Chapter Text
Red Room, Russia, 1996
> Melina
The first time Melina and Natasha’s paths cross in the Red Room it’s been more than a year since Cuba. To be specific, it has been a year, three months and seven days — not that Melina’s counting, obviously.
The thing is, the older widow is not worried about Natasha dying, because she knows the young redhead well enough to know how much of a fighter she is, especially with all of the rumors going around (“Have you heard? Natalia Romanova just had her first kill.” or “That redhead is Dreykov’s and Madame B’s favorite, she just beat a girl three years older than her.” or “Some people think that Romanova is gonna be the future of the Red Room.”)
The real thing is, Melina’s just lying to herself, and the fear — terror, if she’s honest with herself — is always there, in the pit of her stomach, and she just can’t make it go away.
So, the first time she sees the redhead after Cuba, the Iron Maiden has to physically stop herself from running into the room and make sure the girl is okay (she isn’t, Melina knows that very well, but it’s nice to pretend they’re back in Ohio, back to taking care of each other and feel safe).
Natasha doesn’t see her (she never will, not for another twenty years), too busy analyzing the girl in front of her, who’s at least five years older than her and in a fighting stance, ready to attack.
Madame B is standing behind them, unbothered by the whole thing, and when she moves her head — almost imperceptibly, if you weren’t trained to see all of those kinds of things — the older girl jumps forward, immediately aiming at Natasha’s legs (Melina later finds out her name was Sonja, but it doesn’t matter anymore when she does).
The redhead dodges her hit easily, turning around and quickly lacing her legs around Sonja’s head. They fall on the floor with a loud thump, but Melina doesn’t even flinch at the sound.
The fight continues for what feels like hours, and it’s almost like a dance, beautiful in some twisted way, with the blood dripping on the ground and the sound of bones cracking. Natasha is fast, light on her feet, but Sonja is older, stronger, more experienced — not as much as she should be, Melina notes, or maybe it’s the redhead who is far better than every other girl her age.
And then, with the umpteenth thump, Natasha is down on the floor and she doesn’t get up, chest rising and falling too fast, her ragged breath loud enough that Melina can hear it, and the woman freezes, terrified.
There’s silence, she thinks — she wouldn’t know, not with the sound of her own blood rushing through her ears — and Madame B waits, waits, and waits, until she doesn’t anymore. She walks to the table in the corner of the room, picking up the gun sitting over it, and Melina’s breath falters (no, please, not Natasha, not her Natasha, not yet).
The glock slips in Sonja’s hands and Melina closes her eyes, just to open them a second later — she doesn’t want to see this, but she has to, — and that’s when it happens, so suddenly that the woman almost starts sobbing right there on the spot.
Natasha gets up.
Odessa, Ukraine, 2009
> Maria
Maria gets the call at 4 a.m. in the morning, and she’s on a quinjet headed to Ukraine before she even realizes it.
“Natasha’s been shot. It’s bad. The engineer is dead. The shooter is gone,” are the only things she’s able to extort from Coulson, whose voice is almost shaking while speaking, and Maria can’t remember the last time it happened.
The flight isn’t long (it is, but the agent feels numb, and scared, and she can’t stop thinking about Natasha, the young woman who was brought in four years prior by Agent Barton, still unable to function like a real person because of the things that were done to her).
They land hours later and Maria doesn’t even think before bolting out of the jet, she just runs as fast as possible through the hospital door and up the stairs — Natasha’s condition was too critical to move her to a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, and that on its own is bad enough.
Clint is already in the waiting room, knees bent over the chair and head in his hands, rocking back and forth. Maria approaches him, shoving her own fear inside her mind and landing one hand on the archer’s shoulder.
“Oh my God, Maria,” he says desperately once his eyes are on the woman. “Please, do something, they won’t tell me anything and I don’t know—” Clint chokes on the words and takes a deep breath before continuing. “There was so much blood, Maria, so much blood.”
He shouldn’t be affected this much — none of them should, but Maria has a feeling she would be acting the same way if she was in Clint’s shoes — and still, Natasha was — is — his partner, and everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. knows how deep their bond goes.
“I’m going to take care of this, wait here,” Maria finally responds, trying to keep the panic that’s blossoming in her chest out of her voice for the man’s sake (and hers, somehow).
It happens quickly — too quickly. One moment, she is walking towards the nurse desk to find some information about Natasha’s condition, the next she’s caught in the middle of a group of doctors and nurses rushing in the corridor, and everyone’s pushing each other and screaming so loud that Maria almost falls on the ground.
