I have arisen from the dead! My good friend Audrey and I have collaborated to bring you this Marvel Cinematic Universe/Crimson Peak crossover, and it will also be posted on AO3 under the same name. After watching Crimson Peak, Audrey and I were a little let down, having imagined all kinds of supernatural goings-on, and were disappointed that it was only ghosts, and there were no ritual sacrifices going on. We also found Thomas Sharpe to lack a spine entirely, Edith to be a terrible Mary Sue, and Alan almost a copy-paste of Raul, Vicompte de Chagny (from Phantom of the Opera) where we didn't like him in the first place. So, with all respect to Guillermo del Toro, we sought out to create the story we thought Crimson Peak emshould /emhave been. Given Tom Hiddleston's role, and both our preferred fanfiction domains, the Marvel solution practically presented itself.

A few comments before you begin reading:

The purpose of this story is to retell Crimson Peak as if it had taken place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For this purpose, we have stayed fairly close to Crimson Peak, changing only the character's names and their reactions to keep them in-character. As such, there is a lot of dialogue taken directly from the movie. When we first started writing, we didn't have access to the movie itself and had to go off of the novelization. This resulted in rather large portions of the text being used exactly the same. We hope that since we're not making any money off of this story that Guillermo del Toro and Nancy Holder will forgive us this offense.

Likewise, we don't own any of the characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We've borrowed them from the Avengers, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and anywhere else we thought appropriate. We also dipped into the Comics universe for more info, particularly for Ivan, Lorelei (who is one of my FAVORITE comic book characters and I was THRILLED when she showed up on Agents of SHIELD, pretty much unchanged) and Steve's family.

So we hope you enjoy the story, and look forward to your comments!

Prologue

The first time Natasha saw a ghost, she was just ten years old. It was snowing on the day they put her foster-mother in the ground. Large wet flakes fell softly, silently out of the sky, coating the congregation that stood in the cemetery. As was custom Natasha had been dressed all in black: her boots and stockings, a long black coat, and a black bonnet that framed her stricken white face and almost entirely hid the shock of her red, curly hair. She couldn't understand why she'd had to wear the garments, they itched terribly, and her mother had always hated to wear black. Had called it droll, drab. If Natasha tried hard enough to stifle her sniffling she swore she could hear her Mama pleading with Ivan, Natasha's foster-father, to not make his wife wear the color. They'd left Russia for a life with fewer rules and expectations, and now they were going to be trapped by them?

Natasha leaned back against Ivan's sturdy legs. She couldn't help but call her foster-father by his first name, although she had learned to call his wife, Alyona, her Mama quickly. Mama had been young and sweet, the warmth of a fireplace incarnate. Ivan was a stern man, but Mama had always balanced out his demeanor. Perhaps that had been why he married her. As they stood there she couldn't help but let her gaze wander, hoping it would help to distract her. It was a habit of hers to watch people, to try and figure out who they were from what they wore. To most, it would look as if everyone wore the same, albeit fantastic, uniform. Black, and more black. But there were touches here and there - muddy shoes that implied that man had been to another funeral earlier that day; a brooch made of human hair, likely belonging to a deceased loved one; a black veil that hid dry, uncrying eyes - that told her that the denizens of Buffalo, New York were no strangers to mourning.

Now, only two years after they had left Russia for a better life in America, it hardly mattered. The woman in question was hidden in the black, gleaming coffin - locked, for what reason Natasha knew not - and with her went all the warmth and affection Natasha had known in her ten years of living. She watched as it passed, breaking away from her study of the other mourners.

At last the coffin reached the rather ostentatious monument that Ivan had commissioned for their newly-purchased family plot. It was tall, and mostly composed of angel wings. Natasha thought it had very little to do with death, but perhaps that was the point. She turned to stare at the coffin, trying not to imagine her Mama within it. Her Mama's body had been so black that it looked as if she had died in a fire - or so Natasha had overheard Cook describing it to DeWitt, their butler. Natasha had been intrigued by the horrific revelation, but had no way to confirm it. In the Somodorov home, no one spoke to her about her terrible loss; all the servants fell silent whenever she walked into a room, completed their work quickly, and left to resume their whisperings elsewhere. Away from her. It wasn't anything new, they'd always acted like that around her, but she felt it more keenly now. She couldn't say what she would have liked them to do, she suspected only Mama would have known. The staff continued to keep their distance, as if the little Russian girl was bad luck.

