Prologue
“Are you kidding me?”
“What? What could possibly be wrong with this one, Barton?”
“You’re sending me to Russia to assassinate a teenager? That’s a lot, Coulson, even for you,” he says, crossing his arms.
“What do you mean “even for me”?” he blanches, then rights himself.
“She’s taking out our operatives left and right. They’re calling her the Black Widow. Can’t see her coming, and when you do it’s too late. You should be flattered, Barton. You’re the best equipped agent to take her out.”
Clint snorts, “Really flattering that I’m best equipped to take out a teenaged girl. Thanks for the stamp of approval.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Hawkeye, just get ready to go. She’s gonna pull a fast one of you before you even nock an arrow,” Phil huffs as he’s leaving the office.
“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” he mutters.
Standing over the desk, Clint examines the pictures with a huff of his own.
“You really wanna pull a fast one on me, Black Widow?”
Late June, 2004
St. Petersburg, Russia
The streets are dark, unpleasantly so.
It’s raining, and it has been all night, the icy drops landing on Natalia’s skin a pointed reminder that it’s best to get inside now before the storm moves in. She hasn’t listened to that instinct, or can’t in any case.
Not if she wants to live to see another day. The more she thinks about it, the less she wants to.
Or perhaps it’s that she doesn’t want to live to see another day in Russia, another day tortured by her handlers, another day pushed over the edge of a cliff where the only place to fall to is a sea of red.
Her boots beat on the ground as she runs, wisps of shoulder length red sticking wet to her face as she gains in pursuit on her target.
He’s fast.
Natalia is faster.
He takes a sharp left into an alley and she’s following after him, hand on her pistol and pulling it out as she rounds the corner. He’s slipped half-way down the alley and as she comes up on him he cowers from her, cradling a bloody arm with its opposite.
“Please! Please, you don’t need to do this! I’ll hand everything over!”
He’s pleading as Natalia comes to a halt in front of him, gun aimed at the center of his forehead.
“I have a family at home, please! My wife! She just had another baby!”
She almost doesn’t do it. Almost waits so long she can’t bring herself to pull the trigger as the familiar nightmare of a dark haired baby flashes in her mind.
Her teeth are clenching, body tense as she listens to him gush over the baby boy waiting for him.
Still, traitor to the Motherland, he’s going to end up dead. If she doesn’t do it then someone else will.
She makes it quick, the spat of blood bringing a nausea to her stomach she doesn’t often experience.
She’s so remarkably selfish. It would be so much less damning to just give herself over to them. She thinks she could gladly endure the torture as long as it ended in death.
She stumbles back into brick and when that vision comes back, the beautiful green-eyed little girl, she’s sliding down to the wet ground and pressing her palms so hard into her eyes that she feels pain.
It’s less pain than she deserves for taking a parent away from a child.
You were that child once, you monster.
Her fists slam into the stone ground beneath her, bringing blood to the surface of her knuckles that doesn’t break through until she’s done it a few more times.
Clint Barton is watching her from above, arrow aimed and not quite ready to be released. Saving the man he’d just watched her kill isn’t part of his mission. He’s been following the chase from the rooftops, easier than trying to hide from her on the ground, and easier to kill her if she’s not fighting back.
As he watches her grind her fists into the ground he’s not so sure that it’s himself he should be worried about her injuring.
He sends his arrow through the flimsy metal trash bin a few feet to her right and she is on her feet in a second, running the next. He hadn’t been expecting anything different and he’s following her again, bounding across rooftops until he finds the best place to get to the ground again.
His feet hit the pavement and she’s heading into another alley, though not before he sends an arrow into her left shoulder.
She’s sitting slumped against a crate and weeping when he gets to the mouth of the alley, and she kicks her pistols to his feet.
Damn it, Coulson.
“Just do it. Please just kill me.”
Her pleading voice is deeper than he was expecting it to be. It’s tired, like a withering tendril of smoke getting blown away as her fists clench.
Against his better judgement he takes a step closer, not lowering his arrow, but not aiming to shoot either.
In retrospect, a mistake, because as soon as he’s close enough she’s grabbing onto his bow and yanking the arrow from her shoulder. She strikes the tip over his forearm and as he grunts, the bow comes out of his grip.
That’s a first.
Really, damn it, Coulson.
Truthfully he’s astounded for a moment by her show of simply pulling an arrow out of her body and still fighting on, but it turns into disturbance upon realizing that she’s likely endured so much worse from the Red Room. That program needed ending.
He doesn’t really have more time to think on it because her assault on him is unrelenting. She kicks like a mule and her hits always land. Lucky for him, his do too, and he doesn’t hold back. He may have given Coulson shit, but he’s not here to underestimate her, not when she fights like she hasn’t just been shot through with an arrow.
He’s not sure when he gets the upper hand, only knows that he’s got it when the hits on her left start getting tired.
He gets ahold of her arm and twists it behind her, pushing her forward into brick as she cries out. He can smell the tang of blood, his and hers, around them. Everything is uncomfortably wet from the night and he really is considering demanding a fully funded spa day from Phil when he gets home.
She grunts and struggles between his body and the wall.
“Just finish it!” she hisses, “Just take what you want and go!”
