At the appointed place, Yelena fired off a flare to signal their superiors. Within the hour, a helicopter had arrived to pick them up, and they began the long flight south, out of the polar twilight and into darkness. On the way, Natalia noticed the lights of a second aircraft, heading north on their starboard side. That would be the team sent to pick up the American pilot. By the time they got there, she thought, his body would probably have been burned beyond all recognition. The wife and child he'd mentioned would not even be able to bury him.

Upon their arrival at headquarters, back in St. Petersburg, the two girls were ordered to clean themselves up and change clothes. They were given a quick meal, which was neither as tasty nor as nutritious as the rabbit and mushrooms they'd eaten on the tundra. Then, dressed in the black and white school uniforms that westerners found uncomfortably reminiscent of maid's costumes, they were brought to deliver their report to Madame.

Talking to Madame was always an unnerving experience. She had no scent, not even of soap or perfume, which always made her seem as if she weren't quite a real person, as if she were a ghost or a statue that was capable of moving around. It was next to impossible to tell what she was thinking. Her pale skin seemed to be stretched too tight, leaving her face with very little expression, and at times her icy blue eyes seemed to look right through the girls as she spoke to them. Today, however, she was most definitely looking at them – and it was that, more than anything else, that told Natalia and Yelena that she was furious.

She waited until the guards had left and the door was locked. There were no windows in the little underground interrogation room, not even a two-way mirror, and the ceiling vent that provided fresh air was only six inches across. Besides the chairs the two girls were sitting in, there was no furniture. They were completely isolated, and Madame wanted to be sure they knew that before she began the questioning.

"Why was he shot?" she asked. "You were told not to hurt him unless it was absolutely necessary."

"It was necessary," said Natalia. "I was trying to stop him throwing the film into the fire."

"She failed," Yelena added with a sneer. She knew very well that Madame already knew that. She simply wanted to emphasize it.

"And how did he know you were after the film?" Madame demanded.

"Because Natalia asked him for it!" Yelena jumped to her feet and pointed angrily at her partner. "She took his gun away from him and asked him where it was! And then after he burned it, she shot him again for no reason, so now you can't even question him!"

"Silence!" snapped Madame. "Sit down."

Yelena scowled, but immediately lowered herself back into her seat, glaring at Natalia the whole time. Natalia refused to meet her gaze. Both of them knew that this was a contest – each wanted Madame's approval, and each wanted to make sure the other took as much of the blame as possible. Each was perfectly willing to throw the other to the sharks in order to accomplish that.

"Why did you ask him for the canister," Madame asked Natalia. "You were supposed to take it without him knowing. Then we could use it as leverage when we questioned him, by dangling what we already knew!"

"I tried," Natalia said. "But Yelena blew our cover, so I thought it was time to be more direct."

"You could have salvaged it," Yelena said. "You could have denied it and he would have thought it was all a bad dream, but you didn't. You had to show off!"

"Yelena!" Madame turned towards her. "I did not give you permission to speak! How did you blow your cover?"

"He woke while I was searching him," Yelena said.

"He was talking in his sleep, and thought it was his wife touching him," Natalia said. "Yelena tried to talk to him in English..."

"It was a perfectly reasonable thing to try!" Yelena said.

"I'd been searching the cockpit," Natalia went on, without even looking at Yelena. She would not rise to the bait and shout in reply. That would only make Madame angry with both of them and her goal now was to keep Madame's anger focused on Yelena. "There was a photograph of him and his wife there with a love note written on it in Spanish. His wife would have spoken to him in that language."

Madame nodded once, sharply. "Why did you attempt an imposture without any information?" she asked, turning to Yelena.

"I had information," Yelena protested. "He'd been talking to us, without realizing we understood."

"What did you think you knew?" Madame asked, cold.

"I knew his wife's name was Rebeca," said Yelena. "That's an American name! I knew they had two sons and were living in Anchorage, Alaska, but were originally from Texas. I assumed..."

"Stop there." Madame held up a hand. "You assumed."

"It seemed like a reasonable assumption," Yelena said.

"You do not assume," Madame told her. "You work with the information you have. To assume you know how somebody will speak or what they would say in a situation is risky, and once you have spoken or acted you cannot take it back if it is out of character. What should you have done?"

Natalia smiled a little. She'd won – Yelena was going to take the blame.

