Lullaby
If anyone asks, Natasha is a strong woman and an infallible agent and a sudden role model for thousands of girls all over the world. To everyone from the outside, she appears skilled, determined, deadly serious and incredibly beautiful. And she is all those thing inside, too, but when she can let all the masks drop, she is even more.
Natasha is a Black Widow, a born assassin, a Red Room trainee, a killer, a child of war and violence, and as much as she'd like to know sometimes how it is to be – just a regular nobody – there isn't a way. She has been fooling herself for years, swearing silently to drop out of the business one day, live her life in tranquility, without constant need to be better, to change, without the adrenaline in her veins and the exhilarating exhaustion in her limbs.
It takes her a long time and – a friendship, to stop fooling herself and accept the way she is, the way she was created.
Thor's war songs, she realizes, sung in low humming voice, full of pathos and love, full of death and victory, imbued with blood and sacrifice and grief, and the best lullabies.