Hi everyone! I'm sorry this took a while, but writers' block was basically eating me alive. But I managed to pull through! I hope you'll enjoy this chapter!

In which: the Avengers try to make sense of what happened, and Nick Fury invites himself over. Meanwhile, Natasha and Clint have a little talk, and he tries to gain her trust.


"I'm going to murder you, Stark."

Everyone in the room shrunk under the director's -excuse the pun- fury-filled gaze, and tried to disappear somehow.

Pepper, bless her heart, spoke up in a voice filled with fake conviction. If she had to die facing Nick Fury, she wanted to do it head held high. Even if she felt like crying under the pressure.

Explaining to a normal man that your boyfriend caused his daughter's 'disappearance', for a lack of a better description, would be disastrous. Now imagine having to explain that, in detail, to a man as powerful as the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Pepper felt like she was screwed over in her silent agreement with the Heroes. She never signed up to deliver bad news to Nick Fury, of all people.

"Sir, it's not Tony's fault-"

"Then, pray tell, Miss Potts, whose fault is it?" His one eye hardened, and he looked like he was trying really hard to contain himself. A first for a man as controlled as him.

"Right- uh, we don't exactly know how it happened in the first place." She winced as she heard the words come out of her mouth in the wrongest, most tactless way possible.

"Miss Potts..."

Oops, that was a warning, right there. She better regain full ability of her speech, before she ends up assassinated in a dubious way, her corpse dumped in some remote location, only to be found a month later by an unsuspecting jogger. Oddly specific, but it's not like the Avengers don't know S.H.I.E.L.D's M.O.

She explained the best she could how Stark came up with the idea of a memory organizer and deleter, how he spent weeks checking and rechecking his calculations, how there was no way it could possibly fail unless an outside force intervened at the last minute. Hard thing to do too, when the man clung to the device like his lifeline. He never let it out of his sight.

They were truly clueless as to how and why Natasha was a child, all of a sudden. Maybe it was an excess of the rays Stark had planned to use for the deleting process? Maybe it was an enemy spell destined to weaken the team, and the rest of the Heroes are next? They really didn't know and weren't all that keen on doing so.

"You know what," he muttered more to himself than to them, but they still heard him clearly. He pinched the bridge of his nose, his shoulders tense with the confined anger, and sighed a dejected, "I should come over. Natasha isn't- um, easy to manage."

Well, they all agreed on that.

An hour later, Nick Fury was sitting with them in their conference room, in Natasha's chair.

They weirdly felt uncomfortable with him sitting on the head of the table where their leader would usually be, her feet propped up, a careless air to her. They really did miss her, and they definitely did not like that.

The director himself didn't look like he was enjoying the moment, but he cleared his throat nonetheless.

"Listen to me carefully," he said, leaning in, crossing his arms in front of him on the table. "Do not, under any circumstance, ask her if she wants some ice cream. Those were her "words" when she was a child. Like Barnes'," he added, nodding at Steve, who nodded back with determination. He's managed a brainwashed Russian Assassin out to kill him before. He can manage a small child who just started training.

"They will trigger a response in her that you will not like. Don't," he interjected before Stark could butt in, "ask me why those words exactly, we never figured it out. They eventually were changed into individual words, like Barnes', but Agent Romanoff elected to keep those a secret. We respected that. Also, keep in mind that she looks like she's five, but she's been training with the Red Room for at least a decade."

Silence.

More silence.

And oddly, no threats of imminent death. It was more of a confused silence this time.

"Excuse me, what?" Pepper regained her voice first, and she was really starting to seriously consider letting the Heroes handle their own shit for once. But Natasha was her friend -well, Natasha Romanoff didn't have friends, but she had people she could tolerate, barely. And Pepper was certain she was one of those people. Natasha actually smiled at her once. Or did she? Did Pepper imagine that?

She chose not to dwell on that right then.

"Agent Romanoff is roughly the age of Captain Rogers." He nodded to the captain, who looked as lost as everyone else. "Because of the super serum she was injected with as a child, her aging slowed down monumentally. She also developed superhuman strength-"

"Plus some freaky reflexes, unparalleled wittiness, intelligence and strategic skills?" Tony interrupted hastily again, in such a typical Tony Stark manner, that the Heroes didn't even bother to glare at him. They were so used to his antics by now, it was becoming boring.

"No, those are completely her. The serum only granted her superhuman strength and a healing factor five times faster than of a normal human being's."

They all nodded, kind of still in shock after the whirlwind of information they just received.

"So… uh- she wasn't in the mafia, either, I presume," Tony sheepishly muttered, scratching the back of his head.

"No, she was part of the Red Room's Black Widow program. Basically, they kidnap a bunch of kids and brainwash them into perfect soldiers. They begin with 28 girls, and in the end, only one remains."

"What happens to the other girls?" Banner anxiously answered, wringing his hands together. The whole situation was stressing him out and the Hulk was itching to make an appearance, but Bruce knew that he needed to keep it together. God knows what'll happen if Baby Natasha -Natalia, he corrected himself- sees the monster. She'll probably be traumatized.

"They are-" Fury almost looked reluctant to say it. He finally sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "-killed. They pit the girls against each other as a graduating ceremony and the one who manages to stay alive is their new assassin."

Everyone looked like they've seen a ghost as they absorbed the information. So… Natasha had to kill a bunch of kids to become the Black Widow.

Tony kind of understood her urge to forget her past, right then. He was even more hell-bent on perfecting his Memori machine- yes he gave it a name. A pretty cute one, may he add.

