Natalia Romanova is a child born from bloodshed and a weapon forged in war. She knows how to kill grown men with her hands cuffed, weapons stripped of her, because she is the weapon. She knows how to crack necks, tear off limbs, trample on organs, walk in heels, seduce, and dance. Natalia Romanova is a wind-up soldier, the key in her back click, click, clicking. Natalia Romanova is the ballerina in the music box, turn, turn, turning. Her base is the headquarters of the Red Room, she kills and kisses for Mother Russia, and she does not love.
Here is the mistake people make when they hear about the mission in Budapest – they believe Natalia Alianova Romanova survived. She did not – Agent Barton made a different call, but Natalia was past saving. So, Natasha killed her. Signed Natasha Romanoff into existence in Fury’s office, trained at the Academy like a good girl, saved Agent Barton’s life, met Laura at the farm house, learned to love, killed people, saved others, gained Coulson’s trust, then Hill’s, then Fury’s, worked back to back with Barton, mostly, and sometimes Coulson and May, ate in the cafeteria, ended her text messages with smiley faces, drew love hearts on sticky notes for Cooper, did her job well, watched soap operas with Coulson and Barton in hotel rooms, held Lila in her arms the day she was born and did not break her, worked in a three man team, fucked pretty boys, scared the rookies, fucked pretty girls, went into missions without extraction and walked right back out of them, made the hard calls, came home with Clint, made muffins with Laura, played games in the back yard with the kids, and tried to set Phil up.
Natalia is gone – there is only Natasha.
~~~
When Natalia is sixteen years old, a boy reaches his hand out in the rain, drops his bow, and gives her a choice. Later that week, a man stands before her in a suit, watching carefully, and gives her a chance.
These are the first two people Natalia - Natasha - ever loves.
Within a week, she loses them both.
Just one week. Less than seven days. It’s a miniscule amount of time, really. There are 52.143 weeks in a year. Natasha has been a legal American for fourteen years – 14 times 52.143 equals 730.002 weeks. Natasha has known Clint and Phil for approximately 730 weeks. That is how much time she is allowed.
She loses them in one.
~~~
Coulson says, “Barton’s been compromised,” and Natasha says, “let me put you on hold.” It is not the last time she speaks to him before he dies, but she thinks about it most often. What would’ve happened if Natasha didn’t answer the call? If she stayed right there, in her interrogation, and left Barton – left Clint – in the hands of a nameless, faceless agent who cared more about eliminating the threat than trying to save the unsavable – would Phil have survived then? Was it always going to be Clint or Phil, an impossible choice that she had made without realising? The day Clint had brought her in, when Coulson told each of them to give him a pitch, when Coulson stood before Fury and said “I’ve got a new recruit, sir” – was that what signed his fate?
Whose fault? Loki’s, singularly Loki’s? Or Thor’s? Stark’s? Rogers’? Clint’s? Fury’s? Natasha’s?
Natasha has lost agents before. It has been her fault before. She knows better than to wonder, to think in circles of what could’ve been, what should’ve been and what would’ve been. There is just what is. What did happen.
But Natasha has never lost someone from this little team before. It has always been her and Clint and Phil and May until the end of the world.
(So maybe the world ended. Maybe the aliens touched American soil and there was never any hope of anything being the same again. Maybe they were always going to end up right here.)
Melinda May became the Cavalry became a story, and when she came back, she came back carefully cold, quiet in a new way, but she came back. Natasha knows a bit about the cold, the quiet, about dying and becoming a new self. May transfers to administration and she ignores their calls but Natasha lives with the knowledge that if she walked into the office, there May would be sitting.
Coulson-
Well. Coulson. You already know how that story ends.
~~~
May calls her during shawarma. May hasn’t called her since she transferred to administration, and Natasha hasn’t made her. May calls her now, so Natasha picks up.
“Status report,” May says, clinical but not uncaring.
“Alive. No major injuries. Barton’s fine – he’s currently losing an eating contest to the god of thunder.”
