It was difficult for anyone to deal with - to see something which should have been celebrated and automatically turn it sour. Of course, after a lifetime of this, you did begin to get used to it. When everything had gone wrong, when her one chance at a better life - a good life - had slipped like fine sand through her fingers, back when everything had changed forever she had been full of hope. That young, immature and very naive version of herself had a chance, had an option to get out but she had lost it all and now - seeing the outcome - she wasn't sure she was ready to relax, ready to be happy.
A black ribbon and an unmarked grave in the depths of Siberia where the grass rarely peaked through the crust of snow, those were all she had left. They called them Widows - her and the other girls - but Natasha was the only one of the survivors to truly lose a husband. Although brought up being spoon fed the beliefs of the Russian Orthodox Church she had lost it all, lost her family and her future and believed that it was a result of the person Ivan and the other KGB agents were covertly turning her into.
There was no doubt in her now, not a slither, that she had been a bad person, but sometimes she did allow herself to wonder what that made her now? Was it ever possible to redeem herself? Was it possible to wash the blood from her marred and stained hands? She had long ago lost count of the people who had died at her hands. As a child, it had pained her, as a child she counted them and remembered every face as it took it's last she had learned there was no point counting bullets, they would fly no matter what she did.
After Nikolai, this was who she was. After Nikolai Ivan had been relieved to have her back, his best girl, but she knew even at the age of seventeen that his supposed care for her was all part of a long train of money and blood. She was good at her job, luring them in with her physical assets and then forcing them to reveal their intel through torture, even then most would end up dead and discarded like a rabbit on a country road. They had often looked like rabbits, caught in the headlights, frightened and frozen in fear and shock at this small woman who took control so well.
Of course, all of that had been years ago, a lifetime ago but just because it was a lifetime, did that mean she deserved the chance to start again? Clint had always thought so. He admired her in a way she had always found surprising. She hadn't really believed his friendship for a long time, had slowly been coaxed into his life outside of SHIELD, but then the baby - Nathaniel - he was named after her. That had shaken her, cooled her body in a way that made her feel empty but full at the same time. She was his family, the girl with nothing, an orphan of war was being led into a home where she was adored in a way she never thought possible.
This, this honor which had been placed on her now, it almost sealed her beliefs. She was redeemable, she could be slowly and lovingly pieced back together.
It reminded her of a time one winter, it was cold - bitter even for Russia - the girls had been shoved out into the two-foot snow in their gym clothes. They were five miles from the compound and had to make their own way home. If not everyone returned then no one would receive food. It was cruel but they made it their own, soon throwing snowballs between the cluster of little girls, laughing and running in the snow, offering piggybacks to those less able to deal with the extreme cold. Natasha had treasured this memory for so many years, she remembered very few happy ones in the Red Room, that day she had been a real child, a proper child who was loved and valued and carefree.
Natasha wondered if she could be reset to that child. Was it possible for someone like her to ever be carefree again? She doubted it.
After all that had passed, both in her childhood and in the years with the Avengers team - even in the past three years - she no longer felt it was her place to be carefree. She had seen things that she wished on no one, she had been shot at least ten times and injured hundreds more, she had lost her husband, her chance at life as a happy family when she was barely old enough to call a woman. That was her redemption, that was her mission.
The little guy in her arms squirmed a little in his sleep. He was all dressed for the occasion, a little white suit with a tiny waistcoat and bowtie. He was nestled in a Shawl, a very old one - Russian made - but Natasha refused to say where it had come from. It was too much to remember the past, better to look in his eyes, the same blue as the depths of the ocean, and see the future. It wouldn't be long until his Mom was ready, she had requested a moment alone. This would be a hard day for them all. His father should have been here to see him christened, to see him at all. They believed he knew, deep down, that he was a father, but he would never meet the little boy.
Natasha had been there the day the little guy was born, she had been with his Mom. Pepper had said no one else got it, no one understood that the day her son was born was very bitter-sweet. Pepper would never know how right she was.
Now, she would become his Godmother, a guardian to watch over him if ever he needed her. This too had sent shivers through her body. Not many people even allowed her to hold a baby let alone be so involved with its life. It may have been something she wasn't sure was really her strong point but Natasha knew Tony would have approved. They all did.
The little man had his hair slightly gelled up - Tony would have wanted him to look cool - but every other part of him, dressed in silky white, showed an innocence. He was so new, so untouched by the world and yet the loss of his Dad would be there, like a birthmark on his skin, for the rest of his life.
Natasha shifted the weight of the infant into her other arm, rummaging in the back pocket of black jeans for something. She hadn't been sure at first but the more she looked into the face of the baby boy, the more Tony that she saw within him and the more she related to the kid, she knew he was fast growing into her heart and becoming that family she had never had.
It was an old tradition - celebrated in some parts of the world still but a bit of an old wives tale - and a tradition which was usually practiced with red but this was more than just tradition. Natasha gently exposed the ankle of the baby from underneath the warmth of his shawl, wrapping the old and fraying black ribbon around the back and tying it. Maybe red was the color of the tradition, but perhaps black could come to mean something else. The black ribbon would have been tied to the ankle of her own babies to ward off evil, but it was a connection to hope, to family, and to the fierce protection of the Black Widow which would forever follow him.
She was never sure if redemption was a reality or simply a nice dream, a way of coping with all the bad in the world but neither the less Natasha had found the place she had long needed in the smile of an infant. In him, she found peace.