In the middle of the coastal Siberian tundra, an expanse of silent, white snow and ice, there are jagged black holes opening up in the Earth. They appear almost instantly and without consequence. The largest recorded hole broke open in 2013, and within days, it was filled with ice that, according to some scientists, reached down to the mantle of the Earth. They are the result of climate change, most experts say. The gasses caught up inside of the Earth's atmosphere have begun to deteriorate the ice within the ground that holds it steady. The constant friction and movement of the plates within the Earth, cause the ground to shake, the gasses to expand, and the earth to open up. The result is a mile-wide crater that opens up down into the core of the Earth.

But the interesting phenomenon of these random happen-stance Siberian craters is not that they open up at random, but rather that the ice that fills them will last longer than the 2-million-year-old glaciers in Antarctica. The rest of the world will melt, but these frozen pits in Siberia will probably contain the last sheets of Arctic ice. They will last longer than any of us. They will transcend our lifetimes. It is both tragic and somewhat meaningless. Ice does not protect our secrets, it simply freezes them until it is time to thaw.

No one has ever seen what happens in the formulation of these Siberian craters. They are perhaps one of the singular scientific discoveries of climate change that has yet to evade the observatory measurements and estimates of environmentalists and arctic scientists. The newest crater, the one closest to the sea, is nearly finished freezing. There is a definitive popping, crackling in the air, as the ice begins to permanently settle in for the next millennium.

It is night in the tundra. The closest village, a small Sakha settlement, is miles and miles away from the black, silent crater in the middle of the earth. All that is moving out in the sub-zero temperatures of the night are the creatures that call this hospitable land home.

Out there, on the cusp of the Siberian tundra permafrost and the bleak Russian countryside, there is nothing for hundreds of miles. Mountains, snow, and jagged cliffs that lead to frozen ravines that once were flowing, rushing rivers…thousands of years before. There is not much that can survive here. There is not much that wants to survive here. It is a land of stark, frozen ice. Frozen ice. Think about that phrase. Ice is already frozen, but this land is consumed by an inescapable freeze.

A grey wolf, licking her chops after a late-night meal of grouse, comes to settle on a rock that juts out over the frozen crater. She sniffs the air as if sensing something is wrong with the starless night above her. Her ears flick over to the sound of a frightened peregrine falcon calling out in the dense, frozen brush nearby. She does not speak the language of her sister, but she is familiar with the frightened piercing of her scream. Her yellow eyes shift down to the crater. She has spent many a night on this spot, but now only begins to hear the deep, low buzz beneath the surface of the frost.

And for a moment, while the smooth, black surface of the ice seems still, the grey wolf stands and watches. The buzzing begins again, but this time it is louder. High-pitched. The ice, meters deep, will not break easily, but something is shifting beneath it. A golden glow begins to shimmer beneath the surface of the ice as if the fire of the earth is catching. The wolf whines and backs away from her perch – she is not ready for what is coming.

The ice begins to break, fracturing across the mile-wide crater. Snakes of tension and disrepair crunch down into the frozen edifice. Something is coming. The glow beneath the surface brightens to a glare like that of the sun, the buzzing becomes a hum too loud for the delicate ears of man. Splitting. Screaming. Crying. A large fissure begins to tear the ice in half, and as soon as the surface is broken, the glowing beacon shoots upward. The hum of the universe reaches an octave unknown to human music and melody.

Clouds part in the dark sky above as a tear in the universe reveals itself. A million-star systems glow brighter than is astronomically possible above the crackling, breaking crater of Siberian ice. The tundra looks as if part of the sun has fallen to the earth and shed light in the vast dark, winter night. At the peak of the stars' light, the glowing, shimmering beacon of intense, blinding light dramatically breaks through the broken surface of the ice. It leaps out of the frozen crater, collapsing in a heap on the side of the bank.

The gods sigh out in relief. It is over. The humming stops, the stars disappear beneath the clouds, and the universe sows itself back up. Where once was a glowing beacon from the pit of the frozen Earth is now simply a woman, lying unconscious against the soft, untouched snow. Her bare skin, exposed to the gripping cold and heartless freeze of the arctic air, steams tiny tendrils of hot, vaporous air. The cold does not affect her. She was once born unto this vast, frozen land of ice and silence.

I was born in a land that was made of ice.

