Natasha VI: Barren

Natasha started to resent her hair growing longer. As it inched ever closer towards her jawline and then her shoulders, she felt like she was leaving Clint behind. She wore the arrow necklace every single day, grasping it between her fingers whenever she needed to feel close to him, which was often. At her next spinal chemo infusion, she requested sedation just for a respite from the incessant ache of his absence.

Yelena, who she'd barely spoken to since Nutcracker, went out of her way to tell Natasha that maybe she shouldn't wear the necklace anymore so she could move on. At the gym that afternoon, Natasha imagined the punching bag bore Yelena's face. She spent a lot more time there in the months following Clint's death. Move on. It wasn't that simple. Someone who'd never lost anybody could never understand that.

Wanda understood that. She rejoined their group not long after the funeral, having run into Tony and Parker in New York, which she was visiting for a Twinless Twins convention. That weekend, she shared a video with them of a woman discussing the impossibility of moving on. Natasha watched the entire thing twice in case anything got lost in translation the first time, and it illuminated exactly how she felt. Love never died just because a person did. The dead were not to be forgotten, but remembered and honored. If it had been Natasha instead, that's what she would've wanted Clint to do. Not to move on, but to move with.

She started calling Nick or Kate most nights. It helped fill the empty hour in the evenings when she used to call Clint. They shared their favorite memories of him, and occasionally spoke as if he could hear, telling him about their week or something they saw or heard that reminded them of him. Natasha hoped he'd be proud.

~0~

She finished treatment a year after Clint died. For a moment she spent nearly three years awaiting, it was actually rather anti-climactic. Natasha picked up the pills and swallowed them as she'd done every day for the past two years. And that was it. She was done with cancer treatment. Mama and Papa wanted to celebrate this momentous occasion, but she didn't feel much like rejoicing. The extent of her celebration was to text the group and inform them. Even their enthusiastic congratulations didn't manage to cheer her up. All she could think about was the fact that she made it here and Clint didn't.

Why? What had she done to earn this victory that he hadn't? She hadn't fought harder or longer, not by a long shot. Clint spent seven of his eleven years trying to vanquish this beast and it swallowed him anyway. Who was she to stand before it and declare it beaten? Was it even worth it to stand here at this junction of her cancer journey without Clint by her side? A voice in her head that she couldn't silence repeatedly whispered, "It should have been me." Natasha couldn't say with confidence that the voice was wrong.

On top of the heap of survivor's guilt, the end of treatment carried with it a slew of new anxieties. Chemotherapy had been her defense against leukemia cells, and now she wasn't getting it anymore. Now, instead of actively fighting to get rid of them, she just had to hope they didn't come back. Given that she fell firmly in the high risk of relapse category, she constantly worried that hope wouldn't be enough. Natasha didn't know what she would do if she came this far just to relapse and do it all again with reduced odds of success.

Every month, she had blood drawn to check for a recurrence of leukemia cells, and every month before that appointment she hit the gym harder than usual, using the physical exertion to distract her. She worked until Opekun forced her to stop so she wouldn't injure herself. When results came in and proved she remained in remission, she and her parents could breathe again…for all of one month. Every minor ache or bloody knuckle from boxing that took just a little too long to clot freaked her out.

Natasha knew she was supposed to be moving forward and developing a life without cancer, but she thought if she let it slip to the back of her mind for more than a little while it would take advantage of that ignorance and strike. She knew logically that not thinking about cancer couldn't cause a relapse, that at this point there was literally nothing she could do to control whether she relapsed or not, but her fear wouldn't allow logic to take the forefront. Cancer had taken so much from her that she spent every second looking over her shoulder waiting for it to snatch something else.

As she later learned, it already had. She just didn't know it yet.

~0~

Sometimes, Natasha hated living so far away. She, Thor, and now Wanda were the only three of their friends who didn't live in New York. Even Tony and Bruce, away at college, were still close enough that they could return in times of crisis. Steve dying definitely constituted a crisis. Natasha couldn't eat or sleep, consumed entirely by worry for her dear friend. Bucky tried his best to update them, but he was understandably distracted. Natasha detested the fact that she couldn't be there for real. During Clint's last days, she'd forced her parents to let her go and say a proper goodbye, and every day she was grateful for that opportunity. But that had been over the summer, and they wouldn't let her go now in the middle of October. Natasha suspected there was more to it, that her parents were concerned she'd become too fixated on Clint's death and didn't want the same to happen with Steve, but as the video Wanda shared had said, there was no such thing as moving on when you lost someone you loved. No. Such. Thing.

She had no choice but to hope her prayers reached all the way across the ocean.

And they did. Steve pulled through, much to everyone's relief and immense joy. Natasha didn't think she could survive the deaths of two friends so soon after one another. The day she heard that news, she boxed not for stress relief but for sheer happiness. Opekun noticed her obvious exuberance and challenged her to something he'd never done before: a real fight. During maintenance, she hadn't been allowed to spar because of the port in her chest, but now that was gone. She accepted the challenge with grim determination, excited to finally put all of her training to use.

