The air smelled like dew and new grass when the truck pulled to a stop in front of the farmhouse, and Clint Barton climbed out. He was still in the tuxedo he'd been wearing to the gala in Budapest, and when he let Natasha out of the passenger's side seat, she was dressed in the tattered remains of a black and white ballgown, with a jacket around her shoulders.
"Where are we?" she asked. Why would this man bring her here? This was a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, with no porch – there were stacks of timbers that were probably intended to build one, but nothing had actually been done with them yet. The sky was gray, and a mist of rain was falling. It wasn't enough to actually wet anything, just enough to make it uncomfortably chilly and damp, overlaying everything with the rich scent of damp earth.
"Home," said Barton. He shut the truck door and climbed the makeshift cinder-block steps to knock on the house. "Laura!" he called out.
The woman who appeared in the door a moment later was a few years younger than Agent Barton, with hair just past her shoulders and brown eyes. She was in good physical shape but not fighting shape, suitable for somebody who lived on a farm. The curve of her back and belly suggested that she was three or four months pregnant. If it came to a fight, the abdomen would be a good vulnerable point, Natasha thought. A pregnant woman would act to protect the fetus before herself.
The woman – Laura – smiled and stepped down into Barton's arms. Then she saw his guest, and stiffened in surprise. "Who's she?"
"This is Natasha," said Barton. "I was sent to Budapest to kill her, but the two of us actually ended up preventing a war. It's a long story," he said, with a sheepish smile.
Was that what had happened? Natasha supposed it was, although she wouldn't have described it that way. Clearly the two of them had very different perspectives on the events of the past week.
"I see," said the woman, and then whispered, "what have I told you about bringing home strays?"
They didn't realize Natasha's hearing was better than normal. "She's fully trained and won't shed on the furniture," Barton whispered back. "I'm going to talk to Fury about her, but she needs someplace to stay in the mean time. Somewhere Interpol and the FBI won't come looking for her."
"So you brought her to our house?" asked Laura.
"Yes. Because it's not on anybody's radar," Barton said. He spoke more loudly. "Natasha, this is my wife, Laura."
It was at that moment that Natasha realized she had, for almost the first time in her life, no idea what to do in this situation. She knew how to behave at a party when an important man introduced her to his wife and she had to look like a harmless floozy. She knew how to behave when meeting a woman who had something she needed, how to ingratiate herself so she would get help and sympathy. She knew how to flirt with lesbians and bisexuals, how to get noticed, how to blend in, how to do almost anything...
But she didn't know what to say when the man who'd just saved her life was introducing her to the wife she hadn't expected him to have, and from whom she didn't particularly want anything except food and shelter. Natasha had never had to do that. She was aware of how human beings interacted with each other casually and could duplicate it, but it was play-acting to her. She'd never had to honestly introduce herself. She'd never have to make a friend.
So she said, "hello." It was bland, nothing. A formulaic greeting without any meaning, but it was all she had.
"Hello," said Laura Barton, and came down the steps to offer a hand. "Won't you come in? You can get cleaned up."
Coming in was access to the house and any information or valuables it contained, although from the look of the place Natasha doubted it held much of either. Cleaning up was a chance to change her clothes, her hair, her whole apparent persona. It was as if they were opening the door for her to take advantage of them and flee.
"Thank you," she said. She grabbed her purse and followed them inside.
Barton guided her to the stairs, while Laura went into the kitchen. As Natasha climbed the steps, she looked down and saw a little boy, about four years old, gazing up at her. He did not speak, and plainly did not know what to make of this odd stranger. Natasha said nothing, either.
Once upstairs, Natasha took a shower and washed her hair, which took less than three minutes. Then she dried herself quickly and put on the clothes Barton had left for her – a blouse and jeans that must have been Laura's, and a hooded sweatshirt that was probably his own. In her bare feet, she came softly and silently back down to see what the couple had done while she was out of their sight.
Laura was still in the kitchen. She'd been talking to her husband, but their conversation was covered this time by the whistling of the kettle. When Natasha walked into the room, she was pouring hot water into a pot to make tea.
"That was quick," said Laura.
"I'm efficient," Natasha replied. Whether it was theft, murder, or simply washing up, she did it quickly and quietly and without fuss.