In a frozen shack up against the banks of the river Lena, where the fresh frozen water meets the salt of the Okhotsk Sea, I was yanked out of the lukewarm recesses of my mother, severed from her forever, and spilled into this world. Screaming. Shivering. Tinged-blue from the ice inside my newborn soul. In this land, there was no access to a hospital and there was no midwife. My mother bore me as all mothers of this land did.

My parents gave me no name.

Natalia.

You have heard it.

I know you have. You believe you know my origin because you know my name; you are wrong. Natalia is a name given to millions of little girls across Russia. It is common. It means 'Birthday of Christ' in common-spoken Russian, but in the nameless village I am from, it is slightly different. In the northern Ural valleys and caverns, there is no emphasis on the vowels of our language – the letters that give a name meaning and base, formulate and emphasize – are not meant to be fully spoken in our dialect. To the northern people, Natalia does not designate the spectacular birth of Christ, but has sunken to a commoner's moniker. Nazvaniye. Literally translated: a name.

Natalia is a name as impermanent and eternal as the icy land I was born from. It is given to little girls with no soul, little girls that will be sold into a trade not of their choosing, little girls who are worth only the money our flesh will earn. Names do not matter in the trade and commerce of precious, young flesh of woman. After all, little girls who are defined by institutions, governments, and war, are not given names. Their trade is their name. I was the Black Widow. It was my name, more of a name than perhaps any other.

All things considered, I was lucky in my youth. Natalia is a name given to millions of starving, ice-filled girls across Northern Russia, but it was given to me because I was never meant to have a name. A name means you are permanent, known, and identified; you grow into a name, you build a life on it, and sometimes, you discover the name you had all along, does not define you anymore. Since I was given no name, besides the common, replaceable "Natalia," I had no basis of definition. I could be molded, shaped, sculpted, knitted, and woven into whatever shape, cross-stich, or art form was needed of me.

I have no place in this world.

My parents sold me to the Kremlin for the same reason they kept my younger sister: need. They did not need two daughters to feed, to grow, to care for. One would suffice. One they could sell, the other they could marry. Neither are loved. You are not loved in the nameless land I was born into, you are needed. Perhaps in some instances it is the same thing: love and need, but not my instance. Not my life. Need is defined by survival, not grander, more beautiful fluorescent things like love, hope, and affection. I do not blame my parents; they were simply surviving like the rest of us.

It is the first lesson they teach you in the Red Room: survival does not guarantee permanence, and permanence rarely guarantees survival. It is better to exist as the spider: the dangling, twirling, silent, but tiny arachnid beast that hangs above the ceilings of diplomats, presidents, and leaders as they share secrets of mass genocides in Tiananmen Square, mutually assured destruction between two countries operating under the banner of democracy, and the rise of a Red ocean all around the world. All eight of the spider's legs poised on a silver web, her eight equally watchful eyes unmoving as she takes in the lessons she learns. Her bite is tiny, you will not notice it, but it will kill a grown man within hours.

You are made of ice. You are frozen and cut cleanly, but when you melt, you will be nothing, so the Headmistress tells the 4-year-old Slavic girl from a nameless village in the arctic. She used to be me, in some origin or another. I am made of flesh and blood and bone – the young girl holds her shaky, bleeding knuckles to show that her blood has weight and visible substance. I am permanent! I exist.

The Headmistress grabs hold of her by the chin and yanks her face upwards, a bodily, unnatural crack ensuing from the force of her hold. You are a girl named Natalia – there are thousands of girls with your name in northern Russia. You can be replaced. Girls made of ice are always, always replaceable.

The girl, Natalia, is kicked, knocked to her knees, and thrown into her room. It is a cell, no bigger than a typical bathtub, but they will call it a room. There is a red light that flickers above her, the girl, the little red-haired girl who bears a name I no longer speak of. There are always red lights. They are wired with infrared sensors that flicker and filtrate red, polarizing light, secreting chemicals that muddle the brain and ventilate the lungs. They are designed to brainwash, to take away our agency, and we don't even know it. It is in the air we breathe, and how can you begin to fight something, that pervades your very breath?

That said, our training was not simply a physical process, but an alchemical transformation that took day-by-day, minute-by-minute, and ate into the very miniscule seconds of our lives. The Headmistress trained us, but it's not simply "training." We were not simply trained as killers, we were transformed into them. Our blood was fused with poison from the food we ate, our skin sent men into frenzies, our memories were twisted, our vision was touched with blue-fringed dazes of murder and drowsiness.

