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marmolitaAlso at AO3.
Avengers, Natasha is a BAMF, mostly gen but also Bucky/Natasha. Explicit.
Warnings: a lot of awful things happen, including, but not limited to, underage sex, dubious/lack of consent (kind of by definition for underage), torture, violence, child abuse, and underage people being brainwashed into doing horrible things. One working name for this fic was “epic red room training saga,” so that gives you something of a hint.
Winter in Moscow. Snow piles up along the streets, and people huddle in layers of furs, red faces peering out as they go about their business. A crow caws, black against the white snow on a rooftop. Warmth and music spill out for a moment as the door of a restaurant is opened and closed.
A little girl stumbles out of a burning building, blood staining the snow where it drips from her hand.
***
It has been three hours since Natasha crawled into the cupboard, settling herself for a long wait. The wood is hard under her her hips, too-sharp bones bruising against the pressure. Her legs tremble with the effort of keeping absolutely still, her throat is dry, and she has to pee. She keeps her eyes glued to the crack between the cupboard doors, watching, waiting. Be still and silent, Natalia. Watch, and listen. You will remember every word they say. They must never know you are there. Her instructions repeat on loop in her mind, and Natasha remembers the concentration and breathing exercises Misha is teaching her.
Be still and silent.
Natasha breathes shallowly, quietly, focusing on relaxing her stressed muscles. This is her first surveillance mission; missions like this are usually assigned to older operatives, but Natasha is the only one small enough to fit in this tight space. Before she climbed in, Ivan had removed the jars of beets that filled the cupboard, taking them away in his black duffel bag. He had lifted her up above the stove, sliding her in until her back touched the wall, closing the doors when she folded her legs up, knees touching her chest. Her bare feet have been barely brushing the back of the doors for hours, her neck aching from trying not to scrape her head on the shelf above her.
Watch, and listen.
Finally, finally, there is the sound of a doorknob turning, a door creaking open, and footsteps. Natasha strains her ears, squinting through the crack between the doors. The apartment is small, and from her vantage point she has a view of a cracked kitchen table, and half of the bed. A man comes into view, stripping off his coat and hat and tossing them across the kitchen table.
“Vanya, please--” A woman’s voice, in the entryway; Natasha hears the door swing shut. The man moves out of view and there is a clink of glass.
“I told you Anechka, we can’t talk about this. They are listening everywhere.” The woman passes the doorway, laying her hat and gloves down on the bed before joining the man in the kitchen.
“You checked our home for bugs and destroyed them all just this morning,” she replies. “All I mean is that we should think about his offer. We can get to Leningrad, you know we can, and then he can give us documents for a ship to--”
“Stop it!” The man grabs her wrists and pulls her to him. “Do you know what they will do to us? Do you know what they will do to you?” Natasha can see the woman’s face, contorted with fear, and the man slowly lets go of her.
“Do you know what will happen to us if we stay?” she asks. The man does not answer; he pulls the woman to him and kisses her, and then there are no more words.
Natasha repeats their conversation over and over in her mind, burning it into her memory. Her muscles are burning and her bladder is full, but the couple is still kissing, their hands moving over each other. They move to the bedroom, and Natasha wonders how long it will be before they leave the apartment again and Ivan comes to get her.
She wants to close her eyes when the woman’s floral-print dress comes off, but watch, and listen Ivan had said. So Natasha watches the man take off his shirt, his pants, watches his mouth move over the woman’s body. Her stomach twists in uncomfortable knots as the couple falls back on the bed, and she gets a clear view of the man’s privates. Their heads are now beyond her range of vision and all she can see is legs and hips moving erratically.
Natasha is not sure how much time passes before the man comes back into the kitchen, naked. “Get dressed,” he says, “and I’ll take you to buy some dinner.”
When Ivan comes to get her, she cannot move to unfold her legs. He reaches into the cupboard and pulls her out, cursing when he feels the wetness on her pants. “I told you, Natalia, they must never know you are there. What is going to happen when they find their kitchen reeking of piss?”
***
“Come now, Natalia, you are a big girl. You are strong. Do it just like we practiced before.”
She stares at the trembling woman. The woman’s clothes are ragged and her knees are dirty and bruised where she kneels on the floor. Natasha tightens her grip on the garotte. “Why her?” she asks. Ivan laughs.
“Why not? Don’t trouble yourself with such things. She is weak, and you are strong, and we brought her here especially for you to practice on. If you do a good job, we will let you have cake tonight. If not...” His voice trails off, no need to finish the sentence. Natasha knows what will happen if she disobeys.
She moves behind the woman, taking care to keep the sound of her feet on the concrete floor quiet. Always quiet, silent, that was the first thing they had taught her. The woman keeps her eyes on the ground, her breath coming in choked sobs. Natasha stretches the garotte out to its full length, then crosses her arms, loops it over the woman’s neck, and pulls; a fast and quiet movement, just like she has practiced over and over. Her practice targets were made of rubber, more solid than the flesh the garotte is cutting into now. However, her practice targets didn’t struggle, and the woman is struggling, arms and legs flailing, reaching back and grabbing Natasha’s hair.
“Move your head back!” Ivan barks. “Don’t let go, pull tighter. Remember how I taught you. If she is struggling too much put your foot on her shoulders for more leverage, but keep out of her reach.” Natasha shoves the heel of her foot between the woman’s shoulder blades and leans backward. She does have more leverage now, and the muscles in her arms tense as she pulls as hard as she can on the sides of the wire. Gradually, the struggling grows less.
“Good, good girl. Don’t ease up your grip. Wait until she stops moving, then count five minutes. When you are older and stronger, you will be able to snap her neck, or we will give you a sharper wire. Suffocation is a slow way to kill, and sometimes you don’t have the time for it.”
Minutes later, Natasha glances up at Ivan. The woman has long stopped struggling. “Can I let go now?” she asks, and is favored by a smile.
“Yes, you did well. Next time remember, do not get close enough for them to grab you.” Natasha releases the garotte, and the body slumps to the floor. It is not the first dead body she has seen, but it is the first one she is responsible for. The cleaning staff moves in from outside the room, where Natasha knows the general is watching from behind the one-way glass. Ivan drops a heavy arm on her shoulders and pulls her into his side. “Come along, it’s time for dinner. I think I promised you cake.”
***
The target range is empty when Natasha arrives, but she is sure that someone is watching her. There is no part of the facility that isn’t covered by surveillance cameras, even out here in the open. Marksmanship must be taught outdoors, Ivan has said, so that she can properly learn to compensate for variables in the wind speed and direction. There are targets set up out to a kilometer distant from the entry. Of the weapons they have taught her so far, she prefers knives, but guns are her choice for long-range attack. There are two sniper rifles laid out next to the pistols and assault rifles on the table by the doorway, and Natasha smiles. New weapons are always interesting.
Touching the guns before she’s instructed to is tempting, but the last time she handled a weapon without supervision she was placed in a concrete cell for three days with no food or water. Afterward, Ivan had cradled her head with one hand while pouring tiny, tiny sips of water into her mouth. “Natalia, my sweet, it breaks my heart to see you like this,” he had said. “You know we can’t allow you to take the weapons on your own. You might hurt yourself.” You might hurt one of us, she knew he meant. But still, she had loved him for giving her water, even though he himself had been the one to toss her in the cell.
The door opens behind her, and Natasha is surprised when the man who enters is not Ivan. His eyes are blue, his hair is darker, and he is several inches taller. He smiles at Natasha, a slight upturn to his lips, nothing more. “You must be something special,” he says, “for them to wake me up just to teach you.” With that hint, she knows who he is; the other girls in her dormitory whisper at night about the darling of the program, the assassin they call in for the most complex missions -- the Winter Soldier. The shiny metal of his left hand would have given it away in any case. His words are not a question, so Natasha makes no reply. The man turns to the table of guns, and runs his fingers along the barrel of a sniper rifle. Passing over it, he selects four different types of guns and pulls them out. “Well sweetheart, let’s see what you can do.”
When Natasha has fired all of the guns, hitting bulls-eye’s each time, she tilts her head back to look up at the Winter Soldier. “Not bad,” he says, “but you’re not even really trying. You only picked targets you knew you could hit -- a good idea, but I’m not here to be impressed by your skill. I’m here to make you better. To get better, you have to reach out of your comfort zone.” He points at a target ten meters beyond the one she has just hit. “Try that one. I’m not going to punish you if you miss.” His lips twitch a little at the corner.
Natasha fires and hits the target, but not dead center.
“Again.”
A little closer this time.
“Again.”
The third time, she hits the center of the target. She starts to relax her arm, but--
“Again.”
***
Natasha has training sessions with the Winter Soldier every day, and by the end of the week, they have gone through all the targets and all the guns. He has shown her the ins and outs of the sniper rifle, and how to fire between heartbeats to avoid jostling the barrel. They have worked on moving targets (rats, rounded up in the kitchens and released onto the field), stationary targets, in the wind, in the rain. Her arms are exhausted at the end of each day, after the Winter Soldier’s endless repetition, “again,” “again,” “again.”
At night, the other girls don’t ask about her training sessions. They know she is working with him, and they know this means she is being favored above them. Natasha is glad now that there are such strict punishments for taking a weapon. Unarmed, she is pretty sure she is a match for any of the others, but some of them have been training with weapons far longer than she has. The oldest girls still in the dormitory are 18, 19, and the extra few years gives them an advantage.
Her second week of training with the Winter Soldier takes a different direction. When she arrives at the target range, he is waiting. There is a single gun on the table, and a wide array of torture implements. She is familiar with their uses from training films, but hasn’t been taught to use them herself, yet. Natasha wonders if he is going to teach her to use them, but realizes her mistake when he pushes the gun in her direction.
