Nadia
“You two know each other?” Steve asked, glancing between the two women. They were both frozen in place, looking at the other as if they were two animals at a standstill.
“We used to,” Nadia answered. She slid onto the catwalk, joining the Avengers near the screens. “We trained together as children.”
Tony glanced over at her. “I have, just, so many questions for you.”
“Not now, Stark,” Nat snapped. Nadia grinned.
“Bioweapons,” Bruce stated bluntly, pulling their attention back to the screen. “What do we know?”
“Very little,” Hill stated. “He’s an ex-SHIELD operative who worked on the Tesseract before New York. Afterward, he went to work for Pierce, which is when we think he must have come into contact with the scepter.”
“So he’s had this thing since New York?” Steve asked.
Nadia shook her hand and typed away at Tony’s monitor for a moment, before expanding a profile on Strucker that didn’t look like SHIELD intel. “Strucker started recruiting more heavily after the Triskelion incident in DC. We think that’s when he obtained the scepter. With the death of Pierce, there was a reorg within HYDRA, which would have pushed him into more power.”
“What do you mean he started recruiting more heavily?” Bruce asked. “Why did he need more people?”
“Human experimentation, expanded operations, the list goes on,” she said. “They started pushing more and more girls from the Red Room to get involved.”
“Did they?” Natasha asked. Quietly, she hoped Yelena had not been one of them.
Nadia seemed to understand her concern. “Some of the younger girls, yes. But most who had completed their dosing were already field ready. Only the weak ones were forced into experimentation.”
Steve raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“To make them stronger, faster, smarter, you name it,” she said. “They’re gearing up for something, something they won’t even tell me.”
“And, sorry, who are you again?” Stark cut in, looking her up and down. “Bulgarian Barbie?”
“I’m Lithuanian,” she replied tightly, curling her lip. “I’ve worked with the Red Room and the KGB for over two decades now, defected around the same time Natasha did. Only I wasn’t as obvious about it.”
“So you’re a double agent,” Steve stated. His jaw was tense. “How do we know we can trust you?”
“Because she’s been working with you for the past six months,” Hill said. “Who do you think has been getting our intel on your little manhunt?”
“You’re the one who’s been feeding us intel?” he asked, surprise painted across his face.
“Trying to help you find the bastard before someone else does,” she said, eyeing Natasha, who could tell Nadia’s resentment of James still ran strong. “And you aren’t the only one. I’ve been working with SHIELF for some time now. In Kiev.”
Natasha was taken aback. “You’re my contact? All these years it’s been you?”
Nadia nodded. “I’ve had some help recently, some of your more secretive friends.”
She briefly closed one eye. Again, Nat was shocked.
“Back to my original question,” Steve cut in. “How do we know we can trust you?”
He stared and Nadia, who stared right back, a palpable tension cutting through the air. There was something unspoken, something that ran much deeper than a Cold War rivalry. Natasha could feel it, the dissonance as her old life crashed into her new one.
Natasha Romanoff didn’t know whose side to take.
However, the Black Widow did.
“I trust her,” she told Steve. He glanced her way, looking briefly angry. “If F-- if our friends trust her, then I do.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he gritted his teeth and nodded. “Okay.”
Stark, who had been glancing back and forth between the two of them as if he was watching a tennis match, spoke up. “Cold War indeed. Now if we could please let Princess Elsa finish what she was saying?”
They spent the next hour learning about and researching Strucker, his operations, and his results. Thor and Jane joined them, Pepper following soon after, walking in with the suit still intact and a beard haphazardly taped to the mask. She shot Tony a withering look but joined them nonetheless.
Around two in the morning they called it. Jane and Banner stayed up to monitor the radiation levels of the surrounding areas, putting Jane’s astrophysical knowledge to good use (Tony had apparently not known about that particular degree of hers. The result was a barrage of Dr. Cooper jokes, none of which Thor understood).
Natasha followed Steve down to their room. The rest were still tied up, either in the lab or with party cleanup. Pepper had shooed them away as they tried to help her, insisting she do it herself, turning them somewhat reluctantly to their bedroom.
They undressed in silence, pulling on the pajamas that Thor had once been so excited about. Natasha brushed her teeth, washed her face, pulled her hair back, and climbed into bed with Steve. He had pulled back their duvet to accommodate her, but she slid onto his side anyways.
“It seems like our holiday might be over,” he said. She nodded against his shoulder, feeling his arm tighten around hers.
“It was high time.” She stared at the wall. “I knew we couldn’t go on like this forever, couldn’t keep ignoring the others. I just wished I could have saved Yelena— and you could have saved James— before all this caught up to us.”
“Me too,” he said. “Who knows if we’ll ever get another chance.”
She pressed her eyes shut, blaming the sudden burning on the lingering makeup remover. “I found some old photos when we were in the Vernon house.”
