Chapter 14: Forgive-me-not
It's really easy to get attached to things, but it's even easier to lose them. It's easy to feel and then get hurt. But do you want to know the one thing it's never easy to do? It's never easy to forgive. Forgiveness is so hard to do because as people we find it so hard to put ourselves in other people's shoes and wonder how they would feel, how they could do that, why they would do that? Some people think forgiveness is a way to move on, get past, get over, but it's really hard to get past something when everyday of your life you keep reliving it.
Natasha Romanov was in no means ready to forgive the people who turned her into this; a monster. The people who took away any last chance of her having a childhood, preserving her innocence. She had no clue why people would want to turn children into killers. Her only explanation was that they were sick bastards. She didn't think that she would ever be able to forgive them but maybe, just maybe she would be able to thank them for training her hard enough to be able to whoop their asses in the near future.
At this point she couldn't really even hear clearly. All the people talking around her, just sounded like muffled whispers all jammed together. She had tried to keep her eyes open for as long as possible because she knew that Steve was watching her and she couldn't stand for him to see her weak. She didn't care if she died as long as she went out trying to live, but it was so hard to bear through all the pain. It wasn't even the physical pain that was torturing her the most. It was the mental pain, the confusion she felt about what was right or wrong, all the guilt and regret, but most importantly, it was the empty feeling that she couldn't prevent from creeping in.
When she thought and reflected back on her life, not once did she feel wanted. Sure, the Red Room needed her to work and to kill, but no one ever truly wanted her just for her. That's what made her so angry. The fact that she thought that everything she had done was okay. All those years that she ignored how she felt because the worst part of it all was that she didn't even feel like she was important. She could have died anyway and it would have just been another casualty to add to the list. She wouldn't have got a funeral, she wouldn't have even been buried, and worst of all, she wouldn't have been missed. It would have been like all these years of doing nothing but what she was told, never mattered, like she never even existed. She could deal with the pain, but she didn't think that she could deal with the burning agony in her heart and head every time she tried to remember the last time she mattered, and her thoughts came up blank.
All this made her think 'if I gave in right now, just stopped fighting all together, it wouldn't even matter, I would just be another agent down. No one would cry at my funeral, or visit my grave and place a flower. No one would even celebrate my life, but I can't really blame them because I never really had one to begin with.' But then she thought of Steve and how much he would blame himself, and how guilty he would feel. How he would bury himself in the ground, trying to come up with answers and she couldn't do that to him. Out of all the people she had hurt in her life, she didn't want him to be one of them. He couldn't be one of them because he deserved too much, so the least she could do was make sure that she didn't give up.
She thought back to the conversation they had before all this crap. Most of it was a blur but she did remember one thing, she remembered asking him when the mission was over, to go dancing with her. After that she couldn't remember whether he said yes or no. So the first chance she got, whether she was getting out of this situation or taking her last breath, she was going to ask him what his answer was, because maybe, just maybe that was her chance at being wanted, being important. Because after all life really is a dance when you look at it.