She’s trying to manipulate the other hand, he knows. He’s read the files about her training. Not like he can blame her, though. Grimly he notes that most men probably have taken what they wanted. Tried to go perhaps, only to get taken out in the middle of a filthy, orgasmic stupor.
He presses her harder into the wall and she hisses again.
Against his better judgement, he pulls a tranquilizer from his quiver and sticks it into her thigh. She hisses, growls, bringing an arm loose to swing back at him, but then she’s slumping against the wet brick in front of her until he turns her around and lifts her over his shoulder.
He grabs his bow and decides not to take the roofs back to the safe house.
When she comes to, she’s groggy, but she can sense the absence of all of her weapons almost immediately. She isn’t restrained and she’s dressed still, save for where the shoulder of her suit is pulled off. The arrow puncture is patched up. The bed she’s on is hard, though not uncomfortable. What is uncomfortable is the rain damp suit sticking to her skin.
“I put some clothes on the end of the bed if you want to change. Bathroom is over there.”
She sits up quick as her gaze comes to the man in the corner chair. He has one of her pistols aimed at her. Her eyes dart to where her weapons lay on the dresser.
“I wouldn’t.”
She processes that he’s speaking English. Natalia looks back at the man again. The room has a soft glow from the lamp on the bedside table, and in it she can better see the dirty blond of his hair and the raven colored glint of his suit. She can also see the wounds she gave him. She must not have been out long for him to not have had time to clean up.
“Who are you?”
Her voice cracks, heavy with her accent as she doesn’t exert to effort to anglicize it, and her fingers dig into the duvet she’s on top of.
“You want to give me your word that you won’t go ape shit on me before we start having a conversation?” he asks.
“Does my word really mean anything to you? Why wouldn’t you tie me up?”
She watches his left brow raise.
“You want me to insult you? Because you and I both know you would get yourself out of any restraint I put you in, probably without me even noticing, so cut the shit and give me your word. My handlers are going to be here in about ten minutes, and they are really not happy that I deviated from their mission, but if you can prove to me that I didn’t make a mistake in not sending my first arrow through your heart, we’d both end up a lot better when they get here.”
She’s staring at him, jaw tight as she runs over her options in her head.
She could easily evade whatever shot he took at her in her path to the dresser. It would be relatively easy to take him out before he had a chance to get his hands back on his weapon of choice. She could leave him here to bleed out and be completely out of sight before his handlers even arrived, but then…
This is what she’s been waiting for, isn’t it? A way out. Maybe they’ll take her out of Russia, maybe they’ll take out her handlers who’ve continued to make her life a living hell since the day she killed Ivan Petrovich.
To think she was stupid enough to imagine them treating her any better after that… Madame B hadn’t misled her. She was property and she would do as she was told or she would be disposed of.
“You were sent to kill me. Why didn’t you?”
He shrugs, shaking his head.
“Something tells me you’re not exactly in this because you want to be. That’s a shitty way to live your life.”
“I can’t remember ever living my life.”
It’s almost the truth. James feels so far gone now that Natalia sometimes can’t convince herself that he was ever real.
“SHIELD can give you that opportunity,” he says like he’s not sure whether or not he’ll get fired for it. It makes her smirk.
“Wouldn’t that be rich?”
“What are you handlers here giving you that we couldn’t?”
His words are pointed and she finds herself unable to answer. For once, she allows her shoulders to drop along with the wall she keeps up around herself. She’s so tired of letting herself be controlled, manipulated, tortured.
The past year and a half has been hell. They keep sending her on missions that require nothing more than swaying her hips and slipping into beds with a knife, and she knows she’s meant for more than that, knows her abilities extend so much farther. Her assassinations would be so much more goddamn interesting if it wasn’t for how much her handlers liked seeing her in skin tight cocktail dresses.
The past fifteen years have given her no good reason to be loyal to this country aside from fearing for her life. She’d been thinking about that a lot more often lately. James had been the one to help her realize she was more than capable of outlasting that fear and she finally has the opportunity to fulfill that realization. He would be proud of her for getting out, or at the very least for trying.
This asinine plan she’s concocting has every possibility to fail, but at least if she’s killed it’ll be due to a decision of her own.
When she looks up at him again it’s with a fierce determination in her eyes.
“Okay.”
As though it was the opposite of what he’d been expecting, his brow shoots up and his mouth falls open.
“That was quick.”
She shrugs her shoulders and he notices that she doesn’t even wince from her injury. He watches her for a moment before nodding, one time and brisk, and he jerks his head towards her stockpiled weapons.
“I’ll keep those if you don’t mind. My handlers will want you cuffed when they arrive. If you want to change you’d better do it now.”
Natalia shakes her head. She isn’t changing into sweatpants for the likes of anyone, definitely not Americans who aren’t going to take her seriously in the first place.
She swallows and eyes him.
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Clint.”
Her head is slow as she nods and he sits forward on the chair.
“And what can I call you? Black Widow seems a little intense for small talk.”
The corner of her mouth quirks up, though the moment is brief as she retreats into her head again. She has an opportunity she never thought she’d be privileged enough to find. There’s no one here in this moment trying to stop her from becoming who she wants herself to be. For the first time in her life, someone is standing in front of her and giving back the agency that everyone else has taken away.
Now she has a chance to breathe new life into herself.
“Natasha,” she says, looking up to him again.
“You can call me Natasha.”