Natasha is nine years old when she kills her first man. She is young, but they are all young, young and snarling with fear. He dies whimpering, tied to a metal chair and blindfolded. She shoots him in the heart, once, twice, three times. bang. bang. bang.
Her reward is a sharp order to clean up the blood.
(She does not know the man's name. She does not care.)
--
Natasha wakes each morning and waits for her restraints to be unlocked. She attends her training, acrobatics and weapons and ballet and language. She learns how to infiltrate an building, take down any agency, slip though any security. She kills anyone who gets in the way of her survival.
(She could have been soft, a wide-eyed girl with a smile like the sun. She could have had parents who loved her, a life full of happiness.)
(It could have happened differently.)
(It does not.)
--
A man comes to the Red Room one day. He is there as an instructor, to improve their skills. He has an arm made of metal and a handler watching every move. They know him only as Soldat.
The man teaches them how to use their bodies as weapons, how to hide in plain sight, how to become invisible.
(He teaches them how to braid flowers into their hair and how to swear in every language he knows.)
He says nothing outside of the lessons.
(His eyes say everything.)
--
They find out what he did eventually. They always do.
(She does not see him again.)
--
Slowly, the rest of the girls in the Red Room disappear. Natasha says nothing - is not allowed to say anything - but in the beginning, she tries to keep count of the missing.
Vera loses her first fight. A blow to the stomach and the head places her in her opponents arms. Her neck is snapped.
Dina tries to escape. She picks the locks on her restraints and runs from the compound as fast as she can. It isn't fast enough.
Alla fails her weapons test. Her handgun is assembled incorrectly. She fixes the mistake and is shot with it.
Mariya follows in Dina's footsteps, trying to run during an outdoor training exercise. Her blood stains the snow just short of the forest.
(It is too hard to keep track of the dead. The list never ends.)
The Red Room does not approve of weakness. Natasha is not weak.
(Soon, she forgets the names.)
--
The Red Room calls her the Black Widow. She has become their spider, their spy and assassin and seductress. She lures in prey with a smile and bites, leaves them screaming in pain. The name has become synonymous with death. Her words are an elegantly spun web, her eyes are a trap. No one can escape her grasp.
The Black Widow goes to Italy and takes down two high-level government officials. They are found two days later with identical bullet wounds to the heart.
The Black Widow arrives in Paris to kill a rogue KGB agent, to send a message.
The Black Widow murders three men in their Sarajevo hotel room and takes the intel they have gathered on the Red Room.
The Black Widow means death. Death and blood and pain disguised as a kiss.
--
Natasha knows she is being followed long before she sees the man. Her neck prickles and her hair stands on end. Danger, her mind whispers, predator run run run.
She turns into an alley and waits for her follower. She is a spider and she will wait for her next meal.
The man appears silently, gun in hand and a determined look in his eye. She lunges at him, knocks the gun out of his hands and forces him to the ground. He is stronger than she is and quickly escapes her hold, reaching for the gun. She dances around him, kicking and punching - anything to slow him down. He takes her blows and hits back harder because this man is aiming to kill.
Natasha can feel the bullets as they rip through her throat and lodge deep in her chest, can feel the blood pouring out of her, pain gnawing at her heart until she gasps and stills and -
--
That's not what happens.
The man pins her down, snarling and clawing, but he does not shoot. Instead, he stares at her with dark eyes that show too much, feel too much. She looks down the barrel of his gun and dares him to do it. But the man still does not shoot.
"Shoot, you coward," she spits. "Get it over with."
He looks at her for a moment longer and then drops his gun.
"I won't."
Her hearts skips a beat, shock mixed with a rush of something like relief.
"I'm not going to kill you."
He hold out a hand, eyes gentle and pleading with her to take it. She could attack him, grab the gun and shoot him. The Black Widow would kill him in a heartbeat, dead before he could scream for help.
Natasha takes his hand.
--
She learns the man's name as they fly to SHIELD headquarters and his handler yells at him in the cockpit.
