Natasha knew pain, knew what it was like to be unmade, flayed open, scooped hollow, programmed, reprogrammed, deprogrammed, filled with something and someone new more times than she could count. The story of her life could be told in numbers, carved into her skeleton with a rusty knife, dull blows hacking away slowly and precisely through the years. She was rescued a weeks-old foundling in the last days of 1928, so she knew she was born in that winter, but there was no way to know her birthday. Only the imagined tightness of smoke in her lungs and a scream in her throat. That year was impressed on the inside of her sternum.
She learned how to count to ten using rabbit's ribs on the cabin floor. The number ten was engrained on the inside of her left ulna. For the longest time every number after ten was ten-and-one, ten-and-two, ten-and-three... Ivan found it so sweet he couldn't find it in his heart to correct her, and those numbers were carved on her metacarpals. The water shed was exactly eighteen of his big steps from the cabin - the left metatarsal - and twenty-nine of her smaller ones. Sometimes she would be too tired, or her need too urgent, to put on her boots first; the snow burned a blackened twenty-nine into her right metatarsal all the way there and back as she bounded to her business. One night she slipped and broke her toe on the ice, but Ivan didn't wake up until she screamed and screamed like wolves were nipping at her heels.
Six, her age when Ivan was called to war again, was a leaden imprint on her acetabulum. When he left her at the Red Room facility, where he thought she would be cared for and protected from the world's evils, she chased the military truck carrying Ivan away until she tripped and bruised her hip. They cut her open in twelve places for her enhancements; twelve stars marched down her spinal vertebrae like a stone skipping over water.
On the inside of her skull marched a cavalcade of ones and zeroes, aligning with years of brainwashing, teaching her to sing and sigh and brisé on command without a moment's thought, without ever having opened a book or taken a single dance lesson. Every day a new nightmare's child, every night another seductress turned sour.
The year 1945 was painted red, red as a rose, red as lips, red as a husband's blood, on her iliac crest.
There was love in the numbers along with loss, remorse, regret, violence in hashmarks tallying her victim count, chipping away at bone right down to the marrow. Some tried to say that those who did ugly things could still be beautiful on the inside, but Natasha's insides were just as ugly and scarred as her actions. The only thing that could come even remotely close to balancing all the damage she'd done was the pain. Floating. Eternal. Unfathomable. But it was bearable, until that fight, until Doom aimed his weapon and her battle-scarred bones fell apart. There was no pain until that moment; everything leading up to it was just background noise in comparison.
In the blackness of the void after there was no feeling, no battle, no pain, and Natasha would have liked to remain there, but she had one thousand, nine hundred and forty-three reasons to stay alive; they all revolved around a windy night in a bar at the edge of the frozen world.
A pair of eyes that seemed to go on forever were looking down at Natasha when she woke up, but she wasn't really awake. She existed on a plane somewhere above herself and slightly to the left, looking down at herself even as she looked up at the eyes watching. What was this? This wasn't a near-death experience, Natasha had been through a hundred of them before she turned thirty, this was something completely new.
Come back, Romanova, a voice said, and yet didn't say. It sounded stern, genderless, light as a feather and yet full of heavy meaning. It occurred to Natasha that she should have corrected the voice from Romanova to Romanoff, but she didn't know how to speak when she wasn't exactly corporeal. You are not yet ready.
There were shackles, binding her not-self to that room, and usually breaking bonds weren't an issue for Natasha, but that was when she had a body with hands to break them. The shackles weren't even really shackles, just the inability to flee the sight of her body looking small and withered in that strange golden chamber. How was she supposed to return?
It took a lot of concentration, but she finally replied to the voice, I don't know how.
It's alright, the voice said. I'll show you the way home.
If Natasha had eyes she would have closed them. As it were, she folded herself, whatever form she had taken, up small like origami, like paper roses in the palm of her hand, like shadows in the night time. Another hand, much bigger and, if anything, less real than her own in the moment, cradled her and guided her back to her broken body.
The voiceless, bodiless, genderless voice faded. Rippled and shifted into that of a woman, older than the salt of the earth and calm as a cool breeze. "Hush, Romanova," she soothed Natasha, who was still acclimating to the sensation of solidity again. "Be calm, for you are well and in safe hands. I'm giving you something so you may rest a while before your comrades return. Sigyn, pass me that vial...yes, that one. Thank you. Now drink this and rest, Romanova."
At first Natasha resisted. She hated going under, not knowing how long she would be out or what would be done to her, but a slim cool hand adorned with chunky rings settled on her forehead, inexplicably soothing her, and she accepted the drink that tasted of no berry she'd ever eaten. Her eyes were instantly heavy and she slid into a more peaceful sleep.
Far as Steve could tell, they had been on Asgard for four days. Time seemed to move differently there: every moment slow but fleeting in the eyes of the so-called gods who inhabited the mythic planet. On the evening of the first day they met Odin, who Steve reckoned was impressive enough as a king instead of All-Father of the Nine Realms. He was nice if not a little full of his own grandeur. He provided them with food and lodgings in the palace, and fresh clothes that itched and chafed in all the wrong places. Thor seemed comfortable, but he grew up with the stuff.
The palace was beautiful and extravagant, but none of the Avengers were much interested in taking a tour. Their minds revolved around Natasha, wondering if there were anything that could be done to save their comrade from the metal in her bones falling apart. Still, Thor repeatedly insisted that if there was anyone in the Nine who could save her it was the Lady Eir. There was no comfort in those words, not really, but Steve tried to convince himself that no news was good news for the time being.
