my darlings, i’m so sorry
She’s surprised to wake. Lucky to even be alive.
Back in her day, an injury like that would be a death sentence. She’d become nothing more than a training exercise; for if the bullet to her shoulder didn’t kill her, one to the head most certainly would.
It makes her think of Yelena - the girls that came before her and the ones that’ll come after. Gun thrust into their hands for the first time as they’re told to shoot. The ones who refuse aren’t given a second chance. Those remaining don’t hesitate in pulling the trigger. It is an incentive, of sorts. Kill or be killed.
Melina has killed.
And now, she waits. Be it for the finality of death or the silent relief that is her next mission.
The decision comes in the form of being sedated and shipped off to a farm outside of St. Petersburg. Out of the field and out of sight, but not out of work. Not if the files and barnful of pigs are anything to go by.
Iron Maiden compromised. Reduced to nothing more than a scientist hidden out in the countryside.
Her mind, however, is as strong as ever. Dreykov knows that. Knows how to put it to use.
She throws herself back into her work, ignoring the foreign ache in her chest and the too silent house. Gone are the light-up shoes littering the hallway, gone is the sound of cartoons in the morning and the patter of bare feet up and down the stairs.
Gone is what once was. She refuses to think about it any further.
Half the pigs are dead within the first month. They are replaced before the end of the next.
A line of shallow graves grows around the outskirts of the property. Nameless, forsaken and forgotten.
Days blur together but she would be a fool to lose track of time. Hours upon hours spent trialling formulae and concentrations, reading the files over and over in a desperate attempt to fill the gap.
Month three, Dreykov visits. Checks up on her work before pushing her down against the worktop and reminding her of her place in the world. When he’s done, he grins darkly at her.
“You should be a proud mother. You have taught them well.”
Something inside her cracks. Marble shattering from within.
He could be lying, for all she knows. Yelena could be dead. Her sweet girl, thrown in amongst those who have come before and replaced by another doomed to the same, sick fate. If only she were so lucky.
Natasha…Natasha is alive. She knows. Can feel it in her bones.
(She sees so much of herself in her, and yet nothing at all. They are the same. Then they are not. They have both cycled through the Red Room like a mouse born in a cage, running round and round on its wheel.
But Natasha is no mouse. That fact terrifies her.)
A belt is buckled up behind her and she turns to see Dreykov pull photos out of his front pocket. Intake photos, she can only assume, clipped to the front of their files upon their return.
He holds them just out of reach. A taunt. A trap. But she fell for her girls once, already, and she’d gladly fall again.
“You’ve gotten soft,” He frowns at her, before throwing the photos at her. They flit to the ground like the butterflies Yelena would chase round the yard in the springtime, like Natasha’s hair cut off over the bathroom sink.
She doesn’t reach for them again until he’s left.
Yelena does not look at the camera, but elsewhere in the room when the photo was taken. Eyes wide, cheeks flushed as though she had been crying.
(She briefly wonders if that has been beaten out of her, yet, before shaking that thought from her head and brushing her finger over the printed face of her daughter.)
Natasha stares the camera down with empty eyes.
Unlike Yelena, her fear is not evident to the untrained eye. But it is present. Just as it had been present at the dinner table, hand trembling around her fork.
Natasha had not wanted to go back. She was all too aware of the fate awaiting her, awaiting her sister.
Natasha had not wanted to go back and neither had she. And yet, she let them be taken.
The fault is hers and hers alone.
She makes no progress on her work.
It is just as intentional as it is unintentional. There’s nothing for her to work with, just as she has no desire to work. She’s reached a standstill.
There are no new graves lining the property. The pigs are given names and food and she finds herself nurturing them more than she would like to admit.
One day, after a trip into the city to buy supplies, she walks into the barn to find Twilight dead on the floor, next to Macaroni and Alexis. The needle to her neck comes next and she slumps to the floor among her pigs.
Dreykov is waiting for her when she wakes, with a glint in his eyes unmistakable even through his glasses.
“Come. We have a defect for you.”
She flinches at his words but walks behind him to the other side of the infirmary, anyway. They draw back the curtain to reveal a girl she doesn’t recognise and it takes everything within her not to sigh with relief.
It’s not them. It’s not either of her girls.
