Shoutouts to lovlylobster for reviewing!

After a weekend of watching the Black Widow solo several times, trying to reread my own series as a brush up on the universe I've got going on here, and sending myself on a reminder crash course of both characters' stories in the MCU as well as their 616 details, I think I have a direction I want to go in? I have no idea how to make this work. Anyway, tomorrow means a new Hawkeye episode!

As always, I'm a slut for feedback, and as always, enjoy! =)

Chapter 10

Kind faces and gentle touches. Songs and warm food. Soft beds and cool pillows. The foggy veil of time that typically accompanies memory had been lifted due to Wanda's restoration of Natasha's mind, and so she had remembered everything. Years ago, the first time she reclaimed what she had thought were her memories, she had felt relieved. She had believed that now she knew everything about her past. The second time she had her fake memories wiped away, she hadn't been so relieved. Instead, she felt confused. The third time, this time, she just felt devastated.

For so long, she had thought she'd never had chocolate chip pancakes before Clint had given them to her at SHIELD when she was still in captivity. But after Wanda, Natasha knew she'd had them as a child. Young, innocent, and sweet. She'd had a mother and father, and she now saw their faces clearly in her mind. Bits of memories had been littered about her brain, but the final pieces were now in place, and Natasha remembered.

So much about her past wasn't real, and whenever Natasha really thought about it, she felt so overwhelmed she couldn't breathe. She longed to tell Clint everything. From beginning to end, she wanted to tell him every tiny detail that danced around her head, taunting her, but she didn't know how to start. How could she tell him that the Russian accent she'd had when he'd first found her had been wiped, replaced, and restored all in the course of several versions of the same story? How could she tell him that for a little while, she'd had a fake family in America? How could she tell him about the sister she'd loved and then lost more than once? First, to the Red Room and then again to her mind being wiped. No matter how she tried forming the words, she couldn't find the right way to say them.

"Your parents?" Clint asked. When he'd been sent to kill her all those years ago, he had been given a file on her. Intel. Preparation for the mission. In that file was everything he needed to know in order to find her and kill her, but her parents' names had been left blank. Even when Palmer printed out Natasha's history for her to look over, her parents' names weren't listed. Any time her parents had ever come up in conversation, she had always just shrugged and said she didn't have any and left it at that. He had figured that she didn't remember her parents, that her memories had been wiped, but he'd been surprised to learn that no one seemed to know who Natalia Alianovna Romanova's parents had been.

"I've been remembering things about where I grew up," she said, careful to choose her words as Clint's eyes bore directly into her. "That was already a bit of a surprise, since I didn't think I'd ever had much of a normal childhood. Turns out I did until my parents died. But it was the remembering the parents part that I was still struggling with."

"And that's what happened back at Coulson's." Clint put the two together. "You remembered.

Her throat tightened, and she nodded. "Yeah. I did. But you know how you remember things from long ago, but they're kind of faded because of how long ago it was? Wanda's powers…I remember everything so clearly it's like I saw it happen yesterday. There isn't any dullness, and I can just see everything." She stopped talking and looked away, clearing her throat as if to also clear the words stuck inside her. "Clint…everything I thought to be true…"

"What do you remember?" he asked, his voice as gentle as the touches she remembered of her mother's hands.

"I was loved." Natasha's voice wavered, and she quickly blinked to push away the tears she felt stinging the backs of her eyes. "I've lived my entire life thinking that no one cared about me until you found me, but the Red Room wiped those memories from my head. Even Voloshin replaced the ones the Red Room put in, and I still thought I had never been loved."

"But you were." Clint's fingers lightly brushed against her cheek as he turned her head to look back at him. "That's what you remember?"

"My parents loved me." Natasha leaned into Clint's touch, closing her eyes as she relished the comfort that just his touch brought her. "I was loved."

Clint's heart shattered as he watched Natasha process this new detail of her past. She never should have been made to feel this way, to feel shocked and emotional over discovering that she had been loved as a child. The fact that she had been wiped to believe that she had never had anyone care about her tore at him and made him want to take that suit of armor Tony had wanted to put around the world and put it around her instead.

"I'm so sorry," he said, hoping he didn't sound as pained as he felt. "Those memories never should've been taken away from you."

"Everyone deserves to feel loved." She offered him a shaky smile as her eyes softened. "You taught me that. Once you made the decision not to kill me, and you believed I deserved a second chance…when you cared about me, I learned that I deserved to feel loved."

"I wish I hadn't been the one to teach it to you. You should've grown up knowing that there were people who cared about you."

"I know." She reached out to touch his face, mirroring his touch on her. "It's a lot to process."

"Do you remember what happened to your parents?" He watched her face change with her nod, watched how she went from looking overwhelmed to grieved. "Do you want to talk about it?"

She paused and then shook her head. "Not yet. I will at some point. But…first, I just want to get to Russia. One thing at a time, right?"

"Right. We've got a long flight ahead of us."

"Wouldn't be our longest."

"Right you are on that."

Natasha squeezed Clint's hand again before letting go. He was right – they had a long flight ahead of them, and when they landed, they would be in Russia. This trip back wouldn't be Natasha's first time back in Russia, but it would be her first time trying to track down her past. To really track it down. She had no idea what was to come.

