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There are Black Widows.
Than there is the Black Widow.
Do you understand?
(No. Of course not. No one ever does.)
She is one of twenty-eight girls who are being trained to become Widows. The work is hard, yet necessary. It is vicious and some do not make it. For the greater good of her country, the girls continue on. You do not mourn the weak. You become stronger than them. (Or so they tell her, so they tell them, and she can almost believe it.)
The fall of the glory of the Soviet Union looms before them, but they are unaware of it. They are unaware of a lot of things. They know things in cold and clinical terms, but nothing to make them soft. Nothing to make them weak will work its way in.
A badly forged weapon does not last long. So anything that will break them, anything that will make them weak…it is dealt with.
Mainly by never giving it to them to begin with.
The malleable elements are not named in their forging. The long hard hours of dance weapons training in hard. She dances until her feet break and bleed and one those blood stain toes she dances more and more. She fights and refuses to break, weapons mold to her hands. She is made from the same things these weapons are: coldness and metal. She is inhuman. She is nameless.
She will have earned her name when the time comes.
And then…
And then.
(You do not give them personhood and agency. They are not little girls. They are weapons. A name gives the weapon an identity. Identity is not something you give a weapon until it is yours.)
There is one name that the forging weapon wants, one name that they all want. As much as they are capable of wanting.
Natalia Alianovna Romanova: The Black Widow.
Only the best of them will earn the name Natalia. The name has the legend attached of the immortal, unkillable Black Widow. She will lure you into her web with promises and whispers. You will not even realize you are in her grasp until you are dead. (Even then your knowledge of her is not assured.) She will get you to tell you things, everything. A thing hears confessions all the time, but there is no absolution at the end of it.
nd you will tell her because you do not realize you are bleeding until you last wet gasp of air as you are granted death.
Everyone hears of this story and it is this ideal that they aspire to reach in the Red Room. The Black Widow, Natalia is the ideal they will reach for the glory of their country and the people.
(Or it is what they are told to reach.)
She is seven when the Soviet Union falls.
She has learned key things about her place in the world and what she is.
(She is no one.)
She is seven and there is no more Soviet Union.
But there is the Red Room. That will never die.
The Red Room will bring her more then glory. (The Red Room was too good in crafting her to the point where only she can wield herself.)
She follows them and she will earn her own name.
More importantly, she will earn The Name. Then with that name she will no longer need the Red Room.
There is no Soviet Union. There is no ballet. Madame B whispers false lies and praise into her ears. She pretends to be loyal, but there is no loyalty except to herself.
There is only a goal and she will reach that goal.
She is thirteen when she meets the Winter Soldier. There are a limited number of girls now. The lack of funds and resources has seen to that, along with those who do not make the cut.
(A sharp snap of the neck. She does not grow her hair long as it can be her own noose. They eat like animals for meals, utensils can be weapons if used right.)
Red Room and HYDRA are less like sisters, and more like reluctant allies. HYDRA has admired the Red Room’s work, and the Red Room finds HYDRA’s tendrils to be of use.
So, as peace offering, HYDRA lets their ghost train the potential Widows.
The Winter Soldier cuts an intimidating figure to normal people. To her eyes, she sees how he is controlled. Like a dog on the leash, she can see the invisible chains weigh on him.
(Can feel the weight of her own shackles. Always, always weighing her down.)
He is a taskmaster: ruthless and relentless.
But the moment his handlers eyes slide away from him, he turns the slightest bit kind. Eyes soft and voice gentle.
(They say he is Russian. But she…his accent is American. If you know how to listen, like she does.)
“What is it that you want?” he asked her one day, during those moments.
“To be Natalia,” she answered because she could trust him. (As much as she could trust anyone. All the girls wanted to be Natalia, it was a good focus for them. They have to be perfect to earn that name and perfection is what the Red Room wanted.)
“Hmmm,” he said.
(She hears him at night. Sometimes…the walls are thin. He whispers a soft name, a “Steve” and then the buzz of electricity and the scream. She pretends not to notice.)