The girl must only be a year or two older than Natasha, with a face still round with youth and eyes not quite lost all of their brightness. Or, perhaps, those are the tears flowing freely down her cheeks.
Melina does not ask her name. It doesn’t matter, anymore.
The girl screams and writhes under her restraints. Begging. Pleading.
“Pathetic,” Dreykov spits, motioning for one of the guards to shoot her. She watches the girl’s eyes glaze over as she stills, spattered blood still warm on her skin, “Dispose of her. Melina, come.”
She follows like a dog does its master. At his heel. Nothing more than man’s bitch. He leads her to his office and motions for her to sit.
“I expected better. Iron Maiden, a Red Room failure. Perhaps, next time, we shall give you an incentive. Perhaps, it’ll be one of your girls. Little Yelena, hm? Natasha?” He leans back in his chair, watching her like a lion does its prey. “That one, she has fire in her.”
She tenses in her seat. He grins.
“The Red Room is their home now. As it is yours. Next time, I expect nothing short of success.”
She practically stumbles out of the room when he dismisses her. Two guards wait for her outside. As the needle presses into her neck, she thinks she sees a flash of red hair out the corner of her eye. The last thing she sees before the darkness takes over.
She dreams, that night, of bright, blue hair and wide, wary eyes. Dreams of bioluminescence and books propped open on the dinner table. Laughter echoes throughout her subconscious mind alongside the mirage of two girls with such short-lived freedom and choice.
The image shifts into one of roaming hands and heavy weight pinning her down. A memory. It used to be her own. Now she knows it is shared.
“She has fire in her,” Dreykov leers. “Little Natasha, all grown up.”
She remembers a seven year old Natasha, all animalistic fear and inbred terror. A stolen steak knife on their first night in Ohio, tucked under her pillow. The lilt of her accented English when she was caught with it, outstretched in a shaking hand.
“Forgive me, mama. I’m scared.”
She couldn’t bring herself to confiscate it, back then. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it, either.
When she wakes with a gasp, there is a bitterness in her mouth that she cannot get rid of, even hunched over the bathroom sink and coughing up the meagre contents of her stomach. She’d think it were shame, if she didn’t know better. For it is guilt.
Bile and spit runs the drain, and with it, an unspoken apology.
that’s all on me
Her every move is monitored on the farm, from the moment she wakes through to that same moment the next day. She comes to realise that quickly. Privacy is foreign to men like Dreykov, so afraid to lose their power for even a moment that it becomes their very weakness.
He feeds off their fear; it seems only fair when the tables have turned. And she has spent her life starved.
She reads the stolen files over and over, trying to fill the gaps.
For she is presented with a choice that she cannot make; to fail at a great cost or succeed the very same.
(It should be a small price to pay, for someone who has had everything taken from them. But she knows that for things to be taken, they must belong in the first place. The girls were never hers, but they could’ve been, once. Dreykov knows that.)
A long time ago, she learned that in a world full of evil, there is no lesser option. Just lies, deceit, and death.
And then, in the darkness, there can be light. The opening of a shipping container door after being cramped with dozens of other bodies, scared, disoriented, alone. The flame of the incinerator as their choices are burned in front of their eyes.
“Why give her a choice when she will never be given one?” A younger Natasha had once dared to ask as both she and Alexei tried to reason with Yelena before she threw a fit, “It is cruel. Unnecessary.”
Natasha was smart. Unnaturally quick and sharp.
Sometimes, in Ohio, she would lay awake at night and imagine a world in which things were different. A world in which Natasha would be like any other girl her age, dreaming of a bright, successful future.
She would be a teacher - the kind sort that Americans always seemed so fond of, soft and gentle with the children. Maybe she would have children of her own.
But that sort of life does not belong to girls like them. The ones who fight to live and live to fight.
Natasha will never be given that choice. It will be ripped from inside out, thrown into the flames without a care.
It is cruel. Unnecessary.
Sighing, her fingers trace over the eagle printed at the top of the page, following the curve of its wings.
They say it represents freedom, but freedom is an American concept. There is no freedom for people like them. The closest they ever got was left behind in Ohio; burned down to nothing, alongside the Institute, alongside their choices.
Natasha was merely an infant when she was taken from her mother and thrust into a world of violence. Not yet old enough to walk unaided, but seemingly old enough to be beaten, neglected and starved for a cause that should not exist.