Peter was staring at the ground, a haunted look on his face. The older Heroes wished they didn't let him attend this meeting. They knew he would've managed to sneak in any way, but hearing these things about a woman he considered an idol of his must have knocked her a peg or two down his scale of 'Super-Awesome-Badass-Tough-As-Nails-People-Whom-I-Admire-And-Respect-And-Want-To-Be-Like-When-I'm-Older'.

They didn't want him to think any less of her because of what she's done, and now that they think about it, they realized that Natasha hid her past from them fearing the same thing. She didn't want them to think she was a monster. They already didn't trust her much as it is, she really didn't want their respect gone too.

Needless to say, they felt super bad.

"Should we tell her that she was de-aged or should we keep it a secret?" Pepper asked what everyone was secretly thinking. That was, in fact, an important issue.

"If we tell her that she knew us, and how she actually managed to escape Russia, she'll be more likely to trust us," Banner said matter-of-factly, adjusting the glasses on the bridge of his nose. A couple of heroes nodded along with him, but Thor sighed audibly.

"But what if that information scares Lady Natasha? Odin knows I would be if I were told that I was an adult not even a day ago," he replied, crossing his arms on his chest.

"Let's take it one step at a time, shall we?" Fury looked like he was on the verge of breaking down. That came as quite a shock to the team, who were so used to seeing the man of steel the Director usually was. This was really taking its toll on him. "Keep it a secret. We will use it as a last resort if she stays hostile."

They all nodded their agreements, and he stood up, adjusting his black coat. "Now, shall we pay our pint-sized assassin a visit?"

Back in Natalia's room, Clint was trying to coax Natalia out of her shell, just like he did when he first got her to join S.H.I.E.L.D. He cringed internally when he remembered that it took him months to get her to call him Clint, not Barton, and a whole year to get her to trust him. His partner wasn't the most open person, he got that, but if Natalia was that way too, it was going to become a problem.

"What's the last thing your remember?" He asked curiously, dragging his chair closer to her bed.

She tried to sit up straighter, but groaned, as she fell back on her pillow.

"What… happened to me?" She managed, panting slightly. Beads of sweat were pearling on her forehead, and her teeth were clenched in pain.

Clint felt his stomach lurch painfully. He already gave her, like, a bottle of standard painkillers. What she needed was clearly something stronger but he knew that it would be a bad idea for her to go into anaphylactic shock after a major surgery.

"You had an accident in Tony's lab." He rubbed her hand slowly, and she nodded in understanding.

"Was it the man with the weird mustache?"

Clint laughed out loud at that. So, her sense of humor's always been like that.

He kind of felt better that he could see glimpses of his best friend in that little girl. Natalia was probably decades away from becoming the Black Widow, so all the brainwashing and the torture adult Natasha had to endure was still unknown to Natalia. Of course, she's already lived through plenty, Clint guessed, and that felt like a stab to the gut.

"Yeah, yeah it was. He said you suddenly attacked him. Tony's a friend, Nat."

She actually looked embarrassed, and a little bit ashamed. Clint absolutely did not see that coming. He was gaining her trust faster than he expected.

"I'm sorry, I thought-"

"I know." He grinned his Clintesque smile at her, and she couldn't help but return it, though it was a bit dim. "Don't worry about it. Just try not to kill anyone, okay? We're all your friends here. We're just trying to protect you."

"How did I get out?" She asked as a dark shadow overtook her face. It eerily reminded him of her older self after a nightmare.

"I kind of kidnapped you." He smiled as he recalled the tale. He was tinkering a bit with it, of course, but she didn't need to know that. "I couldn't bear the thought of a small girl as adorable as you being transformed into a killing machine, so I asked my bosses from S.H.I.E.L.D if I could save you, and they let me. Now you live with us- the Avengers."

She nodded her understanding again, and relaxed a bit in her bed, even allowing herself a small smile. She was obviously pleased that she was here and not… there anymore. He was pretty sure she was still a bit skeptical, but she refrained herself from further questioning him, probably in fear that she'll get a beating, or whatever the Red Room deemed a fit punishment.

"It hurts…" She muttered after a while of silence, and Clint's grip on her hand tightened, as did his heart.

He felt his eyes burn with unshed tears. That was his best friend. His favorite person in the whole world. She was given a second chance at a childhood and he would be damned if he didn't make it worth her while. If she wasn't the happiest kid on earth by the end of the week, he would feel like a failure of a partner.

With a new resolve, Clint nudged Natasha playfully, and she looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Yep, she definitely didn't change all that much.

"What do you say we get some food in you?" He poked her stomach carefully, minding her stitches.

She giggled a bit and nodded shyly.

"Can I-" she stopped herself, seeming to change her mind, and rephrased. "Not soup. Please?" She asked in the smallest voice she could muster, and Clint frowned.

"Natalia, those days are over, I promise. You can get whatever you want."

She looked even more lost if that was possible. "I- I don't know what I… want?"

Clint cringed a bit, then kneeled beside the bed, taking her hand in his. "Hey, I know this must be new to you. The country, the food, the people. We'll get through this together okay? You can count on me. Forever and always." He repeated the phrase he often told her, and he felt a sadness wash over him when she just nodded, instead of saying it back as usual.

He wanted his Nat back, yet he wanted to care for this Nat the best he could. It was a weird feeling, but he knew he could live with it. Nat was still Nat, and she needed him now, more than ever. And he'll be damned if he didn't stand beside his best friend in her time of need.

Forever and always weren't just empty words. They were a promise.


This was it!

Next up: Natalia starts to get more comfortable with the heroes, and mischief ensues! But of course, that doesn't mean that her PTSD disappeared. Read as the heroes try to make her feel at home, while also managing her nightmares.

I hope you liked this! Please review! It makes me super happy :3