“Take off your clothes,” he says. Fear is such a constant in her life that Natasha almost doesn’t notice it anymore. She has been trained to ignore any and all emotions. Still, stripping down with a table full of torture devices twists that cold feeling in the pit of her belly, and for a moment, she considers refusing. Natasha glances up at the security camera, then begins to remove her clothes. The air is cold, and she stops in her bra and underwear. “All of it, sweetheart,” the Winter Soldier says, bored and impatient.
When she is naked, the chill in the air raising the hair on her arms, he presses the gun into her hand. “You have already learned to hit all of the targets with no distractions. In the real world, there are always distractions.” He indicates a target for her, and tells her to keep firing at the target until he tells her to stop.
Natasha fires, hitting the bull’s-eye. Again. Again. She can hear him rummaging around on the table behind her, but she does not look. Instead, she fires again. The rummaging stops, and she knows he has found what he was looking for. When she fires again, there is a sharp stinging pain on her back. She doesn’t miss, but it is a close thing. She fires again. Her mind races over the image of the implements on the table, trying to identify the one being used on her. When he hits her again, she thinks she has identified it as a riding crop. He isn’t hitting hard enough to do any real damage, but there is pain.
Natasha keeps firing, and the Winter Soldier keeps beating her. Her shots go off center, her legs and arms beginning to tremble. “Focus,” he says, breath hot in her ear. She fires again, more accurately.
“I’m out of bullets,” she says, some time later. There is a thunk as the Winter Soldier places the crop back on the table.
“All right,” he says. “That’s enough for today. You can get dressed.”
When she finishes pulling her shirt on, Natasha turns to him. “Will you show me how to use those, too?” she asks, indicating the objects on the table. Ivan has said before that Natasha is too young to learn the art of torture, but she thinks maybe the Winter Soldier will disagree. He laughs, and she knows she is right.
***
It takes several days to work their way through the basic torture implements. In the morning, the Winter Soldier uses them on Natasha while she shoots guns or throws knives; they start with the implement from the previous day, and do not move on until she can prove that she can ignore the pain enough to hit her targets. There is a break for lunch, and for Natasha to be patched up by the medical staff, and in the afternoon the Winter Soldier teaches her how to use the devices. They start with rubber dummies, for her to get the hang of it, and then bring in prisoners to practice on. Natasha does not know where the prisoners come from, and she does not ask. She hits them with the crop, puts needles under their fingernails, burns them with hot metal rods, shocks them with electronic devices. He teaches her how to waterboard, how to pull out teeth with pliers, how to restrain the prisoners in uncomfortable positions, how to break their fingers, but he does not subject her to these. Broken fingers would interfere with her training regimen, and missing teeth would harm her ability to do undercover work. While he says she should be taught to withstand waterboarding and uncomfortable restraints, his primary goal is to teach her to be able to hit targets while in pain, and she’s unlikely to be waterboarded or restrained and left with a gun or knife within reach. Natasha sees him talking to Ivan after those sessions, and knows he is making arrangements for someone else to further her training in those areas.
After the day when the Winter Soldier slices her back, arms, and legs with razor blades, she believes that they have completed the tour of torture devices. It comes as a surprise when he tells her to take off her clothes again at the range the next morning. She wonders if he is going to beat her with his bare hands.
When Natasha is naked, he hands her a gun and points out a target, then moves back out of her range of vision. She begins firing, trying to ignore the tension in her body, waiting for the pain to begin. Time seems to stretch as she keeps firing and no touch comes. She empties the clip and reloads. Natasha has begun to fire again when the touch finally comes, but it is not what she is expecting. The Winter Soldier’s fingers trail lightly over her ribs and down her side, and she shivers involuntarily. His right hand slips over her hip, then back up, cupping her breast and tickling across her nipple. Her aim goes wide and she misses the target entirely. There is a puff of breath across her back as he laughs. “Focus,” he says, just as he has for all the other distractions. “It’s not as if nobody has touched you before. Ivan told me everything about you.”
She fires again, dead center on the target. The Winter Soldier presses against her back, clothes chafing lightly against the healing cuts on her skin. “I know that he taught you about sex just like he taught you about everything else.” His mouth touches her neck, hot and wet. “You knew what to expect from the training films but you still trembled when he touched you.” She fires and is slightly off-center. His hand travels down her stomach and hovers over her groin. “Did it hurt when he put his dick inside you? If it did you didn’t show it.” Another off-center shot. “Focus.”
Natasha blinks, clenches her hands around the gun, and fires again, hitting her mark. The Winter Soldier presses his hand down, rubbing her clit in slow circles. His left hand closes on her hip, cold as ice, but his body is hot behind her. “I hear you were good at sucking cock even the first time. Ivan says you have a talented tongue. Maybe someday I’ll have you suck me off. Would you like that?” Natasha doesn’t give an answer because she knows he doesn’t really expect one; she fires again, only slightly off the mark. His fingers slide back, dipping inside her, then spreading the moisture around her clit, rubbing harder. “I’ll take that as a yes. You know, I like to have a woman on top when I fuck her. Ivan tells me you like it that way too. Do you think you could keep hitting those targets if I was fucking you right now?”
“I’m out of bullets,” she says, concentrating on keeping her breathing even. His left hand leaves her hip for a moment, then he hands her another cartridge.
“Reload. I want to see you hit a bull’s-eye while you’re coming.” Natasha reloads and starts shooting again. The Winter Soldier’s metal hand slides up to her breast, rolling her nipple between two cold fingers. His other hand works harder, faster. She is wide on her first shot, but dead center on the second. “I can hear your breath speeding up,” he says in her ear, teeth closing lightly on her earlobe. “Almost there; keep shooting.” Her stomach flutters, muscles clenching, and an involuntary sound escapes her mouth as the orgasm breaks over her, but she squeezes the trigger and fires and the bullet goes straight into the center of the bull’s-eye.
The Winter Soldier laughs. “I knew you could do it, sweetheart. Looks like my job here is done.”
They put him back on ice the same night.
***
Natasha is 16 the first time she is sent on a wetworks mission. She has lost track of how many surveillance missions she has been on, hidden in cupboards, closets, observing from across a cafe. They have sent her to break into offices, rifling through filing cabinets in the middle of the night, stealing tapes, files, photographs. She stopped counting at 30 kills in the training facility, but at this point, finally, her training is complete and they want to see how well she can kill in the real world.
Ivan gives her a rough overview of the situation -- the target is a political dissident and somebody wants him out of the way. The details are irrelevant because no information gathering is required; more important is that the target prefers teenage girls, prefers redheads, and has been known to frequent a coffee shop near a particular school every third Thursday. The uniform is a knee-length black dress with long sleeves, a white lace collar, and a red bow tied at her throat. She pulls on the high white socks and slides her feet into black patent leather flats, then picks up the bookbag Ivan has pre-packed with schoolbooks. The bag has a hidden compartment, where he has placed a service pistol, knife, and garotte.
“He likes lonely girls,” Ivan says as she turns for his inspection. “Get a pastry and sit alone. Don’t act like you are studying, act like you are watching the other children and wishing you were with them. Do you think you can do that, Natalia?”
“Of course,” she replies. “Do you think your training has been ineffective?” Ivan laughs at that, and Natasha smiles.
“Remember, if you decide to use the gun, to use the silencer. There is a window to the street from his bedroom. Go left four blocks, and I will be waiting in a black Volga. There is another uniform in the bag in case you get blood on this one.” He holds Natasha at arm’s length and looks at her like one of the proud fathers in her socialization training films. “You are a special girl. I know you will do well.”
He drops her off three blocks from the school, just before it lets out for the day. She straightens her dress, pushes up the sleeves to her elbows, and blends into the crowd of students spilling through the doors. It’s a short walk to the cafe, where she buys a potato-filled pastry and seats herself at a tiny table on the sidewalk, where she has a good view of the other students laughing and joking.
Natasha is licking the crumbs off of her fingertips when the target approaches her table. “You look lonely, comrade,” he says, pulling out the other chair. “Do you mind if I join you?” He seats himself before she has a chance to answer, and she schools her face into the fluster of a teenage girl meeting a stranger.
“I was just going,” she says quickly, and moves as if she is going to get up. He lays a hand over hers, holding her in place.
“Don’t leave on my account,” he says, holding up another pastry. “Look, I brought you another. You’re so skinny, I’m sure you could use some more to eat.” She hesitates, then sits down again, taking the pastry from him and thanking him. Times are hard in Russia, and the school is in a poor neighborhood. She eats as if she hasn’t had a full belly in weeks, but doesn’t want to let him know.
“What’s your name, comrade?” he asks, smiling.
“Katya.” Natasha swallows the last bite of the pastry.
“Ah, another Katya! My little sister’s name is Katya as well. You look like you are still hungry, comrade. Why don’t you come to my house? I think I have some cake, would you like that?”
She hesitates appropriately, then says, “I should go home. My mother is sick so I need to cook for her and my father.”
“Is that all? Well then you should definitely come with me, I have a big pot of borscht you can take home to them.” He maintains a large, friendly smile on his face at all times, but his eyes are calculating.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks, clenching a hand on her bag. He laughs.
“I can’t stand to see such a beautiful young woman going hungry,” he replies. “Maybe we can get to know each other, and then work out an arrangement. I am a bachelor; maybe you can help me around the house, and I can help you and your family.” The man stands, holding out a hand to her. “Come along, Katya, I’m sure we can work something out. Either way I will give you the soup.”
