Chapter Text
[June 16th, 2078 – New York City]
Claire Danvers was having a very good day. The art gallery she owned and managed had been through a rough month, but this was the week business went up again and on that Thursday she sold three pieces. She couldn't even remember when the last time she had such a lucrative afternoon was. The day was coming to an end and she was talking with the woman who had just purchased a painting, when something seen out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
She turned around and saw, through the glass wall facing the street, a woman standing on the sidewalk. It took her exactly three seconds to recognize her; she had the greenest eyes and red hair that made her unmistakable.
Claire smiled to herself and raised a hand, tentatively waving at the woman and gauging her reaction, hoping for a flash of recognition in her eyes. The woman blinked once, twice, then raised her right hand, that a moment before had been firmly pressed to her abdomen. Her fingers moved slightly in a greeting gesture. She smiled back. A weak, sad smile, that made Claire's heart beat a little faster in her chest. Her eyes shifted to the woman's hand. That was the moment her smiled vanished, as she saw the red stains on the fingers, the palm, the wrist. Something was wrong.
She rushed to the door but could see as she opened it, the woman already starting to fall to her knees. She wasn't going to be able to catch her, she wasn't that fast. But though her eyes stayed on the exact same spot while she opened the door and moved forward, the woman disappeared into thin air. She was there a moment before, bleeding and lost, Claire was positive she hadn't imagined the woman.
And yet, a moment later she was gone, before her knees could even hit the ground.
[March 8th, 2007 – S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, location classified]
Nick Fury was having a very bad day. A very bad week. A very bad month, even. The council had been harassing him about some of his projects and had essentially ordered him to drop some of the ones that weren't showing results yet. Furthermore, Coulson and May had been stationed on the helicarrier for a week and they were already starting to get restless, while Hawkeye and Morse had been starting to lose patience after three days. He was starting to envision a better future, a decade or something similar ahead, when his most promising agents weren't in their early twenties anymore and were actually experienced enough and patient enough to stop questioning his decisions and his orders.
His phone started ringing and he picked up swiftly, ready to hear about another problem, another failed project, another bit of bad news.
“Sir, this is Agent Simmons,” the speaker announced herself, even though her unmistakable British accent left no doubt. “I'm calling about the Web Thread.”
Ah, yes – another project that wasn't showing results. He had just finished discussing that matter with the council and they would probably have to shut it down soon.
“We did it, sir,” her voice trembled slightly at the end, like she was carefully trying to hold back the excited note that Fury could still detect, “we caught her.”
There was a moment when Fury thought maybe he had heard her wrong. Because he’d been having a terrible week – month, really – and this news was a game changer. This was what he needed to both show the council results and finally assign his most promising agents to a mission worthy of their time.
“Call the rest of the team assigned to this, I'm on my way.” He hung up the phone and got up, exiting his office and marching towards the lab with a new-found bounce in his step.
Once he got there, he took a moment to savor the feeling of a much needed victory, the feeling that things were finally turning in their favour. But not even Nick Fury could have ever been prepared for what was waiting for him on the other side of the lab door.
Fitz-Simmons were on his side as soon as he stepped in.
“Sir, we can't keep her here for much longer. We initially thought we had caught her, but after further analysis we realized this isn't the present-time her; she comes from 2002 and was jumping back into 2001,” Fitz explained.
“We pulled her out of her jump and brought her here, but it's like pulling on an elastic band, at some point it's going to snap back to its origin point,” Simmons went on.
Fury was hearing their voices, but he wasn't actively listening to them. The Web – that was what Fitz called it, but it wasn't anything more than a fancy cage with transparent walls – wasn't empty anymore. There was someone in it, but it wasn't the person Fury thought they would catch. They had been after her for months, years, and this was not what he thought they would see once they finally found her.
“-could be six hours, could be twelve seconds, there's no way to know. It all depends on how much time she was in the past for. We can only prevent her from jumping back, but when her time is up, there's nothing we can do, she'll jump back to her present time,” Simmons concluded.
“Sir, are you listening?” Agent Morse’s voice made him raise his gaze.
“This is her?” He asked Fitz-Simmons, then turned to Bobbi, and then back to the girl in the Web again. “This kid,” he stressed the word, “is the Black Widow?”
“Yes, sir. There is nobody else who can be caught in this machine,” Simmons confirmed. “Unless there's another time traveler we're not aware of. Which is highly improbable.”
The girl had long, red hair and piercing green eyes. She was short and looked really young standing there, her chin slightly tilted to the side, observing each one of them. Her eyes scanned the room, then Fury's person, then Fitz-Simmons. She looked briefly at Bobbi, May and Coulson, then stopped at Barton. After a second, her eyes darted away again and she resumed her observation of the room.
“We tried questioning her, she isn't answering any questions, not even about what year is she from, we had to pick up the trail she left to figure it out,” Bobbi told him.
“We thought maybe she didn't speak English,” Clint added, “we tried a few more languages, but nothing will get a reaction out of her.”
Fury didn't say anything, he kept staring through the glass wall at the girl. The Black Widow. She was known by many names, but that was by far the less dramatic. Other honorable mentions were the Devil's Mistress, the Dark Ghost, the Devil's Keeper and, Fury's personal favorite despite its minimalism, Mania – the goddess of death. Staring at her then felt surreal and beyond out-of-character. This little girl looked so innocent, whilst all those legends, all those stories about her, they were anything but.
