A/N: Natasha's treatment in the Red Room and before were all pretty crappy. She has bones broken by people much older than her and in a position of power over her, and attempted dub-con, all before she is fourteen. If that doesn't sit well with you, skip to the first mention of Bucky, which is in the third section.
Rated for implied/referenced child abuse, and implied underage dub-con (not actually committed against any named characters)
Natasha's backstory from/prequel to Put Your Hand In My Hand And We'll Stand
Her mother was a dancer. She doesn't have a lot of memories of her, but she thinks of her and she remembers red hair and pink ballet shoes and the smell of well-worn sound of Tchaikovsky floats through each memory like the soundtrack to a mostly forgotten, but once well-loved movie, catching in places and lacking details, but the feeling of contentment and security is as prominent as the brass section.
She remembers far more of her father. He was short, like her, but soft and round in all the ways that she is hard and angry and unyielding. He took her to all her mother's concerts and every single one of her ballet classes and he platted her long red hair as gently and neatly as his large fingers would allow and kissed her mother on the cheek every time he saw her.
They were a happy family, she remembers that. They loved each other; she remembers that, too. But she also remembers cold hands lifting her up and carrying her - crying and kicking and biting into the leather that covered her mouth - from her family home as her father slept on in the next room.
There are only snippets after that, vague impressions of thoughts and feelings. There is only rage and hate, first for the people who took her away, and then for the world, for letting them.
And then there is nothing. No emotion, no thought. Just the clear and pure knowledge of what she must do to be better, to be stronger, to never be a helpless child again. To be the one who takes, not the one who is taken.
But there is a scar, just above her hairline. It is old. She can not remember how she got it, and she remembers every time when she was injured in the Red Room. To them, pain was the best motivator to never fail twice - they would never have let her forget a mistake. She can't remember a time when she didn't have the small line of raised skin on the back of her head.
They tell everyone she is American now, and it's true enough, except that she is Russian, and she will always be Russian. She was raised in the shadow of the Soviets by a people who ignored the past and so did not learn from it nor critique it. Or perhaps she was raised during, she can't be sure. She's always had to look for both the good and the bad in people to survive; to know that there is no black and white, there is only the mission.
She thanks the Red Room for the memories she has of her parents.
-00000-
It happens the first time when she is fourteen. She was never that awkward, gangly teen she saw the girls around her become; she went from a porcelain doll to someone who would be truly beautiful when they got older, and she never went through the acne or the uneven growth spurts.
He had been her trainer since she was eight, maybe nine, her most constant companion for six years. She has all these memories of her father, but she doesn't really feel anything for them, they're just flashes in her mind - a memory of a place where she knows was happier, but she can not feel any of the happiness attached to it. Her trainer is just as much a father-figure for her as anyone else it her life, seeing as she feels as much for him as she does the distant figure of her memories - that is to say, next to nothing, except for the vague notion that he should be important to her. Her trainer was, after all, the person to bandaged up her arm the first time she broke it when she was nine, even if he was the one who did the breaking. They never broke large bones after that if they could help it - it weakened the structural integrity of the bone - but her fingers fractured constantly until they didn't anymore. He never helped her splint any of those bones, and she is grateful for it. It never did well to show any weakness.
He comes to her at night, just before she falls asleep. It's a test, he tells her, another lesson. A new skill to add to her already incredible set.
She doesn't understand what's happening at first, when he lifts the covers and lies down on the bed beside her. Even when he reaches out to take her arm in a firm grip, she still does not know why he's there. But she feels his hand on her arm and they're not in the training room, so this can not be a test of her skills or knowledge. This is an attack - she knows it, it's all she knows - and she reaches up underneath her pillow to where she keeps the knife she's not supposed to have in her room, and she stabs him in the hand that is not still holding onto her arm. He does not make a sound at that, he would not be a trainer if he could not keep quiet while enduring pain, but his gaze does drop down to his hand, impaled on her mattress, before looking back up into her eyes.
She grins. She will show him what she has learned.
For the other girls that were taken from their families at the same time as her, that night was their first sexual encounter. Some would go on to become highly successful agents in their own right. But she is the Black Widow. She made her first deliberate, independent kill at fourteen.
-00000-
They call him The American and they tell her that it's because he speaks like one. But she knows better. His name is James, she knows that too, and she practices saying it the way he taught her, with just the right intonation, when no one else is listening. She owes him that much. He says that it reminds him of who he was before, even if he doesn't know who that is. But when he starts to get worked up or distracted by something only he can see, she lays her hand on his arm and she says "James" and he calms almost instantly.
