Author's Note: This is the first of a series of long drabbles based around Natasha. This one has plot, but it is limited. Be warned, it is dark. Not as dark as Natasha can get, but has mildly graphic descriptions of death and torture. If this might upset you, please don't read. This one is based around the word "Asset".
Could be considered AU, because it differs from Nat's official Red Room story, and her birthdate. I figured that if Bucky was captured before Nat, they were both assassins, and Bucky was kept in cyro, Nat probably was as well. And we know that HYDRA never gave up on a super soldier serum, either.
Natasha may seem cruel sometimes. She had no choice. She was made, but she broke her bonds and left. This story doesn't touch on how she left, just how she was made.
DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, I just have the privilege of playing with them. All rights go to Marvel.
To the team, Bucky was the Asset. He was the one that the Red Room corrupted, diseased, broke, changed, brainwashed.
And he was.
But so was she.
November 22, 1984.
That's what SHIELD had her birthdate as. But that's false. That was the last time she was pulled out of the cryogenic chamber.
She was born forty years or so earlier. They erased it from her memory, so she couldn't be sure.
Her and Bucky's stories were different.
Bucky had been captured as young man, and injected with a serum. They had tried to replicate Captain America, but it hadn't worked perfectly.
He was twenty-eight when HYDRA had captured him.
Natalia was five.
By the time they had her, they had perfected their memory-wiping devices, and improved the serum.
She was never sure whether she had ever been a ballerina before that, ever had parents, ever had a family, but she liked to believe she did. It made it easier to bear the memories of her training that they left her with. They could have wiped her memory, but they had decided to leave her training behind, remind her of what had happened to the others, and how much she belonged to them.
She remembered spinning across rooms, toes jammed into shoes too large for her, five-year-old body thin and strong. The floor was concrete, and she was clumsy. Dancing for hours did that to a young child. She remembered watching the sun rise, set, and rise again, all the time dancing. She remembered watching the pale colours of a Russian sunrise bleed across the horizon as the red from her abused feet bled across the floor. She remembered the fifty girls her age, stumbling, falling, collapsing, but she stayed strong. She was stone, pulling herself up when she felt like dropping. She watched as the first five to fall where dragged out of the room as the ache in her arms numbed. She remembered the five short, sharp, harsh (just like their short lives) gunshots that sounded outside soon after.
Five-year-old Natalia had sworn to never be them. She was stone, even then. She was the last to stop, falling into the rest position that had been painfully ingrained into her when the instructor called a halt. That was the first time she heard to word "asset".
"This one has potential," they had said. "She may be the new asset."
She remembered the people who the Red Room sent to look after them. They were all she knew as parents. She remembered one, the woman who unlocked the handcuffs that chained her to her bed every morning. She remembered how the woman had slipped her an extra slice of bread one morning, when Natalia couldn't keep herself from shivering, all skin and bones, the beginnings of muscles on her five-year-old frame. She remembered how, later that day, she watched as one of her instructors demonstrated on the woman, knives tearing long, red lines across her skin and Natalia's heart.
The kind woman died.
Natalia killed her; the final person in her class to wield the knife, the one who finally sliced a gash (perfectly placed, for she was a good student) across her throat.
She was stone, but she was breaking. So she became steel, feeling it pump through her veins. She could bend, twist, and almost fall, but they couldn't break her if she was steel.
The instructor watched Natalia's unflinching face as the woman died, and thought this is our new asset. This one, we have complete control over.
She remembered the girls who were her family. There were fifty with her when she woke up in the Red Room, that she knows.
Five fell as they danced, and never came back.
Ten died out in the wilderness a month later, a survival trek allowing only the strongest to survive. Back then, she hadn't even thought it was strange to have forty-five five and six year olds march, naked, through the freezing Russian winter. (Among those watching was a man with a metal arm, mind in agony from a brainwipe, only having the strength for one thought: This one will be a better Asset than I ever was)
There were thirty-five left when she turned six. She only knows this because they were moved in to a new room. The room had thirty-four beds.
