This started out as two separate prompt!fics over on tumblr, but I think they combined into something cohesive, dark, and rather nice. So, many thanks to rennertastic and the anon who inspired this!
I listened to "elderly woman behind the counter in a small town" pretty much on repeat while writing this, so I recommend listening to that while reading. ( watch?v=5i6fCGkFYa0)
I hope you enjoy it!
Memories Like Fingerprints
Or, Five Things that Never Happened (and One Thing that Did)
1. Ballerina
How can we know the dancer from the dance? ~William Butler Yeats
She remembered being bound up with ribbon and satin, yards of tulle sticking straight out from her waist. She remembered shivering before walking on stage, but loosening up as she leapt.
She remembered her parents sitting out in the audience, smiling and clapping for her. She remembered feeling dizzy as she was lifted into the air, the pain as her toes started to bleed and praying that she'd used enough padding that the blood didn't soak through her shoes.
She remembered the joy she felt as she bowed, the scent of the roses that her father handed her at the stage door, the roughness of his five o'clock shadow as he bussed her on the cheek. She remembered the pride in her mother's eyes, the tightness of her hug, the press of her pregnant belly in between them.
She remembered exchanging the tights and spandex for street clothes, the warmth of her wool sweater and the bunnies that danced across the front. She remembered that her grandmother made it for her, the year before she died, and wearing it made the old woman feel close.
Clearest of all, though, she remembered the moonlight, silvery and faint when the three of them stepped out of the tram and started walking the short distance home. She could almost taste the darkness that slipped down in the narrow alleyway, could almost touch the featureless black that obscured the men hiding there.
She remembered the blood on the pavement, sticky and thick between her fingers. She remembered her father begging for her and her mother even as they shot the older woman in the face and splattered her brains on the wall. She remembered her father telling her to run, the way she slipped in the ichor when she started to move, and that last, horrible gunshot that echoed behind her.
She remembered running, running, running. And then, at the end of the running, hiding. She remembered the man who found her, not one of the men she feared, but an older man with a kind face and a grey beard. She remembered that he promised her a home and vengeance. She remembered taking his hand and the roughness of his palm in hers.
It's all a lie.
But it still hurts.
2. Baseball
It's hard to win a pennant, but it's harder losing one. - Chuck Tanner
Whenever he could, he slipped down to the field where the Little League met and watched them play.
If he tried hard enough, he could pretend that it was him out there, shortstop or pitcher or third baseman (though he knew he'd have settled for right field).
He imagined himself in a blue and white striped uniform with a number to call his own, his last name stenciled in bold letters across his shoulders. He imagined making an impossible catch, saving the day, being carried across the in-field by his friends.
Most of all, he imagined the people in the stands, sitting where he did, watching the game and cheering for him, crying out his name with hope and pride and joy and all the things he heard mixed up in the sounds around him.
He imagined his father and mother climbing out of the old pickup, his brother in tow, and ambling over to the bleachers. He imagined his mother clapping, his father yelling at the ref, his brother pouting and reading a comic book rather than watch his little brother's ballgame.
When asked, he would always pretend that he was there to see someone, a brother or a cousin maybe, pointing vaguely into the thickest patch of players when asked for a name. For one fleeting moment, it felt like he was a part of something great. Something that wouldn't end with a bloody nose or a black eye.
These were the pipedreams that kept him going long after the old man has taken his mother with him to an early grave and he and his brother are shuffled through an endless stream of houses. They were the dreams that made him agree to slip away one night when the circus was in town and pledge his loyalty to a man who never missed his target.
These were the same impossibilities that made him step through the front door of the recruitment office, hoping for a different kind of uniform and a different kind of life.
He got his wish, after a fashion, but he will always think that those dreams, the ones born in the summer's heat back when he was young enough for self-delusion, those dreams will always be the best.
3. Ice Cream
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. – Johnson, Moll, and King
The little girl in the blue dress dropped her cone when Draykov died. It was a hot, humid day, and the melt from the treat swirled with the blood pooling at their feet in the narrow alleyway.
He died ignominiously, spurting black gore from his mouth as he slumped to the ground. Most people begged her for their children. Draykov didn't even glance in the girl's direction.