He gradually seems to remember his own personhood as the weeks pass. The electric shocks delivered are not enough. The implanted codes are struggled against.
(He promises her things. This man in the Winter Soldier: running away, a house, dance lessons, a name to call her own. She squashes down the small light in her. It does not come to pass. It never does.)
One day, he is gone.
And they are never to talk about him again.
(She sees him again, but he does not remember her. He shoots through her to get through his target. She feels more at this point, but she tries to suppress the small sting of betrayal at the act. He is a man who is a ghost. He is a poorly forged weapon that is looking to break.)
She doesn’t talk about him again.
Instead she plans and waits.
She will win her freedom with her own two hands.
Natalia Alianovna Romanova dies at Natalia Alianovna Romanova’s hands when she is thirty-three and the younger is sixteen.
The year is 2000.
It is rather fitting, is it not?
She is a new Black Widow for a brand new Millennium.
After the new Natalia disposes of her namesakes’ body, she does not return to Madame B. She goes to a bakery in Paris and eats macaroons until she feels sick.
This is her triumph.
When Madame B and her sweet lies and her harsh hand try to discipline her, Natalia stabs her in the neck.
Natalia has taken what she had wanted from these people. There is no Soviet Union. She holds no loyalty to the Red Room. She cuts her strings and disappears with the taste of chocolate hazelnut macaroon on her lips and blood under her fingernails.
She runs through the streets of Paris and feels an emotion shoot through her stomach. It tingles and tickles and makes her shout.
(And she wants to laugh at Ultron when he comes for his talk of strings and of monsters. Laugh and spit in his face. She has felt both around her neck. No strings hold her. But he…he is choking on his.)
She is now the Black Widow.
And her web is full of possibilities.
(Infinite different universes burst forth into that moment. An infinity of offerings and paths for her to partake in to choose from. In some she is recaptured, in others she dies, in more she is free. But this is not about these.)
She is controlled chaos, wild order through these years. They say, in magazines and books she looks at it to allow her to blend in, that these are years of formative questioning and rebellion.
Natalia supposes she does it a bit differently then most.
She takes whatever contract comes her way from the Widow’s web of contacts. They like that she is a free agent now. Dealing with the efficient Red Room could be messy at times.
An independent Widow is a much more tantalizing prospect.
(And if she is younger then they remember, then they do not say anything. There are whispers of her as Merlin who aged forward and backward and all the ways inbetween.)
She is loyal only to herself. Natalia has allowed herself to be forged for her own use.
The Widow lives through her weaving the strands long formed before she was bred and that will end with her line. She makes her own name for herself: clean efficiency with a taste for the nicer things.
(The things she was denied, she indulges as much as she can allow. Not enough that it makes her soft. Her blade must be sharp and not dull. But even the sharpest blades will pierce the finest flesh.)
Then Budapest happens.
Clint Barton crashes into her life.
He falls in through a window while she is shackled to a wall. Kills the two men who were preparing to sell her back to the Red Room and frees her.
And he is something people rarely are with her.
He tells her about it as he carries her out toe a beaten up car.
(The Widow should not be carried. Her web should be the only thing that is keeping her up. That being said. She hasn’t slept in five days or eaten in three. Conservation of energy is important.)
“I was supposed to kill you.”
His voice is rough and American: flat Midwestern accent that she remembers drilling over and over.
“Then why aren’t you?”
He laughs, which is more like a huff of air. His hands feel rough and calloused on her back.
“Call it a gut instinct.”
(No one has gone with that before then. Usually they looked at her and see a sweet girl. The ones with more experience look at her and feel coldness in their belly, the taste of her poison seeping through their blood.)
“No such thing.”
But three days later, she saves his life when a mobster tries to throw him off a building. She holds onto his rope that is tied around him and swings him through a window.
She goes back with him to SHIELD.
He takes her to the farm after with the sweet smelling grass and his wife and a small child running around. Laura is pregnant with Lila: kind and competent. She looks over Natalia even when SHIELD’s doctors have failed to accomplish this task.