Now, in the churchyard, she spotted Steven Rogers and his sister Nancy. A year older than Natasha, yellow-headed Steve with his pale cheeks was Natasha's boon companion in all things. His dark blue eyes, the only spot of color she could see in the graveyard, found her gaze and held it, almost as if he were holding her hand. Beside him, Nancy was fidgety, clearly bored. Though Nancy was but nine, she had already been to a plentiful number of funerals. They were Victorian children, after all, and death was not uncommon.

But while Natasha didn't find death to be a foreign concept this kind of personal loss was new to her. She felt as if she should cry, but she couldn't. Children are to be seen and not heard, she remembered, though she could hardly put her finger on where from. Steve, watching her, seemed to be the only one who understood the depths of the grief she couldn't show. Tears streamed down his pale, sickly face without a hint of shame.

Nancy shifted her weight and played with one of her blonde ringlets, her eyes unfocused. Steve tugged gently on his sister's wrist to make her stop and she batted at him. Their mother smiled wistfully down on them both as if she had not seen Nancy's unseemly display. Mrs. Rogers was still pretty, still alive.

Steve kept hold of Nancy's wrist. She thrust out her lower lip and their mother reached in the pocket of her sable coat, offering her daughter what appeared to be a sweet. Nancy grabbed at it, jerking free of her brother's grasp. Now it was Steve who pretended not to notice what was going on - or perhaps he truly did not see it. All his attention was fixed on Natasha as she swallowed down the bitter taste in her throat. There would be no more sweets from Mama, no smiles, no stories.

Black cholera had taken her. A horrible death, agonizing and slow. Not clean and swift, as a good death ought to be. Ivan had ordered a closed casket, and asked Natasha not to look so she wouldn't be scared. There were no parting kisses, no goodbyes, no last words, only the smooth, black casket being eased into the frozen ground.

Time did not heal all wounds.

Her Mama had been dead for almost a month, and Natasha missed her more than ever. The black wreath still hung on the door and the servants wore armbands in their mistress's memory. Cook, who Ivan had brought with them when they'd moved, had not wanted the less superstitious maids to remove the black drapes from the mirrors. The butler DeWitt had laughed, said she was too superstitious, and Cook had answered that she was merely careful. "You can't be too sure when the dead are concerned."

According to Cook, back in Mother Russia, the spirit of a maiden aunt got stuck in a mirror in 1792 and had been haunting the family ever since. DeWitt had replied that as the drapes had gone up before Mrs. Somodorova had expired, and now that she was buried, there was no chance that the mistress was trapped.

Still, the drapes remained.

That evening, Natasha was lying in her little daybed, listening carefully to the ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall. The hurt in her heart cut a little deeper, became a little more painful with each passing night now that there was no Mama to read her bedtime stories or kiss her good night. Shadows of snowdrifts mottled the dusty covers of the books her mother and she had read together, a few pages every night. She could not bear to open them, not yet. Perhaps she never would.

Instead she listened to the clock, it's ticking like the distant sound of an axe chopping wood. She found the sound soothing, mesmerizing. When she closed her eyes she could picture the pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. In time she found herself imagining Ivan's pocket watch instead, swinging in and out of a shaft of candlelight. Her breathing slowed, but something within her tensed. Outside her bedroom window, the ever-present snow fell silently over the eastern shore of Lake Erie and the headwaters of the Niagara River. The beautifully appointed Somodorov home was cold that night, as it had been every night since Mama's death. Natasha felt as if it were she who had turned to ice, and could never hope to be warm again.

I hope she is not cold down in the ground. Natasha couldn't banish the thought, even though she had been told a dozen times - a hundred, even - that her mother was in a better place. Perhaps where she was she'd never need blankets again, didn't have to worry about the cold of winter when the chill spread like an infection through the bones and sinews of the body.

She burrowed deeper within the covers, recalling when her room was at its best: the soft, gentle voice of her Mama reading as Natasha snuggled beneath the coverlet with a cup of hot chocolate and a hot water bottle to keep her comfortable. Her imagination would run rampant, filling the otherwise empty, all together too large room, with the images her mother would produce. Her Mama's smile would be warmest of all, as though she knew what it was her daughter could do already, what visions she could create with the simplest of inspiration.

The best stories had started differently each time, each opening sentence a calling card to her imagination. Once upon a time. In a land far away. Across the sea. There once lived a young girl.

Her Mama's scary stories, the ones she told Natasha when she couldn't sleep, were the best. Back, across the sea and far expanses of land, the Russians didn't believe in coddling children with silly fairy-tales. No, they warned their children that if they did not sleep, they would be snatched up and eaten by the likes of Baba Yaga, made a play thing for Koschei the Deathless. Even the lullabies were scary.

Tili, tili bom
Close your eyes now
Someone is walking outside the house
And knocks on the door.

