“Do you remember her?” Morgan had once asked him.
Morgan had always been the most curious of the two. Smart and precocious, daring to know and willing to ask. (James was always much more shy and polite, although at times more temperamental than Morgan could ever manage on her worst days, and she was the only one he was willing to see him like that on those bad days — the only privy to his dark side as she put it.)
Do you remember her?
James remembered the smell of cinnamon, he remembered soft blankets and forehead kisses and someone singing Miss American Pie. He remembered gentle hands fussing his hair and secret smiles while sneaking cookies under Steve Rogers’ nose.
But the Black Widow didn’t have gentle hands, he reminded himself, she was ruthless and unrelenting and terrifying.
James remembered innocuous laughter and gentle teasing, he remembered hearing Miss American Pie and over-the-top stories where the heroes always won — except for one dark tale she refused to reveal when he asked where half of the heroes were — he remembered dancing in the living room and peanut butter sandwiches. He remembered her smile.
(Years later when he found her old mission reports, James couldn’t help but notice the details she’d left out in those stories.)
She’d kiss him on his nose and wipe his cocoa moustache and build sandcastles with him on the beach.
Where are you going? He’d asked her the last time he saw her — before Morgan Stark told him she liked his hair and pulled him in her tent and declared that he was her best friend — she wore the black suit she always wore before leaving except little James didn’t know she wouldn’t come back this time and kissed his forehead and ruffled his hair.
To space, she’d told him with a smile, trying to get him excited with her false enthusiasm (because he knew it was false now, she didn’t want to go).
Bring me back a star, James had told her before his dad pulled him in his arms for his own goodbye while Morgan’s own father spun her around the cabin meadow while she giggled in his arms (she didn’t know it was the last time she’d see him either).
(She did not, in fact, bring back a star.
But James did lose one.)
James Rogers looked like his mother. He would have known this even if no one told him — which they did, repeatedly, he couldn’t help but wonder if Harry Potter also felt annoyed every time he heard the “you have your mother’s eyes” comment — his eyes were blue and his jaw nearly identical to his father but he looked like mother in everything else. The red of his hair was the natural colour she’d grown out again after he was born rather than sporting the artificial colours she did nearly her entire life and face was nearly identical to hers except the eyes and jaw. Clint would always do a double take when he employed his passive look in public, when he’d had the courage to ask one day the archer had answered that he looked nearly identical to his mother.
He wondered how someone would react to seeing Natasha Romanoff’s ghost with Steve Rogers’ spirit — how would the people she hurt react to meeting him? How they would react to knowing she had half a happy ending before she threw it all away to save half the universe. A heroic sacrifice for the ruthless assassin who left a heartbroken husband and motherless son behind, to be remembered as a martyr.
He would sketch her sometimes when he was young, hoping if he did it right enough times he’d never forget her face. She was on half the pages of his father’s sketchbooks — whether it be just her, or with a child, or with a team that was a family — he’d seen her face in a thousand photos and he remembered the shade of her eyes and how her nose was just like his but slightly longer.
Morgan met her a few times, and she had photographic memory even as a child so she remembered and she was blunt so when his first try came out disastrous she didn’t soften the blow when telling him this. James would feel envious of it, she remembered her father and what he looked like and didn’t need to sketch him a thousand times to not forget his face.
He’d never forget her face now, well, he wasn’t sure he could anyway considering the fact that you could find a mural with her face every thirty blocks in New York (you’d find one for Tony Stark every ten blocks).
Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he thought she was the most selfish person in the world for jumping off that cliff. He’d always hate himself afterwards but still couldn’t help the lingering thoughts of why didn’t you choose me over them? or the pathetic you promised you would come back or something along those lines. He couldn’t help but despise Clint Barton’s children in those moments, why do you get to have a father while my mother is dead? Hell, he despised Barton more than anything on those days.
(He’s gotten drunk once, on that day, and when strong arms had seized his shoulders he’d been surprised to see Hawkeye of all people instead of his father. In a haze of grief and fury he’d told the man who he called Uncle Clint, who taught him how to shoot an arrow and told him stories of his old partner, that it was his fault.
Uncle Clint, for the record, didn’t correct him and dragged him back home for his father to wrap him in his arms, nearly choking him, and chasitating him for disappearing off and underage drinking.
He still wondered if he’d heard the Archer mumble yes it is at the accusation, but never brave enough to ask that question.)