She sat down at the table, and the little boy approached her from the living room. He was holding a plush dinosaur. Once again, he didn't say anything, and once again, Natasha simply looked back at him, the two of them unsure how to deal with each other. Barton had told her to be herself, but she didn't know who that was.
So she tried again: "hello."
"Say hi," Barton urged his son.
"Hi," said the boy. "I'm Cooper. This is Pinky." He held up the dinosaur, which was, in fact, pink.
Natasha had been taught that children should be indulged. Talk to their toy animals and give them candy. Play their games, and they will play yours. "Hello, Pinky," she said.
"Do you take milk and sugar in your tea?" Laura asked.
"Just sugar, thank you." Natasha looked at Barton for advice, but he just shrugged, not understanding what she was asking. Was this who she was, she wondered, when she had no role to play? Nothing but an automaton, parroting polite phrases? Maybe it was... in which case, the much more troubling question was whether she had ever been anything else.
For the next several days, Natasha drifted around the Barton family farm like a ghost. She would wake up at five in the morning listening to the birds chirruping outside, and would be unable to fall asleep again even though Laura assured her she was welcome to lie in. Instead, she would get up and walk outside as the sun rose. It was strange place, this farm. Natasha was an urban creature, mostly, but she could survive in the wilderness if she had to. The farm, however, was neither.
There were trees, rustling in the early morning breeze, but they were small and soft, with wildflowers blooming between them, and home to nothing worse than a feral cat or two. There were plains, but they grew young wheat and oats instead of harsh wild grasses. Behind the house was Laura's vegetable garden, where she tended tomatoes and pumpkins and towering sunflowers. The cows were docile and kept to themselves, the dog napped in the sunshine all day, and the chickens scratched in the yard.
In the bustle and crowd of a city, Natasha could vanish easily. The same was true in the wild where there was nobody. Here, however, there was a tiny, closed community, a family, which she was not part of. A place where she did not fit. For somebody who'd spent her whole life learning how to fit in anywhere, it was unsettling. Natasha simply did not know how to function in an environment where nothing was a threat to her.
On the fourth day, Barton left to go meet with Director Fury. He told Natasha to wait at the farm for them. She didn't know if she wanted to meet the man who'd sent Barton to kill her, but the farm would be easy to escape from if she needed to, so she agreed.
Since she was restless with no tasks to perform, she began helping out as best she could. She helped Laura to weed her garden, fed the cows and chickens, picked apples, and cooked meals. They were all odd things for Natasha to do, and she often felt as if she were standing at a great distance, watching herself do all these quiet, normal things without actually participating. If she'd had to fight somebody, to steal information, to do any of the things she'd been trained to do, she could have felt engaged with it. But this? She had nothing to bring to this.
In the evenings, Laura sat and did her sewing or other handicrafts, and Cooper played with his toys or with the dog. Natasha just watched. She noticed that in addition to the quilts and blouses Laura liked to make, there was a big knitted afghan draped over the sofa. Cooper would use it and the cushions to make forts, which Lucky would knock down, apparently worried that the boy was buried and suffocating. The afghan intrigued Natasha, because the design of it reminded her of Baba Galina's old shawl.
She'd kept the shawl after her escape from the orphanage. That was probably foolish, since it was of no use to her, and yet she couldn't bear to destroy it or leave it behind. Instead, she held it against her chest as she slept in the Bartons' guest room, in this strange bed she couldn't shackle herself to. The shawl smelled of lavender and cigarettes and cheap vodka, and the scents brought back flashes of another life. Of crying in the snow while a stranger held her and patted her back. Of being served tea and having a skinned knee bandaged. A voice telling her fairy stories: Father Frost, The Giant Turnip, The Princess who Never Laughed.
"Another!" she'd pleaded. "Another!"
"No, Natushka," a gentle voice had laughed. "You must sleep!"
And she was sleeping, with rain drumming against the roof and windows of the farmhouse, when another voice woke her.
"Natasha!" Laura hissed in the darkness. "Are you awake?"
She opened her eyes and sat up, and the first thing she smelled was blood. "What? Is something wrong?" she asked. For a moment she thought of the escape routes she'd planned over the past few days, but then those sank away to be replaced by another thought, one that ought to have been utterly foreign to anybody from the Red Room. Clint Barton had saved Natasha's life in Budapest. If she had the chance now to protect the family he loved, she would do it. The weapons and hiding places in the home would do for Laura and Cooper as well as for Natasha alone.
