From the beginning they were enemies. Each looked at the other and saw not a face but a loss, not a person but a terror, a horror, a destroyer. Natasha had a heart but some things could not be forgiven, could not be glossed over by the lesser sins of ignorance and youth. Although Wanda had helped them in the end, Natasha remembered still the red-tinged ghosts of her memories snarling around her, the familiar feeling of helplessness that she thought she'd outrun long ago. As for Wanda? She remembers: a clean snap, like a wire being clipped, and knowing, just then, that her family had gone. She remembers: the thing they forced on her twining around her fingertips, its viciousness welcomed like never before, hearing the rubble crumble around her and thinking nothing but good. She remembers: going to him-to Ultron- and the scorn as she looked at his defeat, the scorn as she wondered how she had thought to trust when no one in the world had shown them a thing but agony? She remembers: a vow, never to be so naive again, and swearing on the death of her brother, as she crushes through metal to hold in her hand the spiky heart of a thing like her-created for nothing more than heartbreak.
So did they get along? Nah.
Natasha can be subtle in a closet full of loose tin cans but whenever she sees the girl in the tower she leaves. Wanda, for her part, stays far from the Widow. And everyone else, for that matter. She is trying, for weeks, to feel some kind of okay, but living without Pietro is like learning to breathe again. How can she do it unless someone shows her how? No one can-no one will, actually, because despite inviting her to live among them they handle her like they'd rather she be quarantined, or maybe locked away. Her humanity is overshadowed by the things she is capable of. She stays in her room when she can and talks to him, combing over childhood memories until they wear out, and ponders: how many needle jabs can a love handle until it grows threadbare? Wanda doesn't know, and so she stops one day. She spends the time reading about Sokovia until she too wants to cry out for the blood of a witch like so many others who suffered, until she remembers: what witch is more worthy of burning than her?
Natasha has spent most of her life trying to fix the things she has always feared were unfixable in herself. The team helps, Clint helps, and mostly she's just fine. She was just fine. She can empathize with Wanda, about those who shape when they haven't hands soft enough, about those who prefer to carve when molding would be sufficient. But the red. She couldn't run, she couldn't break or fight or seduce her way out of the red, and she wonders if that makes it better or worse: that she can't escape her past with any of the things they gave her to do so. As the girl lives like a ghost in the tower, Natasha curls into Clint in the nights, desperate to drown out all the things she wishes she wouldn't have been forced to befriend. Still, memories creep up behind her. They poke and prod, insistent now, and sometimes she'll be blinded for a second by one in the middle of training with Cap or reading a book. One day, in the kitchen, a flashback hits in the middle of pouring her coffee.
Wanda is there. She is trying hard to blend into the stainless steel countertops as she fries an egg, the first time she's been able to work up the energy to eat in days. She looks over when she hears a crash, and a quiet fuck. She can't see Natasha's face, but her shoulders are knotted up against each other, and blood is streaking down her forearm from the shard of glass she's gripping tighter and tighter in her palm. Wanda hesitantly touches her shoulder, half-expecting a knife in her face, but all she feels is a minuscule shiver. She turns her around to see Natasha's eyes tearless, looking out at things Wanda can't see but has before, during the fighting. She can help. She's done it for Pietro: soothed his nightmares, softened his bitterness. Slow, she pries the glass out of Natasha's grip. Slow, she makes eye contact with her, put her fingers up to the assassin's temples but doesn't touch, not yet.
"I can help," she whispers, "but only if you'll let me."
Natasha looks at her and gives her a tiny jerk of the chin.
Wanda pulls it up gently, lets it filter quietly through the barrage, turning little switches and muting the brights and lights and river mad hurricane until Natasha gasps. There are tears there now, oh yes. Misting, pooling. Wanda takes her hands away and watches as the shoulders relax, collapse in, as the shivering infects her hands and arms. Natasha's breath catches, and catches again. She sobs just once. Wanda steps forward and wraps her arms around an assassin's back, and the assassin crushes her arms around the witch, and she sobs and she sobs, and every one wracks Wanda's body like her own have for weeks. They stay that way for a time. They neither of them say it but the air reeks of apology and grief. They neither of them say it but they are grateful, and both of them know this will not be the last time.
Natasha comes into Wanda's room about a week later. She has started talking to her around the other Avengers, and Wanda feels no longer in exile. Natasha brings tea with lemon and mint. She sits on Wanda's bed and is silent for a moment as she arranges the mugs on the bedside stands. Then she sits right next to her and asks how she can help. Wanda knows already that there is only one thing that might ease any of the anguish that still avalanches over her.
"Will you speak to me," she asks in Russian, "like he did?"
Natasha doesn't hesitate or deliberate. Конечно, she says. Of course.
That day they share tea and talk about a book that both of them just read. The next week Natasha introduces Wanda to The Magicians, and after they binge all three seasons in a week, they spend hours dissecting the plot and railing against the showrunners for not making Julia and Kady a couple. They watch Wonder Woman together and laugh longingly about living on Themyscira, about meeting Diana. They talk about other things too, of course: when Wanda can't press out Pietro's absence, she brings her grief to Natasha, and the assassin knows, and she only ever asks the same question. How can I help? No matter what it is, Wanda finds, whatever odd small thing she asks for, it does. Help. She tells Natasha all the big and all the small things about her brother: how they protected each other, how it felt when he died. How she prayed for death too, for a while. Natasha listens, and eventually the others do too. Tony knows self-loathing, and he assures her every day that mistake is no name of hers. Banner shows her his experiments, and she laughs at his stupid puns, and feels more and more like she is seen here. Cap trains with her and laughs when she beats him, and demands to go again because he delights in her strength, and at night she tells Pietro these things. Your space is not filled but grown, she thinks, and brother, my love for you has a place to go now.
When Natasha cannot face the memories she comes to Wanda. When Clint cannot help, when training cannot help, she comes to Wanda and asks for anything. The red has a Janus-faced duality, she knows, but when all she can see is her tragedies on a loop she needs the gentle fingers at her temples, and the quiet arms of the witch. Sometimes she sleeps in Wanda's bed because nightmares don't play fair. More often it's because she falls asleep during a movie they're watching. It is hard, she knows, to miss. To long for. And so each goes to war for the other.
In Wakanda, when she hears the enemy tell Wanda that she will die alone, she wants to rip her throat out with her canines. Instead she rasps her weapon tighter against her palm.
"She's not alone." she says, very even. And then, again, for the five hundredth or five thousandth or five millionth time: she goes to war.