“Good,” May replies, and Natasha can already tell. She knows.
Neither of them says it. It sits heavy between them. Natasha likes the silence – it draws her to May like a moth to the flame. This one is thick with grief that neither of them need to acknowledge.
“Let me tell his cellist,” she tells her. May doesn’t question it for a moment.
“I’ll inform Commander Hill,” and then, “stay safe, Agent Romanoff.”
~~~
So, Thor disappears into the sky with a chained Loki, Stark and Banner disappear into the lab at Stark Tower, Rogers disappears into his SHIELD issued apartment, and Clint goes home. They all go home.
Natasha doesn’t. She buys bags of crisps at the convenience store and Clint says, “I’ll come with you.”
“No, you won’t,” she kisses the side of his head. “Tell the kids Auntie Nat says hello.”
Natasha takes the crisps, her widow bites, and a sleek black car from SHIELD and drives across the country. She calls Laura on the landline, spends five minutes talking to Lila and Cooper about the possibility of dragons being real too, and then tells her that Clint’s on his way.
“He’s really cut up about this, Laur,” Natasha says, voice low.
“Of course he is,” Laura sighs. “Nobody else was ever supposed to get his perfect marksmanship. It was supposed to be his.”
All of this was supposed to be theirs. Their city, their country, their planet. This new one feels so very foreign. Natasha wonders if any of them will ever belong here. If they will adapt, or if they will die out. Maybe it’s simply time. All good things come to an end – all bad things too. Humanity – well, it depends on who you ask.
“And what about you, Nat?”
“I’ve had worse,” Natasha says, smiling to the empty screen, mask in place. “What’s a coupla aliens got on me?”
Laura hums. She always sees through Natasha – it’s one of the things Nat likes most about her. She doesn’t say you don’t have to be strong all the time, Nat, or our ability to feel emotions is truly wonderous or even you are allowed to let yourself fall apart, because she’s said it all before. Instead, she says, very sadly, “I heard about Coulson.”
“I’m on my way to Portland now.”
“That poor woman.”
Laura doesn’t ask Natasha if she is strong enough to do this. She knows it is what she needs. She doesn’t question her at all, just says “you’ll come visit soon, or so help you God,” and lets Natasha make a joke, play it off, and end the call.
~~~
Natasha parks down the street, knocks on the door of the pretty little house, and tells the pretty woman living there that Phil Coulson will never return.
“Oh,” says Audrey Nathan, like all the breath has gone from her lungs. She sits down on the dusty floor, crosses her legs, and starts to cry.
Natasha doesn’t tell her that Phil was a good man, because Audrey already knows. There is nothing to say to fix it, fix the mistakes they made, to go back in time and save that good, good man, so Natasha says nothing at all.
Audrey cries ugly, her face screwed up and red and her sobs loud and wailing. This is not a bad thing - Audrey Nathan cares, tries not to be dishonest, and cries ugly. Natasha is reminded of Lila, when she was born - red, scrawny, screaming, and beautiful.
You can be so very ugly, so obviously grieving, and that can still be beautiful. It's how things work. Grief is just love with no place to go, they say. It rots inside your body, turns sour, turns ugly, but it is still beautiful in the sunlight, in the starlight, on the dusty floor.
Natasha gets Audrey a glass of water from the kitchen and cries before she can help it, putting her hands to her mouth to stifle the sound and waiting it out before she returns to the living room, eyes red.
Audrey stares down at a photograph of her and Phil for a very long time. In the photo, Phil is smiling, properly grinning in a way he doesn’t usually, his arm loose around Audrey’s waist, who is clutching a bouquet of flowers and clearly laughing.
“I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life, aren’t I?” Audrey whispers eventually, sounding devastated. “I’m going to have to live without him. Oh, God. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“It was never-” Natasha chokes, cuts herself off, puts her hand back over her mouth like she can keep the sobs in. She knows that is not how grief works, how tears work, and yet her hands fly to her mouth all the same.