He's kind to her, when he doesn't need to be and by rights shouldn't even be able to be. She knows that it could be a trick, a way to find out her secrets or her weaknesses or just to break the last part of her that still can't help but trust, despite everything, but she doesn't think it is. She doesn't really care if it is. Because he looks at her and she knows he thinks she's beautiful, but he never tries anything. Everyone else, they leer at her and they wink in a way that she doesn't understand but implies more than she thinks she wants to know about, but not him. He treats her like someone who wants to learn, to get better - someone who one day could be, if not his equal, than at least his colleague. He's handsome, she supposes, and certainly nice, in the way of someone who doesn't really know how to be, but there is too much for her to do, she doesn't really notice much. All she needs is acknowledgement of her talents. All she wants is to be better.
He sits with her, after they train; backs pressed against the wall of the training room and his hand on her shoulder. She doesn't like to be touched, not really. For her, it has never been a casual action, but in these brief moments he rests his hand on her shoulder and he calls her by an Anglecised interpretation of her name and she knows he doesn't mean anything by it except companionship and protection.
She wouldn't let anyone else do this. But she has experienced so little kindness in her life, and she knows that this is the way that she can repay him. She reaches up and takes his hand in hers, lacing their fingers together and he doesn't smile at her, but it's a close thing, until the other trainers break down the door to the training room they barricaded shut, seize him by the arms and drag him away to the room that even she, with all her talents, can not break into.
Until the next time.
He doesn't fight, and she doesn't follow.
But she doesn't forget.
-00000-
She knows he's there. It's a mistake that so many make, thinking that just because she works in close quarters, that she wouldn't notice people watching her from afar. But she does. She can feel his eyes on her as she steps out of the theatre, but she keeps her gaze trained on her mark, just for a moment to see where he is headed. There are only a few that they would send after her, and she needs to do something now, or he will kill her. She thinks that she could probably dodge the first arrow, but she has heard that he never misses and he probably wouldn't the second time, and certainly not the third. There are too many people here, and she has tried not to keep too much from her time in the Red Room - wants to shed herself of that place forever, clear the red on her ledger - but she shares their distaste for collateral damage. It only brings suspicion, and then certain agencies begin to look in to what really happened.
She plots out her marks route in her head and concludes that he is headed for an alleyway. If her watcher doesn't kill her first, this should prove to be a very simple assassination. It's only then that she lifts her gaze and looks for him on the rooftops. It's the disadvantage of his weapon; that the arrow tip is made of metal that can not help to reflect the light of the setting sun, and she spots him almost instantly. He has an arrow notched to his bowstring and pointing directly at her, but he hasn't taken the shot yet. Possibly, he is waiting for her to make her next move to let the arrow loose, but she has to take a risk if she is going to make it out of here alive.
She makes what she hopes is eye contact, smiles as widely as she knows how, and winks. She doesn't stop walking, and soon steps into the alleyway after her mark, without hearing the sound of an arrow whistling after her.
She makes it up to the roof in fifteen minutes flat. It's kind of unacceptable that it took her so long, but there had been other people in the alley and she had had to knock them all out one by one without being seen before she took out the international arms dealer she had followed in. He's waiting for her on the rooftop. Codename: Hawkeye. There is no arrow resting in his bow, but she knows by reputation how fast he can be, and she can't know for sure if she would get to him before he knocks it or not. She needs time to test both their skills, to watch him in action first, before she takes that kind of risk. They stare at each other in silence. She's already taken a number of stupid risks today, what's one more. After all, she can't go on as an unlisted agent forever.
She lets herself relax, only minutely, and Hawkeye sees what she is doing. He smiles at her, and it's not a kind smile, but it's not cruel or mocking either, and it's been so long since someone smiled at her in a way that wasn't lecherous that she feels the action warm her from the inside out in a way that is frankly ridiculous, giving the situation and even the intent behind the smile. "I want to bring you in to S.H.I.E.L.D."
She notices that he doesn't say that S.H.I.E.L.D. wants her, and though she had guessed that by the fact that he was clearly sent here to kill her, she finds it interesting that Hawkeye would mention it now. But she doesn't say anything, just nods her affirmative. He takes a step forward, and it's all she can do to not step in turn and engage. She forces herself to stand still as he stops within arms reach.
"They will only let me bring you in if you're unconscious".
She knew this was coming, but she had hoped it wouldn't. It would be so easy for them to do anything to her after they've drugged her into unconsciousness; to cut her open and see what makes her the way she is, see what the Red Room has done to her, and then she would never wake up again. S.H.I.E.L.D. takes out a notorious assassin and finds out about secret Super Soldier research all in the one mission.
But Hawkeye didn't kill her when he had the chance. Maybe only because he knew that her mission was right, that the arms dealer had needed to be stopped, but she's still alive. And it's not S.H.I.E.L.D. she's handing herself over to. It's him. There's something about him. She doesn't trust him, but she doesn't distrust him, either.
She nods again, and holds out her arm. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small needle. It is clear to her that he had planned this as an option probably before he even stepped onto the plane to come here, and she knows she has made the right decision.