“All right,” she says, and follows him to his car. He chats politely on the drive to his house, telling her his name (a fake one) and about his job (not his real job). She tells him she is an only child and her father works in a clothing factory.
Inside the house, he takes her first to the kitchen, where he does indeed have a large soup pot full of borscht and a cake. He gives her a slice of cake on a plate, and when she finishes it he holds out another small piece in his fingertips. When she raises her eyebrows at him, he says, “If you eat it from my hand, I will let you take the rest home.” His intentions would be clear to any girl at this point, so Natasha plays the part of a poor girl who will do whatever is necessary to take care of herself and her family. She opens her mouth, sucks the crumbs from his fingertips.
“If you want me to do anything else,” she says, voice trembling, “you will have to pay me. Not just with food.” He smiles and pulls out his wallet.
She lets him feel her up in the kitchen, then follows him to his bedroom, dropping her bag on the night table. She waits until he is near orgasm, laying on his back on the bed with her in his lap, to make her move. He closes his eyes and drops his head back, fingers tightening on her hips; she reaches and pulls the garotte from the bag. With a twist of her thighs she climbs off and flips him in one movement, looping the garotte around his head, and lands with one knee between his shoulder blades. Before he can react Natasha pulls the garotte with all her strength and is rewarded by the crack of his neck breaking. Even so, she holds her position until there’s been no movement for five minutes before climbing off and getting dressed.
Ivan grins when she climbs into the car.
***
“What is it for?” Natasha asks, eyeing the hypodermic needle.
“I thought you knew not to ask such things by now.” The corner of Ivan’s mouth pulls back, not quite a smile. “But, since you are my favorite, I will tell you. Your body is a weapon. Weapons need care. Knives must be sharpened. The serum will keep your body like a sharp knife, much longer than it would be on its own.”
“You mean faster healing?” The needle slides in and the nurse presses down on the plunger. It burns, but she has been through far worse.
“Perhaps. Tell me, Natasha, what is your greatest strength? What is it that will make you successful?” Ivan’s pale green eyes travel over her body. Natasha knows the answer to this -- they have told her often enough.
“My youth and beauty. People will trust me and underestimate me.” This is, after all, the entire point of the Black Widow program.
“Then I think you know exactly what the serum is for.”
***
The first time they alter Natasha’s memories, she is 21 years old, but still looks 17. They are sending her into deep cover in New York, as a secretary for Stark Industries, to gather information on new weapons development and samples of the advanced truth serum that has been rumored. She has been studying English from a young age, and has the flat accent of the American midwest.
“The procedure should not be too painful,” says a man in a white coat as Natasha lays back in the hospital bed. “The nanites have been programmed to reroute your neural pathways, cutting off access to most of your memories and creating artificial ones. After the rerouting is complete, they will remain dormant until activated by a preset trigger to restore access to your real memories.”
Ivan watches her as they wipe down her arm with an antiseptic pad. “I expect they will try their truth serum on you before giving you access to classified information. We have no way of knowing how effective it is, but it cannot break through the physical change in your brain that the nanites will cause.”
“If I don’t remember what I’m there for, how will I accomplish the mission?”
“We will send another agent along to observe. When you have passed all of the background checks and have the highest clearance level, the other agent will provide the trigger, and be waiting to extract you.”
Natasha watches the black liquid in the syringe disappear into her arm, and feels a headache coming on. “And after the mission? How do you remove the nanites?”
“They can be programmed by radio frequency transmission,” the man in the white coat says as he tapes a cotton ball to her arm. “We can reprogram them for your next mission without any more invasive procedures.”
Ivan smiles, and there is a sparkle in his green eyes.
***
Susan arrives back at her apartment later than usual, Macy’s bag in one hand as she locks the door with the other. She can’t keep the grin off her face.
“Sue? You’re late, is everything--” Mary pauses in the doorway from the kitchen, a floral print apron covering her dark blue dress. “Oh my god. Is that what I think it is?” Susan pulls a shoebox out of the bag and shows her roommate the black stilettos that the two of them have been eyeing for months.
“Security clearance came through and I got the promotion!” Susan bounces excitedly on the balls of her feet as Mary pulls her into a hug and a silly dance around the living room. “I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself but payday is Friday so I thought it would be okay.”
“I’ll pick up the grocery bill this week if you’ll let me borrow those shoes, Sue. I was about to put a meatloaf in the oven, come on into the kitchen and tell me all about it.”
“Not much to tell,” Susan calls out as she drops the shoes and her purse in her bedroom. “They told me before that it was just waiting on the security clearance. Background check, that kind of stuff.” She comes back into the kitchen in time to see the loaf pan disappear into the oven. “I’m afraid that’s all I’m allowed to say about it.”
Mary glances at her with narrowed eyes. “You’ve always been good at keeping secrets,” she says.
***
Susan’s security clearance is increased from Confidential to Secret to Top Secret over the next two years. At this point it is high enough for her to know that the fuzzy memories she has of her previous clearance interview are due to the application of an experimental truth serum; she has taken dictation about it and filed paperwork on it. Apparently there is a shortage of trustworthy secretaries, so Susan is brought in for yet another clearance interview when the chief scientist of the chemical division needs someone to manage his paperwork.
“I didn’t even know there were any more clearance levels,” she tells Mary when the clearance comes through.. “I wish I could tell you more about it other than the same thing I’ve been telling you the past two years.”
“That’s all right,” Mary says, “I think I know all that I need to.” There is something different about her voice. Susan looks up from the crossword she has been working on and sees Mary unscrewing a small bottle.
“What is that, a new perfume?” she asks. Mary holds the bottle out for her and Susan is overwhelmed with a powerful smell, something like beets and chamomile and something sickly sweet that she can’t identify. “It’s pretty awful, I don’t know why you’d--” but Mary is saying something, something Susan can’t understand, and she suddenly has a pounding headache.
When the headache clears, Natasha is sitting at the table blinking at Marina. The jumble of Susan’s memories is still there, but only since she began at Stark Industries.
“Are you okay?” Marina asks in English.
“Never better,” Natasha replies in Russian.
***
It takes another month for Natasha to make copies of all the important files, hidden one at a time in the middle of batches of official copying she does. All that is left is obtaining a sample of the truth serum. Natasha uses the fastest method she can think of -- flirting with the chief scientist until she convinces him to stay after everyone else has gone for the day, then giving him the best blowjob of his life. Afterward, when he is halfway unconscious in his office, she tells him it’s best that they not be seen leaving together and that he should wait twenty minutes before following her out.
She uses a disposable pipet to draw off just a small amount of serum from each of twenty samples: enough to fill two small vials without anything going missing. Marina has prepared when she gets back to the apartment. There are two dead girls in the living room, and the place reeks of gasoline.
By the time the police declare that Susan Brown and Mary Smith were killed in a fire caused by a malfunctioning gas line, Natasha and Marina are on their way to Cuba. When they reach Moscow, Ivan is waiting with Natasha’s favorite cake.
***
The fifth time they alter her memories, Natasha is 35 years old but still looks 20. She spends a year as Oksana Vetrova, a ballet student in Moscow, falling in love with a high-ranking government official. They are married in a spectacular ceremony in Saint Basil’s cathedral, followed by an elaborate reception at a hotel. There is a man at the reception she feels she has seen before, but whom she cannot place. She wonders why he wears his gloves indoors.
The man corners her on her way back from the toilet and introduces himself as a perfume salesman. He offers her a sample, insisting it will make her wedding night more memorable. She recoils at the smell, beets and chamomile and rotting meat, and he says something but it is all nonsense; she must have had too much vodka because she suddenly has a pounding--
“Give me until 3:00,” she tells the Winter Soldier. “Bring rope.”
***
Later that night, when Viktor has exhausted himself and fallen asleep, Natasha lets the Winter Soldier into the hotel room from the balcony. They bind Viktor with a gun to his head to keep him quiet, and Natasha has the opportunity to demonstrate just how well she learned the Winter Soldier’s lessons in torture. He holds up admirably to beating and having his teeth extracted, but it doesn’t take much more than a knife pressed to his balls for the man to spill the names of every Capitalist in the Kremlin.
Natasha considers castrating him anyway, but the Winter Soldier shoots Viktor in the head before she gets a chance. He removes the silencer and packs away the gun while Natasha cleans her knife and washes her hands. “You’ve grown up, sweetheart,” he says, eyeing her appreciatively when she comes back from the bathroom.
“We have three more hours until the extraction.” Natasha puts one hand on the Winter Soldier’s chest and one on his belt buckle. “I’m even better at giving blowjobs now than I was when I was 14.”
The Winter Soldier laughs, hands reaching for her hips, and Natasha smiles.
***
Natasha is 55 years old, but still looks 25, when SHIELD tracks her down in Istanbul. She has been freelancing for nine years, since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nine years since she and the Winter Soldier had disobeyed orders, bringing a little girl in to the Black Widow program instead of killing her when she saw them assassinate her father. Nine years since she decided her memories had been altered more than enough times. Nine years since she had slit Ivan’s throat in his bed, killing the man who had been everything to her since he had picked her up outside a burning building when she was five years old.
Freelancing gives her space, gives her control, but it also makes her an easy target. She doesn’t have a network of operatives to rely on for backup, for extraction. Her employers could just as easily leave her to die if a mission goes wrong, and she doesn’t blame them; it would be the smart thing to do.
She knows the assassin is there -- has been there, watching her from the rooftops, monitoring her movements, for three weeks. Natasha has been toeing the line between following enough of a routine for SHIELD to find her and staying hidden enough that nobody else will.