"At the moment it was all I could think of!" Yelena said.

"Because you did not think!" snapped Madame.

Yelena shrank away. Madame rarely came even close to shouting. She was normally content to terrify in the same calm, cold voice as the one she used to tell the girls she loved them. The rarity of her anger made it all the more frightening, because they did not know it the way they knew her other moods. When Madame was pleased she would do certain things, when she was annoyed she would do others... but when she was angry, she might do anything.

"What should you have done?" Madame repeated.

Yelena swallowed hard, her eyes flicking back and forth as her mind raced. "I should have... I should have stayed in character," she said. "I should have made him think I was cold, and curling up with him for warmth."

Madame nodded. "And why didn't you do that?"

"Because... because I wanted to do something impressive." Yelena squirmed. "I wanted to complete the mission myself."

"Missions are not about being impressive," said Madame. "They are about getting the job done. Mistakes are not a luxury we can afford, do you understand that? This is the glory of the state at stake here, and it is so much more important now that we've had to go underground! Do you understand that, Yelena? Can you wrap your miserable, self-important little mind around it?"

"Yes, Madame," said Yelena.

The door opened and two men came in to take Yelena away. Madame would have already decided what her punishment would be, Natalia realized. Maybe she would have to run an obstacle course naked in the snow, the way she'd once prescribed for the twins who'd tried to escape. Natalia stood also, expecting that she, too, would be allowed to go – but the men escorting Yelena did not wait for her. Once they had her partner out of the room, they shut the door in her face.

"Sit down, Natalia," said Madame.

A fall of nausea settled into the bottom of Natalia's stomach as she realized the interrogation was not over. She returned to her seat and focused on the wall just behind Madame's right ear, so she would not have to look into the woman's eyes as they bored into her.

"Why did you shoot the pilot?" asked Madame.

"I was trying to stop him burning the film," said Natalia. "As Yelena has already told you, I failed." She couldn't be punished too badly for that, could she? It hadn't been a fatal mistake the way Yelena's speaking English had been. What Natalia was far more afraid of being punished for was the other shot she'd fired, and she knew Madame was going to ask about that, next.

"Why did you kill him?" Madame wanted to know. "That was not necessary."

"He would have been dead anyway by the time anyone could reach him," Natalia said, lowering her head. "He couldn't get away from the fire. I thought it was kinder to shoot him than to let him burn to death." Why had she been concerned with that? Why had she let herself listen to his aimless talking on any other level than that of gathering information? Why did she care what his wife and sons would think of his end? They would probably never know what had happened to him, and she would certainly never meet them!

Because she didn't dare look up, Natalia didn't know what Madame's face looked like. Her voice, however, had returned to its normal blank emptiness as she asked, "and what unwarranted assumption did you make?"

Natalia had to think about it a little. "I assumed he wouldn't break under torture," she said. He probably wouldn't have. A man who would burn the film with a gun pointed at his head was probably not one who would tell anybody anything he didn't want to. "And I assumed there was no way to save him." She tried to head off the next question, the one she knew was coming. "I should have helped him drag himself away from the fire." Why hadn't that occurred to her?

The door opened again, and the men returned, this time it was Natalia who was lifted out of her seat and escorted out – exactly as she should have expected, really. There was never any point in trying to lie to Madame. There was never even any point in trying to conceal the truth with misdirected honesty. Madame knew everything... and anyone who did wrong would eventually be punished for it.


It was two days before Natalia got to sleep in a bed again, a thing she'd been looking forward to since their first night on the tundra. As the girls got older, they'd been moved into smaller and smaller dormitories. As they entered their teens, they now slept in little rooms that each held four, in two sets of bunk beds. These smelled mostly of laundry detergent, but also of dusty concrete with an overlying layer of must that probably represented something they did not want growing in the ventilation. Girls from the same area did not share rooms, which made them less likely to talk among themselves after the lights went out. Natalia wondered sometimes whether this had always been the case, or if it had been instituted only after the incident when the twins from Chernobyl had tried to escape. She'd never asked.

