It was two days before Christmas Eve when Natasha mustered up the courage to approach the team with her mission. With their mission. "There's some business I need to attend to, but I need you all with me to go through with it," she said over breakfast early that morning, staring down at her knees and the soft navy carpet. Her hands tied themselves around one another but didn't shake. Natasha hadn't seen Sharon in the three weeks since their talk on the roof. She hadn't seen much of anyone, keeping mostly to herself and her thoughts in one of the guest apartments because her old one stank of roses. Her body was peaceful and still even if her mind seethed and foamed with anxiety.
Pushing a glass of orange juice across the table to her, Tony leaned forward onto his elbows and looked directly in her eyes. He did that to her sometimes, like she were a mathematical equation he couldn't quite puzzle out. "Let's do it, I'm in," he said, and her insides itched.
"You know I am too, Tash," Clint said from the couch. She twitched a smile at him as Bruce and Steve murmured their agreement. "The Quinjet ready?"
She nodded. "We can leave after breakfast. It should only be a day and we won't need any battle gear. It's...a peacemaking, I guess," she said to her juice. "No armor, no weapons, we just get in, make contact, and leave. Shouldn't take more than 24 hours." Hair fell in her eyes and obscured her vision with red.
After they finished eating they went their separate ways to pack any overnight essentials. Natasha had had a bag prepared for a week; it took two attempts to actually go through with her determination to ask. Half an hour later they met in the garage to drive to the Quinjet a few miles away. The afternoon was dawning bright and cold and they were all bundled against the wind. Clint and Bruce started throwing armfuls of snow from the tops of cars at one another, laughing like children. It was the most snow seen in Manhattan for a very long time.
"Let's play a game, I'm bored already," Tony announced in the threshold of the Quinjet. "We should drink!"
Crashing into the nearest seat and strapping in, Natasha shot him a glare. "I'm not drinking." No matter how much she might have wanted to.
"Yeah, Tony, should you really be drinking on a mission?" asked Bruce despairingly, and Tony unhappily buckled himself in. Not allowing her face to betray a thing, Natasha leaned against Clint's side and solidly slept for the first time in weeks. The team's voices rose and fell softly around her, wrapping her in sound like a bullet-proof security blanket all her own.
It was the next morning in Slovakia when the Quinjet landed and everyone was a little disoriented, wrapping their heads around the "time travel" phenomenon of jet lag. Gnawing on her lower lip, Natasha guided them all through the little village to their destination. Probably they could have put it off for a few hours, but her head was a mess and a part of her thought this was something that could be gotten over with quickly.
Snow lie thick and slippery on the cobbled streets. Several times Natasha slipped and started to fall but her steady breakneck progress wasn't hindered. Her eyes were fixed on the wooded outskirts of the village, and the villagers' eyes were all fixed on them. It wasn't every day the Avengers' Quinjet landed in your back yard.
"Natasha, do you know where we're going?"
When she nodded and spoke her voice was weak. "Yes. Yes, I know," she replied.
Ghosts of monsters and men chased their way around her ankles in the drifts of snow and stuttering breeze. The scream of a man long dead, a man once loved and held just as dearly as Clint, cleaved her chest apart from the inside out. The cottage at the end of the lane was bigger than her memory served, two rooms had been added since she came across it, but it was otherwise untouched. She looked up at the blue, blue sky and was glad for the vivid brightness. The sun had been blacked out by ruddy smoke and the blood of fallen soldiers last time.
Instead of walking to the house Natasha took a vague left toward the outstretching woods. The footsteps of her friends and teammates fell in time with the thundering pounding of her heart in her ears. Light seemed to separate from the air, pulled together like golden strands, swirled in her vision and shimmered, and for a moment she thought with horror that she was going to faint. But then brambles and broken-off twigs scraped through her coat against her arms as she pushed through the thin outside barrier of the wood, pinning her back down to reality.
"Oh! Cripes, guys, be careful, these are sharp!" Bruce's voice broke through the ten-ton silence. "Natasha, I'm pretty sure you cut yourself. Are you okay?"