It is the middle of the night when Natasha makes her move on the apartment building that is housing the arms dealers she’s been hired to clean out. The SHIELD assassin is on a rooftop across the street, having followed her from her hotel, but the windows of the building are boarded up. Once she’s inside, he won’t have a line of sight on her.
Natasha hasn’t bothered trying to charm her way into the group; she knows a woman would never be allowed into the building. Instead, she’s been watching the patterns, waiting for a day when the leader of the group is guaranteed to be inside, with half of his friends out on an assignment. For once, the direct approach will be the most effective, so Natasha kicks down the front door with a gun in each hand.
She takes out five men in the cramped entryway, rushing out of the first floor bedrooms. The building has a single staircase, which allows Natasha to shoot them one at a time as they emerge from the upper levels. Eventually, enough men are down in the stairwell that there is a risk of blocking it or of enough time passing for the others to escape from the windows, so she vaults over the pile of bodies and works her way up to the third floor.
By the time she reaches her target, they have pried the boards off of the windows and are lowering him out on a rope. Natasha takes out the remaining bodyguards with her last bullets, then leans out the window and throws a knife into the heart of the target, who has just reached the ground.
In the open window, Natasha raises her hands and looks directly at the assassin on the opposite roof. He has a bow and arrow, rather than a gun, and she smiles. New weapons are always interesting. “I want to defect,” she says, exaggerating the movement of her mouth so that he can read her lips even if he can’t hear her. He hesitates, then gestures with the arrow -- down. She backs away slowly and makes her way out of the apartment building, emerging onto the street with her hands still up. By the time she gets there, he is on the ground, a grapple attached to the roof he came from. The bow is still in his hands, and the arrow is still drawn, aimed straight at her left eye.
“You let me find you,” he says. “You’re better than that.”
Natasha shrugs her shoulders. “Like I said, I want to defect.” She takes a step toward him and he backs up.
“Don’t come any closer. Drop all of your weapons and get on your knees, hands behind your back. I’m going to cuff you. If I think you’re trying to trick me, I will kill you.”
She moves slowly, taking four guns out of their holsters, putting them on the ground, and kicking them away. Next are the six knives, one on each ankle, one on each thigh, and one on each arm. She uncoils the garotte from around her waist and kicks it away as well, then sinks onto her knees and crosses her wrists behind her back. “You know, if I was going to kill you, I would have done it three weeks ago when you started following me,” she says.
He lowers the bow and pulls a gun from his hip, then slowly circles around her and approaches from behind, the gun trained on her head. He presses it against the back of her skull while he cuffs her with his other hand. “I started following you four weeks ago,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
***
A week into her stay with SHIELD, Natasha is fairly certain she’s given them all of the information they could possible want about the Red Room and the Black Widow program. She’s been subjected to an improved formula of Stark Industries’ truth serum three times, and every time her story has been the same. Agent Barton has been watching from behind the one-way glass; she hears snatches of his voice or his footsteps whenever the door opens to the interrogation room. It only makes sense that he would want to stick around to see if he should have killed her after all.
On the seventh day of interrogations, a blonde woman she hasn’t seen before comes into the room and sits down across from her. Her lips don’t move, but I’m going to examine your mind echoes inside of Natasha’s head, and she is submerged in memories.
***
Winter in Moscow. A little girl stumbles out of a burning building, blood staining the snow where it drips from her hand.
***
Natasha shoves the heel of her foot between the woman’s shoulder blades and leans backward. She has more leverage now, and the muscles in her arms tense as she pulls as hard as she can on the sides of the wire. Gradually, the struggling grows less.
***
“Keep your lips over your teeth,” Ivan says as he pushes himself into her mouth. “That’s a good girl.”
***
“Tell me, Natasha, what is your greatest strength? What is it that will make you successful?” Ivan’s pale green eyes travel over her body. Natasha knows the answer to this -- they have told her often enough.
***
Susan gazes longingly at the black stilettos in the window at Macy’s. Only two more steps in her security clearance interview and she will be able to afford them.
***
“You’ve grown up, sweetheart,” the Winter Soldier says, eyeing her appreciatively
***
Rachel organizes her papers, selecting the ones she needs to read up on to assist in Dr. Schwartzkopf’s research.
***
Oksana carefully wraps her bleeding toenails. The rehearsal was long, and so much time en pointe has left her feet a mess. Her legs are sore, and her arms. She pulls on baggy sweat pants and a sweatshirt and packs the first aid kit into her bag next to her toe shoes.
***
The Winter Soldier hesitates when he sees the little girl under the table. His target trembles, waiting, pleading. Natasha takes the girl by the hand and walks out of the house, and they wait in the car for the Winter Soldier to finish his job.
***
“Natalia,” Ivan gasps, breath wet and bubbly as the blood gushes from his jugular. She cradles his head close to her chest.
“I’m sorry, Ivan. You always knew it would come to this.”
***
“They really did a number on you,” the blonde woman says to Natasha when her sift through Natasha’s memories is complete. “I can see why you were ready to leave. They must have had a powerful telepath to embed those memories so deep, and erase all traces of the process.” Natasha shrugs her shoulders and glances toward the one-way glass.
“Is this the last test?” she asks. “I’ve done a lot of ugly things in my life and I’ll probably do a lot more. I have a very specific skill set. I’ll use my skills for SHIELD as long as SHIELD isn’t going to mess with my head.” There is a long silence. Natasha wonders what Agent Barton is saying to his boss on the other side of the wall. Is he arguing her case? Has he decided he should have killed her instead?
The door clicks open and a tall man with an eyepatch walks in. The stare of his remaining eye is hard and calculating. “Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Romanoff,” he says finally, extending his hand.
***
Natasha is 67 years old but still looks 28 when Loki decides to bring an alien army to invade Earth. She fights her best friend, debates with herself about killing him, and pulls her punch at the last possible moment.
“Have you ever had someone take your brain and play?” he asks her, sweating and tense from the residual effects on his mind. “Pull you out, and stuff something else in?
“You know what it’s like to be unmade?” Clint’s eyes are pleading, begging for understanding, and for forgiveness.
“You know that I do,” she replies.
***
Natasha is 70 years old, but still looks 28. She has been with SHIELD for fifteen years. It’s been a good fifteen years, as such things go. She’s fought, killed, spied, tortured, and been tortured, but for a Black Widow that is all in a day’s work. The primary difference between SHIELD and the Red Room isn’t the work, it’s the people. SHIELD takes care of its own, when it can. When SHIELD can’t rescue an operative in a mission gone south, they at least provide a swift death.
Natasha respects her coworkers, for the most part. Still, she prefers to be alone; it is part of her, whether by nature or nurture, so when Tony Stark offers all of the Avengers a place to live in Stark Tower, she doesn’t take him up on it. Instead, she keeps an apartment in Midtown, where she has easy access to Stark Tower and the local SHIELD office.
She unlocks the door and enters her apartment after a long day of debriefings, when she notices something is wrong. The sound of breathing, the smell of a body --
“Don’t move, sweetheart. You know I can kill you before you get a weapon out.” The lights come on; the Winter Soldier stands next to the switch by the kitchenette, gun aimed directly at Natasha’s head.
“I thought the Red Room got shut down along with the KGB after the dissolution,” she says. “Can I at least shut the door and put down my bag?”
He nods and motions with the gun for her to come forward. “The Red Room only worked for the KGB because it was convenient. You know that.”
“Why are you here? Obviously not to kill me or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I’m here to bring you in.” He throws something in her direction -- a glass vial, which hits the wall near her and breaks, flooding the room with an awful smell. The Winter Soldier’s words become gibberish, and a too-familiar headache nearly knocks Natasha off her feet.
When it clears, the Winter Soldier is still staring down the barrel of his gun at her. “Why send you just to extract me?” she asks. “They could have sent anyone.”
“Twenty-four years is an awfully long time for an undercover mission,” he replies. A fringe of dark hair falls in his eyes, and he pushes it back with one hand. Natasha can’t help remembering another apartment, another time, another place. “Even though you remember why you’re here now, maybe you don’t want to come back. If you don’t want to come back, I’m going to kill you. You know I’m the only one who can shoot faster than you can react.” She looks at him, and says nothing. “I’d really rather prefer that you come back,” he says. “Things were much more interesting with you around. They’ve only taken me off the ice twice since you left.”
“All right. SHIELD or the Red Room, it makes no difference to me who I work for.” Natasha sits down on the sofa and kicks her feet up on the coffee table. “When is the extraction?”
“Tomorrow, 9:00pm. Private jet out of Teterboro.” He lowers the gun and tosses a USB stick at her. “Fill it up with whatever you think is most important. Make it look like you were kidnapped -- they might want to send you back in some day.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” she asks, pulling off her shoes and stretching her toes.
“Three more jobs in New York for me.” The Winter Soldier walks closer, into attack range, and sits down next to her. He draws her legs onto his lap and begins to massage her feet. “I had all of tonight marked off for catching you, though.”
***
The next day, Natasha smuggles the USB stick into the SHIELD office inside her bra. Stark Tower has more intel available to her, but also much better security. She picks and chooses information, triple encrypting it before transferring to the stick.
On her way out in the afternoon, she composes an email to Clint, encrypts it, and sets it to be delivered at 10:00.
***
Winter in Moscow. Snow piles up along the streets, and people huddle in layers of furs, red faces peering out as they go about their business. A crow caws, black against the white snow on a rooftop. Warmth and music spill out for a moment as the door of a restaurant is opened and closed.
When Natasha arrives, Ivan is there waiting, with her favorite cake. His hair is silver and thin on top, and he walks with a cane. The wrinkles of his face deepen when he sees her.
She joins him in his bedroom the same night. This time, when she slits his throat, it’s not just a false memory.