At three years old, Natalia loved playing with her best friend, having adventures outside, and getting hugs from her mother and father. Viktoria, the neighborhood cat, was her favorite animal, and she loved to sing her favorite songs to the friendly feline while it bathed in the sun. She didn't know any strangers, but were she to meet one, she would not have known to be cautious. So when Natalia was outside playing in the street with her best friend Varya, whom Natalia adored with all her heart, she felt unconcerned by the unfamiliar woman who casually approached them. Natalia and Varya stopped playing and watched this stranger come close.

"Good afternoon, ladies," the woman greeted.

"Hi." Natalia squinted past the sunlight and studied the woman's face. She looked kind and loving, similar to Natalia's mother, and the little girl smiled.

"Hi," Varya softly echoed. She was a little shyer than Natalia, but Natalia never minded being the bolder of the two.

"May I sit?" The woman gestured to a spot on the ground next to them, and Natalia nodded. At three years old, she might have been too young to be playing alone without parental supervision, but her small town was safe, and she had never known any reason to believe that she was anything but.

"Your name's Natalia, right?" the woman asked.

In that innocent way children have, Natalia was not surprised to hear that this woman knew her name already, and she nodded. "Uh huh."

"Natalia. What a pretty name. Did your mama give you that name?"

Natalia nodded again, smiling. "Uh huh."

"My name is Doroteya. We haven't met before, but I know your mama." The woman named Doroteya kept smiling at Natalia, and Natalia thought about how nice she looked.

"That's Varya." Natalia pointed to her friend, who still looked unsure about this new person but felt comfortable enough to let Natalia keep leading the interaction. "Her mama's friends with my mama."

"That's so nice." Doroteya's eyes drifted to the small cluster of houses behind them as if she were looking for someone and couldn't find them. Her glance away was so brief that at the moment, Natalia didn't notice it, but years later in memory, Natasha would notice right away. "It's a really good thing to have friends. Are you girls friends?"

"Yeah."

"Well, Natalia, I have a special surprise for you. Your mama wants you to be where you can have even more friends."

"More?" Natalia's small eyebrows drew together in confusion. On some level, she understood what Doroteya was telling her, but the words didn't seem to click. Her mother wanted her to have even more friends than she already did, but she loved the ones she had. Varya was her best friend, and even at such a young age, Natalia knew she would fight to defend her shy best friend forever.

Doroteya nodded and put a gentle hand against the little girl's cheek. "Yes. More. She wants you to go to a very special place that will give you all the friends in the world."

"Can Varya come, too?"

Suddenly, Doroteya's smile wilted, and she shook her head. "Varya has other things she needs to do."

"Will Mama be there?"

"She won't be there, either."

Natalia's heart raced as she thought about being in a new place without Varya and without her mother. She loved adventures, but she didn't want to be away from her favorite people for long. Who would give her father a hug when he came home from work? Who would help her mother look for her shoes when she couldn't find them? Those were all things that Natalia did, and without her, who would do them?

"I don't know…" She turned over her shoulder to look back at her house. From this distance, she couldn't see her mother, and she moved to try to get a better look. "Where's my mama?"

"Natalia, it's ok."

Something in Doroteya's voice made Natalia's heart jolt with anxiety, and she started to turn back around to keep an eye on the woman when suddenly, all she saw was darkness.

Natasha had shared the revelation about her parents with Clint, but what Natasha hadn't told Clint was how the Red Room had gotten hold of her. She hadn't told him how she had been playing with a friend, a local little girl named Varya whom little Natalia had adored with all her heart, when a woman approached the two of them in the street.

Natasha hadn't told Clint that while her head had been turned away, had been turned toward home, Doroteya had injected her with a sedative. Clint didn't need to know about how she'd been ripped away from her best friend, playing on the street one second and kidnapped the next. One day, she would tell him, but she wasn't ready to talk about it yet. So many years, so many nights had watched her lie awake, either wondering about how she'd made her way to the Red Room or looking back on memories that hadn't even been real.

One version of her history had put her in an orphanage before being handed over to the KGB and the Red Room from a young age. Another version had made her believe that she'd never remember her early years due to being brainwashed into believing she had learned ballet when really, she had been trained to become an assassin. At the time when Clint had saved her, she had been on that version of herself. She had thrived on twisted memories of ballet training contorting into Red Room exercises, and she had even made peace with the fact that she would never know what her childhood had been like.

But more than anything, Natasha felt wrung out. She felt like her brain had been shocked and beaten time and time again, and during the past few days, the exhaustion had weighed on her so heavily that she could have sworn she could physically see it pressing down against her shoulders.

These were the things Natasha hadn't told Clint.

The sound of Clint's shuffling footsteps caught Natasha's attention, and she turned her focus off the plane's controls in front of her to flash him a smile. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty."

"What're you doing up here?" He stifled a yawn and sank down into the co-pilot's chair. Grogginess made his eyes look glazed over, and he rubbed at them with the backs of his hands. "Plane's got autopilot. You don't need to sit up here if you don't want to."

"I know. I just can't sleep. Did you get some good rest?"