The evening she returned to the dorms, Natalia found herself assigned to a room with only two others instead of three – one was Kamila Ibrayev, a girl originally from Kazakhstan, and the other Eglė Mielkutė, a Lithuanian. The Red Room discouraged the girls from getting to know each other personally, but on this particular evening Natalia could tell that her new room-mates were somewhat in awe of her. It was rarer now for girls to simply vanish and never return after a bad mistake, but it still happened... Kamila and Eglė must be astonished that Natalia had come back.

At nine o'clock, women came in to shackle each girl to her bed and turn out the lights – Natalia was locked in to the upper left bunk, above Kamila. Any of them could have easily escaped from a handcuff by now, but few of them bothered. In fact, many of them actually found something rather comforting about the chain. They knew they were where they were supposed to be if they were handcuffed to a bed, and Natalia realized as she shut her eyes that she identified with that idea more now than she ever had before. Sleeping rough on the taiga had made her feel as if the planet were turning underneath her and might throw her off into space at any moment. Here, with the concrete roof above her head and the cool metal of the handcuffs slowly warming to body temperature, she knew she was safe.

Black Widows, however, were never really safe. Natalia nodded off into dreams that most people would have considered nightmares – and woke with a pillow over her face, unable to breathe.

Somebody was sitting on her chest, so Natalia brought her right knee up, ramming it into the attacker's lower back. Whoever it was cried out in pain and the pressure of the pillow eased, so Natalia was able to throw the person off. The room was almost pitch-black, with only a crack of light seeping in around the door, just enough for Natalia to make out faint figures. It wasn't much, but it was enough for her to defend herself. There was no time to get her hand out of the cuff, so she gripped the bed frame with her left hand and swung herself down, prepared to use her other three limbs as best she could.

"Help!" Eglė was shouting. "Help, there's something going on in here!"

The person Natalia had thrown from the bed was lying on the floor, groaning. There was another, however, who ran at her to tackle her. Natalia grabbed the top bunk on the other side and brought her legs up to kick the attacker back against the wall, but the person grabbed her ankles and pushed them up, leaving Natalia twisting in the air. She got one leg free and kicked the other in the face, then dropped to her feet again as the attacker staggered back. In this moment of reprieve, perhaps she could get out of the handcuffs.

Then the lights came back on. For the first half-second they seemed absolutely blinding, and Natalia just had time to make out a prone figure on the ground and Yelena wiping a bloody nose on her sleeve. Before that information had even properly registered, security men rushed into the room and threw Natalia against the wall. They took the handcuffs off her, but then shackled her arms behind her back before pushing her out into the hall. Yelena came next, also in chains. Then Eglė and finally Kamila, walking bent over in pain. All four girls were herded down the hall by men who shouted and brandished guns, and shoved into Madame's office.

Madame was waiting for them there in a long white house robe. Even in the middle of the night, with her hair braided and no makeup on, she still had a green scarf around her neck. Natalia suddenly remembered an old fairy tale, and wondered if Madame's head would fall off if the scarf were to be removed.

"What happened here?" Madame demanded.

Yelena, clutching a fold of her nightgown to her bleeding nose, opened her mouth to speak. Before she could get a word out, however, Madame slapped her hard across the face.

"No," she said. "Nobody who participated in the fight is allowed to say a word. You." She pointed at Eglė. "Tell me."

"I don't know," said Eglė timidly. "I woke up when I heard the door open, and somebody came in to wake Kamila. I tried to tell them to be quiet because we would all be in trouble, but Yelena said they had something to do. I heard Kamila climbing a ladder and I thought she was going back to bed above me, but I couldn't feel the bed moving. Then Natalia woke up and threw Kamila on the floor, and I could hear fighting, so I called for help."

Madame nodded. "So you were the instigator," she said to Yelena. "You couldn't make Natalia take the blame for your mistake, so now you tried to kill her."

Yelena sat up straight. She'd been ashamed of her mistakes on the mission, but apparently she wasn't at all ashamed of her attempt at murder.

"And you wanted her to do the actual killing," Madame added, pointing at Kamila.

Kamila hung her head, and Yelena squirmed a little. Apparently that did bother her, the idea that she'd tried to get somebody else to do the worst of the work. Had she hoped she would be able to pin the entire crime on Kamila?

"You two go back to bed," said Madame, nodding at Natalia and Eglė. "You two," she looked coldly at Yelena and Kamila. "Come with me."

