Chapter Text
“Ah,” Dr. Erskine says, a subdued reaction, she thinks, considering he found her sitting in his home, a gun in her hand. He sits down. “Are you here to kill me?” he asks.
“That depends,” she says. “Tell me, doctor, what do you know about Project Blue Rain?”
He blinks, surprised. If she’s one of Schmidt’s, she’s very good. He can’t hear any trace of German accent at all. “Nothing at all,” he replies honestly.
She crosses her legs. “I don’t believe that.” Erskine was a well-respected research scientist for Reichswehr in the years after the Great War. In his civilian practice he treated rare hormone deficiencies and inherited disorders, while he developed cutting-edge medical treatments for combat injuries. But then came the Nuremburg laws, Kristallnacht. Erskine was largely sheltered because of his value, but in 1938 he escaped his Wehrmacht minders at a conference in Paris and defected to the United States. In short order he was acquired by the Strategic Scientific Reserve. The SSR began to use Blue Rain against its enemies shortly thereafter. There are many people with the scientific skill to have crafted such a fiendish poison, but Erskine is the most likely candidate.
“Well, then I suppose you will have to kill me,” he says.
She leans forward. “I’m not sure you appreciate the gravity of the situation. I need the formula, and you don’t write anything down,” she says, gesturing at his desk. “We have three options. One, you give me the formula. Two, I torture you, and then you give me the formula. Three, you really don’t have it, so you prove that to me.”
“I am afraid I will have to choose the latter, Miss—?” She doesn’t respond, so he continues, “if that isn’t too inconvenient.”
“Fine,” she says, “let’s go to your office.” She suspected it might come to this: she already has an ID prepared.
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She finishes her search, and stares at an open file with an empty expression. These files do not mention poisons or antidotes, just hormones and metabolism and muscle mass. They say nothing about Blue Rain, just some project she’s never heard of, called Rebirth. She closes the file. She has kidnapped a man, threatened him, used a forged ID to lie her way onto a top-secret military base, and for what?
Natalie, distracted, fails to notice she’s been discovered until she rounds a corner and bright lights flick on. The rifles of a dozen MPs point at her, and a full colonel steps forward and tells her to put the gun down.
She drops it. It was useless, anyways, hanging limply at her side. One of the MPs steps forward with a pair of handcuffs. “You’re going to regret this,” she tells Erskine.
“I suppose I will,” he says, eyes soft. He doesn’t exactly relish the though of being the reason she will face a firing squad or a lifetime in prison, but they can’t exactly let her go after she’s seen the files on the super soldier program.
“Right now, I mean,” Natalie says, as the MP snaps the cuff around her right wrist. She twists, and before anyone can do anything she is standing behind him with a knife digging into the tender flesh of his throat. “I’m going to leave now,” she says. “If you want your man to live you won’t stop me.”
“Shoot her,” the colonel says, and Natalie, surprised, doesn’t cut her hostage’s throat in the second she has before a bullet tears through him and into her chest. She notices, distractedly, another shot go past her head. The MP drops to the ground and she puts her hand to her chest. She’s never been shot before.
“Stop!” Erskine yells, but there’s something funny about his voice. It’s dim, distorted. Like she’s hearing it through water.
Natalie blindly tries to take a step forwards and trips over the fallen man. She falls to the ground gracelessly, not how Ian taught her, and finds herself face to face with the fallen MP. His eyes are blank—he was less lucky than she. She wonders what he thought, when he realized that his own people would shoot him to kill her. She tries to move her hand to his face, struck by some strange impulse, but she doesn’t quite manage it.
“Stay with me,” Dr. Erskine asks, suddenly close, and Natalie hears, “stay with me. Stay…”
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Everything aches. Sound comes muffled: voices, footsteps, whirring machinery. When she opens her eyes, her eyes water from the brightness.
“Good, you are awake,” Erskine says. She makes a little, choked noise and he pours her a glass of water from the bedside. Natalie tries to sit up and finds she’s in soft restraints. Erskine doesn’t comment on her discomfiture, just brings the glass to her lips. Despite his care, some spills down her jaw and wets her pillow.
She swallows, grateful for the washing out of the gritty taste in her mouth. She licks dry lips. “How long was I out?” she asks, voice hoarse.
