.
It is not the ballet there are needles they burn like fire they hurt Mama help
She is one of 28 ballerinas with the Bolshoi
She is one of 28 Black Widow agents with the Red Room
The training is hard
The training is hard
But the glory of Soviet culture
But the glory of Soviet supremacy
And the warmth of her parents
And the warmth of her parents
Makes up for…
(she has no parents)
(she has no family)
(she has no memories)
(she is programmed)
(she has nothing)
(it is best to forget)
They are quizzed every morning when they rise and every night before they sleep.
“What is your name?”
“A Black Widow.”
“What is the year?”
“1936.”
“Why do you fight?”
“For the glory of the Soviets.”
“Why do you fight?”
“For the glory of the Room.”
She ages slowly. She does not wonder why. She does not need to know.
(she asked once)
(there was electricity and pain)
(she does not remember that she asked)
(she only knows not to)
They do not explain the freezing process to her. There are no explanations in the Red Room. They tell her to get in the box and she does and then it is cold and she closes her eyes
They open the box. “It is 1945,” they tell her. “Who are you?”
“A Black Widow.” Her tongue is heavy and they give her water. She drinks as though she hasn’t in years. She supposes she hasn’t. Mustn’t suppose. Mustn’t suppose.
“What is the year?”
“1945.”
“Why do you fight?”
“For the glory of the Soviets.”
“Why do you fight?”
“For the glory of the Room.”
They hand her a folder. “This is your mission.”
Necks snapping sound like embers crackling.
They put her on ice again. She looks like she is perhaps 18. It is 1955. They are going to train her with a new assassin. He fights for the glory of the Soviets. She hears his name whispered, some with awe, some with horror, Winter Soldier, Winter Soldier, Winter Soldier.
She is not afraid. They do not allow fear in the Red Room.
She thinks she is in something akin to love.
She has had the capacity to feel love burned out of her. But this feeling burns like the cold, burns like the needles, burns like the sun on her skin.
“Did you have a name?” he asks when they are in bed together after a mission. She shrugs. She cannot remember.
“Did you?” she returns.
“I think I was called James,” he says softly. She runs her fingers through his unkempt hair. It is unbefitting of an assassin.
“It is a good name,” she decides. She cannot remember if she has ever decided anything in her life before. Dzheyms, in Russian.
“You may call me that, if you wish,” he says, and she will. “I want to call you something.”
“I am nobody,” she answers.
“You are fire.” He lifts her chin until she meets his eyes. “My light. Svetka.”
And then she calls him Dzheyms, and he calls her Svetka.
“What do you remember of your life before the Room?” Dzheyms asks her once, while their comms are off and they stakeout a target. The comms are never supposed to be off, but every once in a while there is a “malfunction”.
“There is no life before the Room,” she answers. “Do you remember?”
He is quiet for a moment. “I remember a man,” he says finally. “He had gold hair and he was skinny like a tree. But he was brave and stubborn.”
She thinks. “There was a woman,” she murmurs quietly. “She told me she loved me, and then the world was on fire.”
“We should remember more.”
“We should not. We are this way because we must be.”
“They have taken all from us, Svetka.” He looks into the distance, eyes glassy. “It isn’t right.”
She looks around to make sure there is no one to hear, no one near enough to report her.
“No,” she whispers. “It is not.”
One day she is shot and it shatters her shoulder. He calls her “Svetka” over the comms and she knows it is all over all at once.
She is in the chair life is lightning life is pain
“What is your name?”
“Svetka.”
Life is lightning life is pain
“What do you know of love?”
“The smell of rain the feel of his arms around my waist-“
Life is lightning life is pain
Dzheyms Dzheyms DzheymsJames
She sits up.
“What is your name?”
“A Black Widow.”
“What do you know of love?”
“I do not feel love.”
They are satisfied. There is a name almost on the tip of her tongue but then it is gone on the wind.
“You almost dissented,” the scientists tell her. “You are not to be frozen anymore. We think it will make you more likely to dissent.”
Dissenters vanish. One does not dissent. She is smarter than that.
Blood is red like the buzz cut on her head. Fear is the man staring down the barrel of her gun. Anguish is the scream of the children’s ward as they burn. She feels nothing.
(she feels nothing for a very long time)
(she cannot count)
(she wouldn’t if she could)
She spins the knife in her hand as she flings open the closet door. The woman is holding her daughter tightly.
“It’s all right,” the woman says to the little girl. “It’s all right. Mama loves you, sweetheart, Mama loves you.”
She automatically kills them both, but her words ring in her ear.
Mama loves you.
Mama loves you.
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(she had a name once? she remembers someone asking if she had a name once)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(she had a name once)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(she wants it back)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(it started with…)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(n)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(n…)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(Natalia)
“What is your name?”
“The Black Widow.”
(her name is Natalia Romanova and they can’t take that from her again)
She goes on a mission to London. It is 1999. She is nearly seventy. She looks in her mid-twenties. It is not right. She wants to ask why. She can taste the lightning on her tongue, holding her back.