They fought for them. Natasha laughed when she thought about it. It had been like a gruesome musical chairs, each girl rushing for a bed as soon as they were told to go.
Natalia was the girl left over, pushed aside. She was the smallest (but not the weakest. No, never the weakest).
An instructor was reaching for her arm when she darted away (she remembered the bang of the gun after the dancing girls had failed), jumping on one of the girls who had claimed a bed. She remembered the snap the girl's neck had made, heard it every time she slept.
She remembered there was an extra serving of food for her the next morning. She remembered six-year old Natalia looking around at the thirty-three other hungry girls, realizing that I must outlive them all. I must be stone, and I must be steel.
By the time she was eight, there where twenty girls left. Natalia had killed eleven of those who were no longer there.
She remembered the injections.
Natasha remembered being strapped into the metal chair, eight years old. She remembered one of the girls struggling. She remembered Natalia hearing the snap, knowing nineteen left.
She could still remember, eighty or so years later, the fire racing through her, trying to melt the steel she had infused herself with. But she was also stone, marble, marble that reinforced her bones and held her strong.
She lived.
Only ten did.
After that, she was stronger, braver, fiercer. She was enhanced.
She remembered the instructors whispering, "Asset. This is our Asset. Our new Asset."
As she watched the Winter Soldier in video feed, much, much older, and freer, she remembered her first mission. She had been thirteen.
Every one of the eight remaining girls had been sent out in to Berlin. They had five targets to eliminate and two hours in the whole city.
Natalia killed two of the targets. (Bang, bang, screams and blood, and staring eyes that never went away.)
Four girls were killed when they got back to the Red Room. They had failed to kill a target.
She remembered the mutters, mutters of "The new Asset, the strongest girl." The murmurs of "She killed two. She was lethal."
She remembered the targets of all of her missions after that. HYDRA removed her memories of her missions, but left the target name. They wanted her to know who she had killed, but nothing else.
She remembered how one of the three other girls had pulled a gun during a training session, shooting herself.
She remembered knowing that she could never go that way.
Three girls left.
One died on a mission.
Two girls left.
One failed a mission. Natalia hunted them down. Bang.
She was left, and she was steel and marble and she would never break.
She was sixteen then. They sterilized her, and she graduated.
They called her the Asset, the Young Asset, the New Asset.
She knew what it meant. She was theirs.
Natalia went into cryogenic suspension for the first time a month after graduating. She saw a man with a metal arm being woken up as she lost all sense of reality.
The Winter Soldier saw her and he knew. She is the new Asset. She is the young Asset.
A minute later, all memories of her were erased.
Years later, she was a ruthless and cruel master assassin and spy. She earned herself a new title.
The Black Widow.
Her bite was fatal, and her web was wide.
Her memory was wiped of all but her targets' names (they surfaced in her nightmares every time she dared to close her eyes) and her training, and she forgot the first Asset, and forgot that she was once the New Asset.
Decades later, Natasha saw the Winter Soldier. She saw his file, saw "The Asset" listed as one of his code names.
She remembered. She remembered an age of not-allowed-to-cry pain, and death that followed her, stored in her pockets, each of her bullets claiming a life. She remembered blood bleeding from ballet shoes and bullet holes; pirouetting girls and then BANG. She remembered hard days of training, nights handcuffed to beds, and the girls that didn't make it. Girls who had never had a life worth living. Girls who names and faces had been erased from her memories.
She remembered the time before the Black Widow.
She remembered the making of Natasha, and the girl who had called herself Natalia.
She remembered being the new Asset.
Author's note:
More coming soon! Twenty-five left. For info on when they are to be posted, check my profile or just set this story on alert. Or, you know, wait for it to show up in the 'browse' section as recently updated.
Thank you for reading, and I hope it made sense. Let me know if something is incorrect or needs clarification. Keep in mind, this is a slight AU.
Any feedback is welcomed.
Until next time,
MyNightmaresAreMyDaydreams
