Did she have any family?
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It’s 2012, just after the Battle of New York. Stark near-killed himself saving all of New York, Loki’s been put in chains, and she’s getting a drink with Clint.
It’s right now, right at this moment, where she decides - she does want a funeral.
As a Black Widow, she’s seen a lot of death. A lot of pain, a lot of suffering. She wasn’t just a bystander to the torture, either. She remembers the pain of pointe, the shake of her hands the first time she held a gun. And she remembers realizing that as she was the only Black Widow left, no one would know her name, not in life nor death - she would not have anyone to mourn her.
So she made her peace with it, and she moved on.
She follows their orders for a bit, killing those that would stand in the way of Soviet glory - the perfect weapon, aimed and fired at those who would seek to bring down her handlers.
And then she breaks free.
Clint finds her, and despite his constant quips and comments on her methods, he is fighting the same bastards she is, for whatever reasons he may have. He talks and he talks and he does not shut up, and suddenly she understands why the Cold War came about.
At some point, she starts listening.
He convinces her to come back with him, to his stupid Yankee stronghold, and to join his organization - she nearly smiles at the idea, a черная вдова in their Homeland Intervention division? She knows how it’ll go - but she can’t pass up a chance for state secrets that would be worth millions on the market - so she goes along with his little sightseeing tour.
But when they get there, something clicks. Something about this bald man with the eyepatch (Fury? he called himself) makes her want to stay. Something feels - different - about this place. Watching the men and women hustle as they speak into their comms, she feels the unity, the strength of their wanting to fight against those that want to hurt others, and maybe this is the moment she realises -
she could be good.
Maybe this is where she belonged, next to the idiot archer and his pirate-esque handler, standing in line with Hill and Carter. Besides, it didn’t look like they tortured little girls into becoming assassins, so that was a definite plus.
And maybe, she’d start to do some good. She’s done so much bad, maybe this would be her way to, uh, clear her ledger. Keep her in the black. So she stays. Clint becomes her best friend. Hill and Carter become her first real female friends. (Fury becomes like the father she’d dreamed about taking her away from the Red Room as a child.)
She becomes Natalie Rushman for Tony Stark and helps save him from imminent death and Justin Hammer. She helps fight off the Chitauri. She tries to keep her head held high as she fights for a better future for the home she chose to have, the people she chose to make her family.
She’s not quite sure that they trust her yet, or that they’ll miss her when’s she’s gone, but maybe they’d attend the funeral out of courtesy - Stark might even quip over her coffin. (Personally, that’d be an honor, one she’d be sorry to be dead for). So as SHIELD medics clean up her wounds and Stark proposes that the Avengers join him in his gaudy New York tower, she decides that yes, she does want a funeral. She finally has people to remember her.
(She finds her paper file at SHIELD, after the mess Loki caused. It’s lying there in the archives, slightly singed, but as she hands it to the collection team who’ll take it back to the new headquarters, she slips in a small note. Her file’s been digitized already, along with her final will and testament, but in the event that that information is compromised, she wants it to be in hard copy.)
(The note reads, in slanted near-illegible cursive: I’d like a funeral - make it simple, and make sure my family is there.)
-
Nick Fury, freshly undusted and having attended Tony’s funeral, is back at SHIELD headquarters. He knows Natasha is dead - she’s the reason he’s alive again. In any case, it’s time to retire her file to the archives, (and maybe take one of the photos as a reminder of what he lost). As he opens the file, a yellow Post-It falls out, with red scribble on it.
He takes this back to the remaining Avengers, but Stark is dead and Thor is off-world, Steve is old, Clint is too heartbroken, and the Hulk is busy. He knows that she didn’t get her funeral, and Clint insists that Nat wouldn’t have wanted that, she wasn’t like that- until Nick shoves the note into the archer’s hands and makes him read it.
“Her last wish was to have you remember her the way everyone else is remembered. As human, as something better than the monster she thought herself to be. She wanted you, all of you, to be there. You, her family, to remember her. And you failed her. Good job, Barton. I just hope she’s happy, wherever she is.”
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