Her target is a SHIELD agent. He has sandy hair and friendly, crinkly eyes and a nice smile. He says his name is Andy Wilson. His name, she knows, is Clint Barton. He hits on her at the bar and he laughs in a way she’s not sure she’s ever heard anyone laugh.
For the first time in her life, her entire being doesn’t want to kill someone.
She cries in the shower, the one place she knows the Room hasn’t bugged. She’s never wanted to leave a mission before. The feeling is overwhelming.
“I want out,” she whispers. “Bozhe moi, I want out.”
There are no outs in the Room.
She wakes with a gun to her head and looks up into those crinkly eyes.
“Do it,” she whispers, voice hoarse.
Slowly he lowers the gun.
They stare at each other.
“If you run now,” he says in a low voice. “They won’t catch you.”
There is another moment where she stares up at Clint Barton, uncomprehending that such a deadly and dangerous man could be capable of mercy, and terrified by her incomprehension.
Then she is out the window and away from SHIELD, from the Room, from everything.
(later she will find out that the Room didn’t bug the shower, but SHIELD did)
(if she hadn’t had that breakdown in the shower)
(and if one particular agent hadn’t heard)
(she would never have had a future)
She travels the world.
She’s never seen it before, not without a mark in it, another target to take down. It’s beautiful. She witnesses grace and compassion and beauty and love, and for the first time she envies her incapability to feel the same.
The Red Room comes after her. She dispatches them.
SHIELD does not. She wonders if Agent Barton has anything to do with that.
After a year of traveling, of watching, of using her own name, she allows SHIELD to capture her in New York.
The man sitting across from her in the interrogation room has an eye patch. She knows who he is and how he got it.
“Thank you for being so kind, allowing us to catch you,” he says dryly. She is supposed to be amused. She has learned this.
“You’re welcome,” she answers.
“You know who I am?”
“Director Nicholas Fury of SHIELD.” The words are burned into her brain, like every other case file she has ever read.
“And you are Natalia Alianovna Romanova.” He raises his eyebrows. “Not looking bad for being in your seventies.”
“Thank you.”
“Why’d you let us get you?”
She thinks.
“I’ve seen a lot of emotion in the past year,” she answers slowly. “And I am incapable of feeling the majority of it. I’d like to learn how and I think SHIELD is my best bet.”
“A lot of folk here want me to kill you,” he said nonchalantly.
“I thought they might.”
“And you came anyway.”
“A risk I’m willing to take.”
Director Fury smiles.
“We’ll be assigning a worker to your case tomorrow,” he tells her. “Sleep well.”
The quarters are bigger than the ones in the Room. She doesn’t like the wide openness of it, doesn’t like how it gapes. She silently builds a small square out of furniture and sleeps in it.
When the door opens, her hand goes under the pillow for a knife that isn’t there. An unassuming man watches her.
“My name’s Phil Coulson,” he tells her. “I’ll be working on deprogramming you.”
Deprogramming. It’s as good a word as any.
She won’t let them touch her with needles.
(she likes Agent Coulson)
(she doesn’t remember a father)
A week after working with Agent Coulson, she wakes in her furniture square to see Agent Barton perched on her empty bookcase. Neither of them moves.
“Why are you on my bookcase?”
“I see better from a distance. This is as much of a distance as I could get.”
She sits up. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
“Because you wanted to die.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.” Agent Barton jumps off the bookcase. “Come on, let’s go get cheeseburgers. You like cheeseburgers?”
“I don’t know. I've never tried them. I’m not supposed to leave base.”
“You wanted to come here cause you saw people interacting, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then the best way to get better is to see more people interacting. People don’t interact here. They edge around each other. Edgily. There’s lots of edging.”
He pauses. She watches.
“They didn’t build a sense of humor into you, huh?”
“No.”
“Bummer. You’ll find one eventually. Come on.”
The diner is small. She has never been in one before, seeing them only in the American films that they watched to learn the language when she was a child.
“It looks different than they did when I learned of them,” she comments.
Agent Barton looks up from the menu. “Yeah? How?”
“Not black and white.” It’s a childish thing to say and she berates herself. Agent Barton just grins.
“A lot of the world’s like that.”
“Are you aware that there are no less than twenty SHIELD agents watching us?”
“Yeah, Coulson’s gonna be pretty pissed that I broke you out.” He looks at the back of the menu. “What are you ordering?”
She has had to choose her own meals before, but that was when she was on her own. Barton is not superior to her, but he is her superior. “Pick something for me.”
“Nope.” He pops the “p”. She is confused.
“Why not?”
“Cause I’ve had to be shaken loose of following orders too, and part of it’s learning to make your own decisions. You got something similar to the Captain America thing, right? Makes you hungry a lot? Coulson told me that you scare the agents with how much you eat.” He grins. “Among other reasons.”