Avengers, Natasha is a BAMF, mostly gen but also Bucky/Natasha. Explicit.
Warnings: a lot of awful things happen, including, but not limited to, underage sex, dubious/lack of consent (kind of by definition for underage), torture, violence, child abuse, and underage people being brainwashed into doing horrible things. One working name for this fic was “epic red room training saga,” so that gives you something of a hint.
Winter in Moscow. Snow piles up along the streets, and people huddle in layers of furs, red faces peering out as they go about their business. A crow caws, black against the white snow on a rooftop. Warmth and music spill out for a moment as the door of a restaurant is opened and closed.
A little girl stumbles out of a burning building, blood staining the snow where it drips from her hand.
***
It has been three hours since Natasha crawled into the cupboard, settling herself for a long wait. The wood is hard under her her hips, too-sharp bones bruising against the pressure. Her legs tremble with the effort of keeping absolutely still, her throat is dry, and she has to pee. She keeps her eyes glued to the crack between the cupboard doors, watching, waiting. Be still and silent, Natalia. Watch, and listen. You will remember every word they say. They must never know you are there. Her instructions repeat on loop in her mind, and Natasha remembers the concentration and breathing exercises Misha is teaching her.
Be still and silent.
Natasha breathes shallowly, quietly, focusing on relaxing her stressed muscles. This is her first surveillance mission; missions like this are usually assigned to older operatives, but Natasha is the only one small enough to fit in this tight space. Before she climbed in, Ivan had removed the jars of beets that filled the cupboard, taking them away in his black duffel bag. He had lifted her up above the stove, sliding her in until her back touched the wall, closing the doors when she folded her legs up, knees touching her chest. Her bare feet have been barely brushing the back of the doors for hours, her neck aching from trying not to scrape her head on the shelf above her.
Watch, and listen.
Finally, finally, there is the sound of a doorknob turning, a door creaking open, and footsteps. Natasha strains her ears, squinting through the crack between the doors. The apartment is small, and from her vantage point she has a view of a cracked kitchen table, and half of the bed. A man comes into view, stripping off his coat and hat and tossing them across the kitchen table.
“Vanya, please--” A woman’s voice, in the entryway; Natasha hears the door swing shut. The man moves out of view and there is a clink of glass.
“I told you Anechka, we can’t talk about this. They are listening everywhere.” The woman passes the doorway, laying her hat and gloves down on the bed before joining the man in the kitchen.
“You checked our home for bugs and destroyed them all just this morning,” she replies. “All I mean is that we should think about his offer. We can get to Leningrad, you know we can, and then he can give us documents for a ship to--”
“Stop it!” The man grabs her wrists and pulls her to him. “Do you know what they will do to us? Do you know what they will do to you?” Natasha can see the woman’s face, contorted with fear, and the man slowly lets go of her.
“Do you know what will happen to us if we stay?” she asks. The man does not answer; he pulls the woman to him and kisses her, and then there are no more words.
Natasha repeats their conversation over and over in her mind, burning it into her memory. Her muscles are burning and her bladder is full, but the couple is still kissing, their hands moving over each other. They move to the bedroom, and Natasha wonders how long it will be before they leave the apartment again and Ivan comes to get her.
She wants to close her eyes when the woman’s floral-print dress comes off, but watch, and listen Ivan had said. So Natasha watches the man take off his shirt, his pants, watches his mouth move over the woman’s body. Her stomach twists in uncomfortable knots as the couple falls back on the bed, and she gets a clear view of the man’s privates. Their heads are now beyond her range of vision and all she can see is legs and hips moving erratically.
Natasha is not sure how much time passes before the man comes back into the kitchen, naked. “Get dressed,” he says, “and I’ll take you to buy some dinner.”
When Ivan comes to get her, she cannot move to unfold her legs. He reaches into the cupboard and pulls her out, cursing when he feels the wetness on her pants. “I told you, Natalia, they must never know you are there. What is going to happen when they find their kitchen reeking of piss?”
***
“Come now, Natalia, you are a big girl. You are strong. Do it just like we practiced before.”
She stares at the trembling woman. The woman’s clothes are ragged and her knees are dirty and bruised where she kneels on the floor. Natasha tightens her grip on the garotte. “Why her?” she asks. Ivan laughs.
“Why not? Don’t trouble yourself with such things. She is weak, and you are strong, and we brought her here especially for you to practice on. If you do a good job, we will let you have cake tonight. If not...” His voice trails off, no need to finish the sentence. Natasha knows what will happen if she disobeys.
She moves behind the woman, taking care to keep the sound of her feet on the concrete floor quiet. Always quiet, silent, that was the first thing they had taught her. The woman keeps her eyes on the ground, her breath coming in choked sobs. Natasha stretches the garotte out to its full length, then crosses her arms, loops it over the woman’s neck, and pulls; a fast and quiet movement, just like she has practiced over and over. Her practice targets were made of rubber, more solid than the flesh the garotte is cutting into now. However, her practice targets didn’t struggle, and the woman is struggling, arms and legs flailing, reaching back and grabbing Natasha’s hair.
“Move your head back!” Ivan barks. “Don’t let go, pull tighter. Remember how I taught you. If she is struggling too much put your foot on her shoulders for more leverage, but keep out of her reach.” Natasha shoves the heel of her foot between the woman’s shoulder blades and leans backward. She does have more leverage now, and the muscles in her arms tense as she pulls as hard as she can on the sides of the wire. Gradually, the struggling grows less.
“Good, good girl. Don’t ease up your grip. Wait until she stops moving, then count five minutes. When you are older and stronger, you will be able to snap her neck, or we will give you a sharper wire. Suffocation is a slow way to kill, and sometimes you don’t have the time for it.”
Minutes later, Natasha glances up at Ivan. The woman has long stopped struggling. “Can I let go now?” she asks, and is favored by a smile.
“Yes, you did well. Next time remember, do not get close enough for them to grab you.” Natasha releases the garotte, and the body slumps to the floor. It is not the first dead body she has seen, but it is the first one she is responsible for. The cleaning staff moves in from outside the room, where Natasha knows the general is watching from behind the one-way glass. Ivan drops a heavy arm on her shoulders and pulls her into his side. “Come along, it’s time for dinner. I think I promised you cake.”
***
The target range is empty when Natasha arrives, but she is sure that someone is watching her. There is no part of the facility that isn’t covered by surveillance cameras, even out here in the open. Marksmanship must be taught outdoors, Ivan has said, so that she can properly learn to compensate for variables in the wind speed and direction. There are targets set up out to a kilometer distant from the entry. Of the weapons they have taught her so far, she prefers knives, but guns are her choice for long-range attack. There are two sniper rifles laid out next to the pistols and assault rifles on the table by the doorway, and Natasha smiles. New weapons are always interesting.
Touching the guns before she’s instructed to is tempting, but the last time she handled a weapon without supervision she was placed in a concrete cell for three days with no food or water. Afterward, Ivan had cradled her head with one hand while pouring tiny, tiny sips of water into her mouth. “Natalia, my sweet, it breaks my heart to see you like this,” he had said. “You know we can’t allow you to take the weapons on your own. You might hurt yourself.” You might hurt one of us, she knew he meant. But still, she had loved him for giving her water, even though he himself had been the one to toss her in the cell.
The door opens behind her, and Natasha is surprised when the man who enters is not Ivan. His eyes are blue, his hair is darker, and he is several inches taller. He smiles at Natasha, a slight upturn to his lips, nothing more. “You must be something special,” he says, “for them to wake me up just to teach you.” With that hint, she knows who he is; the other girls in her dormitory whisper at night about the darling of the program, the assassin they call in for the most complex missions -- the Winter Soldier. The shiny metal of his left hand would have given it away in any case. His words are not a question, so Natasha makes no reply. The man turns to the table of guns, and runs his fingers along the barrel of a sniper rifle. Passing over it, he selects four different types of guns and pulls them out. “Well sweetheart, let’s see what you can do.”
When Natasha has fired all of the guns, hitting bulls-eye’s each time, she tilts her head back to look up at the Winter Soldier. “Not bad,” he says, “but you’re not even really trying. You only picked targets you knew you could hit -- a good idea, but I’m not here to be impressed by your skill. I’m here to make you better. To get better, you have to reach out of your comfort zone.” He points at a target ten meters beyond the one she has just hit. “Try that one. I’m not going to punish you if you miss.” His lips twitch a little at the corner.
Natasha fires and hits the target, but not dead center.
“Again.”
A little closer this time.
“Again.”
The third time, she hits the center of the target. She starts to relax her arm, but--
“Again.”
***
Natasha has training sessions with the Winter Soldier every day, and by the end of the week, they have gone through all the targets and all the guns. He has shown her the ins and outs of the sniper rifle, and how to fire between heartbeats to avoid jostling the barrel. They have worked on moving targets (rats, rounded up in the kitchens and released onto the field), stationary targets, in the wind, in the rain. Her arms are exhausted at the end of each day, after the Winter Soldier’s endless repetition, “again,” “again,” “again.”
At night, the other girls don’t ask about her training sessions. They know she is working with him, and they know this means she is being favored above them. Natasha is glad now that there are such strict punishments for taking a weapon. Unarmed, she is pretty sure she is a match for any of the others, but some of them have been training with weapons far longer than she has. The oldest girls still in the dormitory are 18, 19, and the extra few years gives them an advantage.
Her second week of training with the Winter Soldier takes a different direction. When she arrives at the target range, he is waiting. There is a single gun on the table, and a wide array of torture implements. She is familiar with their uses from training films, but hasn’t been taught to use them herself, yet. Natasha wonders if he is going to teach her to use them, but realizes her mistake when he pushes the gun in her direction.