As the drug is released into her bloodstream, the last thing she hears over the buzz of traffic and talk on the streets below them is Hawkeye asking her a question. "I can't keep calling you Black Widow. What's your real name."
She can see the edges of her vision becoming black, and she tells him the only other name that has really meant anything to her.
"Natasha."
-00000-
When the drug wears off and she wakes up in a S.H.I.E.L.D. holding cell it is not Hawkeye waiting there, but a large man in a long black coat and eyepatch. Great spies are unknown by outsiders and most of the 'espionage' community, but the absolute best are the ones that everyone knows, the shadow in the dark that every rookie spy hears about. Nick Fury is one of the best, and for the first time since she felt Hawkeye's eyes on her as she stepped out of the theatre, Natasha tugs at the handcuffs attaching her to the rickety bed and wonders if she made the right decision.
"When I told Agent Barton to take you out, I didn't mean in the romantic sense."
Natasha looks up at Fury, and he looks back at her. She can't tell if he's making a joke. He looks serious, and there was no hint of a lilt in his voice, but if an assignment had said something like that out in the field, she would assume that they were joking. She decides to play it as a straight question, and if he reveals later that he wasn't serious then she can try and claim ignorance to all the subtleties of her non-native language. "I surrendered myself to Hawkeye on my own accord. I am no longer interested in working as a free agent."
Fury blinks, slowly, and she thinks that it's the first time she's seen him blink since she woke up. She doesn't say anything, just watches him. After a beat, he speaks again. "Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D., agent. If you pass the psych evaluation, of course."
Natasha doesn't let her face betray her emotions, but she feels an overwhelming sense of relief as Fury nods - seemingly to thin air, but most likely to the hidden camera she can sense watching her - and then walks in the direction of the exit without another word. As he swings open the door, he turns to her. "That 'take you out' thing was a joke. If you want to get on my good side, you should laugh at my jokes". And then he steps out of the room and swings the door shut behind him.
Natasha doesn't laugh, but she does smile softly to herself.
-00000-
She passes the evaluation; not because they don't find anything, but because they do. She doesn't try to hide it. With the amount of warning she had been given before the evaluation, she had adequate time to hide what she experienced in the Red Room deep down, where not even S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't find it. She is sure Fury knew that, and she is equally sure that this was a test. Natasha is ashamed of her past, but ignoring it will not make it go away. She is going to wipe the red from her ledger herself.
Natasha is not surprised that they don't allow her out in the field straight away, but she's not happy about it. She has been in training for longer than she can accurately or truthfully remember, and she is wasted being kept in headquarters. She understands why they're doing it, of course, but being kept around Fury with her two S.H.I.E.L.D. babysitters always watching over her, she can't help but feel a little resentful. A week ago she was prepping to take out an international arms dealer. A week ago she was out in the world making a difference, if not always for the right people. Now, she's accompanying Fury to meetings and briefings and trying to get the read on Agents May and Hill to determine which would be more likely to allow her to accompany them on a mission without Fury's permission.
It isn't long before she realises what's actually going on, and for the second time Natasha wonders if she really made the right decision, coming to S.H.I.E.L.D. Surely there are other agencies out there that don't offer almost-unrestricted access to recently-defected, ex-Red Room spies. She watches Fury out of the corner of her eye as she walks next to him down the hallway in disbelief. She keeps her face as neutral as possible, but something must slip in response to the sheer lunacy of what's happening here, because Hill and May smile to each other.
"Not used to being trusted are you, Romanoff?"
Natasha doesn't know how Fury found out the Anglicised version of her last name, but she can't even bring herself to reply, because clearly the years as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. have caused Nick Fury to go insane. People don't trust her. In the years since she escaped the Red Room she has tried to be her own person, but she's not ever sure how much of her is her, and how much is memories and thoughts left by her trainers and a veritable cocktail of drugs and serums and electroshock treatments. The only thing Natasha knows is hers and hers alone is the guilt thrumming through her veins, and the face of every single person she killed working for people who could objectively be called the 'bad guys' weighing down on her mind. She is not made to be trusted. She was created to deceive.
But for the past few weeks she has been given access to the inner workings of S.H.I.E.L.D., enough that she has see every weakness and knows every way the organisation could be taken down. It occurs to her that this, perhaps, was the point.
Natasha looks up to meet Fury's eye, and his gaze is softer than she thought possible for him. She smiles.
-00000-
A spider will live in your house, but it is not yours. It is not your pet. It is it's own being, separate from your life, except for sharing the warmth of your four walls. Natasha joins S.H.I.E.L.D. to get in from the cold. She stays because she wants to, not because she has to.
It takes her less than a week to formulate a strategy to patch the holes she observed in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s systems, but two pass before Natasha is finally assigned a handler in Phil Coulson. She spends the extra weeks with Agents May and Hill. She suspects this is another test. She had gotten along with Fury while they were overhauling S.H.I.E.L.D.'s security system. She knows what to do with men. All her life they have been her trainers or her targets. Fury was something more than that, something softer, something like James had been, but different in a way she can't quite put her finger on, that reminds her of what she should be feeling when she thinks of her memories of her family. But it doesn't change the fact that she knows where she stands with men.
