Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This is how things start.

The year is 1989 and Natalia is leaving Russia.

Good girl, she has been praised. Good girl, she has done her job. Good girl, the Handlers are mostly alive and her classmates are mostly dead and her fingernails are bitten to stubs and she can still see blood underneath them in horrible stripes even after scrubbing and scraping and using some of her precious, forbidden soap to purify to baptise to christen herself.

Rebirth. Goodbye, Natalia Alianovna Romanova.

Welcome, Widow.

“You will be granted leave,” says Dmitry, her favorite Handler, after the graduation ceremonies are completed and her most recent memories have been wiped. He has but two years on her, and has been working with the Program since age sixteen; he, too, is trained to be like them, but he, too, has retained quiet doubts through the training (why must we kill her, can we not teach her to be better? he whispers to Natalia while pulling her braids to distract her from the ache of the rib the girl broke before Natalia snapped her neck). She likes him because his eyes are big and brown, soft like woolen blankets and wet earth, and he speaks to her in a voice that is always strangely amused, as if she puzzles him endlessly. “You will have one month to travel the world before being summoned back into active duty, where you will remain on call indefinitely.”

“What is the objective of this mission?” asks Natalia, always duty-oriented.

“They will tell you there is no objective,” says Dmitry, “that it is not a mission. I will definitely not tell you that the ‘mission’ is a test, the objective being to make sure you are trustworthy- to make sure you will return after tasting freedom- because, if I were to tell you that, I would be killed. Besides,” he adds in an exaggerated whisper that nearly makes her grin, “that is a stupid objective for a mission.” He clears his throat and continues. “I will tell you, instead, that your mission is to spend one month doing whatever the hell it is you want, wherever you wish to go, because you have worked hard for many years and deserve a last moment to be Natalia instead of Widow.” A pause as Dmitry grins. “After that month, you will return and I will be waiting to hear of your travels.”

This is how things start.

The moment Dmitry begins talking, Natalia understands the objective- both her own and that of her trainers- but she allows him to finish anyway because the idea of leaving him for a month makes something in her chest uneasy. She will miss his voice.

In fact, the whole of the speech makes something within her disconnect, like the teeth of gears slipping out of place, jamming instead of spinning. She follows the trail of disfunction and is able to find the heart of the problem quickly, for she has never regarded herself as a particularly complicated machine.

It starts with the word deserve, ringing in the space between Natalia’s ears like a footstep too loud or a clumsy bullet against armor, hitting a breastplate instead of slipping between the cracks and into the soft skin above the ribs.

(Find the chink, Tsarina, Dmitry whispers to her. Without fail, Dima, she answers. That is their game: when everyone around is too busy or careless or dead to hear, she is his Tsarina. In a world of red everywhere, it is a beautiful, wonderful dream. To be like a princess. To wield the porcelain moon on a string. And, in this dream, she is allowed to take his name. He is not yes, Handler, thank you, Handler. But he has never been Handler, not to her. Rarely is he even Dmitry: it is too polished for his crook-lipped smile or the thick scar through his bushy eyebrow. He is Dima with a hissed joke, Dima with an extra crust of bread for her, Dima with a sorry smile as he plunges the needle into her neck and her veins begin to scream.)

Natalia has never once gotten what she deserves. If she had, she would be dead.

The thought sends a shiver up her spine.

Her training is not to be emotionless: if you are blank, you stand out.

It is, instead, to evaluate, to be a tactician, and deduce what is the most effective emotion to exhibit, whether or not you are feeling it.

Now, it is not concern. And yet, she worries.

She gives a sharp nod to Dima, face as composed as always, and stews in the pit of her gut. There, it is too dark to see her nerves sloshing and whirling head over heels, and she is too proficient to allow even a shadow of it to show on her face.

She is supposed to do whatever she wants, those are her orders, but she does not know what she wants, and, ah, yes, there is the problem.

She has never had a use for want. It is simpler, cleaner, to be systematic: it has been three days; I need to sleep. My hair has become too long to be forgettable in a crowd; I need to shear it off. I cannot walk on a compound fracture; I need to get it set. There is no want, not in a world where there is nothing to spare.

And now she is being told that there is plenty— a surplus! Go forth and waste, for a moment. And, in the process, you may meet yourself— by the way, you are not Widow, not really, not yet, though we have told you otherwise.

She knows this, intimately, though she tries to hide it from her trainers, her Handlers, Madame.

