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Natasha had gone the Barton farm a lot, those first few years. She still didn’t know what to think of Clint trusting her with that secret, especially early on when he’d had a feral assassin on his hands, when she still could have been a double agent. He and Laura were so trusting. And the kids were warm, happy people, glad to see their aunt Nat. It was a refuge, for her, one she was shy in. One that she wasn’t sure that she deserved.
And then Lila turned six, and Natasha started having problems.
Here was the problem: Natasha had been six. It was too early to go away to a ballet school, the minders at the orphanage said. That was the cover story, ballet school. A child's bones are still soft at six, too soft for ballet. The Red Room took her anyway, even though she was a little young. There was something about her that they’d liked.
All the records that they’d kept on her had been destroyed in the fire that eliminated the city block where the Red Room had been. That was the only thing that Natasha really regretted about that fire. She would have given a lot to know what it was they’d seen when they looked at her, back when she was a small child. She had some guesses, and none of them were flattering.
It was bad, in the Red Room. It wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it was very bad. She remembered lying awake at night, her bones aching - maybe they were too soft - listening to Julja cry in the next bed. Julja should stop crying. Julja couldn’t let them hear that she was crying. If they knew that Julja was soft enough to cry, they’d take her upstairs.
The first time that Lila Barton fell and skinned her knee and burst into tears in front of Natasha, Natasha clapped her hand over Lila’s mouth, because little girls who cried went upstairs. It startled both of them; Natasha more than Lila. Lila just stared at her, surprised, and then opened her mouth and really wailed, more at the indignity, probably, than any real hurt. Natasha took a minute. Natasha let herself check out, for a minute, kind of depart from inside her own head, like she’d just left while so many other things happened in the world. Then she bent, rigid, and scooped Lila up and carried her up to the house so that Clint could patch her knee up.
Lila had been four when that happened, though. Natasha had gotten her scrapes patched up too, when she was four. The caretakers at the orphanage had been harried and overworked, but they’d take you down to Nurse, who had iodine and bandages and was kindly and efficient. These were things that Natasha remembered. She thought about them more, these days. Someone had picked her up and taken her down the winding linoleum hallway to have a bandage put on her knee, once. That had happened. She’d had that experience.
But Lila was getting older. Lila was getting older, and Natasha caught herself watching the girl’s posture, reaching out to correct an arm when Lila danced across the floor with a child’s flailing gracelessness. She didn’t not talk to Clint about it. Clint knew. She didn’t know if Clint knew all of it. She suspected not. She suspected Clint would not want her around his family, if he knew everything that went on in Natasha’s head.
Natasha didn’t have a scar from the operation. There wasn't an outward mark at all. That would compromise her effectiveness as an operative; it would be ugly, and people might put two and two together. The surgeons had gone up - through, through the vagina, with a speculum and clamps. She’d been awake for part of it. She was supposed to be tough. It was like a reverse birth, except that all that came out was an organ the size of her fist, not as big as she’d thought it would be. She woke up bleeding into a maxi pad, with a sore middle, and according to Madame it was through. She was through, graduated. She didn’t exist anymore. She was cut loose from the arc of humanity, where women were daughters and then mothers. Her body was a tool, now. Her body was the Red Room's.
She caught Lila trying to save a bug that had wandered indoors - an ugly little beetle, probably the kind that bit - and some part of her panicked. Some part of her thought: she has to kill the beetle. She can’t think that she gets to save things. Someone will hurt her, she’ll get hurt if she tries to save things. She turned and walked out of the house, shaking. Laura saw; Laura called after her, but she just kept walking.
Cooper was soft too, of course. Hawkeye’s kids were both soft, protected little creatures, because Clint and Laura protected them, because parents tried to save children. Love was for children. Love was for parents. Madame had believed that. She'd told them as much, over and over: that if she'd had children, she wouldn't be able to do what she did to them. That it was a gift that she gave them, to be free of that. Lila hugged Natasha fearlessly, flung both her little arms around Natasha’s neck. She was small, fragile; Natasha was careful with her. Natasha felt a melting warmth when Lila hugged her, felt like she would stand between this child and all the armies of the world, if it came to it, and that must be how Clint felt, that must be what being a parent was. No wonder Madame had wanted to prevent that feeling.
