Chapter Text
There are lots of coping mechanisms in this world. Therapy, alcohol, drugs. Natasha’s favorite, without peer, is violence. She likes bringing down her targets, of course, enjoys the satisfaction of a job well done. But something she tries to keep secret is that she doesn’t mind the rush of pain, either. That she relishes the clarity that comes with a stab wound, the piercing honesty of a physical fight. Which is how she ends up in the ring with a muscular Russian man, intent on hurting her for money.
Ring is a strong word, actually. She’s in a circle of bodies, each with cash in hand and drinks in in the other. When she gets too close to the edge of the circle, elbows buffet her away, pushing her closer to her current enemy.
The Russian sneers at her. He’s been doing a lot of that, all night. It’s one of the reasons she signed up for this particular fight, put her name on the list under the bar, winked at the bookie. She loves to put a man in his place.
The other reason is his tattoos. She can see them, poking out of his short sleeves, just the faded edges of some gnarly prison ink. When Natasha sees KGB symbolism she loses all control. Choice goes out the window. She has to take them down.
The Russian punches her in the face, lands a solid blow right beneath her eye. She can hear the crunch of bone, feel the dizzying shock of her brain hitting her skull. Her vision grays out around the edges. This is what she lives for. She fights the urge to smile. She ducks another blow, shoots out a leg and hooks the Russian behind his knee. He stumbles.
Natasha has rules for this kind of thing. It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise, to anyone.
She slaps him across the face, then backhands him immediately, then closes her hand into a fist and punches him, a third blow in quick succession. When he blinks at her, his eyes are glassy. She knows she’s won.
- No weapons. No killing. No cameras. No cops.
She grabs him by the shoulders and knees him in the balls. He makes an awful squeaking sound. The crowd around her – mostly men – groans in unison. She keeps her face impassive. Blood drips from her eye socket, trickles down her chin.
- Take a hit to give a hit. Every time.
He’s not done yet, the burly monster. He backs up and regroups. The crowd jostles, pushes him back towards Natasha, into the fray. His sneer is pasted on, now, more a defense mechanism than a show of aggression. Natasha is suddenly bored. She’s already broken him.
- Under no circumstances will she reveal her identity. No krav magaw. No showy Black Widow moves. No fighting even remotely close to how she acted with the Avengers. Nothing that could tie her back to who she was.
She dances closer to him, feints and jabs, gets him in the gut. He swings and while she could easily avoid it, she takes the blow, spins with the force of it, and kicks him in his disgusting face. She hears the satisfying crunch that means her foot connected perfectly with his nose.
She doesn’t wait to see him fall. She walks away, through the crowd, which parts for her like the Red Sea. She heads into the bar through the back door and sidles up to the bartender, a short Russian kid in a full Adidas track suit, a heavy chain, and dark glasses even now, indoors and at night. Natasha has to remind herself not to roll her eyes.
The kid looks up at her. She holds out her hand, raises an eyebrow. He glances towards the back door, where the aftermath of the fight floats in, sounds of delight and annoyance as the crowd takes in the outcome. Natasha wiggles her fingers.
“Uh, right. Sorry. One sec.” The kid gives one last, nervous glance at Natasha’s hand, then bolts for the back room. She fights an urge to follow. She lets her hand fall to her side.
The bar fills back up around her. She gets a few nods from the spectators as they file back inside. Pats on the shoulder, words of encouragement. None of it feels as good as that punch in the face.
A young man, maybe thirty or so, slides onto the stool next to her. He puts a hand on the counter, then snakes his other around her waist, quick enough that she knows he knows he shouldn’t try it with her. Not asking permission.
She glances down at his hand, tight against her oblique, then turns her head to face him. She gives him a dead look, the kind that asks a million questions and fills in none of the blanks. The kind that makes men like this sweat.
She’s gratified to hear him swallow hard, see the bob of his Adam’s apple, the ruby flush of embarrassment creep up his neck. His fingers don’t leave her side.
“I’ll give you three seconds to get your hand off me,” she says, low and controlled. Dangerous.
“Sorry,” he starts. He’s still touching her.
“One.”
“I need to talk to you.” She can feel his body heat. She’s about to make a scene.
“Two.”
“I know who you are.”
She flicks her blade down from wrist to fingers and stabs without thinking further, up under his ribs and into the tender mass of his heart. He makes a little gasping sound as he falls. She schools her face, makes sure her expression stays calm and bored and uninteresting. She catches his limp wrist in the crook of her elbow, and helps him slump down gently over the bar top. She doesn’t want to leave prints.
“Three,” she says to his corpse, pure indulgence.
The tracksuit kid returns with her cash. She takes it, counts it, grins at him. Doesn’t let him see the growing puddle of blood gathering beneath her feet. Satisfied that he’s not trying to short her, she nods. He sags with relief. She walks out of the bar, into the night.