She surveys the menu. She has had some of this food on missions before.
“Get whatever you want and as much of it as you want. SHIELD’s paying.” Agent Barton throws his arm over the back of his chair. “It’s good food here, better than the SHIELD shit.”
She orders half the menu. Agent Barton seems pleased, so she assumes this was correct. She eats ravenously. When food was obtained in the Room, one ate quickly so they could move on to the next mission.
“You didn’t need to inhale it, you know,” Agent Barton comments. She freezes. Is this an order? She looks up at him. “Or do. Whatever makes you happy.”
She compromises, slowing her pace by several seconds.
“You know knock knock jokes?”
“I know the structure.”
“You think they’re funny?”
She looks at him blankly and he whistles.
“They really did a number on you.”
She shrugs and returns to eating. Once she finishes, she looks at Agent Barton, waiting for instructions.
“I wouldn’t mind showing you round the city,” he comments. “But I think we’re pushing it already. Let's leave, shall we?”
They stand up and the second they leave the diner they are surrounded by black cars. Director Fury strides out of one of them. One of his eyes appears to be twitching.
“Agent Barton,” Fury inquires in a deadly soft tone. “Did you just take the world’s deadliest assassin out from under our nose for pancakes?”
“First off, sir, little hurt that you don’t think I’m the world’s deadliest assassin-“
She decides not to mention that there are six different ways she could take him out right now.
“And secondly, she’s fine, I think she had a good time, and finally, it wasn’t just pancakes, she had pretty much most of their food, how much do you think that was, Romanoff, on a scale starting at many and ending at lots-“
“In the car, Agent Barton. Coulson-“
“On it, sir.” She is ushered into a different car than Agent Barton, who winks at her.
They are silent in the car until she speaks.
“Please do not harm Agent Barton for his misadventure with me.”
Coulson looks at her. “Why?”
She shrugs.
“Better than that.”
She struggles through her thoughts. “He seems like a good man,” she says finally. “There aren’t many good men.”
Coulson absorbs her words. “Did they harm agents in the Red Room for mistakes?”
She is puzzled. That is asking if the sun shines.
“We don’t do that here. They can be reprimanded, demoted, but mistakes are mistakes.”
Curious.
They don’t go out for a while afterwards, but soon she sees Agent Barton more than Coulson.
(later she will find out that Phil deemed her more relaxed around him)
(I saw six ways to kill you and I didn’t, she tells him one night while they are at his farm, watching the rain fall as she pets his dog)
(You also asked Phil not to hurt me, he answers)
(Think of all the trouble I could’ve saved myself)
(Hey)
(You used knock knock jokes as a measure of my humor, Barton, you don’t get a say)
The more that she remembers, the more she has nightmares.
She remembers children on fire, screaming and begging. She remembers whole families choking to death. She remembers too much.
One night the nightmares are so bad she rebuilds the furniture square, something she hasn’t done in exactly one week and two days, and barricades the door, refusing to let anyone in.
Something clangs in the corner and she grabs a piece of her bed spring that she’s withdrawn as a weapon. Barton climbs out of the air duct.
“Whoa, they should install scented candles in there or something. Smells like feet.”
“Did they send you?” she demands, lowering her bed spring.
“Nah, here on my own time.” He looks at her mattress, ripped apart to get to the spring. “Need to get you a new one of those, I see.” He jumps over her furniture square and sits next to her. “Nice square. Good… square shape.”
“Why are you here?”
“Heard everything kind of sucks for you right now.” He settles his back against the wall. “Everything kind of sucked for me at one point too so I thought we could relate. Swap stories. Braid each other’s hair and paint each other’s nails.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “I don’t have any hair.” Her buzz cut remains.
“It’s a- never mind, it’s not important right now.” He looks at her. “Want to talk? Doesn’t even have to be about your bad shit.”
She looks at this man. “Why?”
“Talking helps.”
“No. Why are you being kind?”
He shrugs.
“I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Wasn’t planning on asking.”
“Why?”
“Why am I not asking to sleep with you or- okay, no, first one. Because. I dunno. Because I remember being as fucked up as you are once and there was a real person underneath it.”
She thinks. “I’m not real?”
“Realer than I was. SHIELD had to step in and unfuck me. You started becoming a person on your own.”
They sit in silence for a moment.
“Tell me something about yourself,” she says abruptly. Normally she gathers information from targets for their weaknesses. She finds she wants to know things about this man simply for the knowing of it. He thinks on it.
“I grew up in the circus,” he finally answers.
“I went to the circus.”
“Really?”
She stops, suddenly aware that it’s true, that she didn’t lie. “Yes,” she says slowly. “I did. Mama took me. There were… lights. And the stallions that did tricks.” She remembers clowns that frightened her until one with bright eyes gave her a fake flower. A daisy. She wore it in her hair, in the lapels of her dress, wherever she could. It became battered and torn and dirty. But it was hers, and it was precious, and it was beautiful. She can’t remember the last time she saw it.