She follows them, ignoring those who try to stop her — she’s a trained agent, for fuck’s sake — and her heart almost stops when she finally gets to their destination.
Though the large window, Maria can now clearly see Natasha’s body, almost as pale as the sheets of the bed she’s lying on, and it’s wrong — it’s all wrong, and Maria’s heart is speeding up, the air closing around her, because the redhead is dying right in front of her and nothing makes sense anymore.
The nurses are saying something, but the only thing the brunette hears is the low buzz in her ears and Clint’s shallow breaths on her left, although she can't remember when he got there.
“Please, Nat, please hold on,” Maria whispers — begs, really. “Please don’t leave me.”
They’re all holding their breath when a small beep breaks through the ringing in the woman’s ears, and she finds herself crying out in relief when her eyes fall on Natasha’s heartbeat, not as strong and steady as it should be, but still there.
Hours later, when the redhead wakes up, Maria is the only person who’s still in the room — she had to send Clint away for a while to let him gather his thoughts, because the man was more of a wreck than she was, and that’s saying something.
“Hey,” Natasha breaks the silence, voice raw and weak, and it feels like the best thing Maria has ever heard in her life.
“God, Tasha, you scared us,” she admits, getting up from her chair and approaching the bed. “You scared me.”
The redhead cracks a smile, tilting her head, “Can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Now, if she’s honest with herself, Maria has no idea where all of the emotions are coming from, the only thing she knows is that suddenly her eyes are burning and tears are streaming down her face, and she can’t stop them.
“Oh, Ria,” Natasha says softly, hands cupping the older woman’s cheeks. “I’m here, I’m okay.”
“You have so much more to live for,” the brunette sobs, unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Please, please, don’t give up.”
“I’m not giving up, I promise.”
Maria stares at Natasha through blurry eyes, and she believes her.
Avengers Compound, New York, 2015
> Wanda
“I have no place in the world.”
The words play in Wanda’s mind over and over, they have since that day at the shipyard, they haunt her in a way that shouldn’t feel so personal.
She’d caught a glimpse of all of the fears she’d brought up in the Avengers mind, but she hadn’t cared — not at the time, when her only goal had been revenge, even if that meant hurting people in the process — until she’d gotten to Natasha.
She’d stopped, for a second, because it had been different from every other fear she’d ever faced before. When they were testing her powers, they often made her do that — entering someone’s mind, making them live their worst fears — and what she saw wasn’t surprising, almost boring.
The Avengers had been different, because they were afraid of the future on a much larger scale in comparison to other people, but their visions were still not that special, all of them except Natasha.
She hadn’t meant to stay (like she said, she couldn’t have cared less) but then she’d realized, and she’d stopped, because for the first time Wanda wasn’t making someone live their worst fear, but re live it, and the thought had made her sick — the idea of being so haunted by your past that you can’t shake the memories away.
She’d seen ballet shoes, guns into the hands of an eleven year-old, knives, she’d heard the sound of bones snapping, the screams of anguish, she’d felt the pain, the fear, the hopelessness, the self-hate, she’d looked down to see crimson lines on her wrist, and blood, blood everywhere, so much blood that she’d thought it would have drowned her.
And then, those words, spoken with so much despair that she’d felt her heart breaking right there and then, crumpling on the cold floor, with nothing to hope for anymore.
“I have no place in the world.”
“Exactly.”
Now, at 3 a.m. in the morning, Wanda wanders around the compound, hands shaking and longing for a cup of tea to hold between them, the scented steam caressing her nostrils and calming down her nerves, because she’s woken up again with that voice in her head — she almost dreams Natasha’s nightmares more than her own, at this point.
The kitchen is empty, and soon the silence is broken by the noise of Wanda opening cabinets to find a mug and her loved teas, stored behind all of the breakfast foods.
She finds the one she wants and while she’s waiting she settles at the table, not before having grabbed the book she’s currently reading from the couch — she’s not sure how it ended up here, because she still doesn’t spend a lot of time with the team, but she’s not going to complain.
They’ve told her they trust her, and Wanda wants to believe them — she does, actually, with everyone but one person. She’s seen the way Natasha always sits in the corner farther from her, she’s seen her flinch the one time she’s taken her plate to the table making it float with her powers (she’s made a mental note not to use them around the redhead after that).
“Don’t worry, she’s like that,” Steve had told her one afternoon while sparring, seeing the way Wanda’s gaze had followed Natasha leaving the room right after she’d entered it.
