Coping Mechanisms
S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters, September 2008
Natasha was punishing the sparring dummy. It was a damned miracle the thing hadn't cried uncle or exploded, but she was sure as hell trying to make it do something.
That was all she knew to do right now, and she was afraid to get into the ring with an actual person, the way she was feeling at the moment. She had had it indoctrinated into her as a child not to express her emotions outwardly, and while she had been deprogrammed by S.H.I.E.L.D. and didn’t hold with those beliefs anymore, old habits died hard. Especially ones that had been beaten, starved, frozen and burned into her. She learned young that love and friendship were dangerous, and she learned those lessons by having the Red Room destroy or kill anything and everything she cherished in front of her to toughen her up. She learned to not give a damn, because caring put everyone involved in danger. She learned to channel her anger into fighting, and into her dancing. The psychologists and deprogrammers at S.H.I.E.L.D. had taught her differently, but the Red Room had ingrained both into her so deeply at such a young age that they were almost instinct. Natasha Romanov was superb at both.
During her time at the Red Room training facility, she couldn’t understand why a group of people who killed without mercy so frequently would want her to study something so beautiful as ballet, and so diligently. She practiced for three hours a day every morning, before she went on to her other lessons. When she didn’t, she was beaten or if it was cold enough, thrown out into the winter for a couple of hours, until frostbite threatened. They demanded that she be perfect, as perfect a dancer as she was a fighter. She was ordered to study science, technology, math, languages, and political science well beyond the scope of what a child her age should have been capable of. Thankfully, Natasha (she had been Natalia then) had a near-genius IQ and could keep up. The children who couldn’t were disposed of as dead weight.
Her handler, Mikhail, saw great potential in her and drove her twice as hard as the other girls he handled. He also convinced the directors of the Red Room of her superiority. She was given “enhancements” which improved her physically and mentally. She became faster, better, stronger, smarter. As she grew older, she understood why they had her learn to dance; her lithe grace and flexibility combined with her strength and the ruthlessness they had bred into her made her lethal. She was a master assassin by fourteen and when she was voluptuous enough to pass for an older woman at fifteen, she was trained as an adult spy for the KGB. Her role was clear: she was to be a femme fatale, with the emphasis on the “fatale”. Part of that training involved her being taken to some doctor and having her reproductive system altered. She had no idea what they had done, all that they had told her was that whatever they had done to her had made it so she would never have to worry about a baby getting in the way of her work. She didn’t care. She wasn’t allowed to love anyway.
Within a year of becoming a full KGB agent at seventeen, she had a worldwide reputation and a nickname - The Black Widow - a reputation she both enjoyed and feared. She was clearly the best of the best; everyone wanted her, for one reason or another. This made her revered and targeted. For a young woman who should have been deciding what to do with her life, going to colleges, dating, starting a family…none of these were options. She was a murderer with a target on her back. She would never live to middle age, and she knew it. Her life was not her own, and it was destined to be short.
Then she went rogue and started doing mercenary work. The money was fabulous, and her renown was such that she was in high demand and could pick and choose at will. She was very, very good and she was whispered about in dark corners, almost a living myth. Six months after defecting from the KGB, Hawkeye had found her and brought her in. Natasha no longer felt that there was a gun being held to her head at all times. There was danger to her job, sure, but most of the time, she felt safe and protected. She will never stop being grateful to him, and to S.H.I.E.L.D. for that.
But there were things that had been indoctrinated into her by the Red Room and couldn’t be extracted, no matter what. Like the fear of letting people get too close. Like her belief that love is for children and has no place in her life. Like her belief that friendships were dangerous.
The last time she had a friend, Mikhail had pulled the girl into the courtyard by the hair and shot her in the head while Natasha watched. He had no reason to do it other than the fact that he found out about their secret friendship. Anya was killed instead of Natasha because Natasha had more potential. Anya’s hair was a dull blonde while Natasha’s was a vibrant red. Anya had a slight overbite and Natasha didn’t. Anya’s arabesques weren’t as high or as straight as Natasha’s. She was inferior, so she was murdered for the crime of friendship. Natasha had vowed to never have another friend or love anyone else, and she hadn’t. Until Clint.