“Oh,” Audrey looks up, “oh, honey, you loved him too.”
She reaches her hand out, holds Natasha’s. Normally touch like this would make Natasha want to fall apart, but she is already falling apart, so she just squeezes Audrey’s callused, cellist hand with her callused, killer one, and lets the tears fall.
“Very much,” she admits.
~~~
Here is the thing- Audrey Nathan dies that day. Phil Coulson died four days earlier (has been dead for ninety-one hours and counting). Somewhere in the world, his funeral is being planned. His grandmother informed. Somewhere in the world, the corpse lies.
Audrey Nathan dies that day, but she is also reborn. She is reborn red, scrawny, screaming, and beautiful.
She is reborn hurting.
~~~
Audrey tells Natasha to stay, tells her that the emptiness is already too much, and would she please do this for her. Natasha says yes, because Phil loved her, loved her proper and never got to enough. Audrey plays the cello every night and cries because every time she plays it, she’ll always look for Phil, and he’ll never be in the crowd again. He’ll never be anywhere. The music is haunted and harrowing, pulling Natasha to pieces. She lies in the spare bedroom, staring at the roof, and tries not to sleep too much (in her dreams, it’s Clint murdering Coulson. In her dreams, it’s always, always her fault).
They drive to the funeral together. Audrey talks too much when she’s nervous, but Natasha just stares out the windscreen at the never-ending road and listens.
"I have to tell my mom," she whispers, aghast. "I have to cancel the trip," she realises, shattered. "I miss him," she admits, devastated. "Oh, God," she repeats, over and over.
Natasha stares straight ahead, lets Audrey talk, and listens.
Coulson is buried beside his mother and father. Audrey cries, body shuddering, when they lower the casket into the ground, and Clint buries his head in Natasha’s shoulder. His tears run down her neck, and she holds him and doesn’t take her eyes off the casket as it disappears. She doesn’t cry, not yet.
That comes later, in the car as Clint drives them home to the farmhouse, where Laura and the kids had to stay so as to remain undiscovered. Clint doesn’t say anything, and neither does she, but she knows they understand each other – one of the first laws of the universe is this, them. They just work. They just do.
Natasha feels raw, her nerves exposed - all her masks, lies, deceit and plays were used up working very hard to not fall apart when Clint- when Clint-
You know how that story goes, too.
~~~
Clint goes quiet in his grief. He comes home, gives Cooper and Lila a chocolate bar and a wide, forced grin each, and curls up next to Laura in the couch. But also, he doesn't come home. He cannot. He goes quiet.
SHIELD calls them defining moments - Natasha just calls them deaths. You die, and you are reborn different, but sometimes you don't have the strength to be reborn at all. Maybe this is how they define you - how much of yourself returns? Who do you choose to be?
Melinda May became the cavalry became a story. Clint Barton became choiceless became a threat became a hero. Natalia Romanova became skilled became a survivor became a saviour. Steve Rogers became a super soldier became a miracle became a martyr.
Phil Coulson just died. The man who gave her a chance, his chances stripped from him. You don't always get a choice about that - sometimes it's your soul that stops breathing, that becomes out of reach, that becomes lost. But sometimes, it's your body, becoming a corpse, becoming a coffin.
Clint Barton, the boy that gave her a choice, had his choices stripped from him. He goes quiet, now. Curls up on the couch and loses his grasp on reality, tumbling through time and space, his eyes empty and glassy. He'll never be able to wash Loki from his mind, his heart, his fingers. Weaker men would not have fired another arrow, maybe ever. Clint stands up - he is a spy, not a soldier, but he stands back up, fires another arrow, and is reborn heroic.
That is a very strong thing to do. Natasha tells Clint this as he shakes, and shakes, and shakes.
Clint is reborn, but before that, he dies. He is reborn shaking.