“Take off your clothes,” he says. Fear is such a constant in her life that Natasha almost doesn’t notice it anymore. She has been trained to ignore any and all emotions. Still, stripping down with a table full of torture devices twists that cold feeling in the pit of her belly, and for a moment, she considers refusing. Natasha glances up at the security camera, then begins to remove her clothes. The air is cold, and she stops in her bra and underwear. “All of it, sweetheart,” the Winter Soldier says, bored and impatient.
When she is naked, the chill in the air raising the hair on her arms, he presses the gun into her hand. “You have already learned to hit all of the targets with no distractions. In the real world, there are always distractions.” He indicates a target for her, and tells her to keep firing at the target until he tells her to stop.
Natasha fires, hitting the bull’s-eye. Again. Again. She can hear him rummaging around on the table behind her, but she does not look. Instead, she fires again. The rummaging stops, and she knows he has found what he was looking for. When she fires again, there is a sharp stinging pain on her back. She doesn’t miss, but it is a close thing. She fires again. Her mind races over the image of the implements on the table, trying to identify the one being used on her. When he hits her again, she thinks she has identified it as a riding crop. He isn’t hitting hard enough to do any real damage, but there is pain.
Natasha keeps firing, and the Winter Soldier keeps beating her. Her shots go off center, her legs and arms beginning to tremble. “Focus,” he says, breath hot in her ear. She fires again, more accurately.
“I’m out of bullets,” she says, some time later. There is a thunk as the Winter Soldier places the crop back on the table.
“All right,” he says. “That’s enough for today. You can get dressed.”
When she finishes pulling her shirt on, Natasha turns to him. “Will you show me how to use those, too?” she asks, indicating the objects on the table. Ivan has said before that Natasha is too young to learn the art of torture, but she thinks maybe the Winter Soldier will disagree. He laughs, and she knows she is right.
***
It takes several days to work their way through the basic torture implements. In the morning, the Winter Soldier uses them on Natasha while she shoots guns or throws knives; they start with the implement from the previous day, and do not move on until she can prove that she can ignore the pain enough to hit her targets. There is a break for lunch, and for Natasha to be patched up by the medical staff, and in the afternoon the Winter Soldier teaches her how to use the devices. They start with rubber dummies, for her to get the hang of it, and then bring in prisoners to practice on. Natasha does not know where the prisoners come from, and she does not ask. She hits them with the crop, puts needles under their fingernails, burns them with hot metal rods, shocks them with electronic devices. He teaches her how to waterboard, how to pull out teeth with pliers, how to restrain the prisoners in uncomfortable positions, how to break their fingers, but he does not subject her to these. Broken fingers would interfere with her training regimen, and missing teeth would harm her ability to do undercover work. While he says she should be taught to withstand waterboarding and uncomfortable restraints, his primary goal is to teach her to be able to hit targets while in pain, and she’s unlikely to be waterboarded or restrained and left with a gun or knife within reach. Natasha sees him talking to Ivan after those sessions, and knows he is making arrangements for someone else to further her training in those areas.
After the day when the Winter Soldier slices her back, arms, and legs with razor blades, she believes that they have completed the tour of torture devices. It comes as a surprise when he tells her to take off her clothes again at the range the next morning. She wonders if he is going to beat her with his bare hands.
When Natasha is naked, he hands her a gun and points out a target, then moves back out of her range of vision. She begins firing, trying to ignore the tension in her body, waiting for the pain to begin. Time seems to stretch as she keeps firing and no touch comes. She empties the clip and reloads. Natasha has begun to fire again when the touch finally comes, but it is not what she is expecting. The Winter Soldier’s fingers trail lightly over her ribs and down her side, and she shivers involuntarily. His right hand slips over her hip, then back up, cupping her breast and tickling across her nipple. Her aim goes wide and she misses the target entirely. There is a puff of breath across her back as he laughs. “Focus,” he says, just as he has for all the other distractions. “It’s not as if nobody has touched you before. Ivan told me everything about you.”
She fires again, dead center on the target. The Winter Soldier presses against her back, clothes chafing lightly against the healing cuts on her skin. “I know that he taught you about sex just like he taught you about everything else.” His mouth touches her neck, hot and wet. “You knew what to expect from the training films but you still trembled when he touched you.” She fires and is slightly off-center. His hand travels down her stomach and hovers over her groin. “Did it hurt when he put his dick inside you? If it did you didn’t show it.” Another off-center shot. “Focus.”
Natasha blinks, clenches her hands around the gun, and fires again, hitting her mark. The Winter Soldier presses his hand down, rubbing her clit in slow circles. His left hand closes on her hip, cold as ice, but his body is hot behind her. “I hear you were good at sucking cock even the first time. Ivan says you have a talented tongue. Maybe someday I’ll have you suck me off. Would you like that?” Natasha doesn’t give an answer because she knows he doesn’t really expect one; she fires again, only slightly off the mark. His fingers slide back, dipping inside her, then spreading the moisture around her clit, rubbing harder. “I’ll take that as a yes. You know, I like to have a woman on top when I fuck her. Ivan tells me you like it that way too. Do you think you could keep hitting those targets if I was fucking you right now?”
“I’m out of bullets,” she says, concentrating on keeping her breathing even. His left hand leaves her hip for a moment, then he hands her another cartridge.
“Reload. I want to see you hit a bull’s-eye while you’re coming.” Natasha reloads and starts shooting again. The Winter Soldier’s metal hand slides up to her breast, rolling her nipple between two cold fingers. His other hand works harder, faster. She is wide on her first shot, but dead center on the second. “I can hear your breath speeding up,” he says in her ear, teeth closing lightly on her earlobe. “Almost there; keep shooting.” Her stomach flutters, muscles clenching, and an involuntary sound escapes her mouth as the orgasm breaks over her, but she squeezes the trigger and fires and the bullet goes straight into the center of the bull’s-eye.
The Winter Soldier laughs. “I knew you could do it, sweetheart. Looks like my job here is done.”
They put him back on ice the same night.
***
Natasha is 16 the first time she is sent on a wetworks mission. She has lost track of how many surveillance missions she has been on, hidden in cupboards, closets, observing from across a cafe. They have sent her to break into offices, rifling through filing cabinets in the middle of the night, stealing tapes, files, photographs. She stopped counting at 30 kills in the training facility, but at this point, finally, her training is complete and they want to see how well she can kill in the real world.
Ivan gives her a rough overview of the situation -- the target is a political dissident and somebody wants him out of the way. The details are irrelevant because no information gathering is required; more important is that the target prefers teenage girls, prefers redheads, and has been known to frequent a coffee shop near a particular school every third Thursday. The uniform is a knee-length black dress with long sleeves, a white lace collar, and a red bow tied at her throat. She pulls on the high white socks and slides her feet into black patent leather flats, then picks up the bookbag Ivan has pre-packed with schoolbooks. The bag has a hidden compartment, where he has placed a service pistol, knife, and garotte.
“He likes lonely girls,” Ivan says as she turns for his inspection. “Get a pastry and sit alone. Don’t act like you are studying, act like you are watching the other children and wishing you were with them. Do you think you can do that, Natalia?”
“Of course,” she replies. “Do you think your training has been ineffective?” Ivan laughs at that, and Natasha smiles.
“Remember, if you decide to use the gun, to use the silencer. There is a window to the street from his bedroom. Go left four blocks, and I will be waiting in a black Volga. There is another uniform in the bag in case you get blood on this one.” He holds Natasha at arm’s length and looks at her like one of the proud fathers in her socialization training films. “You are a special girl. I know you will do well.”
He drops her off three blocks from the school, just before it lets out for the day. She straightens her dress, pushes up the sleeves to her elbows, and blends into the crowd of students spilling through the doors. It’s a short walk to the cafe, where she buys a potato-filled pastry and seats herself at a tiny table on the sidewalk, where she has a good view of the other students laughing and joking.
Natasha is licking the crumbs off of her fingertips when the target approaches her table. “You look lonely, comrade,” he says, pulling out the other chair. “Do you mind if I join you?” He seats himself before she has a chance to answer, and she schools her face into the fluster of a teenage girl meeting a stranger.
“I was just going,” she says quickly, and moves as if she is going to get up. He lays a hand over hers, holding her in place.
“Don’t leave on my account,” he says, holding up another pastry. “Look, I brought you another. You’re so skinny, I’m sure you could use some more to eat.” She hesitates, then sits down again, taking the pastry from him and thanking him. Times are hard in Russia, and the school is in a poor neighborhood. She eats as if she hasn’t had a full belly in weeks, but doesn’t want to let him know.
“What’s your name, comrade?” he asks, smiling.
“Katya.” Natasha swallows the last bite of the pastry.
“Ah, another Katya! My little sister’s name is Katya as well. You look like you are still hungry, comrade. Why don’t you come to my house? I think I have some cake, would you like that?”
She hesitates appropriately, then says, “I should go home. My mother is sick so I need to cook for her and my father.”
“Is that all? Well then you should definitely come with me, I have a big pot of borscht you can take home to them.” He maintains a large, friendly smile on his face at all times, but his eyes are calculating.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks, clenching a hand on her bag. He laughs.
“I can’t stand to see such a beautiful young woman going hungry,” he replies. “Maybe we can get to know each other, and then work out an arrangement. I am a bachelor; maybe you can help me around the house, and I can help you and your family.” The man stands, holding out a hand to her. “Come along, Katya, I’m sure we can work something out. Either way I will give you the soup.”