Melina thinks she met the girl, once, when she was so small.
Left unattended in a narrow room filled with peeling cots and babies who cried and cried and cried.
Not Natasha, though.
The Red Room saw potential. She saw the ghost of a child.
(Perhaps she saw herself, too. Orphaned and alone, doomed to a life fit for nobody. She and Natasha have always been alike.)
She can envision flattened red curls and limbs thinner than the bars keeping her in place. Wearing nothing but a soiled cloth diaper in the bitter throes of winter.
“That one, she has fire in her.”
The girl Melina was before wanted nothing more than to take her far, far away from that place. To save her from the life she would live. To hold her.
She failed.
(Two weeks later, all of her maternal instinct was ripped out of her on a cold, metal table and thrown into the cremator alongside dead little girls who would also never get the chance to experience such. She’d never look at a child quite the same.)
If she’d known then, she thinks she would’ve done it. Thinks she would’ve taken her girls and ran.
They would live on a farm not too different from her own. Yelena would be responsible for feeding the chickens, throwing so much food that they would become fat - fat enough to eat - and they would all never know hunger. Natasha would ride her bike to herd the sheep and pigs back home where it’s safe before the darkness fell.
There would be no handcuffs. No harsh winters without food and warmth. No Dreykov, nor men just like him.
The only red in their ledgers would be the stain of crushed berries in the summer, sweet and ripe. The only smell of death when the leaves turn to rot and fall at their feet.
It is but childish fantasy.
(Forgive her for never having been a child.)
She is pulled out of retirement and sent on a mission, two years into her research. Whether it is a test of ability, or punishment for lack thereof, she does not know. For Dreykov wants results she refuses to give.
He is stupid to think she would give in so easily. But then, she sees the assignment brief and grins in spite of herself.
She is to assassinate a man named Keller - Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. - and watch from the shadows as regimes fall.
It is a test of loyalty.
It is not her first run-in with S.H.I.E.L.D.. Three years and one new bullet wound later, she still aches at the thought of humid summers and melting popsicles, or the memory of squeaking swing sets and scraped knees.
Perhaps it makes this into a punishment, instead.
She’s flown out to America with nothing more than a duffle bag of clothes and weapons, and an objective that does not align with her own; a traitorous plan formulated faster than the chemical subjugation Dreykov will not wait for.
Iron Maiden turns herself in.
S.H.I.E.L.D. does not show pity. They do not cause harm, either. It surprises her.
She gets locked in a cell that she could easily break out of within minutes, but that is not her desire. They watch her. They leave her. They come back. Still, she remains sitting with her hands cuffed in front of her, staring at the door and waiting for him to come. He does.
“I’ve been told you gave yourself up. Handed yourself in. What gives?” He asks with bright curiosity in his eyes. His tone is firm, though not unkind, and she is once again reminded how Americans are strange. Stupid.
“I do not care for you,” She states, “It means nothing to me that you are alive. It’d mean even less if you were dead. I care for your help.”
He straightens up and looks her in the eyes, as though searching for her lies. She tells none.
“Why?”
“I cannot do this alone. Not if I am to succeed.”
There is a photograph hidden in the empty chamber of her confiscated gun. She tells him such, waiting in place until he returns with the image of two young girls - all rosy cheeks and gap-tooth grins. His face is soft. His words equally so. “Who are they?”
“They were key to a Red Room mission that began half a decade ago. The mission was completed. I was compromised and they were taken back. They’ll be lucky if they are dead.”
“How do you know they’re not?” He asks.
“I did not raise my girls to fall into traps. They are alive. I would not be here if I had any doubt.”
She watches as he runs a hand over his face, as though he hasn’t already made up his mind. “What do you want in return? Immunity? To defect?”
“I want them to be safe.”
They ask about the Red Room.
She tells them all she knows. Girls snatched from the streets. Infants stolen from their mother’s arms. Parents killed, defects killed shortly after.
They ask about Dreykov.
She tells them about a man who craves power and the ability to control; an abuser who preys on scared, little girls. A monster who hides in the shadows with an army at his merciless beck and call.
They ask about Yelena and Natasha.
She tells them nothing more.
She works alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. agents as though she is merely another one of them, searching through all the files they can get their hands on and gathering intel. She comes up with a plan. They tell her they do not like it.