Our bodies became twisted and incensed with unhealthy, unfed muscle and tissue. Normally, muscle is meant to be seen, to be visible, it is meant to expand in the body, and give weight. The special muscle of the "Widows," was hollow, but unbreakably strong like that of an iron-made bird in flight. A contradiction, I know. If we punched a wall at full, unhinged force, it would have broken a hole through 100-year-old brick, but Widows weighed less than 95 pounds. Starving on the edge of consciousness, but strong enough to lift a car off of a road. Sickening, but all the while, unbreakably invincible.

There were six of us: Anya, Natalia, Yelena, Çaçan, Adyana, and Marina. Anya was the Headmistress' daughter, a tiny, bird-like little girl. Her bones whistled when she struck as if they were hollow like a teeny, terrified hummingbird's. Yelena, small and pale, was the littlest. She was called "little sister" by all of us. Despite being unsure of her age, we knew she was young. Çaçan and Adyana were twins, sisters. They were aboriginal Siberian orphans, originated somewhere amongst the scattered Yakuts of the Sakha Republic. They were tall, powerful, and fast. I remember what it was like to watch Çaçan when she killed someone, as if she was some great, vast beast striking through deep, dark water. Marina was soft to look at, delicate to the touch. Her face was flower shaped. She once bit off a man's ear and swallowed it whole.

We were friends, sisters, lovers, and inevitably, enemies. We were everything to each other. And for one of us to succeed as the Black Widow, the others would die. We knew this, and yet, when we were still young as girls, we clung to the notion that perhaps we would escape, that we would find a way to live together.

We didn't.

Mostly because our womanhood was inextricably woven in with the killing of mankind. Before you become a full lieutenant of the Red Room, you must kill a man. That is absolute. Your adulthood is contingent upon the death of a man in mid-climax. Adyana, with her dark hair and sharp, hawk-like eyes, was the first. She carried a knife that had belonged to her mother, a huntress. A Yakuttian knife that was specially forged to skin the hides of prey.

Hired as a sex worker, the senator from America asked for Yana specifically. She was 19. The senator requested sex. In answer to his request, Yana cut off the senator's penis with that same knife that belonged to her mother, slitting all the way up to his heart. She gutted him just as her mother had once showed her on a fish, innards and bowls spilled over the hotel room floor. Adyana with her dark, powerful plaits of the Yakut, were braided with his blood. She knitted her bloodstained boots in a foot full of human viscera. When Yana left the senator's room, she was no longer a 19-year-old girl, she was called the Tarantula.

The name Tarantula fit her well. Yana was tall and beautiful. Taller than the man she killed. That's what I remember the most of her story: I towered over his body, Natalia, towered over the mess of his insignificant, male carcass.

I was afraid of Yana in that moment. Not because she had killed a man, not because she towered over him, but because she had become something more than me. I saw her power, her divinity, and even her canonization into a spirituality I could not easily follow her into.

The blood of man indoctrinates the Widow. Men are always stupid flesh and breakable bone, but the Widow who kills him becomes his maker, his undoer, and his god. She giveth life, she taketh it away. The Headmistress had once shown us this doctrine on her own husband, a high-ranking Russian officer. She had shot him, execution-style, before her own daughter's eyes.

She giveth life, she taketh it away. Finally, I saw the power of the Red Room training. It was grueling, it was cruel, it was dangerous, but it manufactured the girls who trained under the Kremlin's program into teeth-cutting, heart-swallowing, golden-forged warriors. Yana had killed a man, soon it would be my turn.

I would become a god yet.

Clint Barton found himself, as he did every night now a days, half-drunk, on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment building, and lost in a sludge of the before-now-after.

You could come back to work, offered Steve Rogers, Captain America, man-with-the-star-spangled plan, super-guy, jawline that would kill, perpetual man of the hour. Clint bet the guy couldn't take a singular bad photo. You know how many bad photos Clint had? A lot.

No, I don't think I can, Cap. I… I need some time off.

Clint looked at his hands, frowning down at the undeniable shake he noticed in his fingers. He stuffed them into his jacket pockets. Don't think about that right now.