She’s crying, she realizes. She can’t remember if she’s ever cried before.
“You wanna talk?” Clint asks gently.
“Nothing, I just.” She swallows. “I lost something. And it was small and insignificant and compared to everything else it’s just… it’s just an atom. But it was mine.”
Clint looks at her. “Lotta kids talk about running away to join the circus,” he says, tone abrupt. “But it wasn’t a picnic. Just me and my brother Barney, only people who were interested in keeping me alive. And we got a pittance for cash, and Barney spent all his keeping me alive.
“But I was a kid, y’know? I wanted kid stuff. So I gave Barney half my money for food and I kept the other half, and I saved and saved and saved. And eventually I bought this little Captain America action figure. Had a little shield and everything. It was great. I played with it whenever I could, and carried it wherever I went. And that stupid little lump of plastic made everything a little bit better, y’know? Like, the rest of the world could fuck me over, but that toy was mine, and mine alone. And then one day, in the hustle and bustle, I lost it.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “We all lose things that are like, cosmically really small and shit. But they mean stuff. And sometimes the stuff they mean, you can’t get back.”
She looks at him, meets his eyes for the first time since he stared her down at a hotel in London, holding a gun to her head. “I’ve killed people,” she tells him. “And I didn’t feel bad about it until now.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He moves as though to touch her and then thinks better of it. This is good- she is growing accustomed to physical contact but she’s not quite to enjoying it yet. She appreciates that he knows this. “I’m sorry. If I could make it go away, I would.”
They fall asleep in the furniture square. When she wakes up, he’s still there and with a new mattress.
The more she remembers, the more she dreams.
She remembers a man with shaggy hair and clear eyes. She remembers his crystal laugh, his steady hand in hers.
“I think I was in love, once,” she tells Clint over cheeseburgers in her room. She likes cheeseburgers, particularly with bacon. It’s important to tell Clint about the man. She doesn’t know why.
“That’s good, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he make your life suck less?”
She thinks about the endless sessions of pain devoted to eradicating him from her memory, and the time he tucked a white rose behind her ear and grinned, giddy as a schoolboy.
“Yes,” she answers slowly. “I think he did, in the long run.”
She wishes she could find him, or know his name.
They want her to start going on missions with Clint.
“They want me to earn my keep,” she tells him. “It’s perfectly logical.”
“You sure you’re ready?”
She feels sadness and pain now. But she also knows happiness, like Clint showing up after a nightmare with a Wendy’s bag and a tray of Frosties (“they’re the greatest treat in the world, don’t listen to Coulson, he’s a goddamn nightmare”), and relief, when Clint comes back from missions with only scratches, and no broken bones.
“I feel now,” she says. “I’m ready.”
She is in total control of herself, and there is no better time to go back to work.
They go to Budapest and it’s a disaster.
They’re not expecting it. The explosion happens and it happens almost directly above Clint’s head. He goes down screaming, and she’s screaming too because he is hers.
She doesn’t remember how the rest of the men became dead. She just knows that an explosion happened and then Clint was down and screaming and then they were dead as she stood over their bodies.
She and Clint go underground, as deep as she can. She can’t take him to the hospital. She can’t remember her medical training. She can’t remember anything. She wants to cry. Clint’s ears are bleeding. She wants to cry. She was wrong to go back into the field, the lack of emotion kept her alive, she can’t fight anymore. She wants to cry.
She closes her eyes and focuses on a pinprick of sanity in her mind. She focuses on Clint, bright and happy and alive.
He won’t be, if she can’t pull it together.
She takes a deep breath and tends to his wounds, watching that tiny light in her brain that is Clinton Francis Barton.
When he wakes up, she is reading. She was not allowed to read for pleasure in the Room and now she is inching into it, The Art of War feeling just enough like reading for missions that she doesn’t feel ill at ease.
He wets his lips and tries to speak. She immediately gives him water, gently easing the rim of the cup past his lips.
“Natalia?” he mumbles.
“It’s all right, Clint.”
“What happened?” he asks, voice a little louder, a little less raspy.
“There was an explosion. Our cover was blown. I was waiting until you woke up to figure out how to transport us to a base.”
He frowns. “Speak up.”
She repeats herself, slower and clearer, and his face morphs into fear.
“Natalia?” he asks again.
“I’m here, Clint.”
“Natalia, I can’t hear you.”
He is her deaf husband in a wheelchair and she is a spoiled rich heiress and they are taking a luxurious train vacation to London. Fortunately the SHIELD credit cards still work.
Clint is silent, has been mostly silent since they discovered he could not hear, not a whisper, not a word. She discovers she can have worry that is not fear.
While they are on the train, she pulls out a pad of paper and a pen she stole from a store in Budapest. He raises his eyebrows and she writes.
We need to communicate. We’ll destroy them after.
His face turns to stone. She doesn’t like it.