Old friend. Would she even return, the little girl named Natalia? She, who laced her pointe shoes too tight and left stripes on her ankles? Who yearned for someone to tuck in the corners of her blanket at night? Who sometimes dreamt of fire and woke up blinking back ash?

She would come, if I asked, Natalia decides, because she, for a moment, before she was snuffed out, still knew how to want.

But, once she comes, would she leave? When the holiday ends and Natalia is to return to her missions, would the little girl return to whatever place she is now hiding?

Would Natalia want her to leave?

Because, for that to happen, she must first relearn want. And the ghost of her youth is the only one who could teach her that.

It feels like enlightenment, this knowledge, except the light is silver from the moon because she does not need to use a candle when the stars and street lamps throw out a gleam that reaches up, up, up towards her gaping window. She does not need to waste a candle when she only has one and it’s hidden beneath a loose floorboard with her soap and a pack of cigarettes and a mint candy she is saving to suck to melted sugar on her next birthday.

God. Everything she does is need.

What does she want?

She lifts her loose floorboard without caution- each of her dormmates is dead, she needn’t hide her stash from them any longer- and shucks a cigarette from the package, holding it between the very tips of her thumb and forefinger as if fearing to be burnt before it is lit.

She replaces the box, then the floorboard. She turns towards the window.

There is snow on the roof, and she wonders if she can slip out without it crunching beneath her heels.

She can.

She wraps the blanket from her bunk around her shoulders and layers a second pair of socks- dirty, because she does not need to clean them yet- on top of her grey ones. The heels are open to the wind and make her dance calluses sting.

They are, perhaps, in need of darning.

There are not many people on the street below her, and she is still and ghostly in the shadow of the roof’s curve. She sits and imagines herself to be a spectre. She wonders what it is like to wear black skirts- made of leather instead of tulle- like the girls stumbling home arm in arm with vodka breath and pupils blown wide; to paint her lips red and wear her hair loose over her shoulders instead of in a harsh bun or paired braids. To feel the cobblestones under her, to press a foot into the creases between them, to run her hands over the ancient rock and taste the years that have elapsed. To hear the stories they whisper into the night.

Moscow has been her home for so long, but she has yet to meet it. How could she, when she has spent so long confined?

She knows pristine white tiles with stained grout running between them. She knows the dorm room with its thin, itchy sheets and the texture of Tyana’s bunk above her head as she grapples with sleep. She knows the mirrored walls of the studio, reflecting back her long, lithe muscles and the sharp angles of twenty-three other soft-cheeked girls reaching for their toes on the barre. She knows the blood-stained towels and the blood-stained porcelain of the bathtub. She knows her daggers and her garrote and her guns and the patterns of calluses each of them etches onto her palms.

She sticks the unlit cigarette between her teeth and digs a single battery and a piece of steel wool out of the pocket of her jacket. These, she has been gifted. Not-Dima Handlers like to give her things without her asking, if she swishes her hips the right way or watches a classmate’s punishment for insubordination and seems particularly haunted afterwards. With a practiced motion, she rubs the flat head of the battery with the steel until it sparks. She makes a small sound of victory and dips the end of the cig into the flame.

She leans back against the chimney and revels in the brick rubbing against her neck, in the bitterness of the smoke sitting on her tongue. A puff of fog streams out of both of her nostrils.

Even these things- her cigarettes and her battery and the remnant of steel wool- she did not want. They were not distant, tantalizing images that danced in her dreams, sensory memories that kept her awake and yearning through the grey hours. They are gifts. A surprise. Appreciated, but in no way expected.

They are not a need, either— this, she knows.

They are somewhere between the two. Unnecessary but enjoyed. She would be equally satisfied with or without them.

She wonders what want feels like.

Is it something at her fingertips, cool like the slush soaking through her gloves now? Is it like the serum in her veins, tepid as it seeps in but blisteringly hot as it runs its course, as each individual molecule melds around her cells and lies, pretends to be part of her?

Knowing that she might learn want scares her. It rattles in the marrow of her bones.

She sucks down more nicotine and lets it make her brain matter thick and cloudy.

That night, she is not handcuffed to her bed. She doesn’t have to be. When you have won, like Natalia has, They have you for good. There is no insurance policy quite as potent as the fear of a young girl for her life.

