Tonight she's burning herself in Bed-Stuy, turning to ashes on the roof of his building.
He's watching hesitantly as she empties the trash bag one item at a time—the rusty grill seems a poor resting place for all these years of her life.
It's time to stop pretending, she says, that she is anyone but who she is now.
Another passport is reverted to dust, the smoke of loss and confusion curling like a halo around her head, disappearing into the stars; another birth certificate of a person she will never be again, never was in the first place.
She knows it shouldn't feel like death, death to all these faces that were her but weren't—these names that held no meaning, belonged to people built of necessity and lies—but watching her history burn puts the same weight in her stomach as if these mangled pieces of paper were bodies and murders.
That disconnected look is back in her eyes, the one he's become familiar with over the years and seen too much of in the last few days. He remembers it in the face of an eighteen year old girl, waking up for the first time, and he looks at it now in the gaze of a woman, lost: that distant sorrow because she no longer knows he she is when all of who she was is going up in flames.
She pauses when she pulls out the ballet slippers, the rhythmic tossing of her identity interrupted by the emotion of these memories. His sharp intake of breath causes her to look up, to stare at him across the crackling sparks.
Bought these with the first SHIELD paycheck, she says quietly, almost to herself, but he doesn't need reminding because he remembers.
He remembers finding her in the training room that night, no guns and no knives and no blood and Tchaikovsky like fairy dust from the speakers. She'd gone up en pointe on the beautiful satin shoes, gracefully different from the girl who had beaten him at sparring that morning by sliding between his legs and knocking his shoulder out of its joint.
Blood money, she says, looking once more at the beautiful relics in her hand. She runs her finger across the ribbons—soft, still looking like new after all the years.
She's spent too long dancing on the nails of killers, she says, dancing to keep from drowning in the death.
Her gaze meets his once more as if needing confirmation and he nods, though she doesn't need him too.
The flames catch the ribbons first, burning their way through the perfect shoes, and she balls the now-empty trash bag in her fist. He walks for the first time to her side, putting an arm around her, and she rests her head on his shoulder. She smells like fire, but he doesn't think she's ever lost that.
On the rooftop in Bed-Stuy, Natalia Romanova and her million other names are ending a dark and twisted journey.
Natasha Romanoff is the phoenix from their ashes, rising.