But there was no music now, and she didn't think Ivan would ever read to her, not in the way that Mama had. Not when she needed those scary stories now more than ever.

The clock ticked, counting off the aching creep of her life without Mama. The tempo became that of the lullaby, and the words rolled on in her mind.

Tili, tili bom
The nightbirds are a-chirping
He is inside the house
To visit those who aren't sleeping.

A strangled sound echoed through the house, somewhere between a sigh and a moan. Natasha jerked and clapped a hand over her mouth. Had that been her?

Her heartbeat stuttered as she shifted her head, listening so hard she thought she might strain herself.

Tick, tick, tick. Only the clock.

No. There it was again. A sad, low keening. A whisper of grief. Of agony. Natasha bolted upright and eased herself out of bed, creeping across the chilly floor, the floorboards creaked and the rustle of silk echoed with them. Yet she was not wearing silk.

Cook had told DeWitt that Mama had been dressed in her finest black silk gown to match the hue her skin had taken just hours before death. In a hushed whisper Cook had used words like "revolting, ghastly. A horror." She had been speaking of her mistress like a monster, yet kept quiet as though she feared she would be caught.

But that was Mama, who had been so beautiful, and smelled of lavender and honey, and loved to listen to the piano and sing. Who told Natasha the most wonderful stories about the headstrong princesses who thwarted devilish witches, of the princes who they rescued. She'd promised Natasha that her own life would end as happily as the stories, with a man who would build her a castle of her own— "with his own hands," she would say, her smile wistful, before adding, "just like your father."

But now, as Natasha stared into the gloom, she couldn't keep that Mama in her mind's eye. Her thoughts kept jolting back to the horror that Cook described, and now she wondered if the shadows kept shifting of their own accord, or if that was the play of snowflake silhouettes on the wallpaper. With a shock she realized that the clock had stopped ticking, as if it was too nervous to intrude upon the silence. She shifted her gaze from the wall to the end of the hallway. It was not quiet there, where the air seemed to shift, and then thicken.

Her blood went cold as the Erie Canal outside as a shape began to emerge from the gloom—a figure cloaked in shadow, hovering at the end of the hall. The figure was that of a woman, swathed in once-fine black silk that now hung tattered, as though it'd been ripped by hooked claws, as though some force had struggled to keep the figure down.

But it was just her imagination, wasn't it? Some trick of her grief-stricken mind? She'd seen Ivan drink more than he ever had in the past. Perhaps he had the same problem with keeping those tricky thoughts away.

Natasha felt her bones grow cold. It's not there. It's not.

She's not.

Her pulse raced. It was not gliding toward her.

She was not.

With a gasp, she turned away and darted back into her bedroom. Her skin prickled and her cheeks blazed even as her body shivered. She tried to listen but could only hear a roaring in her ears and the thud of her bare feet on the floor.

Natasha did not see the thing that followed after her as she ran, or feel the skeletal fingers of a shimmering hand as they moved to caress her hair. Moonlight shone on blackened finger bones, revealed a glimpse of a tormented face, the flesh eaten away and turned the color of coal.

No, Natasha could not see, but still she sensed.

There was something more, a spirit pulled forth by inextinguishable affection, by desperation, gliding, with the rustle of silk, and the clack of bone.

Natasha saw none of that as she scrambled to hide under the covers and plunged her hand under the pillow to find the small knife she had secreted there, stolen from the kitchen. She grasped the handle, quivering in terror. It was just an apparition, it wasn't real. The knife in her hand, that was real. There wasn't anything else to be afraid of.

But seconds later, as she turned on her side and buried her face in her pillow, she went absolutely rigid with shock. She felt the bed dip with the weight of an unseen body, a bony hand wrapping around her shoulder, smelled the damp earth of the grave, and heard the desiccated lips, a hoarse distortion of the voice she had come to love as it whispered into her ear:

"My child, when the time comes, beware of Crimson Peak."

Natasha screamed. She shot up and slashed out with the knife. The blade met only with darkness, until the gas lamps came back on. She hadn't even realized they'd gone out.

There was nothing— no one—in the room.

Until, alerted by her screams, Ivan hurried past her open door and pulled her into his arms, quieting her sobs with his arms wrapped around her small, trembling body. As he whispered to her that she was fine, she was safe, she buried her face into his shoulder and prayed she'd never have to hear that voice again, but the threat lodged itself in her mind.

Beware of Crimson Peak. But what on earth did that mean?

A/N: After I wrote Tilli Tilli Bom into the story, Audrey discovered that it's not actually a traditional Russian Lulluby, as I had believed, but written for a contemporary horror film. We decided that it fit too well, and kept it in. :)