Okay, Barton, well, just uh… Just let me know if you need anything.

Clint stood up and picked up the empty beer bottle he'd been holding. His eyes, a hazy, chaotic mess of steamy blues, turquoise, and Windex cleaner, mixed in with an unexpected shade of indigo, hung onto the label of the empty glass bottle.

Yeah, yeah, I'll do that, Cap, don't worry.

Let's see that aim now, Clint, old buddy, old pal. He threw the bottle across the gap between his apartment building and the one next to it. KHASSSSSSS. He heard the glass sizzle and shatter against the brick of the next-door building. A man, with an apartment window right next to where the bottle had smashed, opened the window and spat angry Yiddish at the dark figure standing on top of the roof next door.

The famous archer, sometimes-Avenger, and sandy-haired disaster gave the angry man a wave of his hand, half-apologetic, half-dismissive. He turned and stumbled back over to where he'd been sitting before, sinking down against the door of the rooftop. The back of his head braced against the brick wall as he shifted those crazy, calamitous blue eyes upwards into the sky.

He was off. He knew his aim had been off. When you're as good as him, the best of the best, and aiming at stuff in motion is pretty much you're only skill, you know when you're off. It's not always a visual thing. Sometimes, you can't "see" when you're off. Sometimes… Sometimes, it's a…

If you're gonna kill me, you should probably do it now.

Closing his eyes, he bowed his head into his hands, crushing his face into his clammy palms. No. No. No. No. Not this… Anything but this. Please…

Why would I kill you? She was a tiny, red-haired Russian girl. Green eyes that were far too big for her face. The bones of her hands, twisted around the gun, were liquid, graceful, and bony. He knew she could've killed him quicker than he could pull an arrow out of a quiver, but all he could notice was the tiny, rodent-like bones of her hand. Her wrists stood out, skinny and unnatural. He probably should have devised a way to escape, but all he could think about was eating pizza with her.

Clint was willing to bet a $100 on Tony Stark's riches that little Russian assassin woulda loved pizza. (He had been right, by the way. She had loved pizza.)

Well, for one, you got a gun pointed at my face.

The Russian assassin frowned at him. He liked that. He liked how her frown made a crease in her eyebrows, how she seemed both confused and irritated at his reply. Confusion at being irritated, irritated at her own confusion.

You were following me.

Yeah, uh… Sorry. I was kinda sent here to kill you.

The grip on the gun tightened as the old suspicion, unsure, and unnatural – instinctual and rooted – rotted away that sweet sense of confusion and irritation she had had only moments ago. So, why shouldn't I return the favor?

Clint let go of his bow, resting it against his leg, as he spread his hands apart in truce. Because I don't wanna kill you anymore.

Thinking that would've worked was his first mistake because Natasha 100% shot him in the shoulder. Fucking fuck FUCK?! What the fuck was that for?! She never apologized for it, by the way. That was okay. Clint never blamed her for it. Well, he did, but he didn't hold a grudge. He wasn't good at holding grudges.

You were sent here to kill me – I give you a parting Russian kiss. Try to kill me again, or I'll do worse. She then kicked him directly in the shin and ran off.

It was pretty much at that point that he realized he really hated this cute little Russian lady. Profusely bleeding from his shoulder and moaning over his sprained muscle, he chased after the Russian assassin through the crowds of the Red Square. Tourists. There were so many fucking tourists. The early 90s were rife with tourism in post-Cold War Russia.

Clint lost her in the middle of all those crowds. His eyes scanned the SHIELD-established perimeter desperately, but there was nothing in sight. Exhausted, he sat down in the middle of the Red Square, running a hand through his hair in both confusion and minor amazement. That was about the same time he remembered his shoulder had a lodged bullet in it. Oh, fuck—

A day later, he woke up in a Russian hospital with the little Russian assassin sitting at his side. She had a duffel bag in the seat next to her. She was packed and ready to go. Just like that. Are you any good at acting? The doctors think I am your wife.

Classic. Surprising him with a giant life crisis as soon as he wakes up out of a coma – was quintessential Natasha. She went home with him after that. Apparently, that little Russian assassin had seen him bleeding out on the pavement of the Red Square and saved his stupid life. I did not want you to die. She shrugged, as if it was nothing.