“All right,” she says, and follows him to his car. He chats politely on the drive to his house, telling her his name (a fake one) and about his job (not his real job). She tells him she is an only child and her father works in a clothing factory.
Inside the house, he takes her first to the kitchen, where he does indeed have a large soup pot full of borscht and a cake. He gives her a slice of cake on a plate, and when she finishes it he holds out another small piece in his fingertips. When she raises her eyebrows at him, he says, “If you eat it from my hand, I will let you take the rest home.” His intentions would be clear to any girl at this point, so Natasha plays the part of a poor girl who will do whatever is necessary to take care of herself and her family. She opens her mouth, sucks the crumbs from his fingertips.
“If you want me to do anything else,” she says, voice trembling, “you will have to pay me. Not just with food.” He smiles and pulls out his wallet.
She lets him feel her up in the kitchen, then follows him to his bedroom, dropping her bag on the night table. She waits until he is near orgasm, laying on his back on the bed with her in his lap, to make her move. He closes his eyes and drops his head back, fingers tightening on her hips; she reaches and pulls the garotte from the bag. With a twist of her thighs she climbs off and flips him in one movement, looping the garotte around his head, and lands with one knee between his shoulder blades. Before he can react Natasha pulls the garotte with all her strength and is rewarded by the crack of his neck breaking. Even so, she holds her position until there’s been no movement for five minutes before climbing off and getting dressed.
Ivan grins when she climbs into the car.
***
“What is it for?” Natasha asks, eyeing the hypodermic needle.
“I thought you knew not to ask such things by now.” The corner of Ivan’s mouth pulls back, not quite a smile. “But, since you are my favorite, I will tell you. Your body is a weapon. Weapons need care. Knives must be sharpened. The serum will keep your body like a sharp knife, much longer than it would be on its own.”
“You mean faster healing?” The needle slides in and the nurse presses down on the plunger. It burns, but she has been through far worse.
“Perhaps. Tell me, Natasha, what is your greatest strength? What is it that will make you successful?” Ivan’s pale green eyes travel over her body. Natasha knows the answer to this -- they have told her often enough.
“My youth and beauty. People will trust me and underestimate me.” This is, after all, the entire point of the Black Widow program.
“Then I think you know exactly what the serum is for.”
***
The first time they alter Natasha’s memories, she is 21 years old, but still looks 17. They are sending her into deep cover in New York, as a secretary for Stark Industries, to gather information on new weapons development and samples of the advanced truth serum that has been rumored. She has been studying English from a young age, and has the flat accent of the American midwest.
“The procedure should not be too painful,” says a man in a white coat as Natasha lays back in the hospital bed. “The nanites have been programmed to reroute your neural pathways, cutting off access to most of your memories and creating artificial ones. After the rerouting is complete, they will remain dormant until activated by a preset trigger to restore access to your real memories.”
Ivan watches her as they wipe down her arm with an antiseptic pad. “I expect they will try their truth serum on you before giving you access to classified information. We have no way of knowing how effective it is, but it cannot break through the physical change in your brain that the nanites will cause.”
“If I don’t remember what I’m there for, how will I accomplish the mission?”
“We will send another agent along to observe. When you have passed all of the background checks and have the highest clearance level, the other agent will provide the trigger, and be waiting to extract you.”
Natasha watches the black liquid in the syringe disappear into her arm, and feels a headache coming on. “And after the mission? How do you remove the nanites?”
“They can be programmed by radio frequency transmission,” the man in the white coat says as he tapes a cotton ball to her arm. “We can reprogram them for your next mission without any more invasive procedures.”
Ivan smiles, and there is a sparkle in his green eyes.
***
Susan arrives back at her apartment later than usual, Macy’s bag in one hand as she locks the door with the other. She can’t keep the grin off her face.
“Sue? You’re late, is everything--” Mary pauses in the doorway from the kitchen, a floral print apron covering her dark blue dress. “Oh my god. Is that what I think it is?” Susan pulls a shoebox out of the bag and shows her roommate the black stilettos that the two of them have been eyeing for months.
“Security clearance came through and I got the promotion!” Susan bounces excitedly on the balls of her feet as Mary pulls her into a hug and a silly dance around the living room. “I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself but payday is Friday so I thought it would be okay.”
“I’ll pick up the grocery bill this week if you’ll let me borrow those shoes, Sue. I was about to put a meatloaf in the oven, come on into the kitchen and tell me all about it.”
“Not much to tell,” Susan calls out as she drops the shoes and her purse in her bedroom. “They told me before that it was just waiting on the security clearance. Background check, that kind of stuff.” She comes back into the kitchen in time to see the loaf pan disappear into the oven. “I’m afraid that’s all I’m allowed to say about it.”
Mary glances at her with narrowed eyes. “You’ve always been good at keeping secrets,” she says.
***
Susan’s security clearance is increased from Confidential to Secret to Top Secret over the next two years. At this point it is high enough for her to know that the fuzzy memories she has of her previous clearance interview are due to the application of an experimental truth serum; she has taken dictation about it and filed paperwork on it. Apparently there is a shortage of trustworthy secretaries, so Susan is brought in for yet another clearance interview when the chief scientist of the chemical division needs someone to manage his paperwork.
“I didn’t even know there were any more clearance levels,” she tells Mary when the clearance comes through.. “I wish I could tell you more about it other than the same thing I’ve been telling you the past two years.”
“That’s all right,” Mary says, “I think I know all that I need to.” There is something different about her voice. Susan looks up from the crossword she has been working on and sees Mary unscrewing a small bottle.
“What is that, a new perfume?” she asks. Mary holds the bottle out for her and Susan is overwhelmed with a powerful smell, something like beets and chamomile and something sickly sweet that she can’t identify. “It’s pretty awful, I don’t know why you’d--” but Mary is saying something, something Susan can’t understand, and she suddenly has a pounding headache.
When the headache clears, Natasha is sitting at the table blinking at Marina. The jumble of Susan’s memories is still there, but only since she began at Stark Industries.
“Are you okay?” Marina asks in English.
“Never better,” Natasha replies in Russian.
***
It takes another month for Natasha to make copies of all the important files, hidden one at a time in the middle of batches of official copying she does. All that is left is obtaining a sample of the truth serum. Natasha uses the fastest method she can think of -- flirting with the chief scientist until she convinces him to stay after everyone else has gone for the day, then giving him the best blowjob of his life. Afterward, when he is halfway unconscious in his office, she tells him it’s best that they not be seen leaving together and that he should wait twenty minutes before following her out.
She uses a disposable pipet to draw off just a small amount of serum from each of twenty samples: enough to fill two small vials without anything going missing. Marina has prepared when she gets back to the apartment. There are two dead girls in the living room, and the place reeks of gasoline.
By the time the police declare that Susan Brown and Mary Smith were killed in a fire caused by a malfunctioning gas line, Natasha and Marina are on their way to Cuba. When they reach Moscow, Ivan is waiting with Natasha’s favorite cake.
***
The fifth time they alter her memories, Natasha is 35 years old but still looks 20. She spends a year as Oksana Vetrova, a ballet student in Moscow, falling in love with a high-ranking government official. They are married in a spectacular ceremony in Saint Basil’s cathedral, followed by an elaborate reception at a hotel. There is a man at the reception she feels she has seen before, but whom she cannot place. She wonders why he wears his gloves indoors.
The man corners her on her way back from the toilet and introduces himself as a perfume salesman. He offers her a sample, insisting it will make her wedding night more memorable. She recoils at the smell, beets and chamomile and rotting meat, and he says something but it is all nonsense; she must have had too much vodka because she suddenly has a pounding--
“Give me until 3:00,” she tells the Winter Soldier. “Bring rope.”
***
Later that night, when Viktor has exhausted himself and fallen asleep, Natasha lets the Winter Soldier into the hotel room from the balcony. They bind Viktor with a gun to his head to keep him quiet, and Natasha has the opportunity to demonstrate just how well she learned the Winter Soldier’s lessons in torture. He holds up admirably to beating and having his teeth extracted, but it doesn’t take much more than a knife pressed to his balls for the man to spill the names of every Capitalist in the Kremlin.
Natasha considers castrating him anyway, but the Winter Soldier shoots Viktor in the head before she gets a chance. He removes the silencer and packs away the gun while Natasha cleans her knife and washes her hands. “You’ve grown up, sweetheart,” he says, eyeing her appreciatively when she comes back from the bathroom.
“We have three more hours until the extraction.” Natasha puts one hand on the Winter Soldier’s chest and one on his belt buckle. “I’m even better at giving blowjobs now than I was when I was 14.”
The Winter Soldier laughs, hands reaching for her hips, and Natasha smiles.
***
Natasha is 55 years old, but still looks 25, when SHIELD tracks her down in Istanbul. She has been freelancing for nine years, since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nine years since she and the Winter Soldier had disobeyed orders, bringing a little girl in to the Black Widow program instead of killing her when she saw them assassinate her father. Nine years since she decided her memories had been altered more than enough times. Nine years since she had slit Ivan’s throat in his bed, killing the man who had been everything to her since he had picked her up outside a burning building when she was five years old.
Freelancing gives her space, gives her control, but it also makes her an easy target. She doesn’t have a network of operatives to rely on for backup, for extraction. Her employers could just as easily leave her to die if a mission goes wrong, and she doesn’t blame them; it would be the smart thing to do.
She knows the assassin is there -- has been there, watching her from the rooftops, monitoring her movements, for three weeks. Natasha has been toeing the line between following enough of a routine for SHIELD to find her and staying hidden enough that nobody else will.
