This chapter contains content dealing with food-related triggers, including bingeing and purging. It also contains references to dubcon and its aftereffects. It's not a kind chapter, and Natasha has not lived a kind life. This is how she takes control of it.

Natalia Alianovna Romanoff is seven when she kills her sister. It's her first blood, marking her for life as a Black Widow. She is fed real food for the first time in days and throws up later-eating good food too quickly has a price.

It's another lesson she learns fast. Learning means winning. Winning means survival. Survival means…

There are years of blood and fire and screams. Years of pretty smiles, of every flavor of man bearing down on her, of acts she can't recall specifically but leave her with nightmares that have her pulling against her shackles.

Natalia learns not to dream.

She is fourteen-her hair still in plaits and her petite body made of muscle and her will as fierce as any tiger's-when a man almost twice her age shoots her pistols from her hands with a bow and a handful of arrows. She tells him to kill her. She is disgraced for losing her weapons in battle. She will be killed anyway-starved or thrown to the babies and left for them to practice on her until her bones are snapped like twigs. Like she did to Liliya.

He drops his weapon and holds out his hand. He offers her another chance.

Survival means breathing free.

Survival means learning to sleep without the cuffs, learning to eat what she wants when she wants, learning to let people in.

Natalia slowly learns how to become Natasha, to leave the Red Room and her old sisterhood behind. She cuts off her braids and lets her hair fly free. She learns that Agent Barton is not only the best sharpshooter she's ever encountered, but he's also the oddest person she's ever met in her life. The first thing he asked, on the Quinjet out of Tel Aviv, was how many languages she spoke and if she could teach him how to say "can I pet your dog?" in all of them. He teaches her how to throw a playing card into the wall and make it stick, how to cheat at carnival games, how to fletch arrows.

He becomes her best friend. Her only friend.

Until her.

Natasha is seventeen and the world is going to hell. She's not stable enough yet to realize that this isn't her fight. She's supposedly been secluded away in the Triskelion, but in reality she's unscrewed the grates on the vents and escaped into the ventilation. She watches from above as S.H.I.E.L.D. agents call the shots and commands, working with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. There are others too, what will eventually become the N.S.A. and Homeland Security.

The war on terror has started, and Natasha is sitting on the sidelines.

When she grows tired, she crawls back to her rooms and there is already a woman sitting on her bed. She's ancient-to a seventeen-year old, anyway-with gray hair that used to be brown and eyes that are still sharp and kind all at once. "You don't listen very well, do you?" she asks, and Natasha knows her accent is polished to hide the neighborhood she's from in London.

There's a staring contest, mahogany against moss, and eventually Natasha looks down. "Not anymore," Natasha admits softly.

"I've been looking for a girl like you for a long time," the woman says.

"For a long time, I've been hiding from people like you."

"What would you say if I told you I could help you find others like you?"

Natasha looks up. Adrenaline rushes through her body, but years of training keep her still and steady. The woman is old, Natasha can break her easily and escape into the vents, escape into the world. She'll be sorry to leave Clint but she's a girl of a lot of talents and can make it on her own. The woman shakes her head as if she's read Natasha's thoughts. "No, not like that. We have… a sisterhood here. It's taken me a long time to consider it that. We're known as another name, we've had other names before, but we're the best. We trained to take on other young women like yourself, but we've grown past that too."

"The Triad," Natasha says. She knows.

"Yes."

"You're pale imitations of us. You're nothing like us, you're-"

"-not a Black Widow any longer, my dear girl," Peggy Carter tells her, because she knows who this woman is. Natasha has been trained to fight against everything this woman stands for, everything she has stolen and warped and-

And she's right.

Natasha is no longer Natalia, no longer bound to the bed and fed scraps and throwing up good meals. No longer killing or lying or fucking on orders.

Sometimes she binds herself to the bed, on days when her head feels like it's going to split open from two lives fighting a war in her head. Sometimes it's the only grounding she has, and when she comes back to herself, when Natalia fades into the depths again, Natasha wants to burn her bindings and makes herself sick on purpose to try and purge the ugliness out of her body.

Peggy watches as a thousand emotions swirl across and melt into the emotionless mask Natasha has worn over her face since she was seven years old, her sister's dying body limp in her arms.

"Will it make me… better?"

Peggy smiles.

Natasha starts small. She works with the operations academy. She has intimate knowledge of current Black Widow procedure, trains the ops classes on what to look for, what to listen for, how to assess a situation that may contain a Widow.

The women watch closely. Natasha doesn't know if it's because women grow up learning these skills as naturally as they learn to breathe, but the women learn to diffuse and subdue and deter and subvert in a matter of weeks. She sends the women on their way to what she hopes are eventual Triad invitations.

The men treat it as a game. They're lucky Natasha knows she's not supposed to kill any of them. It takes them longer to read her signals. Every step forward is six back, particularly when the women return and Natasha turns them loose on the men.

They learn. Eventually. It helps that they're under pressure to succeed and graduate.

But there's a still, small voice in Natasha's heart. It hopes they never have to meet a real Black Widow, or they'll never see another sunrise.

By the time Natasha is nineteen years old, she's stopped sleeping with her handcuffs most of the time. One night in fifteen, perhaps. She's putting on healthy weight, she's finally letting her hair grow long. Part of her is healing, knowing that there are agents in the field who can stop others like her. And at nineteen, it's been decided that there are enough women teaching Widow subversion in ops that Natasha can move on to teaching the Triad.

These women are good. Sometimes too good. Some days Natasha feels like she's back in Russia. Those days turn into handcuff nights.

Clint notices when Natasha starts to drop weight again. Clint calls in Peggy.

"What do you need?" Peggy asks.

Natasha is on the floor, her arms holding her knees to her chest. She feels tired and ill and caged. "I need to feel useful again," she says with a hollow voice.

Somehow-always-Peggy understands what Natasha needs.

Natasha is twenty when she and Clint are paired together. He knows her inside and out, he can ground her when she starts to slip into Natalia. STRIKE Team: Delta becomes a force to be reckoned with, the team called in when even Maria Hill can't strategize a smooth ops, the team without an exit strategy.

Natasha is twenty-two when she throws away her handcuffs for good, and she's cleared to perform operations on her own. She takes on the codename Black Widow.

She reclaims it from them. They may have formed her, but she owns herself now. It's taken eight years, but she's bled most of her poisons out. It's time to show them exactly why they chose to name little girls after the things nightmares are made of.