When he went to sleep the first night, it was to dreams of Natasha sprouting fiery wings and flying to Valhalla without so much as a word of goodbye. He woke up gasping and didn't go back to sleep again.
They were called back to the healing chambers late on the fourth day
"...something else," Steve heard a low voice murmuring when he entered the healing chamber behind everyone else. "I looked into her heart, saw that it was done without her consent by the same who put these monstrosities in her bones, and healed it. If she wishes to have it reversed it can be done, but looking into hearts rarely leads a good healer astray."
Thor grimly smiled. "Thank you, my Lady. I owe you a great debt," he said.
"We all do," added Steve just as Natasha's eyes flickered open. Tony and Bruce inched in closer, trying to get a look at her over his and Thor's shoulders, so Steve knelt. Her eyes found his and he found her hand. "Natasha? Hey, how are you feeling?"
Thin fingers closed around his in an iron grip, poisonous green eyes wide and shining with unshed tears. All at once Natasha sat up and they took a step out of her air. She released Steve's hand and ran both of hers carefully, cautiously, over her body, the soft shift dress that was draped over her to replace burnt battle gear, scuffed knees, unblemished arms, the plane of her stomach, and started to shake. Bruce's eyes widened and he asked, "What? Are you in pain? Thor, should you call-?"
"No!" Natasha gasped, covering her mouth to muffle her shuddering cries. When her hand moved, coaxed by Bruce, there was a near-painful smile distorting her tearful face. "I'm n-not in pain. I'm not in a-any pain at all. I don't...I don't hurt anymore."
It was the only time they would ever see Natasha cry, at least all together as they were, and even though he knew that on any other day Natasha would kick his ass for it Steve wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug.
"I thought she would put it all back," Natasha murmured wetly into his neck, curling herself around his shoulder. "I didn't think she could take it away; I thought she would put it all back where it was." She cried and he held her for all of three minutes before Natasha pulled away, wiping her eyes and catching her breath. There was embarrassment in her face, but there was nothing for her to be embarrassed about. Steve would have cried too, if an unmanageable pain he'd suffered for nearly a century was suddenly taken away.
The Lady Eir watched them from the chamber door, her fathomless eyes silent as the Avengers quietly celebrated this small victory they had no hand in. Natasha stood on watery legs with her team supporting her, closed her eyes, felt the lightness of a body without pain for the first time in eight decades. It was like flying, only better, closer to the ground, free to tread where she would.
Steve watched Natasha meet the Lady Eir's eye and go still as if they were speaking to one another. But not a word passed between them, not even a whisper. A smile flitted over her face and she nodded at Lady Eir in silent agreement - or maybe gratitude - before her hand slid, small and warm, into Steve's. Thor guided them to a different part of the palace so Odin could send them home. Suddenly Steve wished that they could have looked around a little longer, but he was happy so long as Natasha's fingers remained strong in his.
In the next day or two he visited her in her apartment, just to see how she was doing, just to reassure himself that she was still whole. Natasha's smile was like the sun coming up when she opened the door. "You know you don't have to knock," she told him fondly, stepping aside to let him in.
"Yeah, I know, but I like to."
No one ever knocked in his apartment building when he was a kid. It was the kind of community they were; if you didn't want visitors, you locked your doors, and no one ever locked their doors because everyone wanted visitors. People were a lot more private nowadays. They sat at Natasha's kitchen table and she made tea, the spicy kind he knew was her favorite.
He asked her, "So, what's it today?" and she beamed.
Her whole face lit up, like stardust, like gold caught beneath his fingernails, as she replied, "Zero."
When their tea was finished and he got up to leave, Natasha stopped him with both hands clutching his shoulders, craning her neck to look up at him. "I remember how you screamed when you figured it out," she quietly confessed, like the words had been sitting on her tongue for a long time but she didn't get the chance to test their weight yet. "Like it was the end of the world, that's how you sounded."
"It was the end of the world," Steve instantly replied, knowing the words were right only after they fell off his tongue and scattered. His heard started to beat faster as he lost himself in that battle again. The smoke rising off her back. The feral look in her eyes as she threw herself across the void at Doom. "I thought you were going to die. You were going to die, if Thor hadn't been there, you would..."
He trailed off, lost for words in the terror of that moment as Natasha flew toward her possible death. His hand - as if independent of his body - reached up to pet her soft red hair. Something flickered in her eyes and he leaned down and he kissed her. It was only for a second before he caught himself, before he felt her pulling in a surprised breath and pulled away, before he shakily smiled and stumbled on apologies and she stopped him with a hand on his mouth.
"It's okay," she murmured. Her hand trembled so it felt like she was patting his lips with her soft calloused fingers. A smile curled her lips. "It's okay. Come back and see me again. I'll still be here, Steve."
She said it like a warning, like a vicious kind of promise, reminding him that yes, that horrible scary day happened, but it was just a day. It was just another in a long line of memories they tangled together since 1943, whether they liked it or not. She was breathing, and he wasn't afraid anymore when he felt that breath ghost his cheek.
Her hand dropped, and he missed its warmth. "Okay, seeya here," he nodded and she laughed.
"Hey, I'm thinking of making a new scale," she said as he began to walk away. "Except it's a different kind, one of those ones where zero is bad and ten is good."
"Oh yeah?" He was walking backwards, hands tucked in his pockets, wishing he could flee without being rude.
Natasha nodded. "Yep. Wanna guess what today is?"
Even though he didn't need to ask to guess, Steve shrugged, teeth bared in a smile he couldn't fight.
She held up both hands with all ten fingers splayed like stars.
