A/N Hello hello! Wow you guys! Thanks so much to everyone who's already read and reviewed this fic so far :D The show of support for this fic already has really exceeded my expectations so thank you again! I did want to give you guys a heads up that there is some red room canon typical violence and something that could possibly considered dubcon? Nothing is explicit but I don't want to blindside anyone. Anyways this chapter should definitely clear up some questions that I know people had after chapter one so I hope you all enjoy!
And once again my ever lasting thanks to Alexandra926 for being an amazing beta and giving this the posting stamp of approval :D
In all the years that had passed since then, Natasha never had figured out why they had allowed them to be a family. She had many theories that she'd come up with over the years, but they never quite seemed to ring true. Even when she had been living it, she'd wondered. But it wasn't a question she would have dared to try to have answered.
When they'd first informed a still-young Natalia that she was to be bred to the Winter Soldier, she didn't know what to think. Her first instinct was to worry that her handlers had discovered the affair they had carried out on their last mission. And that this was somehow a trap to allow Natalia to incriminate herself, that would end with punishment for them both.
Instead, she was told that they had shown compatibility, both in and out of the field, and that with their enhanced genetic makeup, they were prime candidates for a new program that was being implemented. She had had no desire to bear a child. Nothing in her raising or training had prepared her for this possibility, but she was proud to be chosen and would do her duty for her country as was required of her.
That very night, her few personal belongings were moved to the quarters she would be sharing with the Soldier.
Once they received confirmation that she had conceived, she was pulled from active duty. Her new mission to nurture the life inside of her. The first time that the Winter Soldier was sent out and she was left behind, she didn't expect him to come back to her. After all, he had done his part in their shared mission; the next eight months were up to her.
Three weeks later, she was curled around the toilet; the infamous Black Widow laid low by morning sickness. The doctors said it was a good sign. A sick mother meant a strong future son or daughter for the Glory of the Soviet Union. Natalia didn't know if that was true, but there was nothing she could do about it either way, so she simply accepted what was happening to her.
She was so ill however, that when she heard the bathroom door open when she was supposed to be alone in her rooms, she couldn't even lift her head to look at the intruder, let alone defend herself if needs be. But a hand on the back of her neck told her everything she needed to know about the interloper and she couldn't hold back the moan of pleasure at the feeling of the almost ice-cold metal hand on her overheated skin.
After a few moments she managed to turn her head enough to glance up the Soldier.
"They didn't reassign my quarters," he replied to the question clear in her eyes.
She nodded once before she was sick again. Whether it was an oversight or by design, in that moment they both decided not to draw attention to it and take what comfort from each other that they could.
And so they lived together and slept together. He did everything in his power to alleviate her discomfort and she was always there, waiting for him to get back from any missions he was sent on. But they didn't speak of the baby. It was the elephant in the room. In fact, Natalia tried not think about it at all, but the constant medical exams and her growing body made it hard to ignore the forming life inside of her.
She didn't know if it was by coincidence or by design, but two weeks before the baby was due, the Soldier was sent out on a mission and she was moved to the infirmary where she could be monitored around the clock.
And in the early hours just before dawn, on a cold snowy morning in late January, Natalia went into labor. For hours she bore the pain with a stoic calm as doctors, nurses and scientists buzzed around her. The day came and went, and just before midnight, with a pained groan, Natalia brought a perfect baby girl into the world.
The child was quickly taken to another room and for the first time in weeks Natalia found herself alone. She took advantage of the quiet to close her eyes and rest after her long day. She'd fallen into a light doze, when someone entering the room had her eyes snapping open.
It was one of the nurses who had assisted with the delivery, and she was carrying a swaddled bundle in her arms. She tried to hand the baby to Natalia, but she just shook her head in refusal, squeezing her eyes shut.
"What is wrong with you, child?" the older woman scolded.
"I don't want to see her," Natalia said flatly. "Just take her to whoever is going to care for her."
"What are you talking about?" the nurse asked, confused. "You're her Mama, you're going to take care of her."
Natalia looked at the nurse with suspicious eyes. "Who told you that?"
"Well, there's no one else here to take care of her," she said, clearly starting to lose patience. "And if someone doesn't feed this babe soon, she's going to start screaming well enough to wake the dead."
Tentatively, Natalia reached out for the swaddled baby and took her daughter in her arms for the first time. She looked down at the little girl with impersonal eyes, noting clinically that she had the same thick, dark shock of hair and blue eyes as her father, but she had Natalia's own plump lips and chin. She was pulling the blanket away from her face to get a better look at her, when a tiny fist emerged and wrapped itself around her finger.