James was polite and bashful and kind, he could be stubborn and pervasive and everything his father was (which was no wonder they got into all the time) but at times he would stay silent, no talk but listen. Observe. Notice things that needed to be noticed. He would smile that same smile that drove people insane when they asked him how he knew something he wasn’t supposed to and he would flash a look that said I know more than you. He could be charming when he wanted to get things his way or just in general to get people off his back.
(Morgan, bless her, had the power of seeing through bullshit that people said she’d inherited from her mother. In fact, she specifically had the ability of seeing through his bullshit and calling him out for it.)
Most of all, James Rogers was a liar.
He most certainly knew where he got that from.
There were times when arguments with his father would escalate, when the overbearing would get too much to bear and he needed an out that he’d wound up in Ohio.
He was seven years old when Uncle Clint dragged back a blonde-haired woman on Christmas and said she was his aunt while said aunt looked at him with comically wide eyes and a startled expression, mouth agape, as she tried to form coherent sentences while looking between him and his father and Clint. He recalled giggling and calling her a fish when she opened and closed her mouth trying to find the right words. That seemed to have snapped her out of it because she’d crouched to his level and extended her hand, looking like she was terrified of breaking him, and told him she was his mama’s sister.
(Years later, recalling his first meeting with aunt Yelena always made him cackle recalling the look on her face. But the truth was that was nothing in comparison to meeting his grandparents. The only thing one could call that meeting was a shit show, his father had nearly gotten thrown out of the window now that he thinks about it.)
He’d been told from then on that he was always invited to that little white picket fence, suburb house in Ohio, the house that was the closest thing his mother had to a home before Clint Barton and the Avengers. The only family she had before them, the one she never introduced him to because they were dead and she died to bring them back with half of the universe.
Melina never judged him, that was what he liked about her the most. No matter what happend, whenever he showed up at her doorstep whether he was bleeding or seething in anger or looked worse for the wear with tear tracks on his cheeks she would wordlessly let him in and if Alexei was being too much of an overbearing grandfather when James come here only to escape an overbearing father? Off he goes on a supply run, stop bothering our only grandchild.
She never asked him what he wanted. If he was hurt she’d look him over and if he tried to stop her she threatened to call the former Captain America, or worse, the current Captain America (how she had his number? James didn’t wanna know). If not, then she’d just tell him to sit down and make mac and cheese and rattle off all the reasons why it was so unhealthy and how you and Yelena have been corrupted by American trash while he ate in silence. Alexei, on his supply run, brought back raspberry ice cream. He’d recount stories of the war in his booming voice, talking about how I threw your father out of the window because he’s an idiot and his shield is the size of the dish plate.
James never went to one place though whenever he ran away from home. There was Yelena and Kate’s apartment in New York, or sometimes sneaking into Coulson Academy because Melinda May caught him that one time and gave him that look when he confessed he was Black fucking Window’s son, waiting for her to throw him out before she told him he could stay if he knew when to shut up (his dad still didn’t know about that one).
It was a strange friendship that he had with May, she’d known Phil Coulson, who knew Natasha Romanoff, but she never knew his mother personally. He’d sit in the back of her classes sometimes, but the catch was that e we expected to participate, pay attention and answer her questions. (If not, well, James didn’t want to find the answer to that.)
He never stayed at the same place too many times in a row. His father would joke about it sometimes. Always keeping me on my toes, he would say fondly, just like your mother.
He never said anything in response to that.
(What are you supposed to say when your father compares you to your assassin mother like it’s a good thing?)
Who was Natasha Romanoff? He would ask himself.
Well, first things first, Natasha was not even her real name. It’s what it said on his super secret birth certificate — Mother: Natasha Romanoff — but her birth name, allegedly, was Natalia Alianova Romanova.
She was a spy, an assassin, a child soldier, and she made mistakes.
(“She didn’t make any mistakes,” Uncle Clint would say with an unreadable expression, refusing to meet his eyes, “that would imply that she had a choice.”)
She was a hero and an Avenger, she saved the world.
(“The soul stone needed an exchange,” Bruce Banner told him once, a sorrowful look on his face, “the life of a loved one for the stone. If Nat didn’t make that sacrifice we would have never brought all of them back.”)
She was a daughter and a sister. She was a mother and a wife. She was a friend.
Natasha Romanoff took a lot of lives, destroyed many more because she had no choice and carried the guilt of it on her shoulders her entire life. She didn’t let it stop her from trying to even out the odds though, she never let anything stop her.
So maybe it was no surprise that even Clint Barton couldn’t manage that.
If there was one thing Natasha Romanoff was, it was unstoppable. James remembered that, and he never forgot it.
(“You never stop, do you?” Fury would muse, “Romanoff’s son through and through.”)