~~~
When Natasha dies – when Natasha is reborn – it isn’t a beautiful thing; she doesn’t wait three days and walk out of the cave unharmed, she doesn’t wake in a warm hospital room, seven decades later, when the world needs her most, she doesn’t crumble in the fire and rise from the ashes. Instead, she is a brutal, bloody survivor, she is a cockroach, head cut off and still breathing, still twitching, still fighting, she is the god that lets go of the spear, falls and falls and falls until landing, until conquering, until killing. Natasha is not to be praised for this feat – she is to be condemned.
~~~
After Natasha has kissed the kids goodbye, driven down the driveway, and the dust has settled, she opens the door to Clint's Bedstuy apartment, leaves the keys on the hook, and moves the couch out of the way. It's not quite home, but it smells like burnt coffee and dog hair. It smells like Clint could walk through the door any second, Lucky rushing to greet him, and everything could go back to how it used to be.
Natasha gets her ballet shoes out of the closet and starts her stretches, and then her routine. She settles into this mindset of right now and she does not think about Phil Coulson. Music swells from her phone as she stretches out her hand and reaches, reaches, reaches. She dances as the sugar plum fairy and the dying swan. Jetè to chassé to attitude to arabesque to-
Outside the window, the sky darkens. Natasha Romanoff dances and no one but the wakening stars witnesses it.
~~~
There is a photo on Agent Coulson's desk, framed, front and center. On one side is Agent Barton, easy going, cocky, slouched, his hair ruffled, his knuckles bruised. On the other is Agent Romanoff, younger than anyone remembers seeing her, smiling sweetly, smiling sharply, her eyeshadow bright green, shoulders tan, heels lifting her to Clint's shoulder. In between them, Agent Coulson himself, suit impeccable, bashful in an entirely false way, his smile secretive, his tie a Captain America original, his cheek sliced open and stitched up.
Bright, eager agents tell stories about Strike Team Delta, sometimes. Those smug, secretive bastards who knew something the rest of them didn't.
Natasha - not quite the last of them, but the last of them in SHIELD's eyes - knew this: they had just returned from a mission in Hawaii and had scrambled to get themselves ready in time for SHIELD's biannual party, Coulson had caught Natasha dancing on her sprained ankle that night, Clint had spiked the punch, and Coulson had a stray kitten tearing up his SHIELD issued rooms. They'd each had a different name for it - Agent Moose Rage (the juxtaposition, or perhaps retaliation, of the official Agent Goose Fury badge), Sasha (defending men; defending them) and Howlie (named, predictably, after the Howling Commandos).
These memories are supposed to be theirs. Clint's gone quiet. Coulson is never coming back. They are not singularly Natasha's to keep, to hold on to, to cradle - Loki has them too.
Bright, eager agents tell stories about Strike Team Delta, sometimes. But there will never again be new ones to add to the mix - the tall tales will get taller, and then they will die out and there will be new ones (about the Cavalry, about the Captain). Strike Team Delta - the first two men Natasha ever loved - was gone now. Dismantled. Dead. Out of reach.
This was supposed to be forever. Phil was supposed to be forever.
Natasha knows better than to believe in anything of the sort - people just die. They just do. All of them, eventually. It's not something that can be prevented.
But Coulson - with his dry humour, strong hands and dorky obsessions - he had become something constant, something steady, something reliable. He had been there for the fourteen years Natasha had spent with SHIELD. Half of her life. And now she has to live the rest of it, another fourteen years, and another, without him.
In a world of aliens and gods, that, more than anything, is what seems most impossible.
~~~
Time passes, in that awful way it has a habit of doing. Clint redoes the tiling in the bathroom and the floor in the living room. Laura bakes brownies and trifles and upside down pineapple cakes. Cooper reads aloud on the floor, finger carefully following along with the large black words, and Lila draws dragons on her bedroom door. Jane Foster chases stars and storms and science and Steve Rogers wakes up before the sun to chase something through the streets – ghosts, maybe, or himself. Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff take a meditative yoga class together every Thursday and fake their way through a different book club every Monday that Nat’s in the country. When she’s not, she takes people out and brings people in, saves some people and fails to save others.