Do you want to talk? It is the first time she has made the offer to Clint, and not the other way around.
“Talking sucks.”
Talking helps.
He looks out the window, and they do not communicate for some time.
After perhaps an hour, he takes the pad of paper back and stares at it for a long while before finally writing. She thinks perhaps it is easier for him to write these things down than say them out loud. She understands
“What if it doesn’t come back?”
Then we deal with it.
“We?”
I’m not giving up on you, Barton. She thinks about it, then attempts yet another thing for the first time. You buy me cheeseburgers. I need those.
He gapes at her for so long that she thinks perhaps she misjudged, that this was the incorrect time to try humor. Then he breaks into a wide grin and blurts out “Was that a joke?”
She smiles hesitantly and nods. He shakes his head minutely, as much as he can shake it without a great deal of pain.
“A joke,” he mumbles. “Natalia Romanova made a funny. I’ll be goddamned.”
She’s too pleased at his smile to reprimand him for using her name in public. It gives her the courage to tell him something she has been thinking about.
Not Natalia.
He raises his eyebrows at her.
I want a fresh start.
He thinks. “How about Millicent? That’s about as old timey as you are.”
No. Natasha. Natasha Romanoff. It’s an incorrect Americanized version of her name, just like the woman she is becoming, so unlike the Red Room agent she is leaving behind.
“Natasha,” Clint says, trying the name out even though he can’t hear it. “Natasha.” He grins. “I like it.”
And if you tell me that I’m old timey again, I might poison you.
He laughs, which is good because she was 97.9% kidding.
(in retrospect, she’s certain that’s when she knew, somewhere)
(she wasn’t aware of it at the time)
(but that’s when the strings harmonized for her)
When they arrive at the train station in London, there is a limo with the SHIELD logo that they climb into. Coulson and Fury are in it, and they immediately start asking questions. She holds up her hand and miraculously, they stop.
“Clint can’t hear,” she tells them. “We failed the mission. But the men you sent us to assassinate are dead.”
“Barton can’t hear?” Coulson asks.
“Natasha, are they saying anything I should be paying attention to?” Clint interrupts, eyes drooping.
No, she signs, one of the rudimentary ASL words they’d learned so they could communicate simply over the train journey. She stares down Coulson and Fury, daring them to comment on her new name.
They don’t even blink. She suspects Clint has something to do with the name change appearing on her papers officially the next day.
They say he’ll regain some of his hearing, but not all. Clint agrees to hearing aids, saying that a spy needs to be able to hear.
She and Clint learn sign language together. Clint adapts to the handshapes easily, but he struggles remembering the signs.
One day, he throws the book he’s working from against the wall. He yells until his throat’s hoarse about how much he hates this, how unfair it is, how he doesn’t deserve this, any of it.
She lets him rant and rave, lets him walk out the door and slam it behind him. She continues to study the book and doesn’t look up when, several hours later, he returns. He sits down across from her.
“Listen-“ he starts.
“Ask me where the bathroom is in ASL,” she interrupts.
“Natasha, I’m-“
She closes the book. “Apologizing is not going to get you anywhere,” she tells him evenly. “Your feelings were most likely assisting to impair your ability to learn this. Your feelings are your own, and you’re allowed to express them. Now that you’ve gotten them out of the way, ask me where the bathroom is in ASL.”
Clint stares at her for a moment. His lips quirk and he stumbles his way through asking her where the bathroom is.
“Not bad. Could do better.”
It takes a while, but Clint learns, and he is perfect.
She experiences fear again, on a mission a year later. They are in a warehouse in a corner of Canada and it is on fire and she remembers. She remembers smoke from over half a century ago, and a woman long dead urging her to jump.
She is frozen for approximately three seconds. It is long enough for the building to collapse around her.
(out the window, malyutka)
(mama, she didn’t jump)
(she’s so sorry, mama)
Her physical injuries are mostly minimal. Whatever they put in the needles so long ago
(so many needles)
(so much pain)
(she is one of twenty-eight)
has ensured that she heals quicker than the normal human. Not much faster. But fast enough.
She locks herself in her room for precisely forty-eight hours before she is interrupted from her silent stillness by the sound of someone resting against the opposite side of her door.
“I’m pretty impressed,” Clint tells her. “How did you even weld the air ducts shut with the shit in your room?”
You underestimate me is on the tip of her tongue, the sense of humor she is learning to develop threatening to come into play. But she can’t bring herself to do it. It feels… dishonorable.
“How old were you,” she asks instead. “When your mother died?”
Clint is silent for a very long time. “Three,” he finally says. “I was three.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Not well. Just flashes, y’know? Little things.”
“I didn’t remember my mother at all. It didn’t bother me. And then I did. I’ve only got the one memory.” She’s quiet. Clint doesn’t push. “Her last act was to save my life. I don’t know if they ever found her body. I don’t know if they buried her. I don’t even know her name.” She is surprised to discover that she is suffocating with tears.
