Natasha realized the mission wouldn't be as simple as Fury had said when she spotted a dark figure among the men they were fighting. All of her fellow Avengers were with her, even Banner and Thor. It was one of those missions when they barged in, smashed everything and got out, looking for other HYDRA facilities. Nothing subtle or discrete, just pure strength and violence. That's what worked best in those missions usually. She and Clint had also been tasked with a double-mission by Fury, as always, and were supposed to retrieve whatever intel they could put their hands on.

But the dark figure had caught Natasha's attention and for a moment that lasted no longer that the fraction of a second, she wondered where she had seen that person before. Because she was fairly certain they had already met. But when she looked again, the figure was gone and Natasha didn't over think it and made her way to the office that was most likely to have the intel she was looking for.

She was half-way through downloading some juicy files she was sure Fury would like, when she heard someone behind her. She spun around, her Widow Bites already firing and only one of them touched the figure that had appeared in the doorway of the small office. Natasha could hear her fellow Avengers fighting all over the base but she didn't call them. Surely just one enemy was nothing to be afraid of and even if they would have been dozens, she probably wouldn't have called for backup anyway. Yes, she was that good.

The figure in front of her stepped into the artificial light cast upon them by the lamp on the ceiling and Natasha gasped when she recognized the woman standing in front of her. She hadn't aged since the good ten years she had last seen her. The same black hair, slim features and lethally trained body.

"Recluse," Natasha said.

The dark-haired woman winced ever so slightly at the old nickname but recovered with a devilish smile.

"Teacher's pet. We finally meet again."

Natasha swiftly tucked the USB key into one of her concealed pockets before taking a slightly more defensive stance. She knew perfectly well what was about to come.

"Took you long enough to find me. You came to avenge your mother and fail again at beating me? You never won in the years we trained together, you're not going to win now."

The dark-haired woman, also known as Anya, walked two more steps into the room, her body language confident and intense, ready to pounce. Natasha didn't move a muscle, simply studying her adversary.

"I have no interest in vengeance, Mother had it coming and I wanted to see her dead as much as you did. She made us what we are, she experimented on us, she deserved to die for that."

"It might be true for you, as you always hid in her shadow, but I made a name for myself. I choose my own path and made my own choices. I made myself."

Anya sniggered. "Keep telling yourself that, Natalia."

She took another step but didn't pull out any weapon, or jump on Natasha.

"But Mother was right about one thing: I couldn't take you on while I was at my best. Because it's true, you were the best graduate of the Black Widow program, the one and only that surpassed every other Black Widow that ever existed. And it was useless for me to try and use more of the Kudrin serum to beat you. You had the experience I never could hope to gain. You were chosen to train with the Winter Soldier, you were chosen to marry Shostakhov, you were chosen to go to Slovakia. It's always been you."

Her smiled grew and became more evil as she talked.

"I could never beat you, not with fair odds, that is. A loyal fight… we've never done loyal fights, did we? From the very beginning we used everything we could at our advantage, our body being our first weapon. But I finally found a way to take you down."

She took another step and Natasha lunged, her fist raised to fire her Bites again, when a single word escaped Anya's lips.

"Сонбука."

Natasha's vision went immediately black and her eyelids were forced shut. She fell hard on the floor of the office, her right arm still outstretched before her. She hit her jaw hard on the ground but didn't stir. Anya laughed as she crouched next to the fallen figure of her former colleague.

"You have no idea how much fun I'm going to have watching you die. I promise, it will be painful and long. I wonder if you'll feel it though, in your programmed sleep."

She took a knife from her boot.

"Let's begin."

Everything she saw was white.

The ground was white, the sky was white and everything in between was white. It was not the kind of blinding white that sometimes was cast by the sun in heavy sunrays on a hot summer day. Rather, it was a calm kind of white, soft and almost milky like, just like a bit of cotton. She felt at ease in this white although she couldn't really feel, she wasn't really aware of what was happening.

