natasha- reflection
Natasha isn’t quite sure when she looked at Yelena and thought ‘daughter’. It may have started toward the end of the Ohio mission. Yelena, still little and small, had to be pried from Natasha’s fingers. Natasha couldn’t stop it but she refused to be the one who let go first. She refused to think that she could have done more than simply handing her over.
Yelena isn’t dead but her ghost follows Natasha around. Natasha swears that sometimes it’s almost like Yelena is right at her side. She’ll catch a glimpse of a pink striped shirt, a disembodied giggle, a soft patter of footsteps, a whistle without a direction.
She knows that it’s not real. That she is so desperate for the only light of her life that her mind conjures up something in an attempt to replace it. That ghost of a child she loved is the only thing that keeps her sane in the Red Room.
The ghost follows her when she defects. When Natasha blows up Dreykov, the ghost leaves too.
Natasha had been so used to the ghost of a girl she loved that everything was far too quiet now. Clint keeps asking her if something was wrong and Natasha doesn’t know how to tell him that she thinks her little one might be dead.
Natasha almost seeks her out multiple times but she stops. She liked to think that when she dismantled the Red Room then her little one was taken in by an older Widow, the same with the younger girls. She likes to think that Yelena is safe and happy with a new family and she doesn’t want to ruin that.
Nine years after Natasha’s little one was ripped from her arms, they meet again. Her little one holds a gun to her face and Natasha tries to remember to breathe at the sight of her little girl.
She’s grown into a beautiful teenager but she’s not the happy girl Natasha had envisioned. She is angry and hurt, there are fresh scars only a year old on her body and Natasha is suddenly drowning with guilt.
Her little one hadn’t been free all this time. She hadn’t been happy and she hadn’t reached out simply because she couldn’t.
Natasha doesn’t mean to take her anger out on her little one but her little one is so much better off without her. Natasha just keeps hurting her. She can’t keep her safe like her little one deserves.
Natasha argues. She tries to brush off any familial ties between them. She hurts her little one and it kills her to see the betrayal in the hazel eyes that had once stared at her with love and adoration.
Her little one had suffered and Natasha didn’t know how to make it better.
It’s when her little one cries in her lap, begging to know what she did wrong and pleading for Natasha not to leave that Natasha realizes her mistake. Natasha doesn’t want to leave either.
Perhaps that was the moment she thought of her little one as a daughter.
Or perhaps it was after the Red Room had fallen and her little one was covered in ash and blood, shrapnel digging into her back and a bleary glaze in her eyes. Natasha had felt nothing but terror as she watched her little one plummet to the ground below and having her in one piece, safe in her arms, is when Natasha finally feels whole again.
Her little one calls her ‘big sister’ and Natasha can settle with that. It doesn’t make her love her any less.
She tells Clint that her little one is her kid before they even think of each other as more than sisters. Or perhaps they both saw each other differently and were too afraid to disturb the new relationship they had settled into.
It takes her little one to relive memories of the Red Room before she calls out to Natasha by a different name.
Back in Ohio, Yelena had called Melina ‘mama’. Her English was her primary language and she adapted to the slight southern accent around her.
Momma is something different entirely. It falls off her little one’s lips, soft and unsure, thick with the Russian accent Natasha has come to know and love.
Perhaps that is why she encouraged it. “That’s right, little one. It’s me, it’s momma…”
So while Natasha wasn’t quite sure when she saw Yelena and thought ‘daughter’, it didn’t matter. Yelena was her daughter now - her bright, beautiful, sweet daughter.
There isn’t anyone or anything in the world that would be able to take her away again.