Loose Ends
For Natasha, the killing was getting old.
Not that she didn’t appreciate the purpose it gave her, but she could only do it so many ways. At first, it had been difficult. SHIELD had made that headspace, a place that was once so familiar to her, uncomfortable. She craved the detachedness, the cold resolve that came with it. She wanted to retreat back there.
The first one was a guard. She recognized him. He had been one of James’s handlers, one of the men who had dragged him away as he screamed and fought for her. She shot him point blank in the forehead as soon as he remembered who she was. It made her a bit sick to stare into his eyes as she searched him for intel and weapons.
She thought about Steve that first night, when she retreated to her safehouse. She stared at the ceiling of her flat, stretched across the thin mattress of her double bed, and wondered what he was doing. If he was okay. If he had found James.
She didn’t sleep much.
Thoughts of him plagued her for the first week and she considered reaching out to him. Contacting Hill or Fury and asking them to get him a burner phone or something of the like so that she could at least hear his voice. But, no. She couldn’t cave. She couldn’t be weak, not now. She had to find her way through this, to sort out her life. So she could be around him one day and not be so scared to admit that she loved him.
The second person she killed was a widow.
One of the older girls, who had graduated while she was in Ohio with Yelena. She had seen them off, walked Natasha to the plane and held Yelena until Melina had been there to take her. Natasha recognized her immediately. She had not been kind necessarily, but her presence had been comforting when they were boarding that plane all those years ago. Another girl, a child, but a testament to what Natasha might become.
She was on a mission in Cologne, Natasha didn’t know-- or want to know-- what she was trying to do. She wanted it to be simple, she wanted to snipe her from a rooftop where she didn’t have to see her face or remember that she was just like her one day. But it could never be that simple, could it?
It ended up with close contact. A knife fight in the alley behind the widow’s safehouse. She had to get up close and personal with her, to fight through the same sequences she had learned when she was training. It was like fighting a mirror. They fought back and forth for longer than either wanted. When Natasha finally got her on the ground, pushed on her back and howling in pain after she took a knife to the side, a brief look of recognition crossed her face.
“Natalia?”
The bullet landed right between her eyes, before Natasha could even hesitate.
She ran in the aftermath, sprinted from the scene with the image of the dead girl popping up every time she closed her eyes. She looked so similar to how Irina had in that gymnasium, her eyes wide with shock and blood spilling onto her silken hair.
She dreamt of Irina that night, her blonde hair and bright eyes, the way she had looked up to Natalia for so long. She was a promising girl, had so much talent and potential, she was just misguided at times. Unfortunately, that had ended up getting her killed.
Natasha had told herself, for the few months after Irina’s death, that she was upset over the circumstance. So much potential wasted, such a young girl. And all because Maya had dubbed Natasha’s worth greater.
The truth was she blamed herself for her death. She had pushed Irina away, had been so wrapped up in the novelty of young love that she had forgotten about the little girl who had looked up to her. She told her to fight for her spot, to play to her strengths. To trust no one. And Irina had done just that. She had sold Natasha out, knowing that an offense like that would get her killed.
But Natasha had walked away. Irina hadn’t.
As she left the body of the fallen widow behind, she couldn’t help wondering how much of her last life she would have to erase to protect her new one.
The third target was in Odessa.
Natasha arrived in the Ukraine and took up residence just outside of the city, in an abandoned apartment that had been bought off the building. Her target was a warehouse where Markei Karkoff, one of the scientists from James’s team, had spent time developing bio weapons. He still worked out of it, according to her sources, and had picked up where Zola left off with developing the super soldier serum.
She was told he was nonviolent. Couldn’t fight. He would be one of the easier ones, or at least she thought.
Natasha broke into the warehouse around midnight. At first she believed it to be empty. There was nothing but rooms and rooms of files, stored within dusty filing cabinets. The doors weren’t even locked. She combed the area for Kagnov, walking the length of the warehouse, before she found him.
Or rather— he found her.
She barely had the time to duck after hearing the click of the safety before a bullet sailed straight over her head. She turned around and kicked the man down, knocking the gun from his hand. She shot him for insurance, right in the stomach, and in two seconds flat had him dangling from the rafters. He looked down at her with a sick look of recognition behind his eyes.
“I know who you are,” he hissed. He spit blood at her feet. “You were his whore.”
Natasha raised her gun, not needing to hear another minute of this.
“He remembered you,” he continued. He seemed oblivious to the nine millimete he was staring down. “Every time he would gain consciousness he would remember Natalia. He would ask for you, cry out before we… reset him.”
She couldn’t help it: “What did you tell him?”