He knew better than to be deceived by appearances, but it was still strange to say the least. He had the feeling that whatever might have been the thing that made her, that shaped her into the Goddess of Death, that turned her into the Black Widow, it hadn't happened yet.
“So, she's right here, but we can't keep her, we can't stop her, we can't even talk to her?” He turned and saw Fitz-Simmons look at each other and then to the ground, so he looked at Bobbi, but she just shook her head a little.
That was the moment the lab door opened again and Agent Carter walked in, followed by Agent Hill. They were the only other team members missing, but it wouldn't be important if they couldn't even figure a way to keep Black Widow around, there would be no prisoner to interrogate.
Carter muttered an apology about how they were on the deck when they got Jemma's call, but Fury was more concerned about the look in Hill's eyes than the fact they were a couple of minutes late. Something wasn't right.
Maria stopped as soon as she entered the room and raised her eyes towards the woman in the cage, the reason they were called and ordered there. The alleged Black Widow.
She froze, completely stopped dead in her tracks.
The red hair, the green eyes, even the curious tilt of her chin were familiar to her. She knew that woman.
Standing on shaky legs she stepped forward and walked to the glass, she felt Fury's eyes on her and with every step she took, she could practically feel the others starting to stare at her as well. She didn't care, she kept going forward until she was ahead of the rest of the team and beside Fury, just two feet away from the glass.
The woman looked at her, curiosity shining in her eyes but otherwise there was no sign of acknowledgment or recognition in her movements. She was so young. Younger than Maria had ever seen her. Did she not know who Maria was?
“Natasha?” She asked tentatively, after closing the gap and laying a hand on the glass.
The woman frowned at the name, stepped forward and for the first time reacted to something said to her since she was brought there.
“Who told you that name?”
Her voice made everyone in the room stiffen, it was such a charming voice. None of them ever thought about what would happen the day they finally got to her, the day the met that woman, the Black Widow. They thought about the feeling it would give to finally succeed, about all the lives they could save, the horrors that could be spared. But they never thought the day they put the Devil's Mistress in a cage, she would speak to them with the voice of an angel.
Maria tensed, her hand immediately retracted from the glass and she straightened her shoulders while her eyes hardened. It had been a long time, since she had last heard that voice.
So at least the name was real.
It took just a couple of seconds. Everything was clicking fast, every single moment started to make sense and it all fitted so well that Maria wasn't sure how she hadn’t thought about this earlier. Then again, it was something so unfathomable that maybe not even herself, a trained soldier and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, could have ever guessed it. But suddenly, everything that was unexplainable, became clear to her.
“Maria, what's going on?” Sharon's voice sounded distant and unimportant, like it was coming from a far-away place she couldn’t quite reach.
“Have you seen her before? Do you know each other?” Phil asked her, puzzled, trying to make sense of what was happening.
May looked at him and barely moved her head sideways to prompt him to stay quiet.
Nobody else said anything for a long moment.
“Why-” Maria's voice trembled, breaking the almost reverent silence that fell in the room, and as she whispered her eyes dropped to the ground. When she lifted her gaze again, barely two seconds later, and met the other woman's eyes, the redhead could see a darkness in them that wasn't there a moment before. “Why did you do this to me?”
Something, inside that agent, had been broken. Snapped in half.
Natasha almost cringed at the thought that she did that. This agent, this woman standing in front of her, might have been the first person Natasha broke. The first innocent one she lured into the darkness that seemed to follow her everywhere, enveloping her surroundings at all times.
Those people obviously thought of her as the monster she had been always told she would become. There was no point in showing vulnerability, she had to assert the upper hand while she still had it.
“I've never seen you before. But whatever I did to you,” she paused and faked a smirk, she felt her fingers begin to tingle, her jump was about to end, her time was almost up, “I'm going to enjoy every second of it.”
Maria stared at her smirk, then at her eyes.
There had been a time when she would have given everything she possibly could in order to see those eyes again, just one more time.
She felt a lump in her throat as Natasha's words echoed in her mind. That twisted promise was the final proof that the woman in front of her wasn't the person Maria thought she was. She had been lying to her, deceiving her that whole time.
You let her, she thought. This is your fault.
Maria was a soldier. An agent. She should have known better than to trust someone so deeply, to listen to excuse after excuse, to be okay when she was fed one silly apology after the other. She should have figured it out sooner, how none of it was true. How everything was a lie. Every single word Natasha had ever said to her, it wasn't real.
Natasha wasn't real.
Maria felt a surge of utter rage raising in her chest. She was about to do something, or say something, anything, that would make the other woman respond. But before she could even begin to form a thought, Natasha raised a hand, wiggled her fingers, then disappeared into thin air.
The room was oddly silent for a long moment.
Nobody dared to speak and nobody knew what exactly happened or what to say to ease the tense atmosphere that settled among them.
Then, slowly, Maria seemed to make up her mind. She turned around, looked at Fury and raised her hands, fist clenched.
“Sir, you should arrest me.”
Fury eyed her, trying to figure if this was her way of joking around to break the tension, but then he remembered that Maria Hill never joked around while on the job.
“What for?” He settled on asking, for a lack of a better response.
Maria released a breath and tried not to sound too embarrassed or bitter as the words left her mouth.
“I have reason to believe that I'll be the one who sets the Black Widow free.”