Women are different. Women have always been her competition. And she knows that it is not correct for her to think this way, but for as long has she can remember, she has had to fight for her place as the best against the girls she grew up with. Natasha is sure that the reason they leave her with only Agents May and Hill as supervision is because they don't think like that. Both women should have more important things to do than take her out to lunch, but maybe they don't. She can why S.H.I.E.L.D. might have a policy against the need to win at all costs that she feels coursing through her system when she is out on assignment - not just to take out the target, but to annihilate her competition - even if she isn't so sure she shares their position. But Agents May and Hill clearly do. They smile at her over coffee and they talk about old missions and how they would take out increasingly more outrageous high-profile targets. Natasha finds that when the two weeks are over and they hand her over to Coulson, she is sad to see them go. Although, she continues to see enough of Agent May with Agent Coulson that she starts to wonder about whether S.H.I.E.L.D. is very lax about their fraternisation regulations, or if it's that no one wants to try and tell Agent May to stop. Natasha is impressed with Agent Coulson before she ever meets him.
Her first mission, they send her out with Hawkeye. It's a simple snatch-and-grab, well below what either of them were trained for, but she has a funny feeling that it's not just a test for her. Hawkeye smiles at her in the airplane before they take off and tells her to call him Clint, and she doesn't even try to stop herself smiling back.
She and Clint work well together. They have differing styles, but that works to their advantage, rather than detriment. Their smoothest operations are the ones where Natasha enters a building alone, and Clint picks off any stragglers. Sometimes she lets people get away, just so Clint will have something to do. He knows it, too, and afterwards he waits for her out front of the doors with a grin on his face and his bow strung across his back.
Clint is her first real partner, her first real anything, and she falls in love with him because it's more natural than breathing. With his easy smile and his bad jokes and his steady sense of self. Clint Barton knows who he is, even if he is only stumbling through it all. And when she takes him into her bed and when she marries him, he promises to always show her solid ground to stand on. She has drifted for so long, only knowing what she was told, being anything that she needed to be. But Clint offered her a chance to be who she wanted. Not just the whisper of the Black Widow, but Natasha Romanoff, with friends and a family. And in return, she takes him as her own.
-00000-
Natasha has never had the luxury of getting to know her assignments before. In the end, they're all just targets. No matter who they are, who they were or what they've done, in the end she puts a bullet in them, because that's what she needed to do. There was no reason for her to know them.
But now, she's here to observe. It's not her usual racket, but assignments do not get more high profile than this. There's only one other person who Fury would trust with this, and Maria Hill doesn't smile as prettily as her when things aren't going at the speed she wants. There were ripples through the intelligence community when Fury promoted Hill to deputy director over her, but anyone who knows either one of them knows why he did. Natasha is a field agent, through and through, and Maria was born to give the orders that have to be given. Coulson is on the case, too, and a few years ago May would have been with him. As a team, they were flawless, but now she has taken herself out of fieldwork and out of their lives and it's a thought so painful that she doesn't linger on it; how completely they fell apart, and the ever-present possibility that she and Clint could end the same way. How afraid she is that one day they will. She never had the chance to make a selfish decision before Clint. He's the only thing she's ever chosen for herself.
So there really is no other option than to dress her up in a tight skirt and heels and send her undercover to build a character profile. She watches and she waits and she sends reports back and she comes to a decision that she's never really had the chance to come to before. She doesn't like Tony Stark.
Sure, there are plenty of people out there that Natasha doesn't like. But they're all abstract ideas - dictators, those who prey on the innocent - and Tony Stark is not like them. He's not evil, objectively. He doesn't want to hurt people, beyond some embarrassment. He doesn't want to end the world. He wants to save it, or at least the parts of it that he cares about. Underneath the suit, Tony Stark is a man she could pass by in the street and never think of again. He's just a guy. And Natasha doesn't like him. It's strange for her, disliking someone because of who they are, and not what they've done. She thinks it means that she's growing as a person.
She's read his file. She's memorised it, even, so she doesn't accidentally give away how much she knows. And she knows that for all he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he's had a hard life. He's just trying to clean the red from his ledger, same as her; trying to make himself a better man, despite the legacy he was born into. Tony Stark was kidnapped in Afghanistan and Iron Man returned and Natasha can see what he's trying to do, but it doesn't mean that she likes him.
