Chapter Text
It’s the spring of 2003, and Natalie wakes up for the first time in this century with an ache in her teeth. She coughs up a mouthful of blood, and the attending doctor makes a note in her chart to increase the tranquilizer dosage. She still fights too hard against the cryo.
Her hair is still wet from the stasis pod when she meets with her handler, the same man as last time. He has new creases around his mouth and eyes, and he’s stopped dyeing his hair. He hands her a file, which is slender but not exactly boring.
Bai Tian, Chinese national, was born in the Jiangxi province, the second son of an alcoholic father and a kindhearted but ineffectual mother. Both parents died in an automobile accident, leaving both sons to spend their remaining childhood in a government-run orphanage. The two spent much of their adolescence off the grid, but the elder brother, Bai Cheng, resurfaced when he was arrested for a robbery linked with organized crime. Bai Tian reappeared a few years ago, as the star of a traveling circus. ‘The Astounding Hawkeye,’ reads a colorful flyer.
“You had someone check him out?” she asks. Most marksmanship acts are fakes--collapsible arrows, knives that pop up from behind paper targets.
“To all appearances he’s the real deal. And cocky about it, too.”
“I can use that,” Natalie says. The prep team has done a wonderful job in choosing their subject: he’s comfortable with violence but emotionally needy, with a history of abandonment and tendency to bond strongly. He’s been trained in a variety of deadly arts, and he’s angry at the whole world and completely unable to express it. It won’t be difficult for Natalie to convince him to murder the target.
The target, Su Tai, is the CEO and chief engineer of China’s lead weapons manufacturer. A technological genius of nearly unprecedented stature, the risk that he will single-handedly give China an unacceptable military advantage is such that he’s been targeted for elimination.
“It can’t track back to us,” her handler reminds her. She resists rolling her eyes. She’s the most experienced agent in the nation’s entire intelligence force. She’s more than capable of carrying out the hit herself, the only reason Bai is involved at all is so to act as the perfect patsy. Class rage is the story that’s going to play: one poor kid, undereducated and disenfranchised, taking out a capitalist warmonger.
She’s the most experienced spy in the world, he’s twenty-two and has never fallen in love. He doesn’t stand a chance.
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Bai Tian knows he’s being manipulated. He doesn’t believe the assassination is his idea, he doesn’t even think that Natalie (with her obvious foreignness and multiple languages and access to blueprints) is anything other than a spy. “I don’t care,” he says. “Just tell me that it matters. Tell me that it has to be done.”
“It’s important,” she says. “Kill this one man and you will save so many. I swear, I wouldn’t ask this of you if I could do it, but it has to be done,” she says, and wishes it were true. “I love you,” she says.
He holds her close and she breathes in the smell of him. He closes her eyes and presses her face to his neck. There’s a physical comfort to the familiarity of being held in his arms. “You’ll be here when I get back?” he whispers.
“Of course,” she says, with all the weeks of their affair behind it, all the secrets they shared, all the barriers they overcame. Tian and Lilah: it’s a pretty enough love story, if you enjoy fairytales. She strokes his hair. “It will be over,” she says. “We can go anywhere.”
“Florida,” he says, and smiles. Where she told him she was born.
“Hawaii,” she says back, her part of the familiar argument. He kisses her fiercely, a defiant not-goodbye, and then he’s gone, leaving only the swinging door and the ghost of his touch behind.
He really does love me, she thinks, and raises a hand to her chest in something like wonder. For a single moment, she imagines staying. Then she cleans the apartment, removing all traces of her presence.
It takes over twenty hours to get back home to base.
They put her on the table, put a needle in her arm, and her last thought, as the tranquilizer blossoms in her brain, is not regret.
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He doesn’t make the kill.
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He doesn’t make the kill, and Su Tai doesn’t take his retaliatory strike, either.
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How does the Red Room punish her?
What do they—
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Here is a list of things the Red Room took from her: her childhood, her life outside spycraft, all of her missions prior to 1998.
Here is a list of people the Red Room took from her: Ian, Alex, General Phillips, Dr. Erskine, her trainees, the names she should have written in her ledger.
If they needed to punish her, what would they then take? What more could she lose?
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Her target is a SHIELD agent by the name of Bai Tian. Within certain circles he’s already well-known, despite his youth. Although a newcomer to the intelligence community, he’s a bit of a rising star. With a few years experience, he’s going to be very dangerous.
Her infil on the mission went awry and she had to knock out a guard. It’s only a matter of time before they discover him stashed in a utility closet, so she doesn’t waste time on subtlety, just pulls out her gun and starts shooting as soon as she spots her target. The man scrabbles for cover, but doesn't return fire even as she stalks forward. Isn’t he supposed to be some kind of legendary shot?
“Lilah,” Bai calls out, voice full of emotion.
She tosses her empty weapon aside, pulls the garrote wire from her wrist and strings it between her hands. He dodges her first strike, the feint, but doesn’t quite avoid the second and so she ends up behind him, pulling tightly at the wire twisted around his neck. It catches around the collar of his jacket and throat mike, and so doesn’t slice cleanly through his throat. He twists too much for her to be able to correct it, so she has to settle for strangling him.