Clint Barton.
He could have killed her, should have killed her. She is the Black Widow, master assassin, wanted in over seven different countries. She has blood on her hands, her fingertips are permanently stained red. She is a monster, a spider, a killer. She is a weapon, faceless and deadly. He should have killed her. It would have been easier.
(She thinks about his hand, rough and warm in hers - a lifeline - and some small part of her, buried deep in her heart, is grateful he did not.)
--
She becomes a SHIELD agent. It is obvious that the higher-ups don't see her as someone who can be trusted and Natasha agrees with them. She is not someone who can be redeemed, but Clint tries anyway. He teaches her new things about the world, shares stories and laughter with her. She has never been around someone who showed emotion so freely.
He is gleeful at the idea of a new bow, almost playful in his spars with her. He is patient when a new recruit is struggling, overjoyed when he meets a dog on the street. His face is stony in meetings, but his eyes smile at her from across the table.
She has thought about killing him. She could run away from SHIELD, go back to the Red Room. Or she could disappear into the world and never be seen again. She could kill him. She could be free.
(You can't kill someone you think of as human.)
(Well. You can. But it is so, so, so much harder.)
--
He infuriates her.
On missions, he flirts with danger. Bullets fly past his head, so close they brush his hair. He accumulates cuts and bruises faster than she can tend to the old ones. Bandages litter his body and he ingests more caffeine than actual food.
They don't have an extraction plan for any mission. No agents will come for them if they fail. Clint knows this and still seems to seek out death.
(They never fail. But there are close calls.)
--
Slowly, almost painfully so, Natasha allows herself to become comfortable around Clint. She does not trust him, not fully, because trust is for the weak Natalia you must not trust anyone. Natasha is not weak.
(A fact: weakness is not the same as vulnerability.)
But Natasha allows him to tease her, to draw her feet up on his lap, to draw a smile from deep within her. She tells him pieces, fragments really, of her past and her time in the Red Room. In return, he explains how he ran away from home and how SHIELD recruited him. They don't confess the whole story, not yet, but it is enough.
(The definition of enough: it never lasts for long.)
--
They agree never to speak of Budapest again. It is too bloody, too messy.
(It puts too much red in her ledger.)
(There is so much red.)
--
Here are some things Natasha knows about the world:
- Men in power will do anything to stay there.
- There is no dignity in death.
- To trust someone with your secrets is to put your life in their hands.
- It is easy to scrub the blood off your fingers. It is harder to scrub the blood from your memories.
- There is no dignity in life either.
- To love someone is to become undone.
--
There is no decision when she hears Coulson say Clint's name, say he is compromised. She does not hesitate to kill her captors and leave for India to find Bruce Banner. She will play along with Stark and Rogers, track down Loki, search for the Tesseract. She will do whatever it takes to get her partner back.
There is no extraction plan, not for him. Not for her.
She almost loses hope when they fight inside the Helicarrier. There is no trace of Clint left in his eyes. They are blue and all of the warmth has left, leaving something cold and dead. Something that wants her dead.
She blocks his punches, evades his arrows, uses every trick he has ever taught her because she will not kill him. She slams him against the metal walkway and he crumples. When he looks up at her, whispers her name with confusion and a strange gentleness, his eyes are unfocused and dazed and not blue.
(She has never felt so relieved.)
--
After the battle, Natasha can hear Loki's voice whispering to her. Can you wipe out that much red? Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything?
Love is for children, she had said, I owe him a debt.
She does. She does owe him a debt. Clint saved her, taken her hand and pulled her into a new life. He accepted her history and her mistakes, pushed her to become someone not controlled by the past. He brought her peace when the memories became too much, comforted her as the monsters screamed. He showed her kindness and warmth. He gave her a choice, become what they think you are or prove them wrong. There is a choice, there is always a choice.
She loves him.
Natasha is a spider, a killer, a woman with a ledger covered in red. She is cold and deadly and made of marble.
She loves him. For the moment, it is enough.