"It's Posey. The cow," said Laura. "She's trying to calve, but the calf hasn't turned. Clint's not here, I can't get in touch with the vet, and my arms aren't long enough!"
A cow? Natasha blinked. This woman had woken her in the middle of the night to help a cow? She stared at Laura for a moment and then, by the light of the flashlight the other woman was holding, saw the desperation in her eyes. This was important to her. "I don't know what to do," Natasha said. Of all the things she'd ever been taught, helping a cow to give birth was not one of them.
"I'll talk you through it," Laura promised.
Natasha put on a sports bra and washed her arms as Laura directed her. As soon as she entered the barn, her nose was assaulted by the stink of blood and sweat and wet straw, and she found the cow lying on the floor and panting in exhaustion. The animal was obviously in pain and Natasha, who'd been long taught to ignore suffering in humans, found herself surprisingly affected by the signs of it in this animal. At Laura's direction, she knelt down behind the cow.
"Her muscles will contract and you'll just have to let them," Laura said. "See if you can find the calf's legs. If they're stuck behind the hip bones, you'll have to pull them out."
Natasha was reluctant at first to put her hand up inside a living animal, but this was what Laura needed her to do – this was her mission. The inside of the cow was warm and slippery, like warm gelatin, and as she reached in she felt a contraction. It squeezed her arm until her fingers went numb, and she couldn't move again until it was finished. With her arm in almost to the shoulder, she found something with a different texture, like coarse wet hair. For a moment she had no idea what she might be touching, but then her fingers discovered the base of the tail, and the legs folded up against the cow's spine.
"It's upside-down," she said. "The legs are stuck." There was no polite parroting now. Only the need to exchange information.
"Okay." Laura knelt down next to her. "Stay calm. Push it back into the cervix as far as you can with one hand, and then use your other to free the legs. It has to come out hooves-first. Then as soon as you can get the legs out of the birth canal, we both have to pull. If the umbilical cord breaks before the nose and mouth are free, the calf could suffocate."
Natasha's hands could bend metal. They could kill or permanently disable a large man with a blow in the right spot. This didn't require power, though – this required gentleness, which was something she was unaccustomed to. The calf didn't want to move. Perhaps it was frightened. When Natasha tried to rearrange its limbs it twitched and kicked and hurt its mother, who bellowed in surprise. At last she got a hold of one hoof and tried to maneuver it through the cervix. She'd almost made it when the slippery little animal struggled out of her fingers and returned to its original position.
She felt her eyes sting with tears of frustration, but she bit her lip and focused. Natasha had rarely failed at anything she'd set out to do. She had no intention of failing at this.
At last, after what felt like hours of grabbing, losing hold, and grabbing again, the first leg came free. With that done, it was easier to get the others. The cow's muscles contracted, and calf slid towards Natasha.
As soon as the hooves began to show, Laura grabbed them and they pulled together. In a few more seconds the entire calf – a male – slid free and landed in a heap of blood, straw, and goo on the floor of the barn.
"He's alive!" Laura exclaimed in delight.
Natasha just sat there, stunned. There was blood and torn amniotic sac everywhere, and the calf looked very much dead to her. It was still and glassy-eyed, its little nose blue instead of pink, but Laura had put a hand under one of its forelegs, and was nodding in time with what must have been a faint heartbeat.
While Natasha watched, Laura held the calf's mouth closed and cleaned out its nostrils with straw. After a moment the little animal suddenly coughed, and then began to take weak, whistling breaths for itself. The cow, meanwhile, struggled to its feet and staggered over, tired but determined, to begin licking its baby clean.
"There we go," said Laura approvingly, as the calf raised its head to meet its mother's tongue. "He'll be okay. Let's go get cleaned up."
"Are you sure?" asked Natasha. The calf still looked so weak.
"I'm sure," said Laura.
She helped Natasha to her feet, and the two of them stumbled back into the house with the sun just beginning to rise. Both women showered thoroughly, then Laura made bacon and eggs while Natasha started the coffee maker.
Natasha's hands were trembling. She'd never done anything like that before. Black widows were made to end lives, and here... she'd just saved one and begun another. If that calf had not been born it would have died, and the cow would have expired from exhaustion soon after. Now they were both alive, and Laura Barton said they were going to be okay – because of Natasha.