“Of your sister?”
“Of us at Christmas time. They made us take all these photos every year, to keep up the charade. We sent out a fucking card to the neighbors.”
She laughed humorlessly.
“But, I don’t know—,” her voice softened, “—we watched Christmas movies, did the whole matching pajama thing in a much less—,” she glanced at her Snoopy Christmas set, “—corny way. It was real, or at least it was to us. Who knows what Melina and Alexei thought.”
“When Buck and I were young, when we had to take care of his sisters, we would do everything we could to give them the perfect Christmas. They used to have this show at the church down the street from his house, a little nativity thing that the girls loved. I’d take them there while he would decorate the house.” His cheek leaned against her forehead. “We scraped together everything we had for dinner and gifts and some candy for their stockings. They loved it.”
“Little moments of happiness,” she said. She wanted to cry, knowing they could never get that time back. Yelena was a widow, James’s sisters were long dead.
“Like this one,” he whispered. She looked up at him, eyes shining.
“You’re happy?”
He gave her that look, the same stare of determination that he did when they had gone on their first solo mission together. “Of course I am, Romanoff.”
She leaned up and kissed him, softly at first. She was happy too, she wanted to tell him, wanted to admit everything that she had been feeling recently, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to get his hopes up, not when she was still dealing with so much. She didn’t want to put that burden on him, a man who already had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
So she kissed him. She enjoyed that momemt— the one where she was with the one person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and they were tucked away from the rest of the world.
Of course, it couldn’t last.
There was a knock at their door, a familiar, feminine knock that was burned into her memory after hearing it at her bedroom door for nearly a decade.
“Natalia?” Nadia’s voice was soft but firm. “Can we talk?”
Natasha rested her forehead against Steve’s, letting out a small sigh as she pushed herself up and out of bed.
She peaked her head out the door, enough that Nadia could see her, but not Steve.
“What is it?”
The other woman rolled her eyes. “I know he’s in there.”
“Jesus,” Nat snapped, opening the door fully so that she could stand normally. “How do you always do that?”
“You make it quite easy.”
“Nadia, it’s late—,”
“I just need a moment,” she interjected quickly, uncharacteristically desperate, “To explain myself. To explain everything.”
Natasha sighed but nodded, awaiting Nadia’s next words. The latter peaked around the door frame, seeing Steve laying in the bed, alert to their conversation.
“Maybe not here.”
They went down to Tony’s living room which was, blissfully, unoccupied. Natasha poured them each a drink and took a seat on one of the barstools. Nadia pushed herself up onto the bar itself. Nat didn’t mention its newfound use.
“So?” she asked, gesturing. “What’s the story.”
“Right.” Nadia took a breath to compose herself and steeled back into the widow that she was. “So, after you defected there was some… unease. Expected, of course. You were one of the few who got away with it.”
Natasha raised her glass and took a sip, soluting her own pioneering.
“Maya pulled in… everyone. Every HYDRA op you may have been in contact with. Sergei, the Asset, even that man who ran the Company. She… interrogated them—,” Natasha cringed slightly, “—and of course found nothing.
“She went off the rails, Natalia. I had never seen her this upset, not even when she caught you with James.” She took a fortifying drink, as if the next part physically pained her to recall. “When nothing else worked she… turned on the widows. All of us. Pitted us against each other, threatened our privilileges, even pulled some into questioning. No one was safe, not even the younger girls.”
“Did she hurt Yelena?” Natasha demanded, suddenly seeing red. She pictured her poor sister, who held so much anger and sadness beneath her tough exterior, being tortured mere days after her sister had abandoned her for the second time.
Nadia pursed her lips. “Yes.”
“I’ll kill her—,”
“She’s dead,” she said quickly. Natasha faltered. “An accident, so they said, but she was doomed when she killed Irina instead of you. You ruined her, Natasha. She let you live and you became the biggest liability the Red Room could possibly have.”
“So she’s—,”
“Gone,” she said. “They moved us afterward, new facilities and updated tracking, harder training, less tolerance. Enhanced brainwashing. Everything.”
She gritted her teeth and Natasha saw her jaw flex out of anger. “After watching what they did to those girls— the little ones, even, the ones who couldn’t speak up for themselves and had to sit through beatings when they did or said something wrong— Jesus. I couldn’t stand by.”
“So you joined SHIELD?” Natasha asked.
Nadia frowned. “Not immediately. I wanted out, but I wasn’t desperate. I knew they had some under the table dealings, some unsavory connections. I struck out on my own, started feeding info to various orgs, and did everything I could to interrupt their recruiting. All while staying close, filling in where they needed me, proving myself to the cause.
“Madame B took over Maya’s role, I took over hers. Then, when right before everything happened in New York and DC, I met Maria.” Her face softened. “She pushed me to contact you. Slipped you my number. She thought you would need me.”