“What do you remember?”
She swallows. “There were men in the house. I couldn’t breathe. The entire world was on fire. She made me jump.” She walks over to the door and leans against it, dragging her knees up to her chest.
(the men knew papa)
(she doesn’t remember what papa looked like)
(did she ever even see papa?)
“I don’t know what she died for.”
They sit in silence.
“That sucks,” Clint says. She chokes a laugh and rubs her hands across her cheeks.
“Yes.”
“I mean.” Clint huffs out the sound he makes when he doesn’t know what to say but he’s trying so hard.
(years later she will recognize that she knew that sound like the rhythm of her heart even though she’d only ever heard it twice)
“It really sucks. But there’s stuff we can do.”
“What?”
“You wanna go look for her?”
She is silent for several seconds because she isn’t sure she heard Clint correctly.
“What?”
“I mean, we work for SHIELD. We’re not slaves. We’re owed vacation time. Neither of us has taken a vacation in two years. We could go look for her for a little while.”
“You want to help me look for my mother?”
“Why not?”
She opens her mouth and closes it. “We don’t know her name.”
“I didn’t say it would be easy.”
A wet laugh escapes her lips. She wipes her nose. “Okay,” she whispers.
“Okay?”
“Yes. Let’s try it.”
They travel Russia for six months until they find it.
They have been guided only by her memories
(an apartment building in the city)
(her aunt coming to visit her mother)
(mama braiding flowers into her hair)
and they eventually find her. Ekaterina Romanova, died in a fire in 1927.
Her headstone is worn but firm, and when she runs her fingers across the stone it is cool to the touch. Clint stands next to her for a moment and then leaves her in silence.
She sits cross legged in front of the stone, on top of her mother’s grave. She traces the name with the tips of her fingers. This is the closest she has been to her mother in over half a century.
“I’m who I am now because of you,” she whispers. “I remembered you and I didn’t even know it.”
(mama loves you)
“I jumped.” She digs her fingernails into the first a. “I jumped and I fell very far. But I caught myself, in the end.”
She glances behind her. Clint is looking up into a tree, seemingly fascinated by the leaves. She looks back at the stone.
“I want to say you would have liked him, but I don’t remember you well enough to know that for sure.” She smiles, a tiny flickering thing. “I like to think you would have, though.”
She reaches into the pocket of her coat and pulls out a tiny vial. She scoops up some of the dirt and stoppers the glass.
(she carries it with her for years)
(one day the Helicarrier is attacked by the man gazing at the trees, and it is lost)
(she is a whole person who does not need anyone else to be part of her)
(she doesn’t need it anymore)
She stands, brushing off her knees. She presses her lips to the top of the headstone and returns to Clint.
“All set?” he asks. She nods.
“All right. I’ll be just a second.”
She watches as Clint jogs up to the headstone. He leans in and whispers something, awkwardly pats the top of it, and then jogs back.
“What did you say?” she asks.
He smirks at her. “I said that you were a gigantic pain in the ass and that I can’t believe I let you drag me around Russia.”
She shrugs. “I told her that I considered smothering you because you snore,” she replies airily. “I suppose that makes us even.”
(what did you say to my mother’s grave, she asks while he washes and she dries)
(he considers and answers I told her that I was proud to know you and being around you made me want to be a better man, and I thanked her for giving you to the world)
(she clears her throat)
(one of the things I told her was that while I couldn’t know truly if she would have liked you but I liked to think that she would, she tells him even though he didn’t ask and never would have)
(he mulls this over and says well, at least you didn’t call me an asshole)
(I didn’t say that)
(he splashes her wither water and she swats him with the dishcloth)
When she sees the Winter Soldier, she remembers him. She remembers Dzheyms, and tentative smiles and burning fires.
He shoots a man through her. She heals and tells them who she saw, but does not tell them that she knows him. She doesn’t even tell Clint.
That belongs to her.
She comes to Nick Fury not long after and says “I know what I want.”
Fury just raises his eyebrow. He is a hard man to read, even for her, but she knows this means enlighten me.
“Children,” she says shortly. “Give me the missions that involve saving them.”
“And why would I do that?”
She folds her arms, refusing to be intimidated. “Because I’m one of the best field agents you have and you’re wasting me on petty assassinations,” she informs him. “Monkeys could do what you’ve had me doing just as well. Just because Barton and I execute missions with a 99% success rate does not mean you can give us the easy ones.”
Fury watches her for a moment then smirks. “Only one of the best, huh?”
“Barton and Hill,” she answers shortly. “Give me a mission that’s breakable.”
“You realize this means you and Barton will have to split up?”
“Better that we’re split up than not doing what we should be doing.” She doesn’t say that she’s already discussed it with Clint. She doesn’t have to.
Fury heaves a heavy sigh that she has learned to identify as you’re right but exhausting. “Go see Coulson on your way out. He’ll give you a file.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Sir,” Fury mutters. “Get out of my damn office.”