And during the time when she'd been doing that, Natasha had been there. She hadn't been drifting far away as she had the past few days, never quite engaging with the world. She'd been a part of that.
Now, however, she was floating away again. The room was beginning to blur as she sat down slowly at the kitchen table. She could smell the bacon cooking and the coffee brewing, hear the sizzle of the fat in the pan, but it was as if her ears were full of cotton. Then, slowly, she leaned forward, put her face in her hands, and began to cry.
Natasha had no idea where the well of emotion had come from. It wasn't only the birth of the calf – it just burst up out of her like a geyser and overflowed through her eyes. Maybe it was the grief of every loss she'd never been allowed to mourn. The parents she didn't even remember, who had abandoned her for reasons she would never know. Baba Galina, who'd promised to take her home and had never gotten the chance. The twins from Chernobyl, who'd only wanted to be free. The American pilot she'd shot to save him from the Gulag. The children who'd burned in the orphanage, and the uncomprehending terror they must have felt in their last moments. It all ran over.
"Oh, honey." Laura came and put her arms around Natasha from behind. "It's okay. It's okay."
But Natasha couldn't stop. She wasn't even sure she wanted to. All the tears she'd been taught to bottle up all her life – they were all coming now.
Laura continued to hold her, rubbing her back and murmuring in her ear that it would be okay. The dog came and put its head in her lap. Slowly, Natasha began to run out of tears. She could taste the salt in the back of her throat, and feel her nose running. The skin around her eyes was tender and crusted.
"Here." Laura set a cup of coffee down in front of her. "Do you feel better now?"
"I don't know," said Natasha. She wasn't sure if she knew anything anymore.
After breakfast, Laura went to get Cooper up and had him feed the chickens, then returned tot he kitchen to sit with her guest. She had a set of knitting needles, and was making a baby sweater.
"Did you knit the afghan in the living room?" Natasha asked. She hadn't actually seen anyone knitting since Baba Galina, all those years ago. It was not a skill taught in the Red Room.
"No, my grandmother did," said Laura. "She taught me to knit when I was little. She said it was the only way to make me sit still." She smiled as she turned the needles around to begin another row. "I love making things with my hands. There's something very satisfying about it. Do you know how to knit?"
"No," said Natasha, but a bit of hope rose in her. "I've got... just a moment." She stood, and ran up the stairs to the guest room, where she pulled Baba Galina's old shawl out from under her pillow. Natasha returned to the kitchen and held it up for Laura to see. "Do you know how to make this?"
"That's an Orenburg shawl!" said Laura. "I've got a book about it!" She put her project aside and went to shuffle through a bookshelf, until she found a well-thumbed paperback. "This has some patterns in it. They're not exactly like yours, but they'll give you some idea of the motifs." She offered the book to Natasha. "Would you like me to teach you?"
There were a dozen replies Natasha might have made to such an offer in another situation, if she'd had some sort of a goal. Right now, however, her only goal was learning to do this thing Baba Galina had never gotten a chance to show her. So she simply said, "yes."
An hour later, Natasha was sitting up on an ottoman in the living room. Cooper was playing with his toy trucks on the floor, and Laura was on the sofa facing Natasha, teaching her to pick up stitches from a knitted edge – a vital skill for the type of shawls described in the book. That was where Barton found them when he opened the door.
"Whatcha doin'?" he asked, as the dog came bounding over to greet him. He rubbed the animal's head, then turned to scoop up Cooper and give him a hug.
"Knitting lesson." Laura put down her own needles and went to give her husband a kiss on the cheek.
Barton grinned. "I bring you home a deadly assassin and you teach her a craft that involves sharp pointy things?"
"She's picking it up quickly," said Laura. "She's got very good fingers."
They both laughed, and hearing them, Natasha felt herself smile. That surprised her – she couldn't remember the last time she'd smiled without deciding to, but seeing these two people who loved each other make jokes, and knowing that she had contributed to their happiness was... as corny as it sounded, it was heartwarming. It literally felt warm inside her chest to see it, while at the same time it ached. It ached to know that she could never have that herself, and that was in the same place as the warmth. No wonder people thought emotions happened in the heart.
Natasha had always known she had a heart – she could feel it beating. But god, she hadn't had any idea it actually worked.