For the first time ever, she stepped into the ring, ducking between the first two ropes. Opekun was still three times her size, and she knew she'd be demolished in a real match, but from the first move it was obvious he was pulling his punches to keep her safe. She appreciated the gesture, but she quickly found her advantages and exploited them. While she couldn't reach his head or—per the rules of the sport—hit below the belt, his chest and abdomen were right within striking distance. And he clearly wasn't used to guarding so low. Plus, she was quicker. Ballet had taught her how to move from one spot to another in as much or as little time as suited her, with as many or as few steps. Opekun could barely get a jab in.

"Excellent," he congratulated at the end of the round, holding the ropes wider for her to step out. "You make a formidable foe any man would fear to face in combat."

"Thanks." Natasha hoped she never had to fight anybody, but it was nice to have the confidence that she could if it ever came to that.

That year, she trained harder than ever in all respects. She spent four days a week at the gym sparring Opekun, working the bag, or lifting, and picked up French and Latin classes as her English grew fluent enough that there was little more teachers could teach her. To practice, she continued to watch American and British spy movies in her free time and talked at the TV, critiquing anything from their strategy to their choice of wardrobe. She also talked to Wanda, Tony, Nick, and Kate as much as possible, but Steve was so busy just staying alive that he didn't often have time to call her. Still, he made sure to at least text every so often to check in and make sure she was doing okay. That boy's selflessness knew no bounds.

It was a great year in all respects, except for the fact that it moved her a year farther away from Clint. She still missed him every single day, and sometimes that hole widened and tried to swallow her whole, but she didn't let it. Instead, she reminded herself that she was doing exactly what he asked of her: kicking cancer's ass.

But a few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, she learned that while she'd spent the last year and a half marching forward and leaving the beaten corpse of cancer behind her, it wasn't going to fade into the background without one last slap in the face to remind her that it would always own her.

She still hadn't gotten her period. And at her age, that meant something was wrong. Her doctors were concerned, so they ran even more bloodwork than her usual leukemia check-up and did a pelvic exam. Everything was present and outwardly healthy, but her hormones were all wrong. It didn't take them longer than a brief glance at her medical history to figure out why. Chemotherapy attacked all rapidly dividing cells, and in Natasha's case that included frying her ovaries. They were too damaged to produce hormones. She was sterile and on the cusp of menopause at fifteen years old.

Natasha grieved yet another loss, this time for something she'd barely known she had in the first place. As a little girl, she used to think about one day being a mother like Mama; it was always an ever-distant eventuality, but an eventuality nonetheless. Now it was an impossibility. Natasha didn't even know how to mourn this. How does one mourn the loss of children they never met?

She'd never teach them to knit like Mama had done for her. Never bandage their cuts and assure them that everything would be alright. Never tell them stories of their Uncle Clint. Her mama would never get to be a babushka. It was a blow made all the more staggering not just by its permanence, but by its unexpectedness. With leukemia threatening her life, they hadn't bothered to tell her that the medications about to save her life would prevent her from creating another. Or if they had, Natasha had been too preoccupied with staying alive to let it sink in.

Not only was it devastating, it was dangerous. Without hormone cycles, Natasha's risk for osteoporosis skyrocketed, a situation made even more dire by the fact that her ankle bones were already severely weakened by avascular necrosis. They sent her to an endocrinologist who put her on hormone replacement therapy immediately, and just like that Natasha was right back to keeping a strict daily meds schedule. Luckily, she had practice from two years of maintenance chemo.

However, unlike chemo, there was no glory in this. She wasn't fighting back against something threatening her life, and there was no countdown to the end of treatment, no promise of things one day returning to normal. This was normal. And this time, she could find no solace in any of her Gravesen friends. They were all boys—well, except for Wanda, but Natasha would never stoop to complain about losing something like this to someone who'd lost their twin sister. With cancer, she could commiserate with Nick and Bucky, but they'd never understand this. Kate might get it, and while they were pretty good friends, Natasha didn't feel comfortable talking to her about something so personal. Beyond that, Parker was adopted, and she didn't want to insinuate that adoption wasn't a legitimate way to become a parent. It absolutely was, but this was about more than just the loss of potential biological children. To Natasha, it symbolized both the literal and figurative barrenness of her future.

She ruminated on that barrenness for far too long, focused only on what her future lacked and not what it could still have. For most of Natasha's life, she'd buried these sorts of feelings deep. She thought that if they never saw the light of day, if she never looked at them, then she'd never feel them. Cancer treatment taught her just how dangerous that was. If she ignored something, it would only get worse. So, she turned to Mama and dug up everything she'd buried since her diagnosis.

Mama admitted that she couldn't relate because she already had a beautiful biological daughter, but she did remind Natasha of one very important fact: "Sterile is such a harsh word. It does mean devoid of life, but there's a difference between devoid of life and devoid of living. And you still have so much living left to do."