An unfamiliar weight settled in Natalia's chest. She didn't have a name for it; she had no frame of reference for this feeling, but as she looked at this tiny fragile creature in her arms looking back at her, she felt as though her heart might actually burst.
The baby was eight days old before the Soldier returned from his mission. When he let himself into their rooms, he found Natalia there, watching the infant sleep. The Black Widow didn't need to hear him to know that he was there, but she didn't turn around either. On silent feet, he crossed the room to stand beside her. As Russia's two most dangerous assassins stood over the bassinet, neither of them spoke for a moment that stretched long into the night.
"What have you decided to call him?" the Soldier asked, the first to break the silence.
"Her," Natalia corrected. "I haven't, yet. I never thought that I'd be allowed to decide. I keep expecting they'll take her away at any moment."
"She needs a name." He didn't try to reassure her that they wouldn't take the baby. He expected much of the same and wouldn't give her false hope. "Names are important."
His words carried weight, coming from a man without one.
"Darya," Natalia said, softly. "It means Owner of Goodness."
"Goodness," he echoed quietly. "Yes. We will call her Darya."
They stood in silence for another long while, until this time it was Natalia who broke the quiet.
"I think," she paused mid-thought. "I think I love her," she confessed into the dark, her chest heavy with this unfamiliar emotion.
The Soldier reached out and trailed his fingers down the baby's perfect cheek. "Love is for children," he said softly, in cryptic agreement.
Natalia looked at the Soldier as he looked at their daughter, and thought that maybe she could love him too.
And so, they were largely left alone to raise their daughter, deep in the compound of Department X. They still were sent out on regular missions, but never at the same time so that there was always someone there to care for Darya. It seemed as though their handlers mostly chose to ignore the little girl's existence, except for the doctors that entered their quarters like clockwork to check her physical and mental progress.
And on that point, everyone was thrilled. Young Darya exceeded all expectations, easily surpassing every benchmark in her development. She was up and running around their suite at eight months old. By the time she was a year old she was speaking in complete sentences in both Russian and English. By two, she had added more languages to her repertoire and by three she was reading and writing in several of them as well. Stealth, agility, aim, and other tactical skills were incorporated into the games she played with her parents, with the little girl having no idea that these were actually the beginnings of her training.
All little Darya knew was that she was loved and cared for by her Mama and Papa. And as long as she behaved appropriately for the men who came to ask her questions and made sure that she was healthy every few weeks, and they kept leaving happy, then nothing in her world had to change.
Her parents however, were all too aware that the status quo could change at any moment.
"Milli moi? Why do you think they let us all stay together?" Natalia whispered, one night.
"I don't know," he confessed. "I believe it's part of their experiment. Also, I overheard two of the technicians speaking the last time they were servicing my arm. Apparently, I am more," he paused as he searched for the correct word, "compliant since the project began."
Natalia nodded, silently recalling a long ago day, early in her own training, glancing out the window and seeing a man with a metal arm struggling with eight armed guards out in the courtyard. He'd been winning, too, until one of the guards had rendered him unconscious with a shock of electricity. At the time, she was confused and perhaps a bit frightened, but all these years later she was better able to understand what she had seen and what it had meant.
Neither of them knew how to be a traditional family, but they managed to create one anyways. And sometimes in the early hours of the morning when they were both lying in bed with their daughter tucked between them, she dared enough to admit, if only to herself, that she was happy.
But she knew it couldn't last forever, and just days before Darya's sixth birthday she was proven correct. They got word that both she and the Soldier would be leaving the compound that very night, on a mission that required both their skill sets. When she questioned who would stay with the girl, Natalia was informed that she was old enough to join the other girls in the dormitory. It was time for her formal training to begin.
They left directly from that mission briefing. There was no time to explain to their daughter what was happening. No time to say goodbye.
They were gone for nine months, shuffled from the end of one mission to the beginning of another. Sometimes together, often apart. But it was on one of those rare occasions that they had finished a mission together, that they were sent back to the compound for some downtime, with nothing requiring their immediate attention or their specialized skill sets.
It was late fall by then, and the threat of snow was already biting in the air as they walked to the commander's office for debriefing. They passed through a courtyard full of little girls about six or seven, all of them dressed the same in shorts and tank tops, standing at attention. They were watching some of the older girls sparring, who Natalia identified as the twelve and thirteen-year olds. She gave them very little thought until she saw one small head snap their direction. She barely recognized her at first. She'd grown at least an inch, her once waist-length curly hair was shorn short to just below her chin, and most dramatically to a mother's eye, was that her bright blue eyes had dulled to a defeated grey.