She knew the exact moment she had fallen in love with her partner. It was in Jamaica, last summer. They were after a drug kingpin and posing as a couple of newlyweds, which necessitated the closeness and touching that newlyweds enjoy. Natasha and Clint had played a similar role at least a dozen times before in one form or another: the loving couple. It had never been a problem. They’d become so close since becoming partners and going on so many missions that they thought as one most of the time, and there was virtually no embarrassment between the two of them anymore. They had shared rooms, seen each other clothed and unclothed, stitched each other up, shared beds, none of it sexual or romantic. They were best friends and partners and when they had to play a role, they played it to perfection.
They had had their hands all over each other all that week in Jamaica while out in public, keeping up the appearances they had to as the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Daniel and Jennifer Kohler from DesMoines. They hadn’t had a “couple” assignment in a couple of months, and she found herself enjoying this particular assignment more than she probably should have. Every time he touched her, she felt her heart flutter a little. Natasha idly wondered if that was normal. She’d never had any girlfriends to talk to about things like this, nor reason to talk to anyone about it. But the moment, the actual moment, came when they were at the pool, surveilling the area the kingpin’s girlfriend was known to sunbathe. They wanted Natasha to make friends with her, so they were watching the pool. It had been Clint's idea to have a little fun while they were watching for her. Natasha had been sitting on the side of the pool, dangling her feet in. He had been playfully splashing her, and she was splashing back. He came over, grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder with her squealing, pretending to be helpless, then he dunked her under the water. She came up sputtering and laughing and wiping the wet hair out of her face. He grabbed her by the waist, pulled her body against his, leaned in and said, “You are so beautiful, Natasha.” Then he kissed her.
Not Jennifer. Natasha.
In that moment, she was lost to him. No other man would ever do. It was Clint or nothing. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back, putting her whole heart into that kiss and praying he would never stop. But he eventually did, putting his forehead to hers and smiling at her. She smiled back, and then after a minute splashed him. But her pulse never really got back to normal that day, and every time she's seen him since, it's spiked. She didn't know that was even possible, and due to a lack of female friends, she wasn't sure that's how these things worked. She suspected it was. She had heard mention in movies of things like this before that mission, so she tried not to panic. After that mission, she got a trashy romance novel to find out if what she was experiencing was normal. Natasha ordered it in Russian so Clint wouldn't know what it was if he spotted it in her apartment. She read the book, and it turned out the woman in the book had the same type of feelings she had. The woman also disgusted her: she was weak, dependent, clingy, all of the things Natasha scorned in women. Yet Natasha was having the same feelings as this woman. She was confused, frustrated, angry and in love. Fucking hell.
She has relived that moment thousands of times in her mind, the moment that he stole her heart forever. And since that moment last summer, although she still plays the role of femme fatale for S.H.I.E.L.D., she has not let a man touch her intimately. She’s played her role to perfection, flirting, stroking egos, dancing with targets and kissing if she has to. But she refuses to fuck them. She always tried to avoid it before, ever since she got to S.H.I.E.L.D., but sometimes you had to do what you had to do. Not anymore, though. She just can’t. The thought of letting another man touch her leaves her cold - even if Clint hasn't ever touched her. So in the arsenal she carries on her person at all times, she’s also carried a couple of tiny glass vials. One of them slips into a drink if the mark starts getting too handsy. No one knows about this, and if anyone ever does a toxicology report on one of her kills, Natasha’s going to be fucked in a whole different way. But she’s willing to take that risk: she just can’t tolerate the thought of anyone else touching her.
None of this alleviates her fear, however, of having made herself vulnerable by falling in love with this man. It was beaten into her that to have any weaknesses was to guarantee your own destruction. She has spent hours and hours of the last year telling herself that she doesn’t love him, that’s its all some delayed adolescent thing, or that she’s got a princess complex going on because he saved her and he’s just the handsome prince. All of those are plausible, right? But Natasha knows better, and she can’t fool herself no matter how much she’s tried. And God knows she’s fucking tried. She’s frustrated by her inability to talk herself back into her safe little corner where she doesn’t care about anyone but herself. She cares now, goddammit. She feels and she doesn’t know that she wants to feel. Having feelings - even good feelings - makes you vulnerable. It gives you an underbelly. It gives you a weakness. And now, she has feelings. Goddammit.
Emotions apparently weren’t beaten out of her in the Red Room, they were only beaten down, and now they’re taking root and sprouting again. Not only sprouting, the bastards are threatening to bloom. Fuck. She doesn’t know how to cope with feeling this vulnerable, this unsafe. She doesn’t know what to do. This is uncharted territory for her, and it’s fucking terrifying. Natasha Romanov doesn’t cope well with fear.
So she beats the hell out of the sparring dummy.