двадцать три (Twenty-Three)
Russian Translations:
любовь - Love
Боже мой - Oh my God
Моя любовь - My Love
New 2018 (2023)
"Tell me everything that happened," Yelena requested, her cheek resting against Sascha's shoulder, her eyelids fluttering closed. "What did I miss?"
"Oh love," Sascha sighed. "So much." So, so much...
Moscow, Russia - Earth
2018
A Moscow hotel room. Casual, not too fancy. A good place to hide.
There was a faint click, one Nat would recognize anywhere: a gun. She felt said gun press into the back of her head.
"I wonder - is it possible for a spider to fall into another spider's web?" Unlike Nat, Sascha still had her strong accent. "Or what about a spider falling into their own web?" she continued to ponder aloud, gun still pressed to Natasha's head. "Natalia Romanova."
"Put the gun down, Shostakov. I didn't come to fight."
"I shot you last time - you have guts coming to see me now."
"If you were trying to kill me, you should have made sure-" Nat whipped around, batting the gun from the other woman's hands and shoving her back with a kick to the gut. The gun sailed across the room, striking the wall before landing on the floor.
Sascha stumbled back but regained her balance. "You only found me because I let you." Then she nodded to Nat's blonde hair. "So letting her die wasn't enough? Now you have to try and look like her?
"Sascha, you know I never wanted Yelena to get hurt. I'm so sorry for what happened. You don't have to forgive me, and I don't expect you to, but I want you to know that I'm sorry."
Sascha ignored her apology. "Isn't red your signature colour? I liked the red on you better."
Nat shrugged. "It was time for a change."
"I hear you're a bit of a criminal now. On the run. Good thing you were always good at hiding. Disappear one day only to reappear later, unexpectedly."
"You know why I'm here, Sascha." Nat crossed her arms.
"Do I? To come and rub in the death of the woman I love, which could have been prevented-"
"This has nothing to do with Yelena. Five women, including yourself, who bear striking resemblance to each other have all been found in the last few years, all to do with 'hero' business, on Earth alone. According to our sources elsewhere, there's more." Thor had said that Karen resembled his friend back on Asgard.
Sascha chuckled. "Heroes." She shrugged. "So? I've heard that people can have many look-alikes."
"But as striking a resemblance as these have been? Coincidence? I don't think so."
"Something's coming," Sascha admitted. "Something that could mean the end for all of us. For everything."
Nat nodded. "Like I once told Clint, this is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for. We're going to need all the help we can get. And I can't promise any answers about this whole 'doppelganger' situation, but we might find something. So what do you say? Widow to Widow?"
Vormir - Space
2014
Russia had been a leader in space travel, and now here she was, the original Black Widow, deep in space. Should she feel proud? Maybe.
"If we don't get that Stone, billions of people stay dead." Nat and Barton were so absorbed in their conversation, they didn't notice what Sascha was doing. They didn't see the strawberry blonde approach the cliff's edge and peer down like Nat had done.
"Perhaps I will see you soon, My Love," she whispered. She backed up a few steps and then took off running.
Natasha saw a flash of something go by out of the corner of her eye - the next thing she knew, Sascha disappeared over the cliff's edge.
"Oh my God-" Nat rushed to the cliffside. She stared, shocked. "Sascha! Sascha!" Her voice echoed back.
The echo was soon drowned out by a distant scream, growing steadily nearer. Sascha reappeared, having dropped from the foggy sky.
She landed hard, crumbling to the ground. "What the hell?" She turned to the stranger.
The Guardian of Vormir hardly seemed phased. "Your sacrifice did not work."
"Yeah, no shit. Then what's the point?"
"One of you will retrieve the Stone, while two of you must lose that which you love."
"Natalia, don't you dare."
"You know who it's gotta be, Sascha."
"Natalia-"
"You went and threw yourself off this cliff without hesitation - if you had any red left in your ledger, you wiped it out." Nat looked her way. "I'm so sorry about Yelena. I really am."
Seconds later, Nat was thrown to the ground by Clint, who took off running towards the cliffside. Nat tackled him to the ground, zapping him with one of her Widow Stings.
Both fought their way to the cliff's edge, both falling off it together, hanging on only by the wire Nat threw over to suspend them.
"It's okay," she told Clint. "It's okay. Let me go."
"No!" He tried to pull her up.
His body when briefly numb again when another Widow Sting struck him - though this time not from Nat.
Realizing what must be done, Sascha used her own sting to stun him for long enough. Nat looked up at her and they met eyes briefly before she let go of Clint's hand. Sascha looked away.
There was a flash of light, and she was gone. Natasha was gone.
Avengers Facility, Upstate New York - Earth
New 2018 (2023)
"Hey Sascha, you have a guest," Nora, one of her several doppelgangers, notified her.
"Really?" the original Black Widow said. Who the hell would that be? She didn't exactly have a lot of connections - well, not alive ones, at least. "Who?"
"Sascha."
SMASH!
The glass of water that had been in Sascha's hand fell to the floor, smashing to bits when she saw just who her guest was. Her mouth fell open and her eyes instantly filled with tears. Could this really be happening?
"Y-Yelena?" Her voice was barely a whisper, but it was there.
"Sascha," Yelena repeated, stepping towards her.
Sascha stepped forward as well, closing the gap between them. "Y-you're alive." She reached out and cupped the blonde's cheeks in both hands, pulling her close and pressing their foreheads together, sobbing. "Боже мой... He brought you back! He brought you back!" Or maybe it hadn't been Stark, but Natalia. She wasn't sure who, but one of them had brought Yelena back to her, and she wished she could thank whoever it was. "I love you so much! Oh, Моя любовь-" She fell to her knees, taking Yelena with her, beginning to pepper the blonde's face in kisses and vowing to never let her go, never again.
New 2018 (2023)
"Tell me everything that happened," Yelena requested.
Where to begin? Where to possibly begin? "My real name, my true name, is Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, last daughter of the last Tsar. I survived my family's execution, and they turned me into the ultimate weapon to serve the state. They butchered my identity and gave me a new one more suited to the new state. Out with the old, in with the new. That's where Tatiana Vasilivna came in. I always believed I was serving a better purpose." She scoffed. "I guess my Red Room wasn't much better than yours really, in the end." In truth.
"After we took down the Red Room, I tracked down as many Widows as I could and gave them the counteragent. All the while, I was tracking clones, my clones. Turns out my Red Room had been trying to recreate their prized soldier."
"How'd they do it? The clones?"
"Skrulls. Shape-shifting aliens. My friend Nora's girlfriend Carol helped me. They infiltrated a Soviet base in the 1960s, and they can clone down to the DNA and memories of whoever's appearance they're taking on. That's how they, the Red Room, 'mastered' the cloning process, by using these aliens. They tried that face mask tech before, the kind Natasha and Melina used to fool Dreykov, but the Skrulls were their ticket. So anyways, there's that too. Several clones of me, out there, not sure how many." She finished with a shrug. "So there it is, that's it."
Yelena snuggled closer. "I'm sorry I wasn't there."
"Me too. But we're here now, together. And nothing's going to change that again."
So for those of you who haven't read my Infinity War and Endgame trilogy, here's a recap from those stories just to try and make sure there's as little confusion as possible! (Sorry of there is still any, I keep changing things!)
Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed! :)