She likes Pepper. Pepper is beautiful and she walks around in killer heels like she was born in them and she takes crap from no one. Natasha can see in her eyes that she is afraid, sometimes, that she feels out of her depth, but she stares straight into the eyes of all the men who try to tell her how to do her job and they all end up fleeing the room with their tail between their legs because Pepper has memorised every report and article they've written in the past year. Natasha likes hanging out with her in her office and pouring over official documention because she always has something intelligent to say that is tinged with just the right amount of incredulousness, and when Pepper asks her to teach her how she threw Happy like that, Natasha makes a mental note to give her Maria Hill's phone number at the end of all this. She's sure the two of them could be running the world in under a week.
Pepper Potts is terrifyingly competent, and there is nothing Natasha enjoys or admires more than competence. And Stark doesn't treat her like she deserves. She knows that he loves her, adores her, even, but he flirted with her in front of Pepper, let her get her hands inside his Iron Man glove, inside the most essential parts of him, and she tried to make that happen, of course, but there was a part of her that had desperately hoped it wouldn't work. Because Pepper is so completely devoted to him, and she doesn't even know that he feels much more for her than friendship.
Natasha knows it's not entirely Stark's fault. She knows he is trying to deal with everything that happened to him and everything he did that was not always under his control. But she does not approve of his coping strategies, and those are entirely his. He drinks too much and he doesn't listen enough and he tries too hard to make it seem like nothing touches him. He could hurt someone. He almost did hurt a whole bunch of people at his birthday, would have, in fact, if Colonel Rhodes hadn't showed up with a stolen Iron Man suit to take him down, and Natasha thinks that if she had the chance to meet him, she'd like Rhodes, too. She owes him. She is formulating a strategy for if Stark goes completely off the rails, but it wasn't finished at the time. She could not have saved all those people, and she dislikes Stark even more for putting her in a position where that was a very real and present threat, when it should not have been. She wishes that she could forget everything the taught her in the Red Room, except that who they made her is who she is now, and she can use it to do good, even if she will never make up for all the bad. But they were also the ones to teach her to minimise collateral damage. For them, it was only because wanton destruction attracts too much attention, but Tony Stark is not a person she wants to be around, not when the Red Room had more clearly defined rules about bystanders than he does.
After she reveals herself as S.H.I.E.L.D. to him, she expects him to be angry and hurt and scared. She had her hand inside the Iron Man suit, in the most personal part of him, the part that he uses to define himself, and he knows why she did it, and how easily she played his weaknesses. She expects him to lash out at her. Even so, when Stark calls her fake and questions whether or not she is even a person of her own underneath all her covers and her S.H.I.E.L.D. logo, she wonders if he's better than she thought he was, if he somehow read her own greatest insecurity. She's never been more angry in her life.
-00000-
After she joined S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha tried to read every piece of popular literature she could get her hands on. She found most of them to be overrated, like she was supposed to like them just because everyone else did and that was how they became popular in the first place, but there were a few that she genuinely enjoyed. Every time Clint made a joke about some new book she hadn't read, she would sneak out at night and buy it. If he ever wondered where their money disappeared to, he never asked, but she suspects he knows, and makes the references on purpose so she will know what to read. She had really liked Harry Potter, especially when it had looked like the series may actually have ended with Potter's death. She'd mentioned that to Clint after she'd finished it, and he'd laughed and said it had to be the Russian in her, to hope to go through all that literature only for it to end in a tragedy. She had briefly thought he was making fun of her, until she read some of the Russian classics.
However, there were some parts of Harry Potter that she had not liked. Too clean an ending notwithstanding, she had never quite bought what had bought Harry, Ron and Hermione together as friends. Growing up, she had faced far worse things than a fictional mountain troll and had never bonded with the people that had been there with her. They had faced dangers together, but they did not suddenly become friends afterwards, and especially not if the only reason she was in danger in the first place was because one of the other members of her team had made some mistake that forced her to be there.
After the Chitauri attack on New York City, Natasha realises that her disbelief came from her not having faced her mountain troll yet. Captain Rogers and Thor are good people (or, she supposes, aliens, in Thor's case), although she didn't spend enough time with either of them to really get to know them and they both disappear pretty quickly in the aftermath. She genuinely likes Bruce Banner, and that does not surprise her as much as everyone seems to think it should, given that she was so completely terrified of his alter ego. But Bruce is nice. He joked with her when they met, and most people do not joke with the Black Widow. Truthfully, it was not a kind joke, but she finds that possibly even more remarkable. He's not afraid of her, and if he's wary around her, it's only because of what he might do. But despite his capacity for terrible destruction, she only had to take one look at him to see that he is so, so vulnerable. He is more human than anyone whose rage transforms them into a giant green force of nature has a right to be, and she aches for him. She knows what it is, to be afraid of a part of herself; to know that anywhere at any time someone could do something that would break that part of her out of the cage she tries to keep inside and she could hurt the people she cares about without even knowing she did. It's been a long time since she escaped the Red Room and she doesn't think she has any trigger words any more, just as Bruce seems to have a rough (although clearly incomplete) handle on keeping his own beast inside, but it's never something that you ever feel confident about. Natasha wants to help him, to take his burden and make it her own. Yes, she was afraid of the Hulk, but she kind of likes that, too. It proves that even when she lets her instincts take over and becomes more Widow than Natasha Romanoff, she is still human enough to feel fear.