The next morning is a blur. Natalia is given an empty trunk and a wad of cash is pressed into her palm, cinched with a rubber band. She is not made to don a full disguise, but instructed to buy clothing wherever she ends up. She knows this is logical- that buying clothing second-hand will help her to better blend with the local culture- but there is something mournful about an empty suitcase that chafes in her chest. So she puts her soap, and her cigarettes, and her candy into the bag with a spare blanket from her bed. She slips her candle into Dima’s pocket and he does not notice, but she knows he will save it for her. Before she leaves, he plants a kiss on each of her cheeks and lays a hand atop her head, looking her intently in the eyes.

“I will see you in a month, Tsarina?” he whispers so quietly as to be mouthed.

“I will miss you, Dima,” she answers.

He tugs her braids and then pushes her to the door. It slams behind her, and she hears the lock click before she is able to prepare herself to be left alone.

This is how things start.

In a rare moment of weakness, Natalia looks at Moscow sprawled before her with eyes wide like saucers. It is stunning in a horrible, chaotic way. There is a crowd, more people than she has ever seen, chittering and striding with furry coats swishing around their knees. The noise, the light, the putrid stink of gasoline and dirt and rain— all so potent as to be painful. She blinks her stinging eyes to clear them of the dust but the sun shining off the snow summons black spots in her vision. She blinks harder, again, relentless, to clear them. There is too much happening and she wants to miss none of it.

She senses someone approaching and tells the muscles in her face to relax. She turns towards the presence as it comes upon her and sees a man in a tilted cap and pressed suit, a red star pinned to his lapel. He smells of sweat and has heavy bags beneath his eyes.

“Romanova?” he asks.

“Da,” she answers.

He gestures to a black car. She gets in.

As they drive to the airport, she pats along the fabric of her pants, her sleeves, the lining of her coat. Good. Her knives are all there; her gun is there; her miniature tasers. She is armed.

The driver is silent. He pulls over at the gate entrance and exits the car, leaving it stalling.

The smell of gasoline has not ceased, and it stings the inside of her nose. She yearns to leave quickly if only to escape it. She swallows hard as her throat closes, trying to stave off the retching she is almost sure will come.

The trunk opens and he removes her case, placing it at her feet.

“Safe travels,” he says.

She offers him a smile, reaches out to shake his hand. He presses a slip of paper into her palm. She does not unfold it.

She grabs the handle of her trunk and rolls it away, breathing through clenched teeth to abate the stink, relieved when she clears the exhaust cloud.

She is at ease in the airport, though she is unsure why. Never has there been people pressing into her elbows as she walks- neither as a sign of aggression nor camaraderie was it allowed in the Program- but now she cannot so much as breathe without brushing against someone.

With almost two hundred rubles, she buys a coffee. Drinks it slow. Doesn’t burn her tongue.

She walks until she finds a restroom, crushes the styrofoam cup in her hand, then goes inside. In a stall, she unfolds the paper given to her by the driver.

There is a series of numbers tattooed in a nondescript font, black ink that burns her eyes against the paper’s stark white. She recognizes the code. It directs her to a check-in desk behind which a Handler is masquerading as an employee of the airport. The company he is in uniform for does not exist. He does not scan her for metal, does not run his hands over her body to search for contraband. If he had, she would have lit up like a gas station fire, would’ve been arrested on the spot, and it is irksome when missions complicate like that.

The Handler directs her to a gate at which no one else is seated. She does not sit there, for that would bring attention to her. Instead she walks and walks until her heels ache, and then continues to walk more. She looks at the gates, imagines the places to which people are going in her mind’s eye.

The Philippines, lush and verdant, rolling hills and moss-striped mountains and humidity making her skin sticky. Would she freckle in the sun? She had no way to know.

South Africa, says one, and she wonders how many teeth are in the mouth of a lion. It would be interesting to watch the way their muscles expand and contract, to learn of their ferocious power and tendency to protect.

Greece, offers another. Greece sings to her like a siren song. White buildings and blue sea and hopping between islands on a boat carried by a sail and the wind. The stars speckled above her like pinpricks in a black sheet.

There are no stars above Moscow. She wonders if she would like them.

Greece, she thinks. There is a flight leaving for Athens in twenty minutes. But. She does not want to arrive at another airport surrounded by people who have seen her already.

There is a board upon which every upcoming flight is listed. She closes her eyes and opens them again at random, glares at Roma Urbe Airport and chooses Italy immediately, remorselessly.

This is how things start.