“It would depend on the day. Sometimes that you were dead, other times that you were waiting for him in his next location.” That sick smile was back. “But what always hurt him the worst was the truth. That you abandoned him, left him to rot while you escaped to America. That you had moved on to fight with the soldier. That we were going to make him kill you—,”
She didn’t let him finish.
On her way out she passed through the filing rooms, looking through each of the cabinets marked ‘Red Room.’
She walked out with hers, Yelena’s, and James’s.
She retreated to France to wait for her next target. Kiev had never waited this long to send her anything, and she didn’t like it one bit. When she wasn’t working, she was thinking. And thinking led to crying.
She read through James’s file first. It was hard to get through, but not impossible. She knew most of it already. Through Steve, through James.
Born in New York, 1918, three sisters. Father deceased, mother deceased, drafted into the army during World War II, went missing in the Alps during a routine mission with Captain America. That was all history, information widely available to the public.
It was nothing Natasha hadn’t read already.
The file went on to detail his time with HYDRA. Mission details, journal entries from his handlers, multiple written by Pierce himself. It broke Natasha a bit to hear how they wrote of him, so detached and impersonal. Every mistake he made was a glitch that they had to work out. Something that they would fix with the next prototype.
Rinse.
Reset.
Repeat.
There were huge pieces from his file missing, redacted and blacked out. Natasha tried all she could, but the ink they had used was impenetrable. The entirety of his deployment to the Red Room erased. It was as if it had never happened.
She missed James. Or rather, she missed when she was with James. How simple it had all been, the clarity of her life, the hope she still had. She was loathe to admit, but the Red Room had provided her genuine purpose. It had formed her into the person she was today. It had given her a family, for however brief of a time. She missed James and everything he had represented. Hope. Family. Love.
And now he could never be that for her again. She had realized that the moment they had pulled him away. And she didn’t want to lose that, not again.
Which was why she still hadn’t reached out to Steve.
Week two of France had her ready to pull her hair out. She went for daily runs, trained as best as she could given the size of her safe house, but there was not much she could do to physically better herself. So she turned to the files.
She reviewed her own next.
Most of it she knew. Average weight, average height, red hair, arrived at six. Her aunt, her Tetya, killed to get to her after her mother had promised her away. Dispatched after only six months in training.
There were entries from Alexei and Melina, written during their time undercover.
-
Alexei Shostakov: 1992
Natalia has proven an impressive agent thus far. She has followed our protocol perfectly so far and continues to play the part. She has expressed mild discomfort in lying to Yelena, but Melina has worked with her to overcome it. She will make a strong agent one day.
-
Natasha remembered that first year in Ohio. Yelena had still been so young still, all she wanted to do was play with dolls. It made for plenty of great photos for the albums, but they had to keep retaking them because Natasha was frowning. She just kept thinking of Yelena’s excitement over the new toys, how any day they could be ripped away from her.
-
Alexei Shostakov: 1993
It was Yelena’s first day of kindergarten today. Both her and Natasha were sent home early. Melina answered the call from the school cautiously. Both of us had reason to believe that it might be a setup.
When Melina arrived at the school she found Yelena with a skinned knee and Natasha with a black eye and bloodied knuckles. Another student was in considerably worse condition. The student had intentionally pushed Yelena from the slide and Natasha had retaliated with a ‘impressive amount of anger for such a little girl.’ The boy was sent to the local urgent care.
-
She had pulverized the kid. They shouldn’t have unleashed a child with combat training on that poor elementary school. It wasn’t the only fight she had gotten into in her time at that school, all because Yelena had been bullied. She had been small for her age, kids had pushed her around. And Natasha could never bring herself to teach her younger sister to throw a punch
-
Alexei Shostakov: 1994
Emotional regulation has become Natasha’s biggest problem as she enters her teenage years. She has taken an even stronger liking to Yelena. They have grown quite close. I fear that she will not outgrow this flaw, and that it may extend to those beyond our ‘family.’
-
And it had, hadn’t it? That’s what James had been, an attachment. That’s what Yelena was, family. The Red Room’s biggest fear: the one thing that may become more important than a mission.
She needed to outgrow that mindset, she knew she did. That idea that everything that was important to her was a liability. But it was hard.
Natasha cried that night, for the first time since she could remember. She held her pillow to her chest and buried her face in it like she had when she was a child in Ohio and Melina had scolded her.
She missed her family as they had once been, those idealized versions in her head. Yelena, James, Nadia. Even Alexei, the drunk.
Most of all, she missed Steve.
“Maria?” she spoke into the phone. The line was secure, she was assured of that multiple times, but she didn’t trust it enough for last names.
“Nat?” It was Hill’s voice for sure. “Are you okay?”
“Do you know where Steve is?”
“Buchanan, Liberia. Why?”
“Thanks.”