Chapter 1
Everything is complicated, everything is too much, everything is foreign.
Natalia Romanova is lost, she is angry, she is hollow.
It had been three years, three years, and she still was incapable of functioning like a normal human being. She had gone through solitary, deprogramming, and so many SHIELD mandated counseling sessions, yet she still did not feel like a person most of the time. Deep down she knew it was because she had never gotten the chance to be anything but a soldier. But did it matter ? Would she want to be anything else ? Perhaps as a child she had briefly had dreams, but she had learned from birth that dreams and hopes are for children, they make her as weak as love. Natalia Romanova had not been raised to be weak, she had been raised to be marble - strong, unbendable, unbreakable.
SHIELD treated her much better than the Red Room ever had - it was impossible to be more inhumane than Dreykov had been - but in the end a spy is a spy.
Her life revolved around SHIELD, it was paced by training, meetings, and missions. She lived, worked, and slept at SHIELD. There was nothing in her life but the missions. She did not have friends, she did not go out with colleagues, she had never developed hobbies and even now after three years, she still wasn’t even sure what food or color she preferred.
She had always treated those things as trivial matters, indulgences she could not afford. Why did everyone ask her what her favorite food or music was ? She ate because sustenance was a synonym of survival, nothing more.
SHIELD had always tried to teach her she was a person with free will and was not bound by all the rules of the Red Room anymore, but the former widow had internalized many of those rules and no one at SHIELD had tried to teach her that she was no longer bound by her own rules either. No one cared enough to notice anyway, not so long as they could profit off of her laser focus, skills, and dedication to whatever mission she was assigned.
So Natalia Romanova lived by her own self-imposed and destructive code.
Work with a team but do not get close to any of them.
Trust in skills but not in people.
Be both invisible and remarkable.
Focus on the mission.
Be an agent, not a person because this is all you are good for.
If her assigned therapist could see this code she would probably sigh and shake her head before furiously scribbling in her little notebook, but Natasha was better than this. In fact she was so good at following her code that no one had ever noticed, everyone around her thought she had fully adapted to life outside of the red room. When in fact she had simply adapted to life in another prison - albeit a gilded one.
***
When director Fury himself had summoned her for a solo mission briefing she knew what to expect. Recon, infiltration, kidnapping, assassination - she was his best agent for a reason.
When he mentioned undercover work the possibilities rushed through her mind, gang, cult, drug cartel, trafficking ring - those played right into her skill set. She could be anyone, she could play any role, but even she had to admit that some skins were easier to slip into than others.
The persona that Fury had just given her, Natalia had only played once - a long, long time ago.
If she had been more comfortable she would have let the disdain show on her face, she would have voiced the fact that this mission was below her, she would have told Fury that she would rather die than have to live a fake regular life. She could still remember the bitter taste of fake freedom. Pretending to be normal, making friends, playing sports, having a family, pretending for so long that you start to believe it - only to have it all taken away without warning, only to be thrown back into hell.
Natalia could not refuse the mission - no matter how many times they had told her that she was allowed to, she knew she did not actually have a choice, only the illusion of one - all she could do was remind herself that she was no longer a naive child who would get swept up in their undercover persona.
She quashed any hope there and then before they could even burgeon in her chest. This life he was making her live was not real, it would never be real, it would never be hers.
“Natasha Romanov”, she read slowly, letting the name roll off her tongue in a carefully curated American accent, not a hint of Russian could be heard despite the name’s origin. It was a name she had worn before, they used to call her Natasha as a child, back when she had blue hair and a little sister.
“The easiest way to maintain a cover is to stick as close to the truth as possible,” Fury cleared is throat - he was still hesitant about this whole undercover thing, “I trust you are fine with this cover ?”
“I’m an agent, I am fine with any cover.” Responded Natalia - no, Natasha.
Part of her briefly entertained the thought of telling him to send in a rookie agent because this mission was clearly a waste of her skills. In fact, this mission was Natasha’s personal hell. She would have picked any mission over this one.
Agent Romanov did not mind undercover work, she had been so many people throughout her life that she could switch between covers and aliases without so much as a second thought.
If the order had come from anyone other than Director Fury himself it would have been an insult. She looked down at the file in her hand, which contained all the necessary paperwork and information on her brand new and boringly mundane life.
And yet, deep down it had not eluded her that she was uniquely qualified for this specific mission. Who could be better at unmasking a supposed sleeper cell family in suburbia, than the woman who grew up in one of those families ?