The funny thing was, however, after years of being a SHIELD agent, a mercenary, a circus goddamn freak, a dumbass, and Barney Barton's kid brother, that was about the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him. It came from the lips of a young woman, who could have killed him, had she not chosen to make another call.

Yeah, she saved his stupid life, which made him really fucking bitter. A piece of me will always hate you because I'll owe you forever. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I saved you and you saved me. So thank God we're fucking even, Natasha. Thank, FUCK. Clint pulled his face out of his hands, his vision blurry, and the lights of the city beyond flickering in the light of his drunk, angry tears.

Natasha Romanoff was dead. Apparently, he'd been dead for five years, and because she decided to make the first stupid, selfless decision of her life, Natasha had jumped off a cliff in the middle of space, sacrificing herself for the sake of the world, and bringing everybody back in the process. She died so you could live, pal – don't waste that. Or that's what Steve Rogers told him.

How do you do that, though? How do you go on living after someone dies for you? You don't. You can't. It's impossible. You owe them your whole dumb, stupid, boring existence. Isn't that the argument with Christians? Christ died for your sins! On a cross! You owe him your life! Amen!

All religious sentiment aside, however, it's goddamn near impossible to live a life that was given back to you. Why was his life…? Why did she die for his life? He— He hadn't done anything. He shot arrows, gave himself aneurysm-worthy concussions every other day of the week, and with no real skill, lived day-by-day, hoping to make it to the next. Clint barely avoided life-ending disasters. In fact, if he was being goddamn honest with himself, his whole life was a barely avoided life-ending disaster.

You're an endless blackhole of shit, Clint Barton, as a certain Bobbi Morse would've called him. You cannot use her death as a fucking excuse to be shitty to everyone else!

Couldn't he? Natasha saved his life. She gave it back to him. Couldn't he just fucking use it the way he wanted? Throw it away? Waste it? Drink, scream, moan, and sour? "It's your fault for bein' dead, girly." He whispered, hoping she would hear him.

So, that's where Clint found himself, as he did every night now a days, half-drunk, on the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment building, and lost in a sludge of the before-now-after.

Before: Natasha was alive. Now: Natasha wasn't. After: What the fuck was he supposed to do?

Before she even woke up, before she knew who she was, she remembered him. No, not a name, not a face, but she remembered him.

In a kitchen, somewhere she had intimately once known, standing by a window as early morning sunlight poured in through the broken stain glass window that hung over the sink. Sunlight poured around his backside. She couldn't see his face, but she was standing behind him, watching. He was holding a cup of coffee. The dark liquid in the cup, black and unsweetened, steamed up in the cold apartment air. There was a hole over his shoulder blade in his well-worn purple t-shirt. His shoulders twitched as a cold burst of air whistled through the broken holes in the window. Turning his body, he began to shift his face to look over his shoulder. She caught sight of his cheekbone, the sun gracing the scrappy, unshaven cut of his jaw. No face, no name, no memory. Just an idea.

NATASHA, honey,

WAKE,

UP.

A strong whip of wind brushes the ice-white hair from her face. Her cat-green eyes snap open. She is awake.A shaky, undeniable breath is sucked in through her lips. She breathes. She is alive.

Those eyes, sharp, green, and unmarred by human memory or confliction, are different. She is alive, but she is not here. This is someone new. Her ice-white hair, a mark of her new and bodily condition, whip around her sharp, pointed face in the blistering winds. Prying herself to her feet, she stands against the chilling, unmerciful winter winds. Her naked body did not seem to mind the cold, and she had no need of warmth. She remembered, quite well, as someone had once told her: she was made of ice. Russian winters kill mortal men, but she was no mortal.

Do you want to know how I became a god?

Here it is, I'll tell you the secret: I killed and killed and killed – everyone – except him. He stole my divinity, he stole my chance at exaltation, he stole my wings, he stole my bloody, violent rebirth into this world. He stole me. I hated him. My name was the Black Widow, that was my name.

Until it wasn't. Until the poison washed out of my veins, until I bleached the toxin off of my skin, until I woke up in a bed for the first time and realized half of my memories were wrong, fake, and forgotten.

Pick a new name, he said.

Natasha.

"Natasha." The white-haired woman whispered to the howling, bitter winds as the blizzard set in. It was blinding. Snow fell through the air as if it was a component of its natural disposition. "Natasha was the name I chose."

And in doing so, I was made new.