Natasha V: Opekun

It drove her crazy, not being able to dance. Knitting required a degree of focus, but it lacked the physicality and exhilaration of large-scale movement. Natasha felt utterly useless and unaccomplished, but with her ankles there wasn't much she could do to amend it. In a fit of frustration, she dug through her closet and drawers and pulled out all her dance stuff, from tights and leotards to foam rollers and turnout disks, and got rid of all of it, leaving her closet practically bare.

Natasha stared at herself in the mirror for a long time after that, as if by contemplating her reflection hard enough she could rediscover the missing piece. The swelling in her face had gone down since the end of steroid treatment, and her hair grew just a little bit longer every day, but she still looked exhausted. There was no reason for her to be physically tired anymore. The harshest phases of chemo ended months ago, and the side effects from her current maintenance regimen were barely there. She wasn't dancing thirty hours a week, and instead of aching from the strain of working hard her muscles ached with longing.

Her mood plummeted. Regular days were dark, IV chemo days even darker. Now that Nutcracker was over, Yelena barely spoke to her. Liho was the only one who still treated her like normal. Mama and Papa could clearly tell something was wrong, but they didn't know what to do about it. Natasha considered turning to them for help, but she didn't know what they could even do. Nobody could heal her ankles. She couldn't help but feel like she'd died with them.

"Natasha, have you ever considered boxing?" Papa asked at dinner.

The subject caught her completely off guard. Papa watched the sport occasionally, but he never brought it up in conversation. "No," she said.

"I think you should try it. It's physical but easy on the ankles."

Natasha considered this. It wasn't dance, but it was certainly worth a shot. Avascular necrosis hadn't touched her wrists or hands, so she saw no reason not to give it a shot. Of course, she couldn't actually fight anybody while she still had a port in her chest, but early training probably didn't involve hand-to-hand combat anyway.

A few days after that conversation, Papa took her to meet a friend of his. Natasha vaguely knew of several of her father's friends, but she'd never met this man before. Papa led her into a gym that smelled strongly of sweat, not unlike the Red Room, and led her off to a back corner. The man before her towered over them, with long dark hair and a thick beard. He wore a bright red shirt with a white star and would've been intimidating if it weren't for the borderline goofy smile shining through his thick whiskers.

"You must be Natasha," he said warmly.

She nodded silently. "This is Alexei Shostakov," Papa introduced.

"You can call me Opekun," he said. Natasha considered this man's position as a boxing instructor and deemed "Guardian" a fitting nickname. She glanced around the gym at the other people working out—all adult men with chests so broad they barely fit into their shirts. Two sparred in a ring in the center of the room, and several others worked bags or jumped rope around the periphery. Natasha felt more out of place here than she had as a non-English speaker in America.

"You were a dancer, yes?" Opekun asked her.

She nodded again.

"Excellent. So many boxers are heavy on their feet. Makes them slow, easy to hit."

Natasha didn't exactly know how to respond to that, so she just continued to stare at him. He didn't seem fazed, though. Opekun looked her over with the same analytical glare Uchitel used to observe their form at the barre. If he was pleased or displeased with what he saw, he made no indication. With a nod of finality, he disappeared into a back room and reappeared with a pair of gloves and a pair of mitts. He waved Papa away and walked her over to an empty section of mat. If any of the men around the gym found it strange that a twelve-year-old girl trained alongside them, they didn't show it. They were all too engrossed in their own activities to pay her any attention. Natasha appreciated the lack of scrutiny. In dance, there were always eyes on her whether she knew it or not.

Opekun helped her into the gloves and showed her the basic pattern he wanted her to start with. Left, right, left, right, guard. And repeat. "Exactly like that," he said with a nod. Then he held up the mitts and let her have at it. They were far less forgiving than she expected, probably because of the mass and strength of the man behind them. It felt like hitting a solid wall. "Hands higher. Someone will break your nose," he chided. Left, right, left, right, protect her face. Evidently, she applied the correction properly, because he nodded and smiled. He let her keep at it for a few more minutes before he adjusted her stance.

"I can feel that your left hand is stronger than your right," he stated. Natasha had been one of few dancers in her class who performed skills better on the left than the right. Other girls had always been jealous because in group numbers she always got to perform her strong side, while some of the righties got stuck dancing left to even the numbers out. She placed her right foot in front for better leverage, starting to twist her upper body somewhat to add some torque under Opekun's direction. "That's it," he said.

As she worked, memories of her accomplishments in ballet danced through her head alongside the exhilaration of moving again. The first time she solidly landed a triple pirouette—the first time she hit Opekun's mitt hard enough to feel it give just a tiny bit from the force of her fist. Nailing the counts of a new combination—hitting a rhythm with her punches that got her blood racing and her mind clearing. The notes of a piano song blending seamlessly with her thoughts—the resounding smack of glove against mitt joining the chorus of the rest of the gym. Natasha fell in love once again.

"That's enough," Opekun announced. He dropped the mitts, but Natasha was so in the zone that she threw another punch and hit him square in the chest. The extra distance between her feet and the target threw her off balance, and she stumbled. She righted herself and held her breath waiting for an angry outburst from the man—she had just hit him after all, and he could've easily squashed her like a bug if he so chose. Instead, a rumbling laugh sounded from his chest. "You've got fire. I like that. Now do push-ups until you drop."