The missions are everything she needs.
One day, a billionaire who wears an iron suit announces to the world who he really is, and everything shifts.
Fury calls her in from a mission to play personal assistant to Tony Stark. She takes it unquestioningly because that is what one does, but she does not enjoy it.
There is a man, underneath Tony Stark’s bluster and bravado. A man who is scared and a man who is dying. A man who has been lied to too much and she is close to regret that she is deceiving him too, which is the nearest she ever gets to actual regret on a mission.
Pepper Potts sits her down after the doomed birthday party, when everything is starting to fall to pieces around Stark’s ears.
“I don’t trust you,” Potts informs her, legs crossed and face inscrutable. “Everything fell apart not long after you arrived.”
She meets Potts’s eyes steadily. “I appreciate your directness. Will that be all, Ms. Potts?”
Potts hires her.
She calls Clint while Stark is on house arrest.
“You would not believe the night I had,” Clint tells her gleefully as a hello. “This gigantic blond dude just ripped through Coulson’s security detail. It was awesome.”
“Did you hear about the guy who invented the Lifesaver?” she answers.
“Don’t you dare-“
“He made a mint.”
“Introducing you to humor was a terrible idea.”
“I wonder whose fault that is.”
“How’s living life as Stark’s personal arm candy?”
“Delightful. How’s life as a glorified mall security guard?”
“Excellent. Hey, I saw a picture from Stark’s disaster of a party; can you bring that leopard print thing you were wearing back? I think I’d look great in it.”
She rolls her eyes. “Clinton?”
“Natasha?”
“How do you make holy water?”
“Aw, come on-“
“You boil the hell out of it.”
He hangs up.
She meets with Pepper, after all’s well that ends well.
“So,” Pepper says, taking in her SHIELD uniform. “Not a personal assistant.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Pity. You were terribly efficient.”
She and Pepper stare at each other for another moment.
“I expect to see you monthly for lunch,” Pepper tells her calmly. Pepper’s face makes it clear she will take no argument. She does not intend to give her one.
“Of course.” Her lips twitch. “Will that be all, Ms. Potts?”
Pepper smiles then, a rarity, or perhaps only a rarity in the time she has known her.
“Even if it weren’t,” she answers. “I suspect that I wouldn’t be able to stop you.”
Barton’s been compromised.
The world grinds to a halt around her and then rushes faster than before.
Fortunately, it only makes her more focused.
She does not realize until the precise moment she tells Loki that she was Russian that she realizes that she’s not lying. She’s not Russian anymore. She’s not American, either. She’s of no country, no continent. She is her own and that is all.
She files it away for later. It is, as of right now, unimportant.
When Nick announces Phil’s death she keeps her face stoic. But at the same time she remembers when she was first cleared for combat and Phil took her out for a drink. He handed over her new ID personally. He met her eyes and said “you will do great things, Natalia, even if you don’t believe me.” And even though she knew full well that he was a liar by trade, she couldn’t help but believe him.
Her skin is made of stone and her mind is made of glass.
(Clint says her name like a prayer in that tiny room in the Helicarrier and she wants to ask how did this happen how did we get here but it’s not pertinent and she doesn’t think he’d know the answer anyway)
They save the world.
She is pleased and bitter all at once.
She and Clint sit vigil at Phil’s grave with a bottle of whiskey and two lit candles next to them the night of his funeral. She leans her back against Phil’s headstone. She doesn’t think he’d mind.
“What are you going to do?” Clint asks at one point, lying on the grass, staring at the stars.
“Work,” she answers.
“You ever think about… not?” He never removes his eyes from the night sky. “Just sitting for a little while? Taking a break, no purpose, no goals?”
She can’t. She can’t even try. It would asphyxiate her, the stagnation clawing at her throat. “Phil wouldn’t want that,” she says instead. “He wouldn’t want us to just stop.”
“You really loved him, didn’t you?”
“Love is for children.”
She can feel Clint gazing at her. She doesn’t return it. She can’t.
“Yeah,” he says finally. “I guess.”
They don’t speak for the rest of the night.
She gets assigned to a lot of missions with Steve. She loves it and she hates it because he is a good man and because he expects her to be better than she is.
When he says that he would trust her, in Sam Wilson’s small spare room, she sees the truth of it in his eyes, for he is a terrible liar, and it warms her strangely. There are only two people alive now that trust her completely.
Perhaps, she thinks, her secrets are not the most important thing. Perhaps there are other things that will keep her whole and alive.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Steve says “Bucky” like a man who has seen the face of their god. She remembers a man long ago who had a golden man that was skinny like a tree and she understands.
Nick didn’t trust her, and that wounds her more than she is willing to admit aloud.
(perhaps)
(perhaps)
(perhaps)
She calls Clint on his mission in Belarus from the safe house, before they go after Project Insight.
“Hi, honey!” she says cheerfully.
She can hear the fake grin in his voice when he responds. “Hey, babe! What’s up?”