She visits the admin office and is informed that Agent May has transferred back into the field – “where the Cavalry belongs,” an agent shrugs, and Natasha threatens him with a ballpoint pen held to the throat (they tell stories about that, later). Clint gets a little less quiet and starts sending Nick Fury postcards, like he can sass his way back into the field. Natasha sighs, talks to Laura, and gets him back in the field herself. Clint is kept on simple, solo missions halfway across the world and Natasha longs for the past with a physical ache.
Pepper, Maria and Natasha meet every month or so and get manicures, or pedicures, or massages, and always martinis, the agents among them telling their best stories and trying to make Pepper laugh. Natasha sends chrysanthemums and dahlias to Coulson’s grave every fortnight and asks Bruce to when she’s on assignment and can’t make it. Audrey Nathan calls her every week, and then every month, and then every few months. I see him everywhere, she says, and Natasha doesn’t say me too, even though it's true.
Coulson is in Natasha’s new S.O., in the bloodless agents and the bloodied ones, in the man wearing a press suit on the subway, in the woman who gets stabbed and makes the news, in the bodies that lie in ditches and alleys and make no news, in the face of every soldier being blown up on the news, in the face of every spy that walks through SHIELD’s doors, in every child pointing at Captain America in the store, in every historian, in every collector, in Steve Rogers himself.
She sees him in everything; there, his suit jacket, here, the slope of his soldiers, in the air, his favoured cologne, the man at the grocery store, with his blue, blue eyes, the woman at the Chinese take-out, with determination in hers – all of them, everywhere, are Coulson, except of course, he’s dead and none of them are.
She sees him in everything, and then, slowly, in less. Agent Romanoff takes the shot, twists her body, lies, and steals. Natasha takes Maria home after drinking with Pepper and wakes with their clothes strewn across the room and Maria sipping coffee beside her. There are rumours that her and Clint got divorced – Clint calls her from Mongolia and berates her for never informing him that they got married in the first place. Natasha puts off her paper work and waits for Fury with her feet rested on his desk. Steve Rogers joins SHIELD, throws himself into his work in an intimately familiar manner, and Natasha is placed in his team. She realises that Steve Rogers is not chasing but running away – from ghosts, maybe, or himself. Someone asks her and Bruce for their autographs during this week’s book club and a horde of old ladies glare the intruder away – “the nerve of some people,” an old lady tuts, and another says, “interrupting book club,” sounding appalled.
Natasha picks Steve up in sleek, SHIELD cars, ends her text messages with smiley faces, and starts trying to set him up. She’d pushed Coulson towards Audrey Nathan – sometimes, Audrey called her and cried, or called her and completed crosswords, and sometimes Natasha still felt guilty for that push.
“Is love that ends in grief worth it, do you think?” Natasha asks Steve during a particularly mind numbing stake out.
He pauses, measures up his words, and then says “well, everything ends in grief eventually. May as well play the game before full time.”
“You’re a sport nut,” Natasha groans, and thinks about it. She thinks about Strike Team Delta, and the Avengers, and Yelena. She doesn’t say anything more, and Steve doesn’t ask her to.
Steve Rogers runs away, but sometimes you run far enough to find something. She picks him up in a sleek black car and asks about the handsome runner.
He goes red and stays quiet. Later, he will say even when I had nothing, I had Bucky, and Natasha will understand. She will understand what he was running away from and what he was running towards and how he managed to circle back to it all.
For now, she just turns on the radio and nods her head to the beat.
~~~
It all falls down – Fury, first, and then SHIELD. And then everything.
Natasha didn’t watch Coulson die, but she does watch Nick Fury – the unstoppable Nick Fury – take his final breaths. Her body is paralysed, bones locked with fear, helpless, useless, and she whispers don’t do this to me, Nick, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me. She thinks not again, not again, not you too.