Minute trickles of blood dripped down her forearms into the thin covering of snow on the forest floor. "I'm fine," she called back, voice strong and clear despite how lightheaded she felt. "Almost..."
Her feet stopped and Tony walked right into her back. "What? What the hell?" he asked.
Withered and frozen rose bushes tangled together at her feet, blocking the way. Even in still frigid air the smell of cold sweetened decay came to her senses. Her episode weeks before was still fresh in their minds. Clint's hand touched her waist and he pulled out a pocket knife. "Tasha, do you want me to...?" he offered.
"No," she insisted, holding out a hand to stop him. The ferocity of its meaning stretched out before her as she took in the empty brambles. "No, don't touch them. Don't you dare." Natasha took a breath deep enough to make her chest hurt, then started to push through the thorny tangle despite how it scraped against her legs.
"Natasha! You're going to get tetanus and I will not feel bad for you!"
"Why are we even meeting the contact in the middle of the woods?"
No one followed her, probably convinced that she was going insane, but she didn't stop, couldn't stop, not when she was so close. Not when everything she'd spent the past sixty years running from was laid bare right in front of her. Then there was a heavily accented shout of, "Hey! Stupid Americans!" behind them and Natasha stopped with a hand supporting her against the nearest tree.
A plump dark-haired woman of around Pepper's age was holding an axe at the same entrance of the wood, glaring them down. "Stupid Americans! This land is private!"
Steve looked at Natasha. "Someone lives in that house. Is she our contact?" he asked. He offered a hand to help her back through. The thorns stung more the second time than the first and her heart pounded with the disappointment of coming so close and being stopped. She shook her head at Steve. This woman was definitely not their contact.
"You speak English?" Natasha called to the woman.
She nodded. "I speak enough. What you are doingk here?"
Tony opened his mouth but Natasha grabbed his arm. "No, I'll do the talking," she warned him, and continued toward the woman to speak. "We are not trespassing. A, uh...there was a midwife who used to live in this house, in the 1940s?"
"Áno. My babička. My grandmater," the woman replied. She and Natasha were about the same height when standing a foot apart. They closely inspected one another, dark springy curls against vivd red waves, olive complexion against snowy paleness, brown eyes against green. "I am called Alena."
Alena moved the axe from one hand to the other so they could shake. "I'm Natasha. We have come here because..." She glanced over her shoulder at the team, gnawing on her lip and knowing that nothing would be the same. "Because in February of 1945, your grandmother helped a Russian woman, one of the invading soldiers. She never had the chance to return and thank her, so I came in her place to thank you in your grandmother's place."
"Babka still lives. She is very old, and resting now, but inside."
There was a still, soft moment while the words sank in. Then snow crunched and sang like sparks beneath her feet as she ran to the cottage like a woman possessed. Inside it was musty and dark, sunlight shining through the windows in dusty shafts over the bed where an old woman lay. Alena looked hauntingly like her grandmother as a young woman. Her breathing was heavy and loud, but when she looked at Natasha her cloudy eyes were alert.
«Angel of death,» she croaked in Slovak.
Natasha sank into the chair beside the old midwife and shook her head. «No,» she replied, taking the leathery soft hand in her own. «But I am a ghost.» Tears and time fogged her vision. «I'm sorry I didn't come back. I always intended to, but the longer I stayed away the more afraid I became to face you.»
Zora, Natasha remembered. The midwife's name was Zora, and she shook her head at Natasha 67 years after the fact. «I never needed you to return, my poor sweet girl,» she softly said. «What you lost haunted me, too. It wasn't my first birth, but it was the first time I had ever seen a loss like yours. I hoped you would return. I so hoped.»
«You planted roses.»
«My husband did,» nodded Zora, her wizened old face shakily attempting to smile. «When the war ended he threw a sachet of seeds and never looked back. 'Let them go untamed like that sad wild girl,' he said. I think he fell in love with your sadness, the poor old poet.»
Natasha smiled and pushed a steely curl from Zora's brow. «He was a good man. I remember the photographs he used to take, and his kindness. If given the chance he could make anything sound beautiful,» she said. She could hear voices outside growing closer, Bruce butchering Slovak in an attempt at good manners and Alena laughing at him.