"Mama! Papa!" Darya called excitedly. She took three running steps towards her parents before a riding crop in the hand of the headmistress clotheslined the little girl across the neck.
"BACK IN FORMATION!"
Natalia would never forget the sound of her baby girl's skull cracking against the cobblestones of the courtyard as she fell. Every instinct in her body screamed at her to run to her daughter, and the twitching of the Soldier's right arm told her that he felt the same way. But they both knew that doing so would only make things worse for her. So Natalia waited for Darya to pick herself up, tears welling in her eyes, and watched her shuffle back into line, before they continued on their way without a word.
After their debrief, they were to separate to their respective quarters. Now that they were no longer Darya's guardians, there was no reason for them to share living space. But before he turned to go, the Soldier spared her one long look. In his eyes she saw a rage like she had never seen from the cool, collected and hardened killer.
It would be the last time she would see him for a long time.
Two days later she was pulled from her bed as the sun was breaking over the eastern mountains. The Winter Soldier was gone and he had stolen their daughter on his way out. And they wanted to know what she knew.
She lost track of how long she was questioned, they didn't believe that she had had nothing to do with their disappearance or that she had no prior knowledge of it. Unfortunately, they were the ones who had trained her to withstand torture, so they had a hard time believing she was telling the truth. They also knew just how much she could stand before breaking.
Eventually though, they resigned themselves to the fact that even if she was withholding information, she wasn't going to break, and they released her to the medical wing. When she arrived, she was administered a tranquilizer which she assumed was to allow her to sleep through the worst of the healing. When she woke to a deep pain in her belly, she knew that she had been wrong.
"What did you do to me?" she asked, when a doctor came to check her healing sutures.
"The project has been canceled. It has been decided that it proves to be a distraction from your primary mission. It was agreed that the possibility of future distractions may inhibit your principal function. Now, that won't be a problem."
Natasha nodded her understanding sharply, and told herself that she didn't care. She hadn't wanted to have the first child, why should she care if she couldn't have more?
Years passed and Natalia threw herself wholeheartedly into her mission. She was elevated from a top agent to a living legend. Even the other graduates of the Black Widow program gave her a wide berth, whispering tales of her deadly exploits behind closed doors.
But everything changed again when she was once more roused in the middle of the night. They had captured the Winter Soldier and her presence was requested. She was escorted to The Chair where he was already strapped in. He looked different than she remembered him. More alive. More human.
He knew what The Chair was, every resident of the Red Room did. It was both a cautionary tale and constant threat over their heads. A part of Natalia wanted to warn him that this was not the same generation of The Chair that he was familiar with. She believed that he hadn't been in The Chair since before the girl was born, and technology had advanced in leaps and bounds since then. What had once simply been a device of torture and conditioning had become something so much more. Something so much worse. He had no idea what he was in for.
"Tell her what happened to the girl!" One of the guards barked.
The Soldier sat stoically.
"TELL HER!"
"I shot her between the eyes, and then I set her body on fire," he confessed, little emotion in his voice, even as his eyes pierced right through her.
"And tell her why!"
"Because I'd rather her dead by my hand, than alive in yours," the Soldier spat at the guard, even while he never tore his gaze from Natalia's own.
The chair was activated and it seemed to Natalia that the screaming went on forever. Once they finally shut the machine off, the Soldier was a blank slate. The man she had cared for more than any other, the father of the child she had loved so dearly, was gone.
"New protocols have been handed down, in regards to the Winter Soldier," the highest-ranking of the armed guards relayed. "He is to be stored in cryostasis whenever not deployed on an active mission, and wiped clean as soon as he returns and reconditioned as a part of his briefing."
The scientists and technicians made note of it, as the empty shell of a man was dragged from the device, not even capable of standing under his own power. She accompanied the guards on the escort to the cryotube, and continued to watch as the Winter Soldier was unceremoniously put away. As she watched the frost cloud over the viewing window, her already guarded heart hardened to ice.
Love was for children, and it no longer had a place in her world.
It was also the moment that she decided that she no longer belonged to Mother Russia. When an opportunity presented itself, she would take it.
xXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx
Natasha woke with a start. It had been a long time since she had been plagued with dreams of those particular memories, but given the circumstances she wasn't exactly surprised. She sighed and got out of bed; she wouldn't be going back to sleep tonight.
A/N So does that clear some stuff up? And even more answers will be given next chapter when we get back to Darcy and Natasha in present day :D I hope you all enjoyed it and please feed my muse and let me know what you thought!