A/N: a big thank you to tarpeach1981 for betaing this one-shot story of mine! *hugs* i do hope you guys enjoy it(: it was father's day in my country, and i just thought, what the hell. so i wrote this(: oh, and, for those of you who read Superhuman, i juuuust might be writing up a Clint POV to that(;
disclaimer: well, i own her mom and her dad!(: otherwise, disclaimed.
Her family had perished in a simple building fire. Yes, the only family she had up til she was nine. An unfortunate accident with gas canisters and cigarettes was all that was needed to steal them away from her with cruelty, breaking her little, innocent soul.
On days like this, the celebration of simplistic parenthood, she couldn't help but remember the way her father loved to attend her ballet recitals and give her the loudest applause. Her mother, of course, had also been fairly supportive of her and gave her endearing gestures. But her father pampered her, gave her the good things and revealed the greater side of life. She loved to dance on his feet where his arms carried her and he did all the work.
How had she gone astray? From all his love and his admiration, from the innocent side of life. How had she turned into a criminal, a killer, taking the innocent lives of others? It wasn't exactly the death or the darkness of it all. Possibly, it was the loneliness.
The loneliness drove her off the edge. It made her plunge into the darkest side of the world that her father had created from his own hands. The happy, optimistic world. Gone, just like her father. To know, Natasha wasn't exactly the kind of girl that played with knives and all other weaponry.
She was a feminine child. She would never take part in a fight. Her passion for expressive contemporary dance and the arts was greater than anyone would ever expect. And her love for humanity, her love for her parents, no-one would believe her to the ends of the world, but it was something she cherished.
When her world realistically fell apart, she fell apart. Natalya, the girl with the frills and the dresses, the teddy bears, the blonde hair and the dolls, she fell apart. Eventually taking her place a few years down was a shadow, so full of darkness and fear. So timid. The shadow, her name was Natasha.
Natasha sought for a place in the world, learning how to fight and take charge of her life. She grew from strength. From bloodshed and bloodlust. Revenge, as easily said. Her first victims were the innocent people that had escaped the building fire. How could they stay so happy while she lost everything? Where was the fairness? The impartiality of God?
Realising that spilt blood satiated her bloodthirsty soul, she found her place. A killer, going against all virtues imparted from her father. But Natasha believed that Natalya was gone. She wasn't Natalya, the sweet, young and innocent girl with a father that carried a heart of gold. She was Natasha, cold, heartless and back from the dead.
She made a name for herself after dyeing her hair a fiery scarlet colour, washing away her past. The Black Widow. And the Black Widow killed many. She was a global catastrophe, sending everyone into panic as long as she remained unleashed.
In fact, the Natasha that existed now could say that the Natasha, then, was the epitome of a lost child. She was a lost child, only waiting for someone to break her and realise that Natalya was inside of her, somewhere, hiding from the rest of the world because she knew she was alone.
A man, however, finally came up to her. He looked into her eyes and said that it was okay, that he sawher and that he could make Natalya surface again. He was a SHIELD's Agent Clint Barton. Originally sent to kill her and condemn the demon, he took one scrutinising look at her, and at first glance, he knew she was as harmless as the blonde nine-year-old she had once been.
She, of course, believed him. Natalya wanted to, and to hell with Natasha.
Over the years of hard-earned trust, Clint had finally gotten through to her, because he wasn't any different from Natasha at the start. It was a little chain reaction of reaching out, pulling each lost soul to safety and to light.
Undeniably, Natasha missed her parents, and Clint brought her to her childhood home. Years of untouched furniture brought back the memories she never really forgot.
She remembered how the hardwood floor made squeaky noises against her father's shoes when he danced around with her. She remembered how Natalya would sit in his lap and listen to him talk about wanting to walk her down the aisle and having his father-daughter dance at her wedding when she found a man.
Natasha remembered his voice as he sang Bob Carlisle's Butterfly Kisses to her, saying that it would be the song they dance to when he gives her away to her future husband.
"Daddy, I'll stay with you!" Natasha remembered the way the young girl squealed, because Daddy was a good man. He was a great man and she loved him so very much as a daughter.
Daddy shook his head and laughed. Daddy said no, and she pouted her lips like an upset child. He said, "Dear Natalya, Daddy will find you a good man. Daddy will find you a man that loves you, and he'll stay with you forever when Daddy is gone."
He left early.
Falling to the floor, she cried that night, whispering words in Russian. Daddy, don't go. Daddy, come back.But he never did return. The arms that held her steady was Clint's, soothing her over and over as she stifled sobs into his chest. It was from there, Natasha believed, that she and Clint had developed an emotional bond so strong it had no kryptonite.
Remembering all that, Natasha sat at the table, a gun in hand. She observed her target, a man that SHIELD found would jeopardise humanity like the Black Widow did. He did bad things like she did. The man took the lives of innocent people, and this was his punishment. Natasha watched him from the window of the café, them sitting a few tables apart.
His daughter, around the age of eight, wrapped her arms around him. "I love you, Daddy!" She said, handing him a father's day card with the same words scrawled across the paper. He picked the little girl up in his arms and swung her around, kissing her cheek and thanking her. "I love you too, sweetheart." He replied in French.
His daughter then asked him if he was leaving today. If he was going somewhere after that. When he would come back. He shook his head, smiling. "Nowhere, sweetheart. I'm staying today." He wasn't in the know that he was about to die today from Natasha's gun.