“What?” she’d tried, acting dumb, but the blonde hadn’t bought it.
“Natasha,” he’d clarified, “she was like that with everyone at the beginning. She doesn’t know how to trust people, but she’ll get there with you too eventually, I know it.”
Wanda had wanted to tell him that it was more than that, but she’d shut her mouth, knowing that he wouldn’t have understood — nobody would’ve, because they didn’t carry the same weight as Natasha, and Wanda was the only one who knew that.
The sound of the window slamming against the wall brings her out of her thoughts, and that’s when she realizes it has been open this whole time — how hasn’t she noticed?
Wanda gets up from the table and moves to close it, when something — someone, she notices — catches her attention from the roof and she stops in her tracks, squinting to see better in the dark.
Her breath stops for a second as she makes out Natasha’s petite figure sitting right at the edge, feet dangling into nothingness and hair ruffled by the wind that is hitting her with so much force that for a second Wanda fears it might push the woman down.
The brunette doesn’t know what to do, not when she’s scared that revealing herself would be the worst idea but also terrified of what could happen if she didn’t — it could just end with Natasha knocking her out for seeing her in a moment of weakness, and that would be the best alternative.
The redhead raises her hand and takes a long swing from the bottle she’s holding — vodka? — making Wanda take a step forward, and then two, three, until she’s five feet away from the woman and she stops.
Natasha doesn’t do anything, doesn’t even bother to turn, but Wanda has a feeling that she knows she’s standing there. She just waits, feeling her hands twitch at the memory of the scars on the redhead’s forearms, pretending that she doesn't know where those come from and hoping that things are not as bad as they seem.
“I’m not going to jump,” Wanda freezes at the sound of Natasha’s voice, her words slightly slurred (how much of that vodka has she drunk?), and when the woman finally turns in her direction she has to physically stop herself from comforting her.
There are tear tracks on the redhead’s cheeks, clearly still fresh, and her eyes are bloodshot, the moon reflecting itself inside of the green orbs like it would on the surface of a lake. Her nose is red — Wanda doesn’t know if that’s from the cold temperature or the crying — and when she sniffles it’s like a punch in the gut for the brunette.
Natasha gets up, the vodka bottle still clutched between her fingers, and she speaks the next words so quietly Wanda almost doesn’t hear them. “It’s not high enough anyway.”
With that she leaves, feet as light as cat paws, and the brunette can’t do anything if not watch her go, heart heavier with every step Natasha takes.
Budapest, Hungary, 2017
> Yelena
It happens after a mission — of course it does. It has been almost a year since the day they took down the Red Room (for real, that is), and Yelena hasn’t kept in touch with Natasha a lot during the past months.
First, her sister had been busy with freeing her friends from an underwater prison, then with helping them hide from the government, and between this and Yelena’s job of freeing the widows, they hadn’t been able to meet up until it was almost 2017.
They’d spent Christmas (the American one) with Alexei and Melina, to relive old memories from the Ohio years — and there was so much pain on Natasha’s face at the thought, because Christmases in Ohio were never the same for her, much like everything else.
Still, she’d shown up, put on a smile, because that’s what her older sister does, no matter what is going on inside her head.
They meet again months later, in Budapest, and the way Yelena puts away her gun the moment she hears her sister’s voice is almost ironic — it’s so different from their meeting the year prior, when the same voice had been the reason she’d picked up the weapon.
When their eyes meet the blonde almost cries at the emptiness in Natasha’s, at her lost expression, at the bags so deep under those dull green irises that it seems like they’re cutting into her face.
“Are you okay?” she asks, and she’s not even ashamed at how worried the words sound (this is something that she would’ve been punished for in the Red Room, but she can’t bring herself to care — especially because this is Natasha, her big sister, for fuck’s sake).
“Sure.”
“фигня [bullshit],” it comes out louder and harsher than she meant it to, and Yelena curses herself under her breath when Natasha flinches — one more sign that she is, in fact, not okay. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scream.”
The redhead looks down at her shaking hands, taking a deep breath to ground herself. “I need a mission.”
“What?”
“A mission, I want to help you, Lenka,” Natasha looks up, her eyes silently pleading her to give her something to keep the thoughts out of her mind (Yelena gets it, she does). “Please.”
The blonde sighs, knowing there’s no reasoning with her sister when she’s like this. “Fine, let’s go.”
They end up in some back street in the middle of Budapest, focused on finding a widow Yelena’s been tracking for a few days now. They find her, except the widow is not one, but four.