Natasha is forty years old, looks twenty, feels eighty. She’s been “dead” for a year. She’s been alone for a lot longer than that.
Her apartment is bare, but for the necessities. She’s got a bed, a table, three deadbolts, six different alarm systems, eighteen guns, twenty seven bladed weapons, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Well, not the tree. Natasha has never been very good at keeping things alive.
She stuffs her cash into her go-bag, and checks for any sign of intrusion before she peels off her bloody clothes and allows herself a shower. She stays under the comforting spray until the hot water runs out, her muscles twitching and fraying, and even then she stays, freezing herself into oblivion.
When she finally climbs into her bed, sore and wrung out in all the best ways, she’s asleep within seconds.
Natasha used to be a hero. Before that she was a villain, and before that she was a weapon. Before that she has no idea. Maybe, she acknowledges, on her more masochistic days, she was a daughter, or a sister, or even a person.
She wonders what it was like.
Natasha used to be a hero, and then she let Captain America go, and suddenly she was a problem. She watched as her friends were hunted down and placed in custody, jailed without recourse or due process or greater purpose.
Faking her death wasn’t so much a plan as an instinct. Surviving is instinctual as well. Just like her namesake, she thrives in dark places, undercover, in the shadows. She has always been built for survival.
She wakes to the sound of an ancient, ringing flip phone. She tamps down on her panic and forces herself to alertness. The phone continues to ring. Which is strange. Natasha doesn’t own a phone.
She does, however, own several precautions.
This particular precaution echoes through the thick-painted drywall of her apartment. She walks over and stands near to the sound. It rings its little tune, almost a song, but not quite, over and over. It stops and it starts again. She waits, because she’s a good, patient spy, for it to play through three times.
And then, finally, she punches her wall. Her hand reaches around until it finds the little phone. The annoying, still-ringing phone.
She flips it open and puts it to her ear. “Go,” she says.
“Oh my god, oh my god thank god. Holy shit, you’re there,” spouts the panicked voice on the other end of the line.
Natasha closes her eyes, already tired of whatever this is. “Go,” she says again, more forcefully.
“Right, sorry, right. Uh, okay. Um. It’s Nate.” The voice belongs to a woman, about her age. She sounds surprised, scared, frantic.
Natasha fights the urge to shout. You called me, she wants to shake this woman. You called me on my panic line and you’re compromising my safety and you don’t even know the right code, what the fuck.
“Sorry, sorry. I know there’s a code and stuff and a way you guys do this but uh, sorry. Clint’s not – obviously, he’s not here, and it’s just me and he’s been – he’s gone.” There’s a pause, during which Natasha fights the urge to hang up and return to bed. “Nat?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Laura, don’t say my name.”
There’s a small, panicked inhale of breath on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Even through the phone, Natasha can tell tears are coming.
She tries to mitigate. “It’s fine. When did you realize?” Natasha moves as she talks. She grabs her go-bag, throws on her best tactical clothing, pulls herself together.
“This morning. I went to wake him up and he wasn’t there. And the screen on his window was slashed. And – he’s my baby.”
“I know. We’ll get him back. The other kids?”
“They’re here. They’re okay. Well, not okay, but – they’re safe. I sent them to the bunker.”
“That’s good. Are you holding a list of coordinates?”
“Coord – uh, yeah. I see it. Yes.”
“Great. We’re going to meet at rendez-vous location B4. Got it?”
“B4. Yeah, got it.”
“You’re doing great, Laura. You’re doing really well. You did exactly the right thing, calling me. I’m going to give you some instructions now, okay?”
“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
“Good. You’re going to take out the sim card from this phone and destroy it. You’re also going to destroy the phone.” Natasha shoves as many weapons as she can onto her person. “You’re going to use your home phone to call Rhodey, you’re going to tell him where your older kids are. You’re not going to tell him anything else. He’s going to look out for them.” She takes one final look around her apartment, makes sure she didn’t forget anything. “You’re going to destroy the map, the list of numbers, coordinates, and the tactical plan. You will get yourself to B4. I don’t care how you do it. I’ll handle any tails you pick up when you get there. You will not bring anything electronic with you. No phones, no StarkPads, not even Bluetooth headphones. Nothing.”
“Okay.”
“Repeat it back to me.”
“I destroy the sim card and the phone. I call Rhodey. I tell him where my older kids are. I destroy all the prep stuff. I go to B4.”
“And?”
“I bring nothing electronic.”
“Perfect. You’re a natural. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Nat?”
Natasha closes the door on her little life. She will never see this apartment again. She adds it to her mental list of former homes. She burns it in the fire of her mind.
“Yeah?”
“It’s – will he…? I mean, is he – or, are they…?”
Natasha takes pity on her. “I don’t know any more than you do. But if I had to guess, I’d imagine whoever it is wants him alive.”