Yelena and Kamila were not at breakfast in the morning, nor at any meals for the following several days. Natalia began to wonder if either of them would ever be seen again but then Kamila returned, and Yelena the day after that. They looked tired and thin, but they were present and were able to join in exercises and lessons.

They did not try to speak to Natalia, and she did not speak to them. They weren't worth talking to.


Fifteen years after the helicopter had taken Yelena and Natalia to St. Petersburg, a very similar one landed, a bit roughly, on the deck of the Tugarin Zmeyevich. The ship was a Krechyet-class carrier of the late 1970's, the last of its kind still used by the Russian armed forces, and it was showing its age in rusted rivets and chipped paint. As the rotor wound down, Yelena and Kamila tossed Natasha out onto the deck, where she rolled over once and came to rest on her stomach, with the stink of the fuel-stained metal deck right in her nose. She probably could have gotten up if she'd wanted to, but she didn't want to.

She opened one eye and looked around. At first there were only vague colours and shapes, but then she made out a pair of white boots. Letting her eye move upwards she found a white coat, then a green scarf, and then at the top, the pale face of Madame.

Madame had no aged much in the past twenty years – there were rumors that she hadn't aged much in the past eighty. The only effect the decades seemed to have was to leech her of colour. Her already fair skin had paled to alabaster, her hair had lightened from Russian gold to Nordic cream, and her eyes had grown ever colder and icier. Certainly there was no hint of warmth in the pale gray-blue now, as she turned Natasha over with foot to study her.

Blinking up at the familiar face, Natasha's heart beat a little faster. The task before her now would be extremely difficult, maybe moreso than saving New York from an alien invasion, but she had to complete it. Failure would be worse than death, in several ways.

"Get up," Madame ordered. "Cuffs or no cuffs, I know you can. You're one of my girls."

Natasha tried, but she stumbled and slid, her feet skidding out from under her as the deck tossed in the ocean waves. She got halfway up before she staggered forward and, unable to catch herself in her cuffs, slumped to the floor again. She would have fallen against Madame, but Madame stepped out of the way and let Natasha hit the armored steel deck face-first.

"Stop being such a drama queen," said Madame. "There's nothing wrong with you."

Her voice was one that had always been enough to make even badly injured girls get to their feet and try again. Forcing themselves to go on when they shouldn't was always better than being punished. Nat got to her knees, then bent over and retched. She hadn't eaten in hours, so all that came up was thin, sour bile.

"She's fine," snorted Yelena. "She's faking it."

"You beat her half to death with a bag of textbooks," Kamila reminded her. "After you let her take you down with a taser and Triinu tried to betray us."

"I won!" Yelena informed her proudly. "We brought her back. That was the mission!"

"Yes, and you were reckless and nearly ruined it," Madame said. "You've never learned. You always move too fast on too little information. The only reason I sent you on this mission, Yelena, is because I know you hate Natalia enough to bring her in or kill her. Well done," she added, but her grim voice held no hint of real congratulations. The implication was, rather, that she had no more use for Yelena at all.

Natasha couldn't see Yelena's face, and wondered what was on it. Pride? Affront? Or mere resignation? Surely even Yelena must have her limits.

Madame poked Natasha with her foot. "Get up," she said again. "Your play-acting doesn't fool me."

Natasha dragged herself to her feet inch by inch, as if it were the most difficult thing she'd ever had to do. She was shaking as she straightened her back almost – not quite – all the way, and her eyes stared into infinity instead of at Madame's face. She wobbled as the ship pitched, then stilled herself by sheer force of will.

Madame looked her over, and then backhanded her hard. Natasha saw the blow coming and went limp, falling and rolling several feet across the deck before coming to rest in a boneless heap.

"Garbage," snarled Madame. Nat heard her footsteps starting to walk away.

"What do we do with her?" asked a soldier.

"Put her in the brig, with no clothes and no bonds," said Madame. "Nothing she can use as a tool, no matter how unlikely." She sniffed. "And keep at least two men watching her at all times. I don't want less than four eyes on her, ever, between here and Vladivostok."

"Yes, Madame," said the man.

Natasha shut her eyes and let herself relax, as two men picked her up and carried her away.


The brig on the Tugarin Zmeyevich had not been built to hold high-risk prisoners – it was a simple cage with a sliding door and a lock that would be easy to pick if Natasha had something to pick it with. They had, however, removed all of the furniture. Even the cot attached to the wall had been taken away, so that she couldn't use any part of it as a tool or weapon. There were no chairs, no tables, the only thing left was the toilet.