The fight is not long — no matter how good the widows are, no one matches Natasha and Yelena, everyone in the Red Room knew that — and still, Yelena can’t stop herself from looking around even once the widows are freed, that feeling that they’re not safe appearing in her gut.
The gunshot goes off from behind her, quickly followed by a small whimper, and the blonde freezes when she recognises who the sound came from.
She turns slowly, terrified to see – she shouldn’t be, they taught her better than this – but she’s sprinting the moment she sees Natasha’s body crumpling on itself, blood spilling on the pavement and mixing with the other from the fight, already drying on the floor.
The other widows only need one look to know what they have to do, and they’re gone in a matter of seconds to look for the shooter, leaving Yelena alone with her sister, panicking.
She lifts Natasha enough that she can lay her against the wall of the abandoned alley, trying to control her breathing when she notices her eyes are closed. “Natka? Natasha, can you hear me?”
The redhead just nods, weakly, and Yelena lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“I’m gonna open your suit now, okay?”
Another nod, so the blonde starts removing the high part of the black suit — she could wait for help, or at least move back into the safe house, but she is panicking, and blood is still coming out from Natasha’s side, taking a huge chunk of her concentration.
The fabric slides on the older sister’s arms, and Yelena almost wants to throw up at the amount of scars and almost fresh cuts that are littering the redhead’s milky skin — that should not be so pale to start with, but that’s not the first thing that comes to the blonde’s mind. “Oh, Natasha,” she lets out, tears threatening to spill on her cheeks.
“‘s okay,” Natasha slurs, shallow breaths coming out too fast — it’s not okay, it’s never going to be fucking okay. She looks up, meeting Yelena’s teary eyes. “Why you cryin’?”
“I’m worried about you,” the blonde almost sobs, not able to stop herself, because her big sister is dying in front of her and she’s only seeing it now that she’s physically bleeding (and her mind won’t stop reminding her about the bandages on Natasha’s arms when they’d fist fought in the safe house, about the hollow look in her eyes, about the risks she’d taken during the whole bringing-down-the-Red-Room situation — she should’ve noticed, because the signs were all there, and she hadn’t).
Natasha’s eyes focus on Yelena’s hands as they try to stop the bleeding, and the blonde feels a warm feeling in her chest when a hand lands softly on her arm. “I’m not dyin’.”
“You were shot, Natasha.”
“I’m not dying,” the redhead repeats, her voice clearer. “I promise.”
It turns out Natasha really keeps her promises, because they make it to the safe house alive, and after stitching up each other they conclude that they’re okay — for now, but Yelena knows it won’t last for long, and the fear of really losing her sister for the second time weights on her stomach like a brick (she wants to ignore it, to pretend that isn’t a real possibility, but she can’t, not again, not now that she knows).
They talk the day after that, and it’s not an easy talk. Natasha opens up — in a way she hasn’t for years, she tells Yelena — and the words just tumble out so fast — self-harm, disordered eating, nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, depression, and a bunch of other heavy things that are too much for only one person to carry around.
When she's done, the blonde doesn't want to let her go, not when she's still such a danger to herself, but they have no choice in the matter. Natasha is still an international fugitive, and Yelena is, to put it nicely, a threat to the public (at least in most people's eyes).
So, they say goodbye to each other with the promise of keeping more in touch, and Yelena tells Natasha that she’ll always be there if things get bad again, that she’s gonna come wherever the redhead is hiding if the need to slide a blade across her wrist becomes too strong.
As she watches her sister leave, Yelena hopes that’s enough.
Fairburn, Georgia, 2021
> Tony (+ Pepper)
Three years. Three fucking years. That’s the amount of time it has passed since the last time Tony has seen Natasha in person, and he doesn’t even know why, or how time has gone by so quickly.
He’d been mad at her after the airport fight — furious, even — but it hadn’t taken long to forgive her, because he’d understood why she’d done what she’d done not too long after she had left him on the balcony, his own words still resonating in his ears (he’d never regretted anything that much).
Tony had seen the look on her face, pretended that it hadn’t hurt him too when her eyes had flashed with pain and grief — grief for losing the only family she’d ever had, or at least that’s what he thought.
Still, he hadn’t bothered to make contact with her, not even when the news had shown images of the Red Room falling from the sky (he hadn’t needed to listen to Ross’s angry voice over the phone to know she was the one who’d done it).
They’d met for the first time again after Thanos, and he’d been too weak, angry, grieving, too tired to really give the now blonde his attention. He’d woken up a few times to her sitting at his side, but she’d never said anything, only made sure he was okay — he wasn’t, and she wasn’t either.