Draykov's daughter was staring at the corpse of her father, watching the blood pump out of the holes Natasha put into him. Eventually, the little girl started to scream.
Natasha couldn't afford the attention, had to get away quickly, so she slapped a hand over the girl's mouth, intending to shut her up. It would be so easy, so simple to kill the girl in her arms and silence her for good; all she needed to do was apply the barest amount of pressure, twist a little, and the girl's neck would pop and she would slacken and die alongside her father. It would be gruesomely poetic, and it was exactly what Natasha was trained to do.
But she hesitated, and the girl bit her, kicked her in the shins, and Natasha was so surprised that she let her go.
The girl ran out into street, crying for help, wailing about her father and the red headed woman and the blood.
Natasha wondered how she ended up killing people in front of their daughters.
So even though she knew her memories weren't real, she knew she was done with the people who turned her into what she was.
It was time to get out.
4. Decision
There is a time when we must firmly choose the course which we will follow or the endless drift of events will make the decision for us. - Herbert Prochnow
The first thing he noticed through the lens of his scope was that she was attractive. He watched her clinically, without emotion, noting the shade and cut of her hair, sizing up her height and weight in case she caught wind of him and bolted.
And then he watched, waited.
He figured out the first week that she was clever. She lost a tail sent by the Germans in the middle of a flower market and nearly slipped him in the process. But he already knew her habits by then, and caught back up to her in a coffee shop the next city over.
He didn't notice that she was beautiful until he saw her fight during the second week. She took out three bodyguards in less than a minute, hulking, muscled guys in suits and sunglasses and armed to the teeth.
She didn't even break a sweat.
He approached her in Belfast, knowing it was stupid, but he'd read her file and watched her work and now he wanted to hear her voice, see her eyes zero in on him.
He got his chance when she dropped her napkin in a café, thin paper fluttering to the ground.
He stooped and handed it to her, holding it out between his first two fingers, and when she thanked him, she met his eye without flinching.
In retrospect, he should have known it was a set up.
She was waiting for him when he got back to his hotel room that night, and even now he wasn't sure how she managed to get by him. But there she was, cross-legged and calm when he opened the door.
"You should try contracting. Maybe then you stay in better hotel rooms."
Her voice was accented now, Russian, like she didn't have anything to hide from him.
"Maybe I like having a cause."
It was a lie, but so well practiced that it didn't matter.
She was fiddling with a knife, but then, he'd pulled his gun on her the second he walked in the door, so he couldn't really blame her.
"I think you like shooting things."
She said it like she knew a thing or two him.
She just might. After all, he knows a thing or two about her.
When she threw her knife at his head he didn't duck or flinch or even move. He wasn't surprised when he heard the solid thunk of metal entering flesh or the sound of the man slumping to the floor behind him.
He should kill her now, before she pulled another weapon, but he has been calculating trajectories in his head for almost twenty years, and he was calculating hers right now.
"Thanks." He knew he didn't have anyone after him, but he's seen at least fifteen people gunning for her since he started this gig, so he asked, "One of yours, I take it?"
She stood, pulled a mouse gun from the holster at her hip.
"My skill set creates enemies, but he was not one of them. I called my employers after I made you in the café."
Which means she just killed one of her own men.
She came to stand beside him, looked at him with the same expression she had back at the café, but this time it looked like she was watching him as closely as he has been watching her.
"Do you sleep at night, shooting things for your cause?"
He didn't have a good answer for that, so he gave her the truth.
"On good days."
She stepped around the body to peek out into the hall.
"I think perhaps we go now. My employers will be displeased when they learn I've tendered my resignation."
"What makes you think I'm going to take you with me?"
He had already decided he was going to, of course.
"Because there are twenty men closing in on our position right now, and you haven't tried to kill me yet."
She was halfway down the hall when he realized he liked this woman.
They're on the roof of the office building next to his hotel when he asked the only thing that mattered.
"Why?"
Her red hair was bright in the moonlight when she shrugged.
"I never liked those assholes."
5. Death
πρὶν δ᾽ ἂν τελευτήσῃ, ἐπισχεῖν, μηδὲ καλέειν κω ὄλβιον ἀλλ᾽ εὐτυχέα. – Herodotus
(But until he is dead, hold off, call him not happy yet, but fortunate.)
It was sunny and bright the day she died.
She didn't want to go through with it, didn't want to leave her partner high and dry, but a job was a job and she did as she was told.
So when the blood pack exploded, she swallowed the pill that would slow her heart rate and cried out, dropping to the ground.
It took him longer than expected to get to her, but then he was on a rooftop half a block away and had to fight off insurgents to reach her.
When she saw his face hovering over hers, she almost broke, almost told him that it wasn't real, she wasn't dying, and she'd be back in a few months.
But she didn't. A job was a job.
They had to pry her out of his arms to put her inside the body bag.
No one had ever cried for her before, not really.
She slipped out of the morgue, as planned, taking the passport and credit card taped to the inside of the freezer. Coulson was good as his word, and the door was unlocked.
Two months pass, then three, and she has never felt filthier, bloodier, or more loathsome. She was an obscene version of justice, and a poor one at that, never balancing her scales. Every night she dreamed of blood and bullets, shots taken, lives lost, people betrayed, and she wondered if he would ever forgive her.
But she did her job, and if she stepped onto the helicopter taking her home with three cracked ribs and a broken arm, well, at least she was alive.
She didn't expect him to be there when she limped her way down onto the Helicarrier, thought he would be on a mission in some far corner of the world.
She met his eyes across the tarmac, and time stopped.
She needed to debrief, she needed to go see a doctor, but those thoughts disappeared when Clint approached.
"I thought you were dead."
There was no emotion in his voice, but his eyes were black with rage.
A thousand replies wandered through her mind from the sarcastic to the serious, but she couldn't find the strength to speak.
So she sagged against him, mindless of Coulson and Fury and the dozens of SHIELD agents wandering around them.
She clutched at his shirt with her free hand and whispered, "I'm sorry."
He didn't reply, but he wrapped one arm around her and walked her to the med lab.
+1. Appendix
Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts - it's what you do with what you have left. - Hubert Humphrey
She never reacted well to drugs, something about her enhanced physiology, so she made Clint promise to watch over her after her surgery.
Not that she really had to ask. He'd already taken the week off.
Her appendix had burst in the middle of a mission, and when she slumped to the ground, for a dark minute, he was reliving her first death all over again. She'd grimaced up at him, though, told him that she wasn't hit, but she needed a doctor immediately. Then she passed out.
He stood outside the operating room, pacing and worrying until the rest of the team showed up, and then they paced and worried with him.
He could really get used to this team business.
She was too far out of it the first day to anything more than nap, but by the middle of the second day, she was feeling well enough to want to watch TV in the common area rather than her bedroom.
It was subtle at first, the effect of the Vicodin, probably because he knew her so well. He didn't notice she was acting out of character until Bruce walked in and she started talking about how she loved his purple pants and they would really set off the Hulk's skin tone.
It went downhill from there.
One by one, the rest of the team showed up, and Natasha's uncharacteristic openness was only exacerbated by Tony's curiosity. Soon, he had her talking about Sao Paulo and Budapest and all the times they barely escaped a mission with their lives.
And then Steve asked how they met.
Unsurprisingly, Natasha's version of events was a bit more long winded than his would have been, and in her telling she included bits and pieces of her puzzle that had taken him years to uncover.
He was almost jealous, except he knew she would regret it, would never have revealed so much to people she barely knew.
He just sat there on the couch and listened to her babble, entranced as the others, doing his best to redirect her when the questions became uncomfortably personal.
That night when he carried her back to her rooms and put her to bed, she grabbed his hand and asked him to stay.
He reminded her that he'd been on the couch, would be until she was off the drugs and starting to feel better. She just looked at him like he was the world's biggest idiot and grabbed his hand tighter until he slid into the bed next to her.
He spent every night in her bed until she was feeling better and many more after that, enough that there was no point in pretending that he even had a separate bedroom anymore.
The change was so gradual it didn't seem like change at all, but he woke up one morning and realized that though he hadn't realized his pipedream, he'd found something better. It was difficult and took work and time and patience, but it was worth it.
And in the middle of the night, when the memories became nightmares and sweat felt like blood, she was there for him, and he was there for her, and it was something like peace.