Natasha had dreams where the farm was on fire, and she had dreams where she was the one who lit the match. She had dreams that a woman with her hair in a tight bun, a man with a skinny weasel’s face came and looked Lila over like they were assessing an animal at the market. She had dreams where Lila put her trusting hand in the man’s hand and walked out of the house with them. She had dreams where Laura struggled under a burlap hood and Natasha was seventeen years old and holding a gun.
She found herself pressing her hand into her side more when she was alone, palpitating with her fingertips, which - what was that? Involuntary fidgets, little signals anyone could read, she was better than that. She didn’t need to touch it. She didn’t need to think about it. It was blatantly sentimental of her to think about it so much.
She was happy when Laura told Natasha that she was pregnant, she was, she was, Laura was a good mother and Clint was an amazing father and they had happy children and Laura was Natasha’s friend. When Laura told her, she rested her hand on her still-flat belly, easily. Natasha started having the same dream every night, the dream where she woke up in the surgical bay - just an old parlour, in the house the Red Room was concealed in, a square of surgical linoleum laid down over the parquet floors - with blood running down her legs. The last time that she’d ever bleed from her vagina, you could say that much. Good. Periods were inconvenient. Maria Hill had had to take sick days for cramps before, and what would happen if the world tried to end then? Natasha was spared. And she wasn’t that teenage girl in the dream anymore, anyway, and it was in a different country, and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. She was what she was and she was what she was made to be.
She didn’t go back to the farm for a while after Laura told her about the pregnancy. Clint would invite her and she said she had work to do in DC, Cap needed her, she was working on a thing with Sam - she was, she was working on trying to find some other cold-war-holdover assassin with Sam, it was work she felt particularly suited to. Things were busy, things were very busy. She told Clint to give her love to Laura and the kids.
She felt better once she stopped seeing them. The dreams were't every night, or they were different. She could focus on the work in DC. She didn't have to be so careful; hell, she could leave guns laying on her coffee table if she wanted to. And she got to see Bruce more often, and Bruce was - relaxing to be around, really, once she stopped worrying about the Big Guy. He was so shy around her. When she did her spy-seductress bit - the forward lean, the low, confiding femme fatale voice - he practically fled. He wanted nothing to do with all of this, with SHIELD and then what was left of SHIELD, with supervillains and interplanetary warfare. Violence made him faintly queasy. She wondered what that was even like.
Bruce was shy around her, but the Hulk liked her, which made sense. The Hulk lived in a much more straightforward world where pain was bad and smash was good, where the right thing to do to someone who hurt you was always to hurt them right back, and Natasha was very capable of hurting people right back. The Hulk loved destruction, and Natasha destroyed things. The Hulk ran on anger and fear, and Natasha put all her feelings away, generally, and she figured that that must be restful, for him, to be around someone who didn't constantly leak emotions everywhere. The Hulk let her touch his big green hand. It was a kind of trust, and she liked it. Maybe more than she should, for Bruce’s sake; she knew to Bruce it was one or the other, Hulk or human, monster or man. She would have liked to win over the man and not just the monster. She would have liked to win them both over, frankly.
And then Wanda got her fingers into Natasha’s brain and it all clicked together. She realized of course, of course. No one would ever be safe around Bruce, and no one would ever be safe around Natasha. She needed to get herself away, away from the Bartons and their terrifyingly fragile children, and Bruce needed to get away from everybody. It made perfect sense. Tony could take the suit off. Clint could set the bow down. Even Steve was, demonstrably, a good man in a strong body. But Bruce and Natasha were just weapons. They'd been changed to make them better tools. They’d been taken away from themselves. She had to make Bruce see it, she had to make Bruce see that she needed to get away from this too, that she needed to leave the Bartons safe from her, leave other people safe from what the two of them did to people. She imagined that life, that life of careful self-containment: a cabin somewhere in the North, probably, in the forests, where people left you alone. Just her and Bruce, somewhere where she could probably take out her aggression hunting for food and the Hulk could smash some firewood, probably, it didn’t really matter where as long as it was away. She had to make him see that. She had to make him see.
