The Five Times

by Milli Moi

For a person who has lived so long and seen so much, five experiences of the same thing have stayed with Natasha Romanoff. The Fifth, she hopes will be the last and - she hopes - the time when she gets it right. M rating is currently a warning but there may be sexual scenes as the story progresses.

1. Chapter 1

The first time it happened Natasha was almost sure she had known instantly. She had known because it wasn't like the other times, Nikolai was not like the other man - most of which had beer bellies and smelt of cigars. With him she felt something different, it wasn't uncomfortable to be together, it wasn't uncomfortable with his body inside hers.

This had not been the first time she had lain with a man, the Russia of her youth had very different laws regarding sexual consent. Natasha had many memories of these men, of it feeling sore and wrong, of them getting angry because she cried out or bled a little on the sheets.

It was part of her training, she had to learn to seduce, she needed every man to believe the experience felt good but she couldn't act something she had never experienced.

Nikolai has held her in his lap, she had grasped at his back with flat palms, buried her face in the crook of his neck so far that she could feel her own hot, panting breath back on her cheeks.

He held her, one strong hand on her skull, fingers messed up in her red hair. He wanted her close, as close as she wanted him.

That night Natasha remembered the warmth in her lower belly, the feeling of his seed inside her but there was more. The heat didn't seem to leave. It wasn't unpleasant, it was soft and calming, she felt it in her heart that this was the heat of a baby beginning to grow, a baby which was possible, one conceived of love.

Nikolai has held her in his arms as the heat in their bodies dissipated and they began to shiver despite the fire only two feet away. Natasha had never known comfort, not even in childhood, but in the arms of this young soldier she could relax in a way she had never done before.

She remembered lying there, remembered him covering their naked bodies with a caribou hide - the warmest of blankets in the subzero Siberian winter. She told him then, looking into his blue eyes. Nikolai has laughed, how could she have known she carried a baby already.

She had been right. If only their path had been different. They both had a job to do. Natasha continued to do night watches, taking her turn in the six hours before dawn with her rifle at her side and a concealed pistol strapped to her thigh. She didn't feel so sick when she worked.

Natasha continued to walk miles each day, 10 sometimes 20 miles in the deep snow. After a day of hard walking and sweating in their thick clothes she had undressed fully to see her belly was becoming rounder and a faint brown line ran down the centre, split only by her belly button.

Natasha had held strong, kept her eye on the crosshairs and the crosshairs on the target, pointing the barrel of her rifle out into the field, balancing a box of ammunition on her much bigger belly.

She was sore that day, her back aches and she was sure she should not be anchoring a heavy sub-machine against her shoulder. The men had ventured out, cautiously across a field. Natasha watched to sidelines for any glint of sun on metal which would indicate another sniper like herself. She may have been trained for far more than this but given she couldn't run very well due to the baby and that the small group could not risk anyone seeing her belly, she was resigned to sniper duties.

That was the day it changed. That was the day where Natasha's possibility of a future was gone for good. The day of the scarlet snow. Natasha saw the glint of the sniper's rifle but she was too late. There wasn't one. It was an ambush of at least twenty men with sub-machines. Her troop died on that field. All of them, all men under thirty. Nikolai- the father of her child, the man she had promised to marry - died at eighteen years old.

It was three days later the physical pain came to an end. The baby was dead, it had died in the womb. The physical pain was gone but the emotional pain, losing her future husband, her daughter and subsequently her freedom, those would live on with her for the rest of her life.

Every year she made the trip back, every year, even after she defected to the USA, after the Avengers initiative, until the end of her life. The temperatures could be extreme, and several times tears would freeze solid on her cheeks. Still she went, still she left a black rose, in memory of the family that she had felt slip through her fingers and out of existence.

And that was the first time Natasha Romanoff lost a baby.