With a tiny gasp, Zora's hand spasmed in Natasha's. «We made a box for you We buried it with the roses when the Curtain fell. Such a sad time. My poor old Harald, he sealed it tight. You can still find it. Take it with you when you go back to Heaven.»
She pressed a firm kiss to Zora's hand. «Thank you. I'll find it. Zora, thank you. Thank you for saving me, even when I didn't want to be saved. Thank you,» she said, the words hot and fierce in her throat after so many years locked tightly away.
Another tremulous smile. «Did you find happiness in the end, Natalia?» asked Zora.
She thought of Clint, of her soft white sundress and wedding party of seven on top of the world, of the team, her friends, of Sharon screaming at her for getting hurt, of Jamie's hand tiny and warm in her own, and Natasha squeezed Zora's swollen knuckles. «I did.» She stood, pressed a kiss to Zora's brow, smoothed back her hair once more, and left the bedroom. Everyone was already waiting for her.
"Zora told me there was a box, buried with the...with the roses, intended for Natalia," she told Alena.
Smiling and shaking her head, Alena gestured for the team to sit. "It has been buried until I am ten. There is flooding in the summer, so Grandpa Harald digs it up. I find. You wait," she said and stepped out, wiping sap-sticky hands on a checkered rag.
Natasha sat beside Clint on the couch and folded her hands. Tony, Steve, and Bruce took the two other armchairs (Bruce on the arm of Tony's) and were watching her closely. Blood was drying on her arms and legs. The cuts itched and stung but she didn't scratch them, only met the eyes of each teammate. "It shouldn't be long," she evenly said and bowed her head to wait.
"We aren't here for a mission, are we, Natasha?" Steve asked.
After a long moment she shook her head. "We're here because we're a team. That means...that means knowing everything that can compromise us, no matter how far in the past it might be. And I'm sorry it's taken me so long to tell you," she softly said.
The glockenspiel in the hall loudly ticked. Chimed in the hour. Then Alena finally returned from the cellar with a small pine box in her hands. It was the size of a shoe box but only half as deep, and she passed it to Natasha with a hammer before sitting, waiting, probably just as curious to know what was inside as Natasha and the team were. She'd known of its existence since she was ten, after all.
In steady hands Natasha used the hammer to pry the nails from the old wood, stained with soil and damp and time. Feeling her stillness for truth, Clint put an arm around her shoulders as the lid pulled away with a protesting creak. It had indeed been sealed tight with nails and wood glue. The box's contents had been unhurt by the years, and one by one she pulled them out into the dusty cottage air.
A glass vial, corked and sealed with wax, containing a wisp of russet hair as faint and thin as an afterthought. The glass was clouded on the outside but it still caught light from the window with a jumping shimmer. After inspecting it closely, turning it between her hands, feelings its weight, she passed it to Clint. A note card of thick parchment, creamy yellow with time and quiet despair, a faded little footprint shorter than her pinky finger blooming in ink in the center. Natasha brushed her fingertips around the edges of the toes, the heel and the tiny arch, then passed it along as well. The dust of a rose long since dried and decayed clung beneath her fingernails.
A yellowing black-and-white photograph of Natalia from above her head, only sixteen years old, a long braid trailing over her shoulder and a silent still baby, loosely wrapped and cradled in the crook of her elbow. If she looked closely enough she could see the bruises around the baby's eyes, the darkened fingertips, the mottled lips and ears, so Natasha didn't look closely.
"She was your grandmother?" Alena asked, peering over Natasha's shoulder. "You look of her."
Natasha handed Clint the photograph, bowed her head, and silently started to weep into her hands. At Bruce's murmured request, the vial of hair impossibly tiny in his large palm, Alena left them alone. The air in Natasha's lungs condensed and grew and she howled like a wild wounded creature until the windows rattled. Arms slung around her, Clint's, Steve's, Tony's, Bruce's, they all crowded around the couch and held her just as they would have (and had) held one another in times of trouble. It took five minutes of hysteria, of old horror in a dark Bosnian hotel, of blood and unbearable misery on a Slovakian battlefield, of nearly seventy years swallowing the memories that made her human, before she could breathe and find her voice.