Sitting in the shawarma restaurant, Clint's leg propped up on her chair (and there is a part of her that is more grateful for that than even saving humanity from an alien invasion), she finds that she doesn't even dislike Tony Stark. And that, more than anything, proves to her that you really do bond with people when you face great danger together.
(Honestly, it is possible that she feels better disposed towards Stark because Pepper seems to have found her place with him since she was Natalie Rushman, but Natasha would rather think about Harry Potter right now)
-00000-
She and Clint hole up in one of their safe houses for two months in the aftermath. It's the longest she's ever taken off the job, but there is plenty to keep her occupied. She only takes one phone call the entire time. It's Fury, with the news that Coulson's revival attempt had been a success, although she knows he's holding back from telling her the whole truth about his condition.
When she slips into the bedroom to tell Clint, she feels a little sick with herself. The truth is, there was always going to be a high level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that would make the sacrifice play to bring the Avengers together. And if Coulson hadn't stepped in and gotten himself killed, it would've been Fury. He's the only other agent they all knew. Coulson is her friend. She is under no illusions that she would be here if it weren't for him. Clint may have been the first to make the call, but she would never have gotten through the doors if it weren't for Coulson. But she believes that you can choose your family, and Fury is hers, and there is that small, selfish part close to her heart that is so incredibly glad that he wasn't the one to have to die, regardless of the potential for bringing him back to life.
But Clint smiles when she tells him, and it's the first smile she's seen from him in three weeks. The attack he lead on the Hellcarrier ended in the death of more than five dozen agents who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and Coulson's survival did not nearly make up for that. But Natasha has found that sometimes, you have to let it. You have to take the wins you can get, because otherwise you are nothing. You have to be able to find something to let you heal.
He does start to heal, after she brings him the news, and Natasha will probably never forgive herself for being so selfish about Fury, except Clint would be glad that she is willing to label things as important to her. It's strange for her to be on this side of the process, though. She's been on the receiving end of a brain wipe and subsequent recovery more than once. She heard about Selvig and how he's been coping in the aftermath, and she's always said that there were good things that came from her time in the Red Room, even if she doesn't want to think too much about that, but she knows what to expect when Clint remembers something else that happened. Natasha is kind of glad that he spent most of his time sleeping up until now.
He's always been the touching type, reaching out and dragging his hand over her arm, tucking her hair behind her ears so he can see her face when she's near him, but lately she's found that she's the one grasping for him. It's not unusual that he hasn't been initiating physical contact. Loki's mind control had made him want to kill her, and he remembers that feeling clearly, even if it wasn't his own. He attacked her on the Hellcarrier. There is a part of him that clearly feels that if he touches her he will hurt her, and she understand where that comes from. She's dealt with it ever since she met him.
Natasha doesn't know how to be someone's anchor. She doesn't know how to be here for Clint, now. She doesn't know how to remind him that he is still someone, that he is no one but himself, when she doesn't know how to tell herself the same thing. She has friends now, and a family, and a name that means something that isn't just a title, but sometimes she still feels like she could just float away, like she will just dissolve into smoke. She can be anything that anyone wants her to be, but she never really chose who she was for herself until meeting Clint gave her the opportunity. But now he looks lost, and if someone as sure of himself as Clint can lose it, than what chance does she have for holding onto her own identity.
She doesn't know how to be someone's anchor, but she has to try, for him. So she reaches out as they sleep on their sides of the bed and links their fingers together just he falls asleep and even though it means that she wakes up with her hand numb and stiff it is worth it, because it means that he kept hold of it all night.
And when he walks up behind her one day and trails his knuckles down her spine, she knows that he's going to be alright eventually.
-00000-
Natasha and Clint did not always work together. In fact, they had not even worked together on the majority of their jobs for years. But she'd never had a regular field partner other than him. Until Steve Rogers decided that he would work for S.H.I.E.L.D.
Rogers was the kind of soldier a commander could only dream of - the kind that genuinely wanted and would do everything and anything to help his countrymen - but he was struggling to adapt to the shades of gray morality S.H.I.E.L.D. thrived on. Natasha admired him, actually; that after all he had seen, he still managed to believe in right and wrong as absolutes, but it was potentially troubling. She understood why Fury wanted her to keep an eye on him.
She never thought she would take to him, however. Captain America is everything she never was. He's clean. He's loyal. He's good, and when Natasha looks at him, it's a stark reminder that she is never going to be any of those things. There will always be red on her ledger.