“It’s not safe. People will get hurt.”
“Are they not already? It is not some sanctuary. They are beat. They are starved. They are killed without second thought because there will always be more girls for them to use and dispose of. Life is a death sentence for those girls. Death is mercy.” She argues, rage white hot in her veins.
They do not get it, she decides. They do not understand.
A man named Fury sits across from her, his one good eye seeing more than everyone else in the room. He leans forwards, “You really think this will work?”
“No,” She admits, “But I think it is least likely to fail.”
A tracker is implanted into the nape of her neck, with a promise she won’t be left to die there. She does not tell them they cannot promise such things. Not when she lets herself be recaptured by the Red Room.
She wakes in the infirmary, disoriented and dizzy. She does not let that stop her as she eases her way out of the handcuffs restraining her to the bed and stumbles out of the room.
Her mission was incomplete. A failure. Yet it has only just begun.
The comm in her ear buzzes with static. She frowns, turning it on before giving S.H.I.E.L.D. the greenlight.
Somewhere in the near distance, the ground shakes as a wall gets blown to pieces. And again. And again. And again.
She makes her way past locked surgical suites and empty testing rooms as S.H.I.E.L.D. infiltrates from the outside in. They fight fire with fire. A thousand bullets and several bombs do nothing to work things in their favour, though. Not when the guards use girls as shields and the agents hesitate to shoot.
Those girls are dead either way. She does not let this stop her.
Coulson is the one to find Yelena. Picks her out of the crowd locked in the ballet studio when the bombs went off. She hears his apology in her ear as he tranqs her, and something inside of her cracks at the softness Yelena hasn’t known since Ohio.
“I’ve got her. Yelena’s safe, she’s out. We’ve got her, Melina.”
She turns her focus onto Natasha.
Her feet lead her to Dreykov’s office on their own accord. Hallways scattered with the bodies of guards, madames and widows who tried to get in her way.
She killed them all without hesitation. A bloody path to salvation, to saving her daughter.
(“Spare no one, except my girls.” She’d told S.H.I.E.L.D., knowing that even they weren’t spared.)
She slips into his office; like she used to, a lifetime ago. Barely older than Natasha is now. Scared. Aware of the fate awaiting her behind his closed door.
It is different, now. Her shoulders still tremble the same, but it is not fear that causes them to shake. Only rage.
(Spare no one.)
“Where is she?” She demands, blood pooling around her lips and staining gritted teeth.
He laughs, lowering himself into his chair and leaning back. Something akin to amusement crosses his face - as though this is nothing but a game to him. He lowers his voice to a whisper, “You walked right past her, Melina. You didn’t even look.”
She was trained to show no emotion. But in that moment, she feels everything.
She slams his head into his desk as he had done to her moments before, as he had done to her years before, as he had done to so many others; the ones who came before her and the ones who came after. Natasha.
The breath leaves his body in a pitiful whimper, but it is not enough. She does it again. Over and over and over, until he slumps over and falls to the floor.
She doesn’t stop, then.
Bones crack. Grunts die out. He’s gone with a final shudder. It is sickeningly reminiscent of how he killed so many girls before without even killing them.
It takes Fury grabbing her from behind to get her to stop. He drags her away as she kicks and screams and cries, until her knees buckle. He holds her as her cries turn to sobs.
“It’s over. He’s dead, Melina. You’re free.”
It is true that Dreykov lays dead on the ground, bloodied and broken, but it is not enough. “I will never be free of him.”
Her girls are taken away from her before she even gets the chance to hold them. They say it is for the best, when Yelena is laid down onto a bed, blankets tucked over her little leotard and blood-stained shoes, when Natasha gets wheeled into a separate jet on a trolley and whisked away from her.
She stands in the snow as Coulson approaches her carefully, as though she is an injured animal that will attack the moment it is confronted. He wouldn’t be too far off.
“Yelena is okay. She…they were still dancing, when we got there. Medics have already cleared her. She’s going to be alright.”
“And what of Natasha?” She dares to ask.
He has the decency to look distraught. Or, perhaps, that is just who he is as a person. She’s never known a man so gentle. “They had already completed the surgery. I’m so sorry, Melina. We…S.H.I.E.L.D. will do everything we can for you all.”
She is allowed to see Yelena first.