But Nick does do that to her. The room is a flurry of doctors. Natasha feels frozen. In two years, she has come so far – how did she end up right back here?
No, she thinks, hand on the glass, like she can reach in and pull Fury back into the land of the living, back to her. No, no, no, no. No. Please, no. Please, I’m begging you, no.
On one side is Steve and on the other Maria – two people that have seen so much death, too much death. They both pull back, withdraw, away from the window, away from the body, away from the display of death. Maria, Natasha knows, will fight with her teeth bared, fingernails scratching, to complete what needs to be completed, and then she’ll withdraw. It won’t be running away – it will be self-preservation.
Natasha lingers, but then she too steps away – she leaves Nick’s side. Natasha is going to kill Fury’s killer, feel his blood, watch his heart stop, in the way she didn’t get to with Coulson’s killer, with Loki. Natasha is going to do the impossible – she is going to kill him, she really is. The Black Widow against the Winter Soldier. Not a fair fight, maybe, but the Winter Soldier has been created to be apathetic, and Natasha feels things right down to her core. That, at least, will be in her favour.
She knows how to crack necks, tear off limbs, trample on organs, walk in heels, seduce, lie, interrogate, and dance. She knows how to love.
Natasha Romanoff does not cry ugly – she cries single tears, puts her hands to her mouth to stifle the sound, and waits it out. Her hands are steady on guns and they are steady against her lips, forcing the grief back inside. Still waters run deep, people will say, but they will also see her – the famed Black Widow – and they will spit in her face, call her uncaring, call her apathetic, call her inhuman. They will be wrong.
The one thing she has never been is apathetic.
~~~
Nick Fury is reborn, resurfaces in the way that Phil Coulson never got to (ha! She really doesn’t know. They really didn’t tell her, this girl that loved him, still loves him. Sends chrysanthemums and dahlias to an empty grave and sees a living man in the face of strangers on the street. They really didn’t tell her.)
I wasn’t sure who to trust, Nick says, but he trusts Maria Hill in every moment of every universe. Maria will still fight with her teeth bared and her fingernails scratching, will fight against the diseased organisation that she devoted her life to, anger in her veins, but she will not need self-preservation. Maria won’t have to grieve Fury, not now, not yet.
Maria won’t have to, but for precious, devastating moments, Natasha did.
I wasn’t sure who to trust, Nick says, and Natasha wants to scream, because she has done everything, for so long, to gain trust, to be trustworthy.
Clint gave her a choice and Natasha chose to go straight. Coulson gave her a chance and Natasha fucking took it. But now here they are, and the last sixteen years has meant nothing. Fourteen years with the KGB and sixteen years with Hydra. Can Natasha ever be free of it? Is she destined to this cycle of darkness, of red? Is that why Fury and Hill made their plans and weren’t sure who to trust?
I thought I knew whose lies I was telling, but I guess I can’t tell the difference anymore, Natasha says, and it hollows out her body, makes her want to curl into a ball and cry. She thought she’d had half a chance at being good, of maybe-
But no.
The Triskelion falls into the Potomac and so does Captain America. Natasha steps on a moment and the world sees her for who she really is. Sam’s wings are ripped from his back, and he thinks of Riley, but doesn’t see him. He instead sits in the quiet hospital room next to Steve Rogers, turning the pages of his book, and thinks about survival, about wars, about falling, and about flying.
Natasha texts the Barton family group chat and informs them that she’s still alive and doesn’t tell them that Fury is too. That will come later, in person, stretched out on the couch and eating Clint’s pancakes. Now, she sits in bed with her laptop and begins combing through SHIELD files, calls in favours and asks for information on the Winter Soldier, who she didn’t kill, and who didn’t kill Fury. Natasha thinks of Clint’s hands, shooting, of his blue, blue, eyes and his forced loyalty to Loki, and doesn’t know if she hopes that Steve finds Bucky Barnes or spends the rest of his life looking. She thinks of Clint going quiet, and wonders.