And then she gets to know Steve. Steve is not Captain America. Steve is just a sad kid from Brooklyn, so desperately alone and drowning in this new world, and she want to help him with every fiber of her being. The first assignment they worked together, she broke into his apartment to let him know she arrived. It had been midday, sunny, with a cool breeze to just take the edge off. She and Clint had planned on spending the day at the park - she had been given the set of A Song of Ice and Fire two weeks ago, and she couldn't believe no one had recommended them to her before now - before Hill had called and given her the briefing on some smuggling ring or another. Natasha had expected Steve to be out doing something with his day, so when she slipped through the window of his apartment she was surprised to find him sitting on his couch. There was a record playing on his gramophone and he was staring at a spot on the wall just above it, not even looking over to her coming to stand next to him, and Natasha's heart breaks for him, because loneliness like that is something no one should have to endure, especially someone as genuinely good as Steve. When they take in the leaders of the ring a week later and arrive back on American soil, she refuses to leave his side until he agrees to have dinner with her and Clint.
For the next two months or so she invites him out for meals with them every couple of days, and he always comes along. Steve has no problems saying "no" to people that he thinks are doing the wrong thing, but she has a hunch that he never learned to say it politely and he doesn't want to offend her. Natasha thinks it's endearing, if completely unnecessary, and she has no issues taking advantage of it in order to get Steve out of the house. Then Clint mentions that the point of all of this was for Steve to make friends, and he can't do that if he's just with them all the time, at which point Natasha decides to try setting him up on dates.
She knows Steve isn't straight. She's seen him look at Clint just as much as he does her, and if she were more willing to share what she has chosen for herself, she thinks the date search would be over as soon as it begun. But as it stands, she starts throwing out names of girls every time she and Steve meet up. He may be bisexual, but she is aware of what the attitudes towards same sex relationships were like before he was frozen, and she doesn't want to push that angle until she's sure that he can handle it.
Her first thought had been Hill, but she is Steve's superiour agent, and Natasha doesn't think that he would be entirely comfortable with a relationship that could potentially create that kind of conflict of interest (also, she followed him, once, when he went to the only other person he visits besides her and Clint, and Steve doesn't need another reminder of Peggy Carter and all he lost). Besides that, he's not Maria's type. And then there was May, but last she heard May ways working with Coulson again and has started taking up field missions in order to have his back, and some things are just inevitable.
Natasha realises that for all she promised herself she was going to stop seeing the women around her as competition, habits of a lifetime are hard to break. She only really knows them and Pepper, and none of them are available (she still thinks Pepper can do better than Stark, but she seems comfortable in their relationship, finally, and Natasha is happy for her self-assuredness there, if nothing else), so she spends her off time talking to S.H.I.E.L.D. employees. And then she asks Clint for advice.
Steve doesn't go out with any of the girls she suggests. Natasha thinks he's afraid, but of what, she can't be sure. Of replacing the people he left in his past, perhaps, or of losing the new people in his present. It's not healthy, she knows, but she understands.
She never thought she'd take to Steve, because Steve is good and she isn't, but he doesn't think like that. He may not fully trust her and that's fine, she doesn't really trust herself, but he looks at her like he thinks that she could be good. Like what she's done in the past doesn't outweigh what she's trying to do now. It's not just that she feels acutely for what has happened to him, it's that she likes him.
And when S.H.I.E.L.D. puts out a call for Steve's capture, Natasha steals the flashdrive from Steve's (terrible, awful, what was he thinking?) hiding place and waits at the hospital for him to return. It's almost intoxicating, having Steve Rogers believe in you.
-00000-
It's the fact that she didn't see that really hurts. Not that parts of S.H.I.E.L.D. were corrupt; because that's to be expected of any big organisation, and especially one that deals in secrecy and moral ambiguity like they did. But it's that she didn't see how deep it went, despite how much time she spent analysing and planning to make S.H.I.E.L.D. more secure.
Because she failed. She failed Clint. She failed Fury. She failed Coulson and May and Maria and even Steve, even though he hasn't been with them long, because they believed in the organisation, believed that S.H.I.E.L.D., were doing the right thing, protecting people. Natasha always thought them fools for thinking that, for trusting a faceless organisation to remain bound by arbitrary rules that existed only on paper, but she never wanted their belief to be broken. She got involved with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s administration because she wanted to keep her friends safe, because she wanted them to have something to believe in and a reason to get up and go to work every day even if it meant killing people, and she couldn't give that to them, because she didn't see. She let them down.
Natasha doesn't let Steve see how's she's feeling when she first finds out about HYDRA, and she doesn't let it show on her face when she's talking to Fury or Pierce or the world. She remains blank, because it is their time to grieve, not hers. S.H.I.E.L.D. was their safe haven, not hers. And she is the Black Widow. The world knows about her now, about what she's done, and she has an image to maintain. Someone has to be out there to face the public, and weakness has always meant death.