Natasha was stripped. Even her underwear was taken, and then put her into a hospital gown – basically an oversized T-shirt – before they pushed her in and locked the door. She collapsed on the floor, not even caring that it was bare riveted metal, cold and solid as stone, and lay there quietly for a very long time before she raised her head for a look.

There were still three people in the hallway outside the cell – two guards in blue and white Russian naval uniforms, and Yelena, who was standing there with her hands behind her back, watching Natasha. She was still dressed in her stewardess' uniform.

"I knew you were really awake," she said, beginning to smile.

Natasha blinked at her, uncomprehending.

"You only ever called one number on that prepaid phone," said Yelena. "It belonged to a woman named Laura Barton. She's an artist and farmer from Ohio, married to an FAA retrieval specialist, and she was coming back from a vacation to Australia with her two children." Her eyes were focused on Natasha's face, watching carefully for any hint of a reaction. "She seems to be nobody... but then again, so does Natalie Rushman." Yelena rolled her eyes. "Come on, you couldn't come up with anything better than that?"

Natalie Rushman had been Fury's idea. He'd bet Nat a donut that Stark wouldn't be able to figure it out, and he'd won. Natasha murmured something to herself.

"What was that?" asked Yelena.

"All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go," Natasha sang softly. "I'm standing here outside your door. I hate to wake you up to say goodbye..."

"Stop it!" Yelena shouted. "Even Madame thinks you might actually be brain damaged, but I know better! What was on that plane, huh? Documents? Secrets? Diamonds? What does Laura Barton have that you want?" She rattled the bars.

"But the dawn is breaking, it's early morning," Natasha kept singing to herself, rolling over onto her back, "the taxi's waiting, he's blowing his horn... already I'm so lonesome I could die."

"I told you, that's enough!" said Yelena. She shook the bars, making them rattle. "I'm calling your bluff! Cards on the table! Whatever's on that plane, it will never get to SHIELD." She smiled meanly. "I set the hydraulics to blow before we jumped off. The plane can't be steered. They're going to crash into the Indian Ocean when they run out of fuel. It doesn't matter if Mrs. Barton knows what she's carrying or not, it's going to the bottom. You've failed, Natalia. How do you like it?"

"So kiss me and smile for me," Natasha sang. "Tell me that you'll wait for me... hold me like you'll never let me go." Her voice got louder. "Because I'm leaving on a jet plane! Dunno when I'll be back again! Oh, babe, I hate to go!"

"You gotta stop that sometime!" Yelena snarled, and turned to the guards. "When she wakes up, call me. Not Madame – me. I want the first crack at her!" And she stomped out.

Natasha didn't move after her rival had stomped out, she merely lay there limp and stared at the ceiling, which needed painting. She hummed a few more bars of the song, and tried to ignore the cold of the metal floor biting into her skin.

The truth was, Laura Barton did have things Natasha wanted. She had a lot of them. Laura Barton had a home. She had a life, with a job and a family and children of her own, beautiful bright children for whom she was working to ensure the best future she could. She had hobbies, she had her pottery and her garden and her sewing. She had her dogs and her cows who loved her almost as much as her human family did.

And she had Clint. Clint Barton was the man who'd given Natasha the second chance she didn't deserve. He was the one who'd seen the good in her that even she didn't know existed. How could she not have fallen in love with the first person since Baba Galina who had believed that Natasha Romanov was capable of love?

Laura Barton had everything Natasha had always dreamed of and always known she would never be able to have... but she could take them now. All she had to do was wait right here. If she lay here and sang to the walls like a woman with multiple concussions, flight AA113 would crash and everybody on it would die. Clint would be devastated, but he would know that Natasha had tried and failed to save them. The two were so close, it wouldn't be a stretch for him to turn to her for comfort. If she played her cards right, she could be Mrs. Barton herself by this time next year.

One of the things they'd taught her in the Red Room was that when the world arranged itself to complete a mission for her, she should sit back and let it happen. There was no sense in fixing what wasn't broken. It would be so much easier just to stay right here. Nobody would ever know it had been anything but a tragic accident.

Nobody... except Natasha.