He grunted and squinted his bleary eyes at her. "What's good rest, anyway?"

"I'll take that as a yes."

"Go lie down. I'll take a turn up here."

Natasha shook her head, tucking a piece of hair back behind her ear to get it out of her face as she drank in the sight of her partner beside her. "I won't be able to. Besides, like you said, no one needs to be up here right now with autopilot going, so there's no real point in you sitting up here when you don't have to."

Clint's sharp eyes remained soft as he gazed at her. Sometimes he thought that if anyone had the power to take him down permanently, Natasha would be the one to do it. Not take him down as if they were going against each other – but take him down in the sense that the thought of her getting hurt or dying could make him freeze and want to die himself. No one had ever had that kind of power over him, and even now, the terror of the realization struck him deep inside.

"Come here," he said, his voice quiet. Natasha blinked and tilted her head to the side in mild confusion. His face was difficult to decipher, but he looked so earnest that it was impossible for her to say no to him. "Come on. Come here."

She opened her mouth to protest but then shut it, getting up and crossing toward him. He held her gaze as she drew closer, and he took her hand when she was close enough. Before she could ask what he was doing, he gently pulled her to sit on his lap, half-expecting her to push him away with the insistence that she was too old to do that. But she didn't. Instead of getting louder, declaring that she was fine and didn't need any kind of comfort, she surprised him by allowing him to do it.

"Thanks," she said, her voice so soft he didn't hear it. He felt the gentle exhalation of the word from her mouth, and he pointed to his ear to show that he had missed what she said. Looking apologetic, Natasha pulled back just enough to sign, Thanks.

I love you, Clint replied, using his thumb, forefinger, and pinky to form the telltale sign that he never tired of using toward her. Natasha put her hand against his and copied the sign in order to form a perfect mirror of it, their touches pressed together. It didn't escape Natasha's notice that even now, they stayed together. Their love touched the two of them in ways that were familiar and electric, and in her weakest moments, she felt addicted to it.

She leaned forward the slightest amount, her eyes scrutinizing his body language for a sign that he didn't want what she was signalling she was going to do. He didn't move, but his eyes darkened, and she felt his breath quicken. His chest rose and fell with each inhale, each exhale, and leaned into him even more to close the distance. Within half a second, her mouth was on his. Eagerly, she swallowed the moan that rolled out of his throat and deepened the kiss even more.

How long had it been since she had kissed him like this? In reality, they'd fucked right before Ultron had come into their lives, but despite the fact that it hadn't even been that long ago, her body ached for him as if she hadn't been able to touch him in years. Her hands grew greedy, frantic with each pass her fingertips made over his shoulders. God, how she never grew tired of his shoulders. Every muscle beneath his skin was primed and ready to go at all hours of the day, and her stomach flipped with desire as she thought about being the subject of his attention, of his body.

"You drive me crazy," she murmured into his lips.

"Huh?" His voice rumbled. He moved his mouth to her neck, his tongue hot as he flicked it out against her skin to taste her.

"You drive–"

Clint cut her off with a short laugh. "I heard you. I'm fucking with you."

"You damn well better be." Natasha moved to readjust, already picturing how she was going to straddle him and ride him right there on the plane, but the plane's instrument panel lit up.

"Ignore it." Clint's grip on her hips made her want to genuinely toss the plane's signals to the wind, but she managed to pull herself back long enough to cast a look over at it.

"Shit." Putting a hand on Clint's chest to keep him from pulling her back in for another kiss, she gestured with her head toward the panel. "Think we're going to need a raincheck."

She didn't need to look at him to see the mingling discomfort and disappointment on his face, but she felt his muscles tense beneath her palm as he realized what she was looking at. A flickering blip on the radar told him everything he needed to know, and he exhaled a slow sigh. "We're here."

"Yeah." Natasha untangled herself from his lap and slid back into the pilot's chair she had originally been sitting in before Clint had decided to join her. "In a couple moments, we'll be on the ground."

"The usual place?" he asked. He knew exactly where they were, and he couldn't stop himself from looking out the window at the familiar city.

"Yep." She double checked the coordinates. "Thankfully, Coulson got a plane with stealth, so we'll be able to use our usual place to land. Finding a place to stay that isn't registered with the Avengers or with SHIELD will be mildly trickier but not impossible thanks to some friends who owe me some favors."

"Lot of people owe you favors, I see."

Natasha grinned and shot him a look that was so utterly Natasha at her flirtatious peak he couldn't help grinning back. "You owe me one now, too, since we didn't get to finish that fun little activity we just started."

"Yeah, yeah, ok. Just tell me what we're doing next, deadly girl."

"Well, first thing's first. Let's land first, secure the plane, and then I'll fill you in. Sound like a plan?"

"How's it feel?"

Curiosity colored her face. "How's what feel?"

"Being back." Clint pointed out the window. Again, the city loomed beneath them, but this time, Natasha really absorbed the sight in front of her. She'd been here a thousand times before and would probably be back a thousand times again in the future, but she never grew tired of seeing the city skyline she could have cut out in her sleep.

"Well," she sighed. "It's how it always is. It's Moscow."