His hand shudders towards the knife sheathed at his hip, but she kicks it away. He splutters, chokes, digs futily at the wire slicing his skin. He slows down, and she is very, very close to completing her assignment, when four more SHIELD agents arrive and she’s forced to retreat.
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When she fails, but has nothing left, what do they do? What do they take?
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Natalie is sent to steal a briefcase from the SHIELD HQ.
Here is what Natalie would think about SHIELD, if she bothered: they are an intelligence agency. Their interests sometimes counter America’s.
Natalie doesn’t think a lot about motives. She doesn’t question orders. She goes where they tell her. She shoots, strangles, and poisons who they tell her to.
Natalie is the perfect spy, everyone keeps telling her.
She walks briskly away from the storage room, her heels making a rapid click-clack, like a mechanical heartbeat. Or the drumbeat when they hang you; she’s not good with metaphors. She smoothed the small creases in her outfit before she left the storage room; she’s far too practiced to give in to the urge to triple-check for bloodstains. The trick to walking away from a corpse, or corpses, is confidence. Not looking nervous.
She’s stopped before she reaches her exfil point. “Can I see your ID?” the agent asks. He’s in his early thirties, Asian, with a muted Chinese accent. His stance and the gun strapped to his thigh say he’s as a field agent. She would think this is just a routine security check, but there’s something funny in his eyes.
Her forehead crinkles, as if in confusion. “I’m Dr. Harrison,” she says, like he should already know. She unclips her badge with her right hand. “Civilian consultant for the psych division. I already talked with Agent—” she tries to gut him left-handed with a tiny switchblade she’d taped to her leg, but he somehow anticipates the move. She throws the knife instead, and he dodges. She kicks twice and he takes both blows, but instead of retreating or reaching for the gun that she already took, he dives for the attaché case she dropped.
She levels his gun at him, but hesitates when instead of attacking her or calling for help he fumbles with clasps of the case. “Put it down,” she says. It could be a weapon.
He looks up at her with wide, panicked eyes. “I know you know who I am,” he says, but there’s a question in his tone.
“Why would I,” she says, and gestures with the gun. “Step away.”
“Five seconds,” he pleads. “Just give me five seconds.”
“One second,” she allows.
“I met you in Beijing, two years ago,” he says, as quickly as he can. At the same time, he snaps open the case, and blue-white light pours out.
“Don’t touch that!” Natalie says, suddenly afraid.
He looks up at her. “Am I pure of heart?” he asks, and then slams down his hand.
An explosion of light, painless even though it fills her ears with screaming white noise and blinds her with blue lightning.
“Remember!” he shouts, and she hears it even through the scream of the Tesseract. Where did she learn its name?
And Natalie—
Natalie—
Natalie remembers.
Natalie is four years old, and Ian is speaking to her in French. Natalie is five, and cries as her mother takes her to her first day of school. She’s seven, and Ian teaches her to throw a punch. She’s fifteen, and she’s both attending an Indiana high school dance and playing lookout for a robbery for one of Ian’s friends.
She remembers dancing at the party where she met Alex, falling in love with him fast and marrying him at the courthouse just before he shipped out for the last time. She remembers coming back to the safehouse to find Ian unconscious and sweating.
She remembers volunteering in ‘42 to save Ian’s life and in ‘43 to memorialize Alex’s.
She remembers all her missions, and the backstories they made her believe, and the terrible, blank feeling of having no past at all.
She remembers why Tian risked so much to save her: because he genuinely loved her.
She screams, and she screams, and only stops when she hits the ground.
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“You know what the worst part is?” she tells Tian through the glass door of her prison. “I was loyal. They didn’t have to cut my brain into ribbons to get what they wanted, all they had to do was ask.”
“Why would they do it?”
“It wasn’t enough for them to use me. They wanted to own me.” She changes the subject. “What did the Tesseract do to you?”
He shrugs like he can’t see the point of trying to hide it from her, and pulls off his shooting glove to show her the raised white scar on the palm of his hand, like a many-pointed star.
“Last man to touch that thing was burned to ash, and you get a scar,” she says thoughtfully.
“Well,” he says, “legend says it only grants wishes to those pure of heart.”
She raises an eyebrow at him, and he ducks his head, admitting he’s no such thing.
“Maybe it takes purity of intent into account. Maybe it makes allowances for love.”
She looks at Tian, frowning, wondering what he must have seen to try and save a woman who used him, abandoned him, and tried to cut his throat with a slender spool of steel wire. The Black Widow was not much of a person, by the end. Natalie wouldn’t have tried to save her.
Natalie would have killed somebody that did that to her. When she found out their brain was being played with, she would have tried to bring them in alive, but she never would have put her hand on the kind of magic that can raze entire continents. She would never have laid her love on an altar and prayed it wouldn’t take two lives.
Tian is a man worth loving, she knows.
She just doesn’t.