Two and a half weeks pass before she can drop off the grid, and it's another two until Clint joins her. She hadn't been able to leave him any hints about where she was going, so she assumes that he checked every one of their safe houses until he found her. That night she lets Clint wrap her up in his arms and she cries into his chest; for everything the world has lost, for everything that he's lost, for everything that she's lost.
Natasha is in her late twenties or maybe she's much older than that, she can't be sure, and she didn't even know that she could cry anymore - couldn't remember the last time when she did - but she realised something when Clint buried one of his hands in her hair and wrapped the other around her waist, something she hadn't known in all the years she has lived: she has a home.
And S.H.I.E.L.D. had been a part of it.
-00000-
Natasha could never bring herself to be afraid of James. She knows she should be. He's not really a person, not any more, just orders in a human shell conditioned and wiped to fulfill the will of others, but she doesn't believe that. The first time she met him, that is what they had told her, that he was there to put her through her paces and then he would be put back into his box for the next time, like an educational children's toy. But then when she hit the training mat on her back he had reached down and offered her his hand to help her to her feet, and she knew that somehow they were wrong about him. That somehow there was some human part of him that remained, and she was not afraid of him.
He's missed her twice when he should have killed her (and the second time was so sloppy, so visible, that either HYDRA is spectacularly bad at secrecy for a secret organisation - and all evidence points to the contrary - or they were never planning on the Winter Soldier surviving the mission). She has a scar to show for it, but she also has her life, and if she truly had a reason to fear James, then she should have none of those. The Winter Soldier is an assassin, and assassins are encouraged to not take out anyone that isn't their target, but she escaped from the Red Room and went freelance before joining S.H.I.E.L.D. Regardless of whether she is the specific target, Natasha knows that she's on the list to be taken out on sight if someone gets the chance. James had two clear, easy chances, two times when she deliberately put herself in front of the bullet to protect her charge. And Natasha is still alive.
That doesn't mean, however, that she's not wary when she hears that Steve has bought the Winter Soldier to Avenger's Tower. Whether or not she sees him as a threat to her, she remembers what she was like when she first started shaking off her years of brainwashing and conditioning. It was not pleasant to go through it alone, but she's glad she did. She was dangerous at the best of times. She doesn't think that James should be here, not around so many people who are struggling to hold onto their own sanity and control.
But he is here, and it's out of her control. She saw the way Steve had looked at him. It's not something that she has any say in stopping. And as much as she wants Steve to make friends in the here and now (and she'd actually had a brief thought about setting Steve up with Sam Wilson before she'd seen the way Sam had looked at Hill when she rescued them in the back of that van), she doesn't want to stop it, either.
Still, she makes sure that Steve is out of the building when she slips in to see James again the first time. She needs to not be able to see him when she sees James again. Natasha always does what needs to be done. But she worries that she might not be able to with Steve watching. No matter how she feels about James, no matter how Steve feels about Bucky, she is not going to let the Winter Soldier hurt anyone. For all their sakes.
He is waiting for her to step out of the elevator. Pepper and Tony are in the next room watching television, and Natasha would grimace at that, but it would give too much away. They lock eyes, and for a second Natasha wonders if she actually could kill him, if it came to it, before James is on his feet and striding towards her, recognition painted so clearly on his face. She never saw him display emotions like this when she knew him, and it is beautiful.
His hands go immediately to where he shot through her to his target and he apologises desperately in Russian and it's nothing like when Clint touches her, there's no bone-deep longing to be closer, no fierce pride in getting to call him her own, but it's just as profound, like that last piece falling into place, and suddenly she can see the jigsaw puzzle that is her with her own eyes.
Yes, there are pieces that were taken from it, blank spaces where there should be memory and life, but they are not missing; those dark places just throw the light into sharper contrast. She is Natasha Romanoff. She is the Black Widow. She is a protector and a spy and a wife and a friend. She has Clint and she has Fury and now there's James making small circles on her hip and muttering mostly nonsense about never getting to see her again to fill that part she never knew was missing. She's not just a fearful whisper in the dark, she's a person, with people who care about her and that is terrifying, but it is all there for her to see, in all its imperfections.
That night Natasha calls Clint. She doesn't know where he is. He didn't tell her and she didn't ask, but she is sure she could figure it out if she needed to. But a phone call will be enough for now. She wraps herself up in a blanket and listens to the dial tone and hopes that she isn't interrupting anything important to whatever mission he's assigned himself. He picks up after the fourth ring, and he sounds just as tired as she feels.
"Did I ever tell you about James?" she asks, and she hears him inhale sharply. She knows that she's mentioned him in passing, just as she knows that she has never told Clint about him completely. It's the only part of her that she's kept to herself from him, the only part that she has not told him of, because to speak of it would be to ruin it. She is not always good with words. She doesn't use them often enough. She could not do justice to the one part of her early life that did not hurt her, did not take. But as she listens to Clint breathing, patiently waiting for her to talk, Natasha can not help but feel an overwhelming rush of love.
"He taught me how to speak English..."