"I." A soft sound of frustration and kneading at the tears still streaming from her eyes. "I was in love with a boy outside the Room. He was a pilot and-and we eloped and he died in an air raid after I became pregnant. It was early in 1945 when... The Red Room...they made me fight, in the hopes that I would lose the baby, but I just...kept fighting, right up until my water broke. Harald was the one who found me and brought me to Zora, the midwife.
"My baby was stillborn. And her name was Rose. Would have been. Harald buried her in the woods. I tried to leave the Red Room after that, I couldn't take the grief and keep it locked up so I ran from this house and defected. For a long time I was a free agent because there was nothing else for me to do. They found me six years later, after a bombing in Moscow. Winter found me. Ivan, the man who raised me, he was dying, but Bucky offered us the serum. I accepted to save Ivan's life and became their-their tool. I never came back to this place until now. I couldn't face it, knowing that my daughter died for nothing."
She look at them all then, and didn't hide her eyes. Didn't hide the ghosts clawing their way free from the hollows in her cheeks or the rose dust beneath her fingernails. She wanted - needed - them to see, because they were her team and her family and she needed them like air in the middle of the ocean. She wasn't asking for them to cry for her or to try to save her tortured soul. She was waiting.
Tony, of all of them, was the one to break the heavy silence. With his cell phone. "Yeah, hey Fury. I'm buying out half your R&D department to work with mine on a personal project. Well, you'll get 'em back when the job's done, so gimme the best you got. Why?" He met Natasha's eyes with his own, his gaze fierce and vast and darkly proud as he appraised the spy who betrayed his trust so long ago. "I'm going to find a cure for the Russian super serum. Yeah, it's kind of an outdated concept, but it's worth it."
He hung up and scowled at her like he did when he wanted a drink. "Merry fucking Christmas."
Two years. Two years of waiting, of tensing every time the phone rang, innumerable requests for more blood, from her, from Steve, from Bucky and Bruce, to cross-reference them, of watching Jamie grow like a weed, of watching Steve and Sharon fall in love, of watching Pepper become pregnant and give birth to a healthy baby girl, of sleepless nights, two years of disappointment and wondering if all the money was even worth it, when finally a boy named Peter, a boy who had taken her photograph the night after the Chitauri attack, started working for SI as an intern and stumbled upon the project. He supplied the team with his father's flawed Decay Rate Algorithm to alter as they saw fit, and only weeks later Natasha's phone started to buzz with the news she'd so long been waiting for.
The night before the procedure, she and Clint sat on the roof in total silence, watching one another in the dark of the city night. Worry and love chased each other across his face, but every time it looked ready to overwhelm him Natasha leaned across the space to kiss him. She wasn't afraid at all, no matter the outcome. Not anymore. She had made her peace.
"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Bruce asked, eyes crinkling reassuringly over the top of his surgical mask. "There's no going back when you get your first gray hair."
She met Clint's eye in the safety of the observation deck, and nodded once. Despite her serenity she didn't trust her voice to be steady.
The doors of the transmutation chamber closed around her and she felt the injections pierce her flesh. The device whirred to life and the lights were blinding. There was pain, an incredible amount of pain to the point where she could have screamed. But she didn't. Couldn't for the seizure of her muscles and the clench of her jaw. She didn't scream. Not even when sparks flew from the device. Not even when alarms blared. Not even when the technical team ran circles around one another to stop the chaos.
Instead, she raised her head and imagined she could see the sky over Stalingrad. Raised her head and laughed in her mind as the chamber burst into flames, because in that moment she was Natasha. She was resilient Natasha, and she was yearning Natalia, and soft-spoken Natalie, pig-headed Nadia, and flirtatious Nadine; she was every life she'd ever lived and every life she'd ever lost; she was Sharon Carter's friend, she was Bruce Banner's teammate, she was Tony Stark's roommate, she was Clint's wife, she was the mother of Rose.
Natasha looked skyward and laughed with her lion heart beating strong, because in that whispered moment she was human.
The End