“She’s pretty smart.”
“She’s incredibly smart,” Nadia agreed, continuing. “And when SHIELD fell, I knew you would need me. What I didn’t expect was the soldier.”
“Steve?”
“And the other one. James.” The name seemed to taste bad in her mouth. “And when you reached out, asked for information, well— I half expected you to find him yourself. But you didn’t. Which made me think there was something holding you back.”
Natasha pulled her lower lip between her teeth, a habit she had recently developed. A nervous tick. “I wasn’t ready to face him.”
“I think you were scared,” Nadia replied bluntly. “You’re scared, so you run away. Distract yourself. It’s the same thing you did when you left the Red Room.”
“What are you talking about?” Natasha demanded. “I left the Red Room because I had to. You left too.”
“You left the Red Room because you saw James and Irina everywhere you looked.”
The statement cut her to her core, even though Nadia was remaining unnervingly calm. She set her jaw
“Maybe—,” she swallowed the lump in her throat, attempting to gain her composure once more. Nadia was one of the few people on earth who could affect her like this. She took a deep breath. “Maybe I did. But I’m trying to fix it now.”
Nadia clenched her jaw. “Not everything can be fixed.”
Natasha was silent, staring at the ground.
“You need to stop running, Natasha. This search for Yelena, for the Red Room— It’s not time yet. The time will come, but HYDRA is too strong. The KGB is too strong. You won’t succeed.”
“Why did you send me to the Vernon house, then?”
“I thought—,” she looked at ceiling, “—I don’t know. That it would give you closure, or something. That you would remember what it felt like to actually live. But it only pushed you towards her more.”
Natasha studied the tiles of the floor, working around her ice in the now-empty glass. She felt her throat closing up, desperately trying to contain a sob. “I can’t leave her there.”
“She will be there when the time is right to save her. You and the Captain… you’re both chasing people who are not ready to be found. You can’t fix the past, and you can’t rush the future. You can only move forward.”
“So I should do nothing?”
Nadia looked as if she was going to reach out and take Natasha’s hand, but remained upsettingly still. “You have so much you need to do, Natasha. Your team needs you. And you need them”
Natasha remained unmoving. Nadia sighed.
“Look, there’s no going back. The world needs the Avengers, so focus on that. Otherwise we’ll just have more ‘accidents’ and more messes. Finding the scepter, taking down Strucker, it won’t end there.” She dropped her voice, leaning closer. “The world needs you in the present, Natalia. And you deserve to live the life you always wanted.”
Natasha was crying, so softly she didn’t even notice it. Nadia’s words hit hard, not that it made them any easier to accept. It felt like giving up, like she was abandoning her sister— her sisters— all over again. They deserved her help after all she had put them through. How many more Irinas had their been when she went missing in Budapest?
It hurt to think about, to think about all that she had missed out on. Recently, she hadn’t let herself go there. Now, it was all coming down on her. Yelena was a woman now, twenty-four, a fully operational widow. How could she have let that happen to that little baby in Ohio?
She wanted to scream.
She wished she could believe Nadia, she really did. Mostly because it was so out of character for the other woman to say something so sentimental, but partially because she wanted the reprieves from the guilt that had been eating at her for the last decade.
“You’ll make sure nothing happens to her?”
Nadia rolled her eyes. “She doesn’t need my help.”
She laughed sadly and wiped a tear from her cheek. “When did you get soft?”
“Maria had changed me,” she replied, shrugging. She offered her a small smile, a brief token of friendship. “My advice, lean on that soldier of yours. He cares about you a lot. And I like him a lot more than the last one.”
Another small laugh, this one choked as Natasha thought about everything Steve and her had said to each other the last few months, everything they had done. Finally, she said what she had been so afraid to since he admitted he loved her in DC. “I’m scared I’m no good for him. What if I lose him too?”
“I can’t see anyone taking him from you,” Nadia said. “And it’s nice to have someone that you can be yourself with. Not a widow, just Natalia.”
“Natasha,” she corrected. Nadia threw her hands up, exasperated.
“They cut a tracking chip out of your neck but couldn’t give you a better name?” she demanded, cursing in Russian. “Natalia Romanov or Natasha Romanoff? Are you kidding me?”
Natasha laughed, a blurry chuckle at her old friend's outrage. Nadia calmed down and shared a smile with her. “You can let yourself be happy. You deserve it.”
Natasha smiled, wiping away still more tears. Nadia offered her a refill, wagging the bottle of cold vodka in her face. Natasha refused.
“I need to get to bed.” She pushed herself off the stool, her head spinning from the pressure of crying. “It’s really great to see you, Nadia. I’m glad you’re alive.”
Nadia poured herself another drink. “Same to you.”