Wanda had fucked up in one way, though. In her right mind, Natasha could have made Bruce see it her way. She’d played Loki, the God of Tricksters. But the person talking to Bruce in the Barton’s upstairs bedroom wasn’t Natasha Romanoff, super spy, a woman who kept her traumas neatly bottled in global emergencies. It was a teenager with a bloody middle, and it was Nat, the Bartons’ closest friend, and trauma came leaking out all over and made a real mess of things.
Which was good, because otherwise the world would have ended. In the end, the thing that probably saved the world was that Wanda Maximoff wasn't very good at people, yet.
It was a monster’s choice to betray Bruce: but then, that was Bruce’s mistake. Bruce thought monsterhood was opt-in, opt-out, and maybe for him it was. But it was also a monster’s choice to let the world burn. It was also a monster’s choice to sacrifice other human beings in order to stay out of the fight. Natasha stood in the falling city, certain that this, here, this fight was the last thing she would ever do. That Clint was going home to his children, to his baby. She was certain that at the end - at the end of her, at least - she had taken everything that she’d been made into and used it to save people who were probably no better or worse than any other sliver of the seven billion humans overrunning the planet, who were probably not all that important. She hadn’t saved them because they were missions, or marks, but just because they were people. It was, in fact, a good way to go.
And then she lived, and had to go back, and the first thing she did was land the jet down on the south pasture of the Barton farm, and the first thing Laura did was wrap her up in a huge, exuberantly pregnant hug, and Natasha took Laura’s hand in hers and said “I need to tell you about some stuff.”
---
She was in the room when Nathaniel was born. It was hard work, labor - she’d never seen it before - and Clint was ridiculous in his surgical mask just like Natasha was ridiculous in hers, and the doctor was practical and kind and Natasha had gotten really good at not getting edgy around surgical tools. Laura took deep, heaving, shuddering breaths and clenched her hands on Natasha’s supporting arms like Natasha and Clint were the only things holding the world together. Natasha put Laura’s hair up in a ponytail for her and Clint rubbed her back and neither of them slept at all that night. Steve was out on the perimeter, Tony was keeping an eye from the air and when Tony had to go Sam showed up with the wings and an overnight bag. This hospital was probably the safest place in the world.
The baby was born around two in the morning, and it was one of the uglier things to ever come out of a human vagina, squinched and purple and covered in slime. Clint caught it - Clint was good at catching things. There was a squall, some murmuring between the doctor and the nurse, and then for some reason Clint handed this baby - this slimy little football of a human being - straight to Natasha.
His head was pointed and his umbilical cord was still pulsing and he was furious, face screwed up, and then he unclenched his eyes and looked at Natasha, for one moment, one long moment as she brought him up to Laura’s waiting arms. He wasn’t so gross, once he looked at her. She felt the start of something, in her chest, and she’d expected it to feel more foreign. It was big, yes, it was a big feeling, bigger than she'd ever had it, but it wasn’t a new feeling. It was what she’d felt when she’d gone to save Barton, right before New York. It was what she felt when Lila hugged her. It wasn't alien at all. So she supposed that, deep down, Madame had been completely full of shit.
Nate was so small, and he was so fragile in Natasha’s hands. He blinked at her, with big, unfocused blue eyes, and she wondered what he’d seen when he looked at her.
She couldn’t stay on the farm. Clint had things to do there, Clint had a dining room to renovate, Clint had missed two months of girl scout meetings and soccer games and besides, you couldn’t leave Laura on the farm with a baby alone. The Avengers, such as they were, had generous paternity leave. Natasha also had things to do. She had a scared, traumatized Maximoff to train, for starters, and Steve needed, her, and she had a world to save.
Every time she called the baby on the Starkphone he babbled, and waved his arms, like he knew who he was looking at. Every time Laura took over - usually when Nate tried to start grabbing the phone and putting it in his mouth - she made Natasha promise to come on home.