Natasha didn't think twice, so used to obeying commands from an instructor. She tore off her gloves and dropped to the mat. They used to do these during conditioning for ballet, but never that many of them. The art form required enough upper body strength to hold the arms aloft for extended periods of time, but it wasn't contemporary or modern dance, so they didn't do floor work or balances. That being said, Natasha hadn't trained at all since before cancer. She reached fourteen, and on the fifteenth her arms gave out. "Not bad," Opekun said flatly. He let her take a water break and then set her on a dumbbell circuit. By the time she finished, her arms were shaking and exhausted and she was panting worse than she used to after a particularly difficult adagio. Despite this, she felt more alive than she had in months. It was a good ache, nothing like the fatigue and pain of chemo side effects. Natasha thanked Opekun and on the way out asked Papa when she could come back.

~0~

Now with something to work towards, Natasha's life brightened once again—both literally and figuratively. As winter turned to spring, they got more and more sunlight. Winters in Russia were cold and dark, and Mama had made her bundle up in upwards of three layers of clothing before letting her step outside, afraid that she'd catch something in the cold. On her way to school, Natasha often had to shed a layer or two to avoid passing out from overheating. Besides, she knew that cold weather itself didn't cause illness; germs spread by people did. Still immunocompromised from continued maintenance chemo, she had to be extra careful, just not quite as much as during the more intense phases of treatment.

With all her time freed up by the absence of dance classes and rehearsals, Natasha decided to pursue another goal in addition to boxing: continuing her English education. Now that she wasn't living at Gravesen, she didn't listen to the language all day every day, and she could tell when she talked to Clint that her fluency was well on its way to nose-diving. Mama and Papa put her in an evening class three times a week, and she quickly picked back up what she'd lost since returning to Russia.

The happiness that Natasha had strived to build over the past few weeks came crashing down when Clint told her the news. Dr. Potts had exhausted all options to treat his cancer. He was terminal. Only a few more months remained before the tumors shut down his organs. Clint told her over a video call, the closest option they had to direct interpersonal communication, and it took every ounce of strength within her not to break down crying. But she knew her weeping wouldn't help him.

"I'm so sorry, Clint," she said, voice quavering.

"It is what it is," he said with a shrug. He was trying so hard to seem nonchalant, but she could see in his eyes how deeply he was hurting.

"What are you going to do? In the meantime?"

"I still have a Wish I haven't spent."

"Do you know what you're going to do with it?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Well, you'd better make up your mind." She tried to smile with that line, but the reality of how little time he had left to choose and execute a Wish made it a harsh instruction.

"I will," he sighed.

The day after that conversation, Natasha asked Opekun at her training session if she could have a go at one of the punching bags. He looked surprised at the request, probably because the bags were usually occupied by the men who frequented the gym, but he humored her. Natasha taped up her hands and took up a position between two guys three times her size. They both looked at her, not with disdain or surprise, but with approving smiles. She squared her shoulders and let loose all of her frustrations. The bag proved a sturdier opponent than she initially anticipated, but that only made her strike it harder. It barely gave under her onslaught, too massive for her small frame to budge it, but she imagined it was a tumor. She wished beating the living shit out of cancer was as easy as going at it on this hunk of leather and sand.

Her knuckles bled through the tape by the time she quit.

"Rough day?" Opekun asked with genuine concern. He helped her take the tape off her hands and started cleaning and bandaging them with incredible gentleness for a man his size.

"My best friend is dying," she said. She trusted Opekun and decided not to sugarcoat it. Plus, saying it out loud was something she needed to do in order to come to terms with this dismal inevitability.

He paused his ministrations and tried to meet her eye. Natasha looked away because she feared she might cry, and she promised herself she would never cry in front of him. "I am sorry to hear this news," he said. "I can think of few things in life that are harder than that."

He was right. Natasha couldn't think of anything she'd endured in the past year that was more difficult than coming to terms with losing Clint. Not coming to America alone, not induction chemo, not going to Budapest, not losing dance. None of those even came close. Without her asking, Opekun opened his arms and offered her a hug. Though they both smelled like sweaty gym, Natasha accepted. And then she cried.

At first she tried to stop it, to stem the flow of tears before they could slip past her eyelids, but her efforts proved futile. She feared Opekun would lose all respect for her, a little girl who thought she was tough enough to box but crumpled to a sobbing heap when things got tough. But he didn't. "It's okay to cry," he told her. Before long, he was crying too, even though he knew nothing about Clint. Whether it was just a show of commiseration or he was actually upset to see her so upset, she didn't know, but it helped. She imagined that, if he could, Opekun would punch the cancer out of Clint's body. But of course, nobody could do that. In that moment, he really lived up to his nickname. Despite the impending loss of her best friend, the solidarity of this man she barely knew made Natasha feel protected.

Am I kinda-sorta headcanoning the backstory of David Harbour's character from Stranger Things onto this completely unrelated David Harbour character? Maybe. But that's not important.