“Two days,” he says. “The bullet perforated your left lung, passing within three inches of your heart. You needed two surgeries, and even then we were afraid we would lose you. You were very lucky.”
She swallows past the sudden lump in her throat. Two days is almost all the time she had. Fresh out of surgery and restrained there’s no chance of escape. Trial for treason is best case, and what are the chances she can convince a judge she wasn’t working for an Axis power? Military prison is likely, worst case is that the SSR is permitted to kill US citizens to preserve its secrets, in which case they’re just going to take her out back and shoot her.
There are always options, Ian said. They just aren’t always the ones you want.
Natalie can make a new best case, she just has to trade away the only thing of value she has.
“Why are you here?” she asks, because data is the most precious resource of all, and because she’s afraid, and needs these last seconds before she does something she can’t take back.
“Well, you didn’t kill me,” he says. “And I don’t believe you meant to kill that boy.”
She nods, because that makes sense to her. He seems kind, around the eyes. “I need to speak to someone in charge. I’m willing to make a deal.”
The only thing she has of value is herself.
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When Dr. Erskine comes back, it’s with the colonel that captured her. He introduces himself as Phillips. The name makes her smile wanly.
“You knew my father, I believe,” she says.
“The finest intelligence officer I have ever known. I spoke at his funeral. And if I recall correctly, that was a few years before you would have been born, little girl.”
“A man wishes to leave a life of espionage. He finds a way. He said to tell you that unless Sergeant Kowalski talked, what happened that night in Austin is still a secret.”
“That so?” he asks, and peers at her closely. “That son of a bitch,” he says finally, “I should have known it would take more to kill him.”
She smiles at him. “He taught me everything,” she says.
“How much?” he asks, in crusty Italian.
“Everything,” she answers, with a flawless Milanese accent. “I can smell a lie, I can break a code, I can fly a plane.” She stops at the expression on his face. “Would you like me to continue in German, perhaps?”
“I’m getting the gist,” he says, “and I don’t speak Kraut.”
“I can shoot,” she continues, choosing French, instead. She thinks she’d be quite good working with the Resistance. “I can poison. I am exceptionally good at hand-to-hand combat. I can demonstrate the latter, but I do not think that you or Dr. Erskine would enjoy it.”
Colonel Phillip’s mouth is a grim line. “What are you offering?” he asks.
“A trade,” she says. “Two weeks ago an SSR agent dosed Ian Stone with Cortiprexone 17-A, codenamed Blue Rain. I know you have the antidote. Give it to me, and I give you my loyalty.”
The colonel looks at Erskine. “We’re trying to make perfect soldiers, not spies,” he says.
“You asked me to find you a good man. I have found you an extraordinary woman. This is a success, yes?”
“As I recall, she found you,” Phillips says. Then he sighs. “Look, this doesn’t end when your father gets better. This all works out, and you are the exclusive property of the US government. You go where we tell you, shoot who we tell you, and you don’t get out when we win this war. The Army is a lifetime job, kid.”
“Do we have a deal or not?” she asks.
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SSR agent Natalie Roman is one of the most valuable assets the USA has. There’s Oppenheimer, Feynman, Captain America, and then her, Agent Roman, codenamed the Black Widow. A greater secret than the atomic bomb, she’s deployed to root out Nazi, Servizio Informazioni Militari, and Hydra cells domestically. Internationally, she tracks defectors across the Alps, teaches guerilla tactics to the French Resistance, and leads a small group in an incursion into Germany herself. She hunts spies, couriers messages, and eliminates key figures.
Captain America almost single-handedly brings down Hydra, and the war ends. The world is giddy with relief, but Natalie busies herself with the ugly cleanup. She tracks down Nazis in South America, quashes rebellions in Japan, and helps vet politicians for the new German government. Yet she is becoming redundant. Her workload is slowly evaporating. The spaces between her missions grow longer. She spends more and more time training new operatives and working on domestic assignments, the routine intelligence work of any great nation at peace. Emergencies that require an agent of her caliber are become few and far between.
Natalie is very young, only twenty-one when the Nuremburg trials begin. She hasn’t even peaked yet, not in terms of experience and the unfurling flower of her beauty and the inevitable slow decline of her athleticism. But even so she’s on a timer: so long before every man in the room stops looking when she walks in, so long before her knees and back and hands begin to ache. She has less than two decades before she stops being the most extraordinary intelligence operative the world has ever seen, and they’re going to be spent in peacetime.