She was just surrounded by white and it became her universe.

Clint wasn't worried. He rarely was. So when Natasha didn't answer the com, he simply shrugged. She might have had a problem with her earpiece, it had happened before. Because she wouldn't just ignore him. If she heard the worry in his voice, she would make a sarcastic remark but would still answer.

It's when she didn't answer after the third time that he started to worry. He knew she was far from reckless and that she could hold her own, but so much could happen in a few minutes. He had already done his sweep of the perimeter; they had agreed he'd search the west side of the building while Nat searched the east side.

"Anybody has eyes on Nat?" he asked. Maybe one of the guys was with her or has seen her disappear into an office.

Only negative answers came from the team plus a groan from Hulk. He actually jumped up, smashing through three floors and almost breaking down the whole base in the process. Clint was about to cross the newly created hole in front of him –thanks Hulk- when he heard the big guy groan again, smash something and send pieces of furniture flying through the hole, forcing Clint to pull his head back when he wanted to look up. Then, the big guy talked, yes, it happened sometimes.

"Found Widow."

Then a huge green mass jumped into the hole and landed hard on the ground, making it crack and sink a couple of inches. The Hulk was there, holding an unconscious Natasha in his arms.

She was cold.

The whiteness around her wasn't welcoming. But it wasn't threatening either. It simply seemed neutral. The cold started coating her body and that was the only thing she could feel. It was holding her in its transparent and immaterial hands that didn't seem to let her go. Then it crept through her skin, piercing it like thousands of tiny needles of ice. It kept on going, always farther in, deeper inside her mind as she lay there in the whiteness. The cold froze her veins, turning her blood into crimson crystals like a sculpture of ice, frozen forever. Her bones were next and were slowly being covered in a white thin layer of coldness, almost like snow.

She was far, far away from everything she knew and yet, it was somewhat familiar. But her mind wasn't her own and she got lost, unable to go back or even wake up from that weird dream she seemed to be stuck in.

The Hulk laid Natasha on the ground and Clint was by her side in an instant. He checked her pulse and looked for injuries. There was a nasty bruise on her chin that had already turned purple. She had cuts on her arms and the fingers of her right hand seemed broken. Her hair was tousled and there was a red string of blood on her hairline but when Clint felt her head, he couldn't feel any swelling or break. He was no doctor and they would need Banner to do an assessment, but he had been wounded countless times and he had seen some nasty injuries in his life. Her catsuit was also ripped on her belly and blood was seeping out of a gash near her navel that seemed to be rather wide. It looked as if someone had stabbed her several times and it was not a clean cut. Clearly whoever did that didn't care if Natasha recovered or not.

Other than that, she seemed rather unharmed. Except for the fact that she wasn't waking up.

"What happened?" Clint asked the Hulk as he pressed onto the wound on her stomach with his bare hands.

"Woman was there. Dark hair, dark clothes, looked like Widow."

"A spy?"

The Hulk shrugged.

"Was hurting Widow. So I smashed her."

Clint nodded and when everybody else cleared the area, the Hulk shrunk back into Banner and went to full doctor mode without even bothering to put a shirt on. While Clint still pressed onto the wound, Banner checked Natasha's head and spine but nothing seemed out of place or broken. He then took Clint's place while the agent tended to Natasha's other injuries like blocking her hand so her fingers wouldn't get more hurt.

"Why isn't she waking up?" Clint asked. "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with her head… I don't think she has a concussion…"

"I don't know," confessed Bruce. Clint saw just how worried the doctor was because he wasn't able to tell what was wrong.

The others joined them and headed back to New York but before they left, Tony managed to get JARVIS to steal the footage of all the cams, hoping to find out what happened to Natasha before the Hulk smashed, completely by chance, into the office she was in. As for her attacker, she had managed to escape.

She could finally move after what felt like an eternity.