Laura’s relief is palpable, even through the phone. Natasha does not say that death is so much safer than life. That death is easy, and final, and unemotional. That life is messy and ruinous and impossibly hard.
“I’m going to hang up now. This phone won’t work again.”
She flips the phone closed, pries out the sim card, smashes it and the phone beneath her heel. She tosses them both into a public trash can when she reaches the street. She takes off running.
It feels good, running somewhere, having a purpose. It feels, paradoxically, safe.
Before she turned into Mom, Mama, Mommy, I hate you, you never let me do anything, she was Laura Barton. She likes being Mom, and she likes being Laura Barton. Those are easy, calm identities. She doesn’t have to reach very far for them. She feels, mostly, like herself.
Before Laura Barton was Laura Barton, she was Agent 19. She was Ma’am. She was Mockingbird. She was somebody, and she was nobody. She enjoyed her time with S.H.I.E.L.D. She learned a lot. She met her husband. She saved people. When she left, she was ready to go.
Before that, she was just Laura.
Laura, just Laura. Sometimes Laur. Student, feminist, daughter, friend. Laura who went for long hikes on weekends, tripped acid in the desert, snuck over the fence to touch the Hollywood sign, flashed the band at concerts for a quick tour backstage.
Laura Barton hasn’t thought about Laur in years. Laura Barton thinks Laur would take one look at her and run, screaming, for the hills.
Laur can’t imagine being married, or wanting kids. She can see, with some mental gymnastics and a gargantuan effort, that others might want that white picket fence, that steady life, those days of blissful sameness all blending together.
That’s not what she wants.
She wants escape. Adventure. Amusement. It’s in pursuit of these lofty aims that she first runs into Natasha.
She’s at the first of ten self-defense classes, a free program UCLA is running, geared towards women, but open to anyone. Laur and her friends signed up on a whim, which is how they do everything. They make no plans and keep themselves open to the world. At twenty, they haven’t yet learned how to close themselves off.
The class is taught by a short redhead, all tension and muscle and pent up rage. Even Laura can see that, although the redhead keeps it close, hidden under a vail of normalcy. She seems about their age, but it’s hard to tell. She speaks with the lilt of internationality, the dissonant accent of multilingualism. Laura likes her immediately.
She introduces herself as Natasha, says they can call her whatever they want as long as they’re willing to suffer the consequences. Even the few jokers in the class don’t push it. Everyone calls her Natasha.
She shows them how to step inside a punch and jab an attacker in the eye. They practice on plastic dummies, on each other at half speed, and finally on Natasha.
When Laura steps inside Natasha’s punch, she feels a jolt of electricity, a connection she has never felt before, a strength and a power and a weightless sensation. Natasha looks right through her, and Laura realizes that she has never wanted anything at all the way she wants Natasha.
Natasha fixes her posture and guides Laura’s hand to her own eye. She tells the class they’ve done a good job, that she’ll be expecting them to remember their eye strikes and jabs next week.
It takes Laura three more classes before she works up the nerve to stay behind. She waves her friends away, tells them she’ll catch up with them later, she has to talk to Natasha about something.
Once all the students have trickled out, once Natasha has finished her paperwork, and Laura has gathered her things and changed into street clothes, once they’re alone, Laura panics.
Natasha watches her. She stands very still, still enough that Laura wonders if she’s uncomfortable.
“Can I help you?” Natasha asks.
“Uh,” Laura says, feeling like an idiot.
Natasha’s lips twitch, but her eyes don’t move at all. “In your own time,” she says, and she sounds like she’s smiling, but she’s not.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Laura blurts. Natasha raises an eyebrow. Laura rushes to explain, “standing so still, I mean. Don’t – don’t your feet get numb?”
Natasha lets out one, huffy laugh, and moves. She crosses the room with the grace and speed of a ballerina. Laura takes an involuntary step backwards. Her heart pounds for no reason. She tells herself not to be frightened, but telling herself only goes so far.
“Sometimes.” Natasha is right in front of her, now. If they were practicing eye jabs, Laura could step inside Natasha’s guard with half a step of movement. “But I’m used to it.”
“Oh,” Laura can feel the air sizzle between them. “That’s, uh – dark.”
Natasha shrugs.
Laura shakes her head. “You’re sure not making this easy on me.”
“There is nothing about me that will ever be easy.”
Laura has to catch her breath. Natasha, still right there, still mere inches away, doesn’t react.
“But,” Natasha continues, with a deliberate shrug. “the worthwhile things in this life rarely are.”
Laura gets herself off every night that week thinking about the conversation, Natasha’s voice, Natasha’s hair, Natasha. Her roommate throws a pillow at her and tells her to go fuck one of the water polo boys if she’s so fucking horny, they’re always down and she needs her beauty sleep, but Laura doesn’t want a water polo boy. Laura wants electricity and danger. Laura wants to play with fire. Laura wants Natasha.