Three years later, Tony opens the door of his cabin and she’s there, looking smaller than she’s ever had, almost shy, and it’s something that doesn’t fit her, not in the slightest. “Romanoff, what are you doing here?”
“This was a mistake,” Natasha murmurs after a moment, turning to leave. “Sorry, I— I shouldn’t have come, sorry.”
The man watches her walk on the porch, too baffled to react, then he shakes his head and moves to grab her arm (he notices the way she flinches slightly, he notices how she’s not that good at hiding how she’s feeling, if she’s even trying — Tony can’t tell). “Red, hey, stop!”
“Look, I didn’t mean to disturb, I’m—”
“Come on, you want me to believe you just drove for 14 hours just to turn and leave?” he asks, letting a loud scoff follow his words.
Natasha raises an eyebrow and tilts her head to the side. “I took a quinjet.”
“Same fucking thing.”
“Actually—”
“Natasha.” Tony finally snaps, and the redhead sighs, her gaze dropping to the floor.
“Look, I uhm,” Natasha starts, voice shaking slightly. “I know that I'm probably the last person you want to see right now but need someone, and uhm, Steve is in Brooklyn, Carol’s in space, I have no clue where Thor or Bruce are, Clint’s MIA—” she chokes on the last word, and Tony swears there are tears in her eyes — he’s never seen her like this, not since Wanda’s visions, and it scares him more than he wants to admit. “I don’t have anyone,” the final admission comes out brokenly, followed by a small laugh that sounds more like a cry.
“Do you want to come in?”
Natasha just nods, so Tony leads the way into the cabin and they get to the living room, where Pepper is sitting in the armchair, Morgan sound asleep in her arms. She raises her head to look at them, and her husband doesn’t miss the way she tries to hide her surprise. “Natasha?”
“Hey, Pepper,” the redhead says shyly, her eyes moving on Morgan’s frame. “I’m sorry I never came here before.”
Pepper gets up, and in a second her daughter is back in her crib and the woman’s arms are around Natasha, holding her tightly. Tony looks between the two, smiling slightly when he sees the redhead relax a little into the hug.
“I’m going to take Morgan upstairs, you do whatever you need to do,” Pepper says after a while, then she leaves, the three year-old resting her forehead on the mother’s shoulder, eyes still closed.
Tony and Natasha sit on the couch, putting a small distance between each other, and surprisingly it’s the woman who breaks the silence — not the awkward kind of silence, but still one that needs to be broken. “Morgan’s really beautiful, I’m happy for you.”
In response the man smiles softly, then his eyes land on Natasha’s hands, that are fidgeting with the sleeves of her jacket, and he’s reminded of the reason why she’s come there in the first place. “What’s wrong, Red? I mean, beside the obvious.”
The redhead bites her lip, eyes lost somewhere he’ll never know, like she’s tasting the words on her tongue. “I have, uhm,” she starts after a moment, “before Thanos, I was working on getting rid of... habits… bad ones, and uhm—” Natasha stops, breaths ragged.
“Now you’re falling back into them?” Tony tries to guess, having a feeling that she’s not going to be able to admit that by herself.
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
For the first time, Natasha meets his eyes, and he can see the pain inside of them — it’s so clear, raw, that he wonders how he’s not noticed until now. “I used to hurt myself, first in the Red Room, the again after Ultron, and then someone found out, and she helped me as much as she could, and now—”
“She’s gone too.”
A tear slips down Natasha’s cheek as she nods, and Tony reaches out one hand in a comforting gesture, holding hers when she doesn’t give signs of pulling back or flinching.
“I’m proud of you,” he says, and he means it with every cell of his body, “For telling me, you know. This is a big deal, and I’m glad you’re trusting me.”
“I don’t know how to stop anymore,” Natasha whispers with a sniffle, voice breaking on the last words, and for a moment Tony thinks she looks like a child, the child she never got the chance to be.
“It’s okay, Nat,” he says softly, squeezing her shaking hand. “We’re here, we’re gonna help you now.”
And they do. In the next two years, until the Time Heist, Tony and Pepper become Natasha’s safe place, the people she turns to when things get bad — which is often, especially during the last months.
She gets bad before she gets better, and even then, she gets bad again. The whole time it’s like a rollercoaster, but still she keeps getting up, keeps fighting, and Tony watches as she finds the strength to go on every time he thinks she’s too far gone.
For a while, he thinks they’ll be okay.
It takes one single minute for him to realize how wrong he was.