There is sun there, and food, and architecture. There would be plenty to do. She can drink wine and find out if it dizzies her or if the serum prevents it. She can take a boat to Greece if she decides to see it. She can touch the Mediterranean and dance along foreign cobblestones and look at statues carved of marble.

You are made of marble, echoes Madame in her mind.

I will see real marble, she answers, turning on her heel. She stalks towards her designated gate, tells them Rome is where she will go. I will see real marble and then I will know if that is what I am, or if that, too, is a lie.

There is a jet waiting for her. It is short and narrow and the pilot calls her Comrade in a tone that makes her skin crawl with gooseflesh. She returns the sentiment with a smile that is too feline to be ordinary. Something like fear flashes in his eyes. Natalia takes a seat, satisfied.

She has chosen to sit right behind the wing, so that she might watch Moscow shrink beneath her and Rome, grow. For a moment, she wonders if it will feel like an empire.

The engine roars beneath her and she clenches the armrests in her hands.

Stay, I pray you, whispers Moscow.

I must go, she answers, but she mourns.

At hour one, Natalia searches out the bathroom. Uses it. Counts her knives and fixes her lipstick in the mirror.

All of hour two is spent skimming an Italian dictionary that was tucked into the seat in front of her. She feels fairly confident that she is fluent by the time the hour has elapsed.

At hour three, a man brings her tea. She thanks him, holds the mug tight between her hands, close to her chest, and breathes it in, heady, blackish leaves and sour, sickly lemon. Once she finishes the drink, she sucks on the lemon wedge until it is loose, shriveled skin.

Hour four and she lands, the wheels bouncing on the tarmac.

It is quick, getting out of the plane. She has only the one bag, after all, and she brought it to her seat with her.

If anyone in the airport terminal finds it strange that she is the only person disembarking the plane, clambering her way through the gate alone, they don’t act that way. They send kind grins her way, greet her in all dialects of Italian, and shoo her towards the street. Grazie, grazie, now kindly fuck out of the way.

She steps out, calm. What else could she be?

She walks for a while, finds a dingy looking hotel— stained, stucco walls, wooden floors so scraped they looked striped. The air is thick with cigarette stink. She books a room for the night.

She systematically unpacks her bag, placing each of her objects in its place: under a floorboard, which she has pried up with the tip of one of her knives. A centipede corpse was waiting under there. She eases it out, balanced carefully on the flat of her blade, and flicks it out the window.

The night is long and quiet. Natalia does not sleep. Not yet. She knows, logically, that it must be safe. That no one knows who she is, not really. There are now-dead Widows-in-training who had gone on more missions than her before she graduated. They would have been recognized more readily. Besides, she is excellent at her job; a pinch-hitter; a team wrapped in one. Any enemies she has made are ash or mold or a stain washed into the pipes of her bathroom sink back in Moscow. She is safe. She is safe.

Still. She does not sleep.

The next morning, she feels like a cadaver. Her skin is waxy and tight. It is warm even though it is only January, and the still, sickly air of the hotel room makes the thought of remaining there any longer unbearable.

She buys a bus ticket. The cheapest ride that goes the furthest distance?

Napoli.

The city is unreal. The buildings are old, all in shades of gold and brown and stained whites. There are trees planted along the pavement edges, as if the land remembers the natural marvel it once was and yearns not to lose that part of itself. The living part.

Though she would be amiss to say the city lives not now. There is an ancient energy to the place, a hum beneath the streets, every footfall percussive, a swelling orchestra with trumpets blaring and violins singing a thin soprano and the conductor— well, the conductor is her. And every other person stepping along these streets. They bend the city to their will by walking through it: they part the crowds, they slowly shave down the stone with every scuff of their heels.

This city has lived and died and lived again. And now it screams.

Something about it feels right. It settles the vibrations that had thrummed in her bone marrow all through the night.

This is good. This is her place. She will stay here, for now.

She finds another hotel, this one nicer than the first. There are feathered palm fronds in enormous stone pots all along the lobby, and the stairs to her room are tiled with shiny terracotta. Her bed is large, though the room is small, and it looks out towards the cloud-cutting apex of Vesuvius across the water. She throws the windows open, ignoring the murmur of mosquitoes.

They don’t bite her. They can smell the poison in her blood.

She unpacks her bag again, decides to make the process of it habitual. That will keep her on track. It will make this feel like a mission, which will, in turn, make her feel almost as if she is in control.

She goes to a cafe and drinks a cappuccino, crunches on a biscotto. She considers how funny it is that an Italian cