Hi, everybody! So, this little fic was inspired by that little scene in the Avengers in which Clint asks whether Natasha knows what it's like to be unmade. And the whole 'Budapest' thing.
Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers.
"Do you know what it's like to be unmade?"
They came when she was five.
Her house had just burned down. She had been at ballet the entire day, pursuing her dreams of being a ballerina, a dream her parents actively encouraged. When she came back from the practice, there was nothing but a burned out shell of her home. Her parents were nowhere to be found.
She had dropped to her knees and frantically shifted through the ashes for something, anything remaining. She found a blackened, charred hand.
Horrified, she had dropped the hand and run to the nearest alley (Russia had a lot of those), and cried. They found her two hours later, in a slightly battered tutu and leotard, tears streaking her grimy, young, innocent face.
They had asked if she wanted to be better, faster, stronger, more graceful. If she wanted a new family.
She thought about how she could use that strength to avenge her parents, and to become what she had always wanted to be.
She said yes.
She had felt a sharp pain in the back of her neck, and suddenly she knew no more.
Natalia Alianova woke up three hours later Natasha Romanava, the KGB enhanced super-spy. Her body was tall, lithe and strong. Her mind was cold, impenetrable.
She didn't remember her dreams of becoming a ballerina, or her love for her parents, or anything besides the desperate need to use her newfound strength to serve her country in any way possible.
They smiled.
"Welcome to the Red Room, Natasha. You are ours now."
It was her first mission.
Technically, she was eight. Biologically, she was sixteen. Mentally, she was thirty-two.
Seeing as it was her first mission, she was to be monitored at all times. Her every action, reaction, and thought was to be recorded. That was okay with her. After all, it was routine for all first, second, and occasionally third missions.
The mission was relatively simple. Infiltrate, seduce, and kill. It was, essentially, what all of the operatives her age and skill did.
It went very well, unsurprising considering she was one of the best of her class. She had him in the position she wanted him, satisfied, complacent, about to fall asleep. She saw a flash of fear in his eye.
She hesitated, for just a moment, before she put the knife in Drakov's heart. She felt her resolve falter, for just a second, as she stared into the warm brown eye of a man she felt an odd… attachment to.
But something within her burst through, and she brought the knife down, silver flashing.
Later that night, she could not sleep. All she could see was the face of Drakov, a man that was once her father, silently begging to be spared. To be spared from his own daughter, from a punishment of an imagined crime.
She didn't remember falling asleep. But when she woke, she realized she could no longer feel any sort of sorrow for Drakov. It was as if the part of her that was able to feel remorse had just… vanished.
"We could not let emotions cloud your work, Natasha. We hope you don't mind terribly."
There had been one strange man she met on a mission. He was her target, so, naturally, she put on her figure-hugging dress, strappy black heels, and crimson red lipstick.
She went to the upper-class party he was attending (in England, no less. How classy.) and looked around for him. It was strange, normally her targets were attracted to her.
This one, not so much. Whenever she felt like she had caught a glimpse of wild black hair or unnerving ice-blue eyes, the man would disappear back into the crowd. Whenever her hand brushed a soft trench coat, she would whirl around and there would be nobody there.
She quietly made her way to another man, one she had seen often talking with her target. Short, blond, and just generally unassuming. Before she could reach the man, however, she felt something clout the back of her head.
She woke up in a small, dark warehouse, tied to a wooden chair that was nailed to the floor. Her bonds seemed to be made of some form of steel, as no matter how hard she tried, she could not break them. There was nobody in sight, and her head throbbed in a way that suggested she had been hit recently.
Three weeks later, she was found, still tied to the chair, emaciated and half-conscious.
They rewarded her dearly for her failure, making her scream and cry and beg. She knew nothing but pain. She knew not her name, purpose, or even why she was being punished. There was nothing but the relentless, agonizing pain.
That was the only mission she ever failed.
"Failure is unacceptable, Natasha. Do not fail us again."
She met him in Budapest.
Her assignment had been just to kill him. Simple, it seemed, given that she had been working for the Red Room for quite some time now (seventy years? Eighty?).
Not so simple, it turned out.
This guy was fast. And really, really good. But that wasn't the only problem.
If it had been just him and her, she probably would have been able to take him out. She had been trained to deal with people that had skill levels much higher that her. But that wasn't the case.
Apparently, this guy also had a government agency full of people willing to shoot her from the air. So not only was she going after the guy with the bow, she was frantically dodging shots from the air while trying to return them to lessen the fire.
It was hard work. And the bow man didn't make it any easier. How he had managed to shoot an arrow through both her guns, impaling them into the steel building behind her, she would never know. But that wouldn't change the fact that it had happened.
So now she was one women, weaponless, (save for the Widow Bites, but he had proven he could dodge those and they were useless long distance) against an army.
She was also a cornered women. With an arrow and no less than twelve guns trained at her head.
She was panting, exhausted, and dirty. Her uniform was torn, and her hair was a disgusting mess, matted with blood that may or may not have been her own. She was certain she had at least three broken ribs, and quite a few sprains.
In short, she was everything she never was. Everything the Red Room had trained, beaten into her not to be. This went against everything she knew and was.
She glared at the man in the ridiculous purple uniform. How had he managed to get her like this in that thing?
He grinned cockily.
"Hi, I'm Agent Clint Barton of SHIELD, better known as Hawkeye. You want a job?"
After SHIELD recruited her, everything changed.
First of all, failure, while frowned upon, was accepted. There were no real punishments for failure, perhaps a slap on the wrist and a few extra training laps.
Not everyone was her enemy. Not everybody wanted to be the top agent, competing with her for the spot. Some agents just wanted to stay in the middle and be average. The idea was so… foreign, it was almost incomprehensible.
SHIELD taught her that everything she had previously been taught was wrong. Russia was not the world's greatest country, the U.S. was.
That shocked her to the core.
After that, everything was easier to learn. Do not finish a mission if it mean sacrificing your partner. Do make a sacrifice play every now and then. Do not kill those that offend you. Do make friends.
You are allowed to have a romantic partner, so long as it does not interfere with your work.
All this was written out in the SHIELD guidebook (they made a genuine book as their guidebook. A three-volume, three hundred-chapter book. Yes, she read all of it.)
So SHIELD took the hardened KGB spy and made her a hardened SHIELD spy, one that was against everything the KGB spy was for.
"You probably know Agent Barton, aka Hawkeye. He's going to be your permanent missions partner."
She had been on a stupidly simple mission, a time-waster while Clint was on guard duty.
It was some information-gathering thing. She hadn't really bothered paying attention to the details. All she was doing was getting everything they knew (honestly, idiots.) and she got a call.
A call that said he had gotten compromised.
She felt a flash of white-hot rage. Rage at whoever was stupid enough to cage her bird, and rage at her bird for being stupid enough to let himself be caged. And she was this close to losing herself to the rage and becoming a weapon of mass destruction (because she really didn't know the limits of her abilities.)
She had just gotten comfortable enough with him to share her stories, and for him to share his stories. They had just gotten to really know each other, and he went and got compromised.
And she had just gotten him to abandon that ridiculous outfit.
She channeled her rage into the idiots. They weren't all that hard to defeat in the first place, so she ended up defeating them in a few minutes.
And then the mission was cancelled and she was on a jet back to the Helicarrier and there was nothing but rage.
And just maybe, a touch of concern. Because no matter how angry she was at Barton and the world in general, she wanted him un-compromised.
Because he was an effective mission partner, that was all. But, oh, she was so going to kill the guy who compromised him. Because she was maybe just a bit possessive.
And she wasn't sure what she was thinking or why she was thinking anything.
And that was the scariest part, because she always knew what she was thinking and why she was thinking it, and only Clint knew how to make her not know what she was thinking.
And that was, again, that scariest part.
It was stupid, almost, how she was so torn apart by a few simple words.
Did she know what it was like to be unmade?
"You know that I do."