Hypothermia
She didn’t know why she was doing what she was doing. She had just finished a mission for SHIELD, it had been simple. Break into the target’s house, collect the stolen information, kill him and leave staging the scene as a suicide. Child’s play. Except that the location of the target’s house was only 20 miles away from the burnt remains of the place she had been raised, the Red Room.
She should’ve headed back to the extraction point to be flown back to America, but for some reason, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave just yet. She hadn’t been back to the remains of the Red Room Academy since she burnt it to the ground 5 years ago, just after she defected to the States. No one had been in it though, she was too late. Right after she escaped the Red Room operation went underground, and she still couldn’t find where they were hiding. Clint and the others had tried to convince her that maybe they weren’t doing that to children anymore. But she knew they were. Why would they stop something that had been so successful?
So instead of walking the 5 minutes to the warm cabin that was her extraction point, she went out the door into the harsh Russian winter wearing nothing but her catsuit and a light jacket she had on earlier. A stupid decision that would come back to bite her in the ass. But she hadn’t been thinking clearly when she had left the target’s house.
Now she had been walking for about an hour and a half, the cold had finally started to affect her. She was shivering violently no matter how hard she tried not to. She could barely feel her feet as they stepped through the thick snow that was up to her knees. They felt like blocks of ice weighing her down. But she just kept walking, she couldn’t make herself stop. Something was drawing her to the academy, what she didn’t know. She just needed to get there.
Walking through the snowy forest reminded her a lot of one of the tests given to them by the academy every winter since she was 6 years old. They would randomly wake them up one winter’s night and cart them outside and pile them into a van. Wearing nothing but the nightgowns they wore to bed, some girls didn’t even have time to get their shoes on. They would be driven a while away from the academy and then thrown out into the harsh winter. They were to make it back to the academy on their own. The girls who couldn’t make it back were considered weak. The places they had succumbed to the cold acted as their final resting places. Alone in the Russian wilderness. She had learned at a young age to always go to sleep in the winter with her shoes on.
The sun had started to set. The sunbeams poking their way through the fir trees and reflecting off the snow. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to soak up the little warmth the sun provided, as it would soon disappear. She knew she was walking slower than she had when she first started the trek. She chose to ignore the realization that she was entering the first stages of hypothermia. But if she could survive the cold as a little 10-year-old in a nightgown, then she could do it now.
The next hour of walking was spent thinking about memories from the Red Room, something she wasn’t necessarily choosing to think about. She felt as numb as her feet and hands. The memories she was reliving didn’t feel like they belonged to her but to someone else. Like her younger self was just a fictional character in a story she was telling. Suddenly she realized she had started to cry. She only noticed the tears sliding down her face because of how badly the hot tears burned her frozen skin. It felt like someone was slicing her cheeks with a knife.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried in front of anyone. She had been close, but she had always been able to keep the tears at bay. Crying meant weakness. And she couldn’t let anyone know that she was weak. Even though she was alone she still felt ashamed of the tears that spilled onto her pale skin. She wished she didn’t. She wished she could just cry and not feel like such a failure. She wanted someone to hold her tightly and let her sob into their shoulders. But that would never happen. So she wrapped her arms tighter around herself and continued walking towards the place that had created her. Tears freezing to her face.
She had been walking for about 3 and a half hours now. She was so numb she didn’t even feel cold anymore. She hadn’t even noticed she had stopped shivering until now. Each step she took was painful. Finally, her body could take no more and she fell to her knees. She tried to grab onto a tree trunk to help pull herself back up but her muscles were so frozen she couldn’t do it. She looked down at the base of the tree trunk. That's when she saw it. The dirty brown piece of fabric poking up out of the snow. She used the last of her energy to dig it out and bring it to the surface to see what it was.
Horror and sorrow surged through her as she realized what the fabric was. In her frozen hands, she was holding a little girl's nightgown. Dirty from the years spent under this fir tree. More scalding tears poured down her face but she made no noise. She just felt so tired. As she lay under the tree looking up at the sky, more snow started to fall. Flake after flake landed on her frozen skin, melting as soon as they did. Finally, Natasha Romanoff did something she never did. She gave up.
Clutching the little girl's nightgown to her chest she let her eyes fall shut. She would die here where a little girl had frozen years earlier, at least now the child wouldn’t be alone. As the world slid away from her the last thing she heard was a familiar voice calling out her name in the distance.