The girl is still unconscious when she enters the room, but it does not take long for eyelids to flutter open and a body to barrel into her with desperate force. Yelena is now eight and a head taller than she used to be. It is still easy enough to hold her close to her chest as the girl sobs against her shirt, “I thought you were dead. I thought that you died.”
She shushes her as she used to years ago, when the girl would wake from a nightmare or would be sick with fever. “It’s okay, baby. I’m here. Mama’s here.” She promises - a mantra too late to be enough.
Yelena cries herself to sleep, eventually, and she lays her back down with a kiss to her head, tucking the blankets tight around her. She slips away.
Natasha is next.
Drowning in an infirmary bed intended for people twice her size and paler than the sheets she rests against, it surprises her to see that her eldest girl is awake, much less curled up into a ball that surely hurts. But Natasha doesn’t flinch. Not even when Melina lowers herself onto the mattress, too.
They sit in silence for almost an hour. Natasha in her tight ball and her hovering on the edge of the bed, watching her carefully. It is Natasha who breaks the silence.
“They took a part of me.” She admits, looking even smaller than she did those many years ago when they first met. Hidden under a paper gown far too big for her carrying a burden even bigger. “They took a part of me, mama. I-”
“I know, big girl.”
“I didn’t want…” She continues, voice wavering. The rest goes unspoken. She thinks she understands.
She didn’t want to suffer at the hands of those who made and unmade her. She didn’t want to be unmade. She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t quite want to live, either.
She gets it.
“I know.”
“You were dead. He told me you were dead when he…but he lied.” There are tears in the girl’s eyes. They do not fall. “Did you kill him?”
“Brutally. He is dead. He cannot hurt you again.” She promises, too late once more. Natasha nods, face hardening and eyes glazing over.
“It wasn’t brutal enough.” Natasha says coldly.
“I know.”
For all that she loves her girls, she hates herself just the same.
She’d look at Yelena and see a face filled with innocence and childlike wonder. Melina had been the same age, once, but she was never a child. Not like that.
Yelena would push her. Challenge her. Test her limits and boundaries for all they were worth.
Natasha did the same, but it was different.
She’d look at Natasha and feel an ache in her heart far from the envy she felt when she looked at Yelena. It was sorrowful - pitiful - it was guilt.
She and Natasha were the same. Both cut from the same blood-stained, ruined cloth; worn down and used without care. The knife that cut them wielded by the same wicked man.
They all had monsters, back in Ohio. But whilst Yelena’s monsters hid under her bed, Natasha’s and hers would crawl into theirs, smelling of tobacco and stale blood.
Dreykov’s death was a kindness he didn’t deserve.
She remembers her own graduation ceremony. The way she danced, the way she killed. The anger, fear and confusion as she was forced back onto an operating table, exposed in ways she could not comprehend.
They reached up inside of her and snipped, snipped, snipped her hopes and dreams away.
She felt it all.
Sometimes, on the best days, she wishes she died on that very same table. She does not talk about the bad days.
A part of her wonders if Natasha feels the same way.
Neither of them have talked about it since their return from Russia and all she can think of are the earliest days spent in Ohio, where she refused to acknowledge the blatantly, painstakingly obvious. That was, at least, until it was too late. She refuses to let this become the same.
She finds Natasha in the library, tucked away in the far corner and reading a book. The cyrillic tells her it’s printed in Russian. Tolstoy, if she were to guess. “Natasha?”
The Natasha left behind in Ohio would’ve folded the page’s corner to keep her place, or mumbled something quietly and continued to read.
Instead, the book is softly shut, eyes snapping upwards to meet her own. “Yes, madame?”
She looks at her daughter and sees rows of children, shoulders tense and stiff. Soldiers learning to march - told they will take their first steps towards salvation but dying before they can learn to run away from it, far and fast.
Her daughter was taken from her, blue hair and warm heart, and returned as marble.
(A burlap sack would’ve been kinder.)
“Walk with me.”
The book is abandoned as the child scrambles up off the floor halfway between graceful and gauche. Natasha rushes to keep in step, following her through the maze of corridors and hallways, swerving around corners.
Melina does not have a plan for this. She digs around for the maternal instinct that has long been trampled down, unfolding it at its corners and praying to an entity she does not believe in that it will be enough.