Barton gave his wife another kiss and then came to sit down on the sofa where she'd been a moment earlier. "How are you doing?" he asked Natasha.
"She delivered Posey's calf this morning," said Laura. "I checked on him an hour ago – he's on his feet now and nursing."
"Is that a fact?" Barton asked, looking at Natasha with the same sort of surprised respect she'd seen several times in Budapest.
"She talked me through it," Natasha said. "I've never done anything quite like that before." It was okay to talk, she was starting to realize. Talking didn't need to happen for a reason. She could just talk, the way ordinary people did, if that was what she wanted.
"Congratulations," said Barton. "Did you give the little guy a name?"
"Clint." Laura put a hand on his arm. "I said if it were a male I wanted to try making my own cheese."
"We're not using somebody's first calf for rennet," said Barton firmly. "You got a name for him, Nat?"
She shrugged. Natasha had no idea how to give a thing a name... she'd never even been any good at coming up with pseudonyms for herself. "Cooper can give him a name," she decided. If it were a privilege the child would enjoy it, and might be better at it than she was.
Barton smiled. "Sure. Trust it to a kid who names his dinosaur Pinky." But then his face became serious again. "I've got Fury with me – he's waiting outside. You can talk to him if you want, or he can leave. But I gotta warn you, Nat, if you turn down his help, you're probably going to jail."
Natasha wasn't worried about that – she was confident that she could escape from any prison this Fury could put her in. But once she was out, she would have to start running again. Running from the Red Room, running from SHIELD, running from the dozen other organizations that wanted her dead or wanted her working for them, all the while trying to find work to keep body together with whatever she had instead of a soul, never knowing if there were any place she could rest. She was so tired of that. If she went to see Fury, if she agreed to his terms... maybe she could stop. She could do more things, perhaps, like learning to knit and delivering baby cows. Maybe she and Barton could even save the world again.
"I'll talk to him," she decided.
What Natasha had learned about Nick Fury from rumors and shadows in the past few years had always made him sound terrifying. She was surprised, then, to find that he was older than she'd expected, at least in his fifties. He was, as the stories said, missing an eye, although there was no trace of a bionic arm that she could see (and she'd seen more than one). He looked stern, but not unkind.
"Miss Romanov," he said, offering her a hand. "Nice to finally meet you in person."
"Mr. Fury," she replied. "You're not what I expected."
"I'm gonna assume that's a compliment," he said. "Now listen. Barton here has told me some pretty impressive things about you, and to be honest I was already pretty impressed – if I wasn't, I wouldn't have sent him. I'm here to give you an opportunity."
"An opportunity to stay out of prison?" asked Natasha. As much as she wanted a space to breathe, she wasn't going to take anything offered her without question. Only a fool would sign a contract she hadn't read.
"An opportunity to do some good in the world," said Fury. "You've already done good with Barton. How did it feel, making that choice after all the things you've been forced to do?"
A glib answer floated on Natasha's tongue, until she reminded herself that she wasn't doing that anymore. She was here now. She'd just brought a new life into the world. She could do anything she wanted. She'd always been able to be anything she had to... now she could choose what to be. And what she chose to be, at that moment, was honest. "Surprising," she said. The Prime Minister of Hungary had kissed her hand and told her she was a hero, and she'd almost wanted to laugh at him. If he'd known who she really was, he probably would have had her shot.
"You surprised us all," said Fury.
"She didn't surprise me." Barton smiled a bit.
"Nothing surprises you," Fury told him.
"I've seen it before," Barton said. "That person who doesn't realize what they've got in them until they need it."
"You mean your wife's seen it before," Fury snorted, and turned back to Natasha. "It comes with conditions, of course. There'll be training and testing, and believe me, it's not the kind of training and testing you can fake your way through like a polygraph or a truth serum. We've got telepaths who can tease the truth out of you while you're still coming up with a lie. We've got supercomputers that can analyze everything you say in less time than it takes you to say it. If you're going straight with SHIELD, then you're going straight, do you understand?"
"Yes, I do," said Natasha, and once again she almost laughed. The idea of her, of all people, telling the truth... she didn't even know what it was half the time. "What does SHIELD do, Agent Fury, when you're not searching for defected Soviet spies?" Defected, that was the word. She'd almost said defective.
He smiled a little. "We save the world, like you did in Budapest last week. Miss Romanov – let me tell you about the Avenger Initiative."
