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Before.
Before, she would watch birds drown in the fountain, indifferent. Dark-eyed and nearly bored as their bony little bodies thrashed violently before sinking to the marbled bottom.
Now, now she tries to save whoever, whatever she can. The mistress would call her weak. And it is a weakness. To care. But at least now it’s a fault she embraces. The Red Room took everything, pounded it, grated it, gave it back to her in a bleeding mess. But it was the only thing she knew, the only history she’s allowed to remember.
She doesn’t let frogs get caught in Tony’s rooftop pool filter and she doesn’t let other little girls suffer an aborted childhood. At least, when she can save them. She tries not to think about the ones she can’t, the doe-eyed child bride in Kyrgyzstan, the limp little body her stepfather showed her as a warning to stay quiet ten or one hundred years ago, her sisters, the faceless shadows of children she can’t bear, of choices that should have been hers to own.
She’s not impenetrable and she’s not superhuman, but it’s another day wishing she were.
Today she’s been alive too long and her bones ache with the thousand lives she’s been forced to bear. Today is another day peeling off her anger like a scab before it festers and necrotizes her heart.
She tries not to blame the other Avengers for the folly of man. Thor is a god of them, he’s been alive longer than she can fathom. Why, with his infinite power, does he allow the cycle of misery to perpetuate? How can he, eon post eon, bear the suffering of his charges? Why doesn’t he feel as achingly old and tired as she does?
She tried once to have that conversation before Jane could be too affronted to intervene. Thor answered in that irritatingly righteous sympathy that he could control man no better than he could control Loki. But don’t you get tired of the murder, of the rape, of the terrible mundane endlessness of it all?
Something akin to regret may have flashed in his eyes, or maybe he was just close to smiting her. Jane had consolingly pulled him away by the forearm before she could find out. Clint had looked on from a distance, face inscrutable but his fatherly aura of sympathy and disappointment were palpable to her from afar. Jane, Thor, they had to know she wasn’t angry with them. But their little merry band all suffered tasty variations of PTSD so it was probably inappropriate to be picking fights.
In her defense, that morning Natasha had witnessed a criminal walk, a criminal she had personally tracked and delivered to the police at S.H.I.E.L.D.’s insistence, instead of gutting him like he deserved. A senator’s son acquitted, evidence "circumstantial", victim and sole witness conveniently committed to long term rehab for her mental health. She would, of course, never be able to testify; the brain damage was too extensive.
She was nine years old.
You can’t save them all, she heard Clint say softly, but the anger scrubbed clean from the words appeared in the creases of the soft age around his eyes. She could read his mind: if it were my daughter... Indeed, the bastard would be stuck with arrows before the day's end. But if it were my daughter, Natasha thought, well. He would be spread across the eastern seaboard and his mother could pick up the pieces like King Aeetes.
After the court let out, she stood shaking in rage on the court steps, near to bursting, gritting her teeth so hard the dust could be used to make blini. She wanted to burn the city, the earth, to the ground. She wanted to scream. She wanted to choke the judge, to feel his trachea crush under her fingertips. She is not above killing for revenge. But that’s a slippery slope, for at what point would she stop? When, and not if, would she become the abyss? The mistress? The choices were easier when she didn’t have them.
Sasha is the only one who knows her, knew her then, the only one who would understand the cold bloodlust, the need to fell your own family, but that little mudak is frozen God knows where. Coward.
Now, now she tries to be good. For whatever it means. For whatever it’s worth. Every day is an act of contrition for the little birds in the fountain, the little bird bodies of her sisters.
Keep pushing, Natasha. Just one more life. Just one more day. They need you.
They need you.