(Her voice is kind in the butter yellow room. Her hands are warm and her voice is low. She stops when Natasha tenses and never pushes.)
Her voice warm as she tells Natalia that she works as a nurse.
But she rolled her eyes and looked at Clint, “Most of SHIELD’s doctors are men. Didn’t you even think she would have liked a woman doctor?”
She isn’t used to other’s thinking of her preferences. Doctors always meant…
They meant a lot of things.
But Laura, heavy with child, looks over her without a blink, tries to establish her comfort.
…
It was nice in a way that Natalia didn’t know people could be nice.
(Natalia doesn’t feel love like other people. But she is pretty sure that she loves Clint and Laura Barton. But she gives them something more preciously guarded: her loyalty.)
Natalia becomes Natasha her second year in SHIELD.
There is an enemy of a previous Black Widow: thirsty for blood and filled with the stories of the immortal Widow.
The Widow is not immortal, but she is. She is endless in the stories, whispered like a tale of the Bogeyman for those in the underworld.
Not as bright and shining as Captain America, but not a ghost story like the Winter Soldier.
This is how Natalia becomes Natasha.
A series of kills: neat and clean. But interesting enough to catch SHIELD’s eye for one reason: the hourglass painted in blood at each.
The calling of the Widow (when a calling was demanded for it).
A calling for Natalia.
(But which Natalia she doesn’t know. The name she has earned for, killed for, and made her own has a long and varied history. She knows nearly all of those captured in the web of the previous Widows previously.)
Clint inspects the latest of the calling cards. Blood still tacky on the wall.
“Nat? Who do you think is leaving a message for you?”
Natalia stills and looks out the window.
“I have a lot of names in my ledger, Clint.”
(Written in careful script, stained with blood. The names drip down the page and her hands are stained with red.)
“This one seems strange though.”
“I’ve lived a long time, Clint.” Clint makes a face as if he doesn’t believe her lie. She continued, “Made a lot of enemies, none of them normal.”
She doesn’t even know the definition of the word.
(Her normal will always be different from others. It will be gods and legends and men in metal. It will be a man who turns into a monster that even frightens her. It will be facing a man who promised her a home. It will be having friends, perhaps even a family with broken people. She is a weapon. Her normal will never be like others. But it will be home. Love is for children. But home can be attainable.)
Ultimately it turns out to be some sort of revenge. Another Widow agent, name unknown but of the line that goes by “Dottie Underwood” in the States, tries to kill her.
She kidnaps Clint, and Natalia goes to rescue him. He is half-conscious and his wrist is broken.
And the woman attacks.
“I will become Natalia!” screams the woman. Her eyes are half mad and her hair is chopped short and dyed red. “You do not deserve the name traitor!”
Natalia proves exactly what she had claimed the name for her own.
(Later as she and Clint step over the broken body of the woman, he looks at her. “What did she mean?” And she doesn’t smile, doesn’t blink. “You name a weapon after it proves its usefulness, Clint. And for a long time, that is what I was.” He paused, “And what are you now?” She had no answer.)
In one of her safe houses, after making sure Clint would not escape from the medical wing, Natalia stares at herself in the mirror.
Names are things that have power. She remembered hearing that once or twice from the more superstitious of the criminal sect. Natalia Alianovna Romanova has power to bring lesser people to their knees. It is a promise of death and of blood. It is bathed in blood and whispered in dying breaths.
She does not know what she is now. A person who was formerly a weapon, a weapon trying to live as a person. She is old and young, newly born and a legacy.
But Clint was taken because of that name. Laura almost lost her husband. The man with the metal arm who wanted to give her a home once…he promised her that name and he was taken as well.
She does not want to bear the name of a weapon anymore.
She does not deserve the name of a person quite yet.
There is red in her ledger and her hands are smeared with it. It can be wiped away, the story can be changed.
But it must be re-written in order for it to occur.
(She must take the first step in changing that story which others have written for so long. She must make it HERS and it terrifies her. The Widow should not know terror, but she feels it in her gut.)
She closes her eyes.
She breathes.
She makes a decision.