Despite the cold, nothing hurt. She sat and looked around her. Everything was as white as before, but she could now make out shapes and nuances in the whiteness. The sky was a darker white, almost grey and there were no clouds. The snowflakes that were falling from the heavens were the purest white and one of them landed on her nose, making her squint her eyes to look at its tiny frozen star shaped branches. The condensation that came from her mouth as she breathed was a more transparent white. The horizon was a deep cover of trees and bushes covered in snow, with dark brown and green patterns that appeared from under the white. Finally, the ground was entirely covered in snow, the purest whitest snow. She was shipwrecked in a sea of the clearest snow. It shone on the ground, undisturbed, like the winter mantel of Mother Earth.

Her skin was pale, almost transparent and sick but she felt fine. She only felt the cold but it wasn't preventing her from moving. So she moved her fingers in front of her and they didn't seem frozen. She had no idea how long she had been laying there in the snow. She had no notion of time and space. She also couldn't remember what had happened before or who she was.

She stood up and only realized the incredible emptiness that greeted her on either side of the road she was standing on. There was nothing there besides trees and snow.

A few hours of Nat not waking up, Clint could take. It had taken them two hours to reach Avengers Tower and by then, Bruce had stitched all of Natasha's wounds and even hooked her to an IV. Upon arrival, she had been placed into the best hospital bed Tony had -and he was very picky about that kind of thing- so she had only the best of the best. Bruce ran some tests to check on her brain but nothing seemed abnormal. So they set her in one of the guest bedrooms near Bruce's room and on the floor where the main living room was so someone could always have an eye on her.

A few days of Nat not waking up, Clint could take. She had been out for days, weeks sometimes, after rough missions that left her broken. But she always woke up, no matter what and Clint usually didn't fear for her, despite the risks. They both knew the risks and they took the highest ones because they were the best at SHIELD. And most of the time, they were the only ones who could get the job done. It wasn't the first time that Clint had spent the last couple of days watching her recover.

But she had never been in a coma and it felt too much like it for Clint's liking. Of course, everybody else on the team was as worried as Clint, but the agent was her best friend and had known her more than any of them. Despite that, Rogers lingered a lot in her room too.

Tony spent most of his time going through the footage with JARVIS. He had clearly seen the way Natasha fell literally on her face at some point during her conversation with the other woman, but he couldn't make out what she had said to Natasha. He looked at the footage over and over again but couldn't just figure it out. And it was driving him crazy. Because it didn't look like the other woman did something to her to make her fall. She didn't shoot anything, Tony could see no device in her hands, no gas that suddenly leaked from the ceiling, nothing.

It's Hill that enlightened them when Barton reported that Natasha was in a coma –they had decided to call her situation a coma because they had no other word for it- a few days later. She was worried for the agent, but she remained professional and didn't show it. Instead, she brought them a file and asked every Avenger to meet her for a meeting. They reluctantly left Natasha's side and all crammed into a meeting room in the tower. Hill was at the end of an oval table and placed the file on it.

"What is it?" Steve asked.

"Agent Romanoff's file. Or rather what little SHIELD managed to salvage about her," Hill answered. She opened the file and they could see Natasha's picture in the corner of the first page that contained basic general information. "Some of those things we discovered ourselves, others she told us."

Clint lowered his head. "And for some of those, we had to dig." He didn't seem proud of that and was probably the one that had to do the digging. "Like really dig deep and we barely scratched the surface."

Hill took over. "This is her level-10 classified file. Not even you Stark managed to crack it." Tony shrugged. "It's all we've got on her and I wouldn't show you this if it wasn't an emergency."

She took a deep breath and continued.

"When agent Romanoff was in the Red Room in the late 30s and throughout the whole 40s and 50s, she was experimented on. The Kudrin serum was the main thing that was done to her. That serum is however very different from your super-soldier serum, Captain," she said looking at Steve. "The other experimentations were the intense and rather inhuman training she received."