It is the middle of the night when Natasha makes her move on the apartment building that is housing the arms dealers she’s been hired to clean out. The SHIELD assassin is on a rooftop across the street, having followed her from her hotel, but the windows of the building are boarded up. Once she’s inside, he won’t have a line of sight on her.
Natasha hasn’t bothered trying to charm her way into the group; she knows a woman would never be allowed into the building. Instead, she’s been watching the patterns, waiting for a day when the leader of the group is guaranteed to be inside, with half of his friends out on an assignment. For once, the direct approach will be the most effective, so Natasha kicks down the front door with a gun in each hand.
She takes out five men in the cramped entryway, rushing out of the first floor bedrooms. The building has a single staircase, which allows Natasha to shoot them one at a time as they emerge from the upper levels. Eventually, enough men are down in the stairwell that there is a risk of blocking it or of enough time passing for the others to escape from the windows, so she vaults over the pile of bodies and works her way up to the third floor.
By the time she reaches her target, they have pried the boards off of the windows and are lowering him out on a rope. Natasha takes out the remaining bodyguards with her last bullets, then leans out the window and throws a knife into the heart of the target, who has just reached the ground.
In the open window, Natasha raises her hands and looks directly at the assassin on the opposite roof. He has a bow and arrow, rather than a gun, and she smiles. New weapons are always interesting. “I want to defect,” she says, exaggerating the movement of her mouth so that he can read her lips even if he can’t hear her. He hesitates, then gestures with the arrow -- down. She backs away slowly and makes her way out of the apartment building, emerging onto the street with her hands still up. By the time she gets there, he is on the ground, a grapple attached to the roof he came from. The bow is still in his hands, and the arrow is still drawn, aimed straight at her left eye.
“You let me find you,” he says. “You’re better than that.”
Natasha shrugs her shoulders. “Like I said, I want to defect.” She takes a step toward him and he backs up.
“Don’t come any closer. Drop all of your weapons and get on your knees, hands behind your back. I’m going to cuff you. If I think you’re trying to trick me, I will kill you.”
She moves slowly, taking four guns out of their holsters, putting them on the ground, and kicking them away. Next are the six knives, one on each ankle, one on each thigh, and one on each arm. She uncoils the garotte from around her waist and kicks it away as well, then sinks onto her knees and crosses her wrists behind her back. “You know, if I was going to kill you, I would have done it three weeks ago when you started following me,” she says.
He lowers the bow and pulls a gun from his hip, then slowly circles around her and approaches from behind, the gun trained on her head. He presses it against the back of her skull while he cuffs her with his other hand. “I started following you four weeks ago,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
***
A week into her stay with SHIELD, Natasha is fairly certain she’s given them all of the information they could possible want about the Red Room and the Black Widow program. She’s been subjected to an improved formula of Stark Industries’ truth serum three times, and every time her story has been the same. Agent Barton has been watching from behind the one-way glass; she hears snatches of his voice or his footsteps whenever the door opens to the interrogation room. It only makes sense that he would want to stick around to see if he should have killed her after all.
On the seventh day of interrogations, a blonde woman she hasn’t seen before comes into the room and sits down across from her. Her lips don’t move, but I’m going to examine your mind echoes inside of Natasha’s head, and she is submerged in memories.
***
Winter in Moscow. A little girl stumbles out of a burning building, blood staining the snow where it drips from her hand.
***
Natasha shoves the heel of her foot between the woman’s shoulder blades and leans backward. She has more leverage now, and the muscles in her arms tense as she pulls as hard as she can on the sides of the wire. Gradually, the struggling grows less.
***
“Keep your lips over your teeth,” Ivan says as he pushes himself into her mouth. “That’s a good girl.”
***
“Tell me, Natasha, what is your greatest strength? What is it that will make you successful?” Ivan’s pale green eyes travel over her body. Natasha knows the answer to this -- they have told her often enough.
***
Susan gazes longingly at the black stilettos in the window at Macy’s. Only two more steps in her security clearance interview and she will be able to afford them.
***
“You’ve grown up, sweetheart,” the Winter Soldier says, eyeing her appreciatively
***
Rachel organizes her papers, selecting the ones she needs to read up on to assist in Dr. Schwartzkopf’s research.
***
Oksana carefully wraps her bleeding toenails. The rehearsal was long, and so much time en pointe has left her feet a mess. Her legs are sore, and her arms. She pulls on baggy sweat pants and a sweatshirt and packs the first aid kit into her bag next to her toe shoes.
***
The Winter Soldier hesitates when he sees the little girl under the table. His target trembles, waiting, pleading. Natasha takes the girl by the hand and walks out of the house, and they wait in the car for the Winter Soldier to finish his job.
***
“Natalia,” Ivan gasps, breath wet and bubbly as the blood gushes from his jugular. She cradles his head close to her chest.
“I’m sorry, Ivan. You always knew it would come to this.”
***
“They really did a number on you,” the blonde woman says to Natasha when her sift through Natasha’s memories is complete. “I can see why you were ready to leave. They must have had a powerful telepath to embed those memories so deep, and erase all traces of the process.” Natasha shrugs her shoulders and glances toward the one-way glass.
“Is this the last test?” she asks. “I’ve done a lot of ugly things in my life and I’ll probably do a lot more. I have a very specific skill set. I’ll use my skills for SHIELD as long as SHIELD isn’t going to mess with my head.” There is a long silence. Natasha wonders what Agent Barton is saying to his boss on the other side of the wall. Is he arguing her case? Has he decided he should have killed her instead?
The door clicks open and a tall man with an eyepatch walks in. The stare of his remaining eye is hard and calculating. “Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Romanoff,” he says finally, extending his hand.
***
Natasha is 67 years old but still looks 28 when Loki decides to bring an alien army to invade Earth. She fights her best friend, debates with herself about killing him, and pulls her punch at the last possible moment.
“Have you ever had someone take your brain and play?” he asks her, sweating and tense from the residual effects on his mind. “Pull you out, and stuff something else in?
“You know what it’s like to be unmade?” Clint’s eyes are pleading, begging for understanding, and for forgiveness.
“You know that I do,” she replies.
***
Natasha is 70 years old, but still looks 28. She has been with SHIELD for fifteen years. It’s been a good fifteen years, as such things go. She’s fought, killed, spied, tortured, and been tortured, but for a Black Widow that is all in a day’s work. The primary difference between SHIELD and the Red Room isn’t the work, it’s the people. SHIELD takes care of its own, when it can. When SHIELD can’t rescue an operative in a mission gone south, they at least provide a swift death.
Natasha respects her coworkers, for the most part. Still, she prefers to be alone; it is part of her, whether by nature or nurture, so when Tony Stark offers all of the Avengers a place to live in Stark Tower, she doesn’t take him up on it. Instead, she keeps an apartment in Midtown, where she has easy access to Stark Tower and the local SHIELD office.
She unlocks the door and enters her apartment after a long day of debriefings, when she notices something is wrong. The sound of breathing, the smell of a body --
“Don’t move, sweetheart. You know I can kill you before you get a weapon out.” The lights come on; the Winter Soldier stands next to the switch by the kitchenette, gun aimed directly at Natasha’s head.
“I thought the Red Room got shut down along with the KGB after the dissolution,” she says. “Can I at least shut the door and put down my bag?”
He nods and motions with the gun for her to come forward. “The Red Room only worked for the KGB because it was convenient. You know that.”
“Why are you here? Obviously not to kill me or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I’m here to bring you in.” He throws something in her direction -- a glass vial, which hits the wall near her and breaks, flooding the room with an awful smell. The Winter Soldier’s words become gibberish, and a too-familiar headache nearly knocks Natasha off her feet.
When it clears, the Winter Soldier is still staring down the barrel of his gun at her. “Why send you just to extract me?” she asks. “They could have sent anyone.”
“Twenty-four years is an awfully long time for an undercover mission,” he replies. A fringe of dark hair falls in his eyes, and he pushes it back with one hand. Natasha can’t help remembering another apartment, another time, another place. “Even though you remember why you’re here now, maybe you don’t want to come back. If you don’t want to come back, I’m going to kill you. You know I’m the only one who can shoot faster than you can react.” She looks at him, and says nothing. “I’d really rather prefer that you come back,” he says. “Things were much more interesting with you around. They’ve only taken me off the ice twice since you left.”
“All right. SHIELD or the Red Room, it makes no difference to me who I work for.” Natasha sits down on the sofa and kicks her feet up on the coffee table. “When is the extraction?”
“Tomorrow, 9:00pm. Private jet out of Teterboro.” He lowers the gun and tosses a USB stick at her. “Fill it up with whatever you think is most important. Make it look like you were kidnapped -- they might want to send you back in some day.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” she asks, pulling off her shoes and stretching her toes.
“Three more jobs in New York for me.” The Winter Soldier walks closer, into attack range, and sits down next to her. He draws her legs onto his lap and begins to massage her feet. “I had all of tonight marked off for catching you, though.”
***
The next day, Natasha smuggles the USB stick into the SHIELD office inside her bra. Stark Tower has more intel available to her, but also much better security. She picks and chooses information, triple encrypting it before transferring to the stick.
On her way out in the afternoon, she composes an email to Clint, encrypts it, and sets it to be delivered at 10:00.
***
Winter in Moscow. Snow piles up along the streets, and people huddle in layers of furs, red faces peering out as they go about their business. A crow caws, black against the white snow on a rooftop. Warmth and music spill out for a moment as the door of a restaurant is opened and closed.
When Natasha arrives, Ivan is there waiting, with her favorite cake. His hair is silver and thin on top, and he walks with a cane. The wrinkles of his face deepen when he sees her.
She joins him in his bedroom the same night. This time, when she slits his throat, it’s not just a false memory.