“I was sixteen when I graduated,” She starts. Natasha’s head snaps up, “I was the best in my class. Ruthless. Efficient. I danced and fought and killed flawlessly. Mindlessly. ”
She glances down next to her to see Natasha nod simply.
“They pushed me back onto the bed and took my choices, too. I…I did not want that,” It is the first time she has been so truthful. The first time she has talked about such things in such ways. She continues, “I did not deserve that. And neither did you.”
Natasha looks to the floor, eyes seemingly empty. Lost in her own mind and memories.
“I tried to fail,” The girl admits. Softly. Silently, “I was sloppy. But they could see it was pretend. I wanted them to kill me for it. Madame told me the ceremony was necessary for me to take my place in the world.”
I have no place in the world.
“Pain only makes you stronger. Right, mama?”
Natasha’s voice wavers and she sees her ten year old daughter, sobbing over her dying body on an airstrip in Cuba. Recognises the desperation and animalistic terror all too well. She wore it, too, once.
“You shouldn’t have needed to be strong. You were a child.”
They both were. And yet they both never were.
It is unfair.
S.H.I.E.L.D. puts Yelena in therapy. They say it’ll help. That the woman is a specialist in childhood trauma and abuse; the best there is.
They want Natasha to have therapy, too. Melina objects.
She imagines the last time Natasha was forced into an office alone with someone, forced over a desk as she was stripped of her choices in more ways than one. The involuntary hysterectomy that followed was just a parting gift.
For that alone, she knows how this will go. A memory. A flash of fear. Neck snapped within a minute, bullet in her daughter’s head just as quick.
They do not understand their fear. Cannot begin to comprehend the extent of the horrors they were exposed to and forced to live.
She does not want those reliving.
Things are different, here. The men are kind and the women are equal. She has made allies in May just as much as she has Coulson and Keller. And then, there’s Fury.
Fury brings Yelena boxes of mac and cheese and Natasha books printed in Russian. For her, he brings a badge and hope she thought bled out years back. “They want you to work for them. Turn your life around, call your own shots.”
“I do not know how to do that.” She admits, far too honest for her liking.
“You’ll learn. You all will.”
He says it with confidence - not quite a promise, but too convicted to be a lie. She thinks she believes him.
There's a wall of floor to ceiling mirrors in the gym. People can look at themselves and correct their forms, adapt their postures, and watch the motion of their movements as they train.
She finds Natasha standing in front of it, early one morning, when she comes down to start her routine sets.
She finds herself joining her, arms stiff by her side as Natasha stares ahead with empty eyes.
“I thought,” The girl starts, “I thought I would look different. I thought I would look changed.”
The words cut deep, for she knows the feeling. When something is taken from you and you feel utterly broken, but that pain and hurt cannot be seen. It runs too deep for that - woven between years of scar tissue and taut muscle.
“You know, I remember when we dyed your hair in Ohio. You never asked for it, you knew better than that, but I could tell…you never wanted anything more.” She starts. The ghost of a smile flashes across Natasha’s face, before it is replaced by something bitter.
“They cut it out when we went back.”
“There is nothing to go back to anymore,” The admission is dark, but it eases the tension in the girl’s shoulders just a fraction. A crack, to let the light into, “What colour would you like?”
They find themselves crammed into the bathtub, hours later, washing dye down the drain and combing curls. Yelena’s blonde hair now has highlights of pink and purple, Natasha’s underside a darker blue than it had once been. The top remains red - dye hidden upon the girl’s request.
“They can’t take it from me anymore, but I’m scared.”
She trims their ends and cuts Natasha bangs, watching as Yelena grins and Natasha’s eyes light up.
It doesn’t feel like much, but somehow it’s enough.
Coulson is the first to see their new hair, smiling softly as he compliments them both. She expects Natasha to bristle at the attention. Instead, the girl nods her head in acknowledgement. It’s a start.
Fury is the next, though he was aware of their plans when Melina had asked for the dye and a pair of scissors. He doesn’t smile at them in the way Coulson had, but he hands her a bag containing a box and a book with no cover. “Thought you might like to start a new collection.”
She doesn’t open it until that evening, with Natasha leaning her head on her shoulder and Yelena watching television at their feet.
Inside is a photo album, empty except for the photo she had given to Keller all those months ago, and an instant camera with a note on the box.
To fresh starts - Nick
it was i who made you stay