“I just wanted to let you know, the guys just came by and did the inspection and it turns out we’re gonna have to move out for a little while.”
“Oh, no. What happened?”
“Termites.”
“How many?”
“The whole house is infested.”
The silence next lasts just a few seconds too long. “Whole house, huh,” Clint finally answers, voice perfectly distressed, not too much, not too little.
“I’m afraid so. Don’t worry, we’ve got exterminators.”
“How much is that gonna cost us?”
“Everything in the budget.”
He lets out a long rush of air. “Gotta tell you, I’ve heard better news before.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.”
“Do you need me to fly back and give you a hand organizing everything?”
“No, it’s okay; I’ve got some friends who are helping me handle it.”
“All right.”
She doesn’t know for a second what to say next. And then she does.
“Hey, babe?”
“Yeah?”
She swallows. “What do you call a fake noodle?”
He makes a noise that she thinks is a hoarse chuckle. “What?”
“Impasta.”
“That was terrible.”
“Yeah.” She clears her throat. “Have a good business trip.”
“Thanks. Good luck with the exterminators.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
“Bye, sweetheart.”
When she tells Steve that all her covers are blown, she is not lying. When she tells him that she has to build a new one, she is.
First she goes to Russia, and gets a new vial of dirt from her mother’s grave.
When she arrives at his farm with nothing but the clothes on her back and a bag slung across her shoulder, Lucky comes bounding up to her. She kneels down and pets him behind the ears while Clint jogs up to them.
“You made it out of Belarus okay, I see,” she comments.
“And your exterminators did the job well, if the wreckage floating in the Potomac is any indication.”
She looks up at him and smiles and he smiles back and she thinks perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
She tells him everything while they sit in his living room and she drinks the iced tea and cheeseburger he’s made her. After she is done, they sit in silence, listening to the birds outside.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asks. “Are you going to work as a mercenary? Or are you going to do an avenging angel type thing, just show up and kill bad shit?”
She looks at him for a long moment before she answers “I was thinking I’d stay here. Take a break. No goals, no purpose.”
He blinks in surprise before he grins at her. “Too bad,” he says carelessly. “I had your wings and sword all picked out.”
“I’m sure you’ll look just as good in them,” she replies solemnly.
(she whispers in Lucky’s ear, while Clint is in the barn)
(shall I tell you a secret, pup?)
(I can be whole with parts of other people all at once)
Six months after she arrives at Clint’s farm, they are sitting out on the back of Clint’s porch.
“Soooo…” Clint says casually. “Breaks are great and all, but, you know-“
“I’m bored, too,” she interrupts. “Let’s go kill bad people.”
Clint looks relieved. “Oh good.”
They take various missions of their own devising- drug kingpins, child traffickers, the scum of the earth.
In all technical senses of the world, she is tied to nothing and no one, but that’s not true. She’s tied to Clint, and Steve, and Pepper, and Tony, and Thor, and Bruce, and Maria, and, and, and…
There are threads tying her to so many people.
It doesn’t make her feel trapped at all.
It makes her feel free.
It is one year after Project Insight and she is in the hospital.
She and Clint were fulfilling a mission in upstate New York when she was shot. She was careless and when she wakes up she is annoyed with herself.
Clint is by her side. He is asleep, head lolling in his chair.
She reaches out and pokes him in the nose. He flails, falling out of the chair and she laughs.
He rights himself and she immediately regrets waking him up. On closer inspection, he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks.
“Sorry,” she rasps.
He shakes his head and reaches over to take the glass of water at her bedside. He gently helps her drink the water and when the cup is drained he returns it.
“Jesus, Nat,” he says. “Scared the shit out of me.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, I know that now.”
She coughs to clear her throat. “Gotta get Stark to build me a better suit.”
“You kidding? He probably has one waiting for you.”
She snorts and they settle into companionable silence until Clint suddenly looks uncomfortable, rubbing the back of his neck. “Uh, listen, this one was really close.”
“I’m okay, Clint. Really.”
“Yeah, I know, I just, uh. Well, look, I mean, if you died, I just- you should know-“
He stumbles and stammers for a few seconds more until she takes pity on him.
“I think there comes a point,” she says thoughtfully. “When people have spent a long time together and know each other better than anybody that they don’t really have to say certain things. They just know.”
Clint is relieved, entire body sagging. “Yeah,” he agrees. “You just know.”
She slides her hand into his and he gives her that big goofy grin she knows so well.
“Go back to sleep,” she tells him. “You look like shit.”
“You sure know how to sweet talk a gentleman.” But he scoots his chair closer so he can rest his head against her hospital bed, curled up in an impossibly small ball in his seat.
“They didn’t teach sweet talking in the Red Room. They were better at how to gut a man with a can opener.”
“Mmm, you don’t need to display that one for me right now.” Clint falls asleep, head in her lap.
Natasha Romanoff smiles, and closes her eyes.