Or even if he had known, like she knew it was probably her time when Clint came looking for her with his bow and quiver, he hadn't wanted to make his little girl cry. His wife brought their little girl to the playground after that, and Natasha's target stood up to follow after a few minutes. He looked at Natasha, mouthed a 'thank you' for granting him life that day, and stalked off to find his family.
Natasha didn't follow. She just sat there, in the café, and finished her cup of coffee before dialling for a SHIELD hovercraft to take her home. That evening, Fury had scrutinised her loyalty to SHIELD for not completing her mission.
Clint waited outside, fretting over her decision and wondering if Fury had dismissed her from SHIELD completely. He was almost there, too, just for the fact that he had brought Natasha in, whether it meant an imprisonment for the Black Widow or not. The fact that she had let her target go, instead of bringing him in, it was a question of loyalty, but he knew it wasn't that.
At night, Clint sneaked into her sleeping quarters and, for an unexplained reason, caught her by surprise. He kissed her on the cheek, the forehead, then on the lips, hoping for it to last longer so he could question about her meeting with Fury a little later. If she was dismissed, it would possibly be the last time he would see her and feel her.
"What did Fury say? Why didn't you do it?" Clint mumbled into her hair, damp from her bath from earlier on. It smelled of sweet cherry blossoms, somehow. He ran a hand up and down her arm, then watched her eyes as they gazed into the far distance.
After allowing a small moan to leave her lips as acknowledgement to his question, Natasha turned to face him. "Do you know what day it is today?" He didn't, but she did. Clint shook his head and rested his cheek on her head again, making her chuckle. When she started to move out of his arms, he had a quizzical look on his face.
She dug through her drawer for a while, then revealed a recording device. A camera-looking recorder of some sort. "Remember that night at my house in Volgograd? You gave this to me." Natasha turned on the worn camera and a fairly dim light appeared to illuminate the screen. After clicking a button for a bit, she handed the device to Clint.
He remembered passing it to her, but he had no recollection of whatever content it held, probably because he hadn't watched it as means of personal privacy. Peeling his eyes from the quiet woman at his side, they flickered back down to the screen.
The video shook for a bit, blurry, before focusing on a young girl. She was beautiful, and the innocence in her face was divine. Her blonde hair flowed perfectly in fluid straight strands, ending at her hips with a gentle curl. She wore a dress, a white dress with a light blue ribbon wrapped around her waist with a bow-tie knot.
He didn't recognise the girl at all, her features bubbly and adorable, but he could never forget the saltwater green eyes that never failed to seize him with their depth. "Say hi!" A blithely voice laughed from behind the camera, to the femininely vivacious girl, and she waved instantly.
"Hi Daddy!" She squealed into the screen. "Hi Mommy!" The camera juggled for awhile, and the girl's father appeared in the screen, her beautiful eyes following. It tore Clint's heart to watch. The father lifted the girl into his arms, and she asked him to greet the screen too as she sat on his leg. He greeted his wife instead.
He turned to the face the girl with interest. "What day is it today, sweetheart? I'll let you guess!"
"Father's day! Me and Mommy bought you a present too!" In an instance, the girl ran into her room and ran back out, a wrapped present in hand. 'To Daddy.' it said in a scrawled out font on a little card. The words underneath was in a smooth italic font, probably written by an adult as compared to the first scribble of words. 'From your wife, Yvette, and your little angel.'
Yvette. It was her mother's name. Clint had read it in her profiling. He blinked a couple of times, knowing that Natasha was watching him closely rather than the video. He snaked a hand down her arm and held her hand, intertwining her fingers in his.
The video made a little noise, the sound of ripped paper, but he didn't really watch. He pecked Natasha on the forehead before watching the screen again. "A tie? You shouldn't have!" Her father, eagerly rejoicing over his present with his beloved daughter, said. Natasha chuckled beside Clint, reminiscing the truth of that scene. She and her mom hadn't really known what to buy.
"I love you, Daddy!" She hugged her father, standing up on the sofa. Clint felt Natasha lean a little closer into him, tensing up slightly. "I love you too, Natalya." The man beckoned, kissing her forehead ever so slightly with tenderness. Her smile was genuine then, the brightest Clint had ever seen. Thiswas Natalya.
The video stopped after a few seconds, then started to replay again from the start, but Clint turned the device off as he knew his answer. Compassion. She had let him walk free, and it was simply out of compassion.
"My target, he had a daughter around eight. He was like my father, in the ways he treated family, except that he committed crimes for all the wrong reasons." Natasha started to explain, bringing back the memories of her mission today.
"For all the bad things he'd done, he didn't deserve to die today. Or at least, his daughter didn't deserve the loss any less. She was happy. The smile on her face. I remember how that felt. And she's such a young child. I didn't want her to lose that, Clint."
She was Natalya today. And knowing that the little blonde-haired girl with her father's heart of gold still existed in Natasha, ready to outshine the darkness that had loomed above her for so many years, Clint knew his mission was accomplished.
Eventually, Clint had gotten down on one knee and promised her, specifically giving his promise to the blonde-haired girl she would have grown up to be, Natalya, endless love and all the things a man would say to propose. She had said yes, of course. From the events of her father's promise to his death, her loss of direction and her resurrection, all of it leading up to Clint's proposal, Clint was, without doubt, what her father had promised her.
Even if she had grown out of fitting over his shoes, her father had still found her a great man. Tears fell as she repeated it at their wedding, and to conclude her speech, she whispered in Russian. "Daddy kept his promise, he found a man. Thank you, Daddy."
Natasha hoped he heard her, wherever he was at.
THE END!
happy? sad?(: i just really think that she had a better father-daughter relationship than with her mom!