~~~
Her agency fell, and with it, her world. Natasha stays up late at night and calls Clint, who died two years ago and still has nightmares.
“Who am I without SHIELD?” Natasha asks. “Who do I be? I’ve never- I’m not-”
“You’re my best friend,” Clint says fiercely, which he knows is not enough of an identity but says anyway. Natasha doesn’t know who she is, but she’s been Clint Barton’s best friend for sixteen years. That’s something. Not everything, but something. Something big, something important.
“You have to find out for yourself, Nat,” Laura tells her. Maybe Clint’s nightmares woke her up, or maybe her own did. “You get to.”
Natasha understands that – a choice, a chance. Choices are taken, sometimes, and chances aren’t given to everyone. So, when you have them – choices and chances – you must hold them tight and make the best of them.
Her agency burns, falls into the river, goes up in smoke all across the world. But Natasha herself is not smoke in the air, ruins in the water, fire in the walls. She’s not a toy soldier and she’s not the ballerina in the music box. Just a girl. Just a woman. Just a person.
Natasha dances as the sun rises, this time.
~~~
Clint gives her a choice. Coulson gives her a chance. May gives her consistency. Maria gives her curiosity. Nick gives her commitment, something to commit to, something worth committing to. Steve gives her courage, Laura gives her compassion, and Sam gives her cheer.
What does Natasha – who is Natalia still (Natalia changed, but Natalia all the same), who is Natasha still, who is both and neither stuck inside this body – give herself?
~~~
She is summoned to Capitol Hill and says you know where to find me and walks right back out. Tony prattles praises and Bruce says I guess book club is indefinitely on hold, and Natasha says are there any rules regarding the opening of a book club? and you’re not getting rid of me that easily, Banner, and when she reads his reply – I wouldn’t put it past the old ladies – she can very nearly hear his dark, conspiring voice in her ear. She misses him, then, even though she tries not to.
Later, when Natasha answers her phone, the first thing Audrey Nathan says is “I saw you on TV.”
“Oh, joy,” Natasha says, “I’ve officially made it.”
“The corner stores are selling t-shirts with your face on it, and those things have not been printed overnight. I think you're past making it.”
“What part of secret spy do they not understand?” Natasha groans.
“Some people would think of it as an honour,” Audrey offers.
“Some people are idiots,” she says, thinking of Clint and his far too large collection of bright purple Hawkeye merchandise.
Audrey sighs, and then says, in a very small voice, “Hydra, in SHIELD. Phil’s SHIELD.”
“Coulson wasn’t Hydra,” Natasha says immediately.
“I know that,” Audrey snaps back vehemently. “I don’t need you to tell me that Phil was a good man. I have always known that.”
The following quiet is thick with tension. Natasha closes her eyes and leans her head against the wall. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“I know you are,” Audrey replies quietly. “You’ve taken very good care of me, Nat. I just wonder if you’ve been taking care of yourself.”
There are truths, and there are lies. “I’m trying to,” Natasha says, because she is also trying to be honest with herself and open to others. Currently, she’s in New Zealand, climbing mountains, touching skies, finding a cover and finding herself. She’s trying.
~~~
Once a fortnight, Bruce places chrysanthemums and dahlias on Phil Coulson’s grave. He places marigolds on Nick Fury’s. He does this every fortnight for a very long time, until Natasha Romanoff comes home. They visit the graveyard together, after that.
~~~
There are truths, and there are lies. In an agency such as SHIELD, you simply learn to trust the system. You live without knowing, you live with belief in your superiors, you live with trusting the goddamn system, because the alternative option is to let it tear you up, rip you apart, and spit you back out.
Clint and Natasha grieve Phil Coulson for the rest of their lives. They watch an empty coffin being lowered. They grieve a living man – die and are reborn hurting the moment they are informed of his dead, dead, body. This is how SHIELD works – secrets on secrets on secrets on secrets.
It makes sense. After all, they are not Level 7, Agents Romanoff and Barton.