"Wait a second. You mean Natasha is like, what, eighty years or something?" Tony asked.

Hill nodded. "She told us she was born in 1928. The woman she encountered at the HYDRA base was one of her former colleagues from the Red Room." Of course, Tony had sent Hill the footage. "She managed to neutralize agent Romanoff with a single word in Russian. That's because when agent Romanoff became a true agent of the KGB in the late 40s, the Red Room planted a trigger word in her brain that would start a programmed sleep. They did a lot of brain washing with their best weapons." Steve's fists clenched.

"And she gave you that trigger word willingly?" Bruce asked. Somewhat he couldn't believe it and when he looked at Tony he realized the billionaire had just thought the same. Hill sighed.

"It's… complicated. Director Fury wanted a way to neutralize her if she went rogue. She had just been brought in by agent Barton and, truthfully, nobody trusted her. It was almost the end of the Cold War but relations with the USSR were holding by a thin thread. Director Fury had known that the Red Room had a contingency plan for agent Romanoff and so he wanted to know about it. Agent Romanoff wouldn't tell…"

"So you made her," Steve finished.

It was Clint that spoke.

"I tried to. I was the only one she trusted at SHIELD. I tried to make her tell me, but she didn't want to. I didn't push it, but the wrong had already been done. I had hurt her and I don't know how she ever trusted me after that again. She knew that the Red Room had turned her into a weapon and that someday, she might lose control. So after a while, she gave it willingly. As a way to protect all of us from her if she lost control and turned back into the monster she was before she left Russia."

Clint's eyes glistened and he turned to Hill. "I just didn't know what that contingency plan was exactly. If I had known there was a counter word, we could have woken her up earlier…" Thor put a friendly hand on his shoulder.

"Of course, there's a counter word to wake her up and she told us that too, although, she wasn't sure it would work because it had never been tested before. By the Red Room or by SHIELD," Hill finished.

"Then let's find out."

She was showered in snow as a carriage pulled by two horses rushed past her.

She looked at it as it disappeared in the distance. Somehow, it all seemed familiar, as if it was a dream that came back every night. She couldn't pinpoint the location or the time, but she knew she had been there before. This was not just some kind of thing she'd remember just by seeing it on a photograph, that was the kind of memory that was felt and she could feel it in every ounce of her body. There was just something special about Russian winter.

She turned towards the direction where the carriage had disappeared when she heard someone call "Natasha!" Somehow, the name seemed familiar too. Her head started buzzing and the world swirled around her, the whiteness disappearing in a blur. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, she was somewhere else. It all came back to her, her life, her friends, her mission.

She groaned in pain because this time, she could entirely feel her body. She immediately guessed she had been stabbed in the stomach and that her fingers were severely damaged. She looked at the faces surrounding her and groaned again. Her friends told her what had happened and Natasha carefully listened. She wasn't mad at any of them, they didn't do anything wrong and it took Clint a few days to stop lowering his head every time he caught Nat staring at him.

On her second week of rest, she decided it was enough. She had already been resting too much, there were things that needed to be done and so she slid her legs off the bed. She pulled out her IV and JARVIS gently asked her to go back to bed. When she told him fuck off, he had no other choice than to tell the closest person which was Steve. Clint ran into the room after him.

"Nat, get back in bed," Clint started.

"No, I need to do something."

"You're not going after that spy if that's what you're thinking."

Natasha stopped as Steve's strong arms pushed on her shoulders to make her lay back down. "I'm not going after her."

Steve sighed and Clint sat in the chair next to her bed while Rogers made sure she was lying comfortably. "I want to go to Russia. When I was asleep, I had the strangest dream…" She stopped to think, her eyebrows knitting together for a brief moment. "The Red Room brainwashed me so many times, I don't remember certain things… especially when it comes to before the Red Room. I think… I think I could unlock those early memories if I came back."

Since Natasha insisted to go there, Steve and Clint decided they would go with her, on this journey to the past.