Her handlers think, that would be a shame.
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“Shoulder still bothering you?” the doctor asks.
“Not so much,” Natalie says. “I could go off the painkillers now,” she offers.
Dr. Roberts smiles. “Always the hero,” he says.
“I don’t like drugs,” Natalie says. They slow her up.
“Well, you’re going to need this one,” he tells her, and picks up a syringe. “We need to take out the tracker we put in two months ago.”
She makes a face at the prospect, and Dr. Roberts feels a twinge of guilt. He has a daughter not much older than her. It’s only a twinge, though, and he gives her the anesthetic anyways. She leans back against the chair, and he can see it gently pull her into unconsciousness. And the second she’s all the way out, he opens the door, and the technicians and other doctors walk in, bringing strange machines and drugs with unfamiliar names.
He leaves the room, closing the door behind him. He isn’t cleared to know what they’re going to do to her.
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Natalie taps her fingers on the wooden armrest as she watches the fight. “Watch your stance,” she calls out to Hope, sparring with Daniel in the boxing ring. The two are among her most promising students, and they’re well matched despite their difference in stature. Daniel’s an ex-sailor, Hope, a code breaker forced to retired at the end of the war. When she’s done with them they’ll be exemplary field agents, a credit to the SSR.
Daniel takes her words as an opening, and aims a kick at Hope’s knee, but she’s a step ahead of him and jumps back, then steps onto the pillar that holds up the ropes and uses the height to twist into a modified flying kick that hits him solidly in the face. Daniel tries to stagger to his feet, but Hope jumps onto his chest, cuts off his windpipe with one hand and pins his arms with the other.
“Match to Hope,” Natalie announces, before it can get ugly. Hope grins, wipes sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She gives Daniel a hand up. The two of them are good friends, when their competition doesn’t make Hope too aggressive.
The door to the gym opens and closes with a bang, and every eye goes to Corporal Lorraine, who smirks minutely at the attention. The woman has no appreciation for subtlety, Natalie thinks. “Agent Roman,” Lorraine says, “General Quinn wants to see you.”
“Give me a moment,” she says, and gives her excuses to Daniel and Hope before heading to the women’s lockers. She’s not scheduled to give her report on the trainees’ progress for another week, so he must have a new assignment. She changes into her spare uniform so she doesn’t have to get debrief while sweat-stained. And, as she always does before she leaves on assignment, she pulls the wedding band off her finger and locks it safely away.
With eternal love, Alex, reads the etching on the inside.
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“Project Winter Soldier,” Quinn tells her.
“What about it?” she says, flipping through the file. It details testing of a cryogenics protocol on animals, then humans. There’s a letter from the director authorizing use on key personnel.
“We want you to be the first real subject,” he says, and her gaze flickers up to his, surprised. “Can you do that?” he asks, slowly.
She holds up a finger and flips back to the final page and carefully rereads the letter. She follows the reference to the preceding document and reads the project proposal. ‘Key personnel’ apparently means SSR agents with extraordinary talents, people that cannot be replaced. Instead of being allowed to age out of usefulness in the normal course of time, they will be placed into cryogenic storage and revived as required.
She taps her fingers. They are very sure of this technology, or they would not be asking her. The risk of brain damage is not the major concern. The major concern is that the subject, the sleeping spy, the winter soldier, will cease to live in the world, they will merely be beside it. She imagines years, decades slipping away like water between her fingers.
Alex is dead. Her parents gave her up long ago. What does she have here to miss? What does she have, really, other than her work, other than her desire to desire to serve her country?
Natalie’s dance career ended with the beginning of the war, and she joined the SSR after she’d been given an urn and folded American flag. She’d wanted Alex’s life to mean something, to have changed things, for all that it was short. Better luck than she’d hoped, that she turned out to be a first-rate field operative, not just a typist or radio operator.
“Yes,” she says, and looks up. “When do we get started?”
The first time she slips into cryogenic hibernation it feels like drowning on dry land. It feels like she’s dying right under their hands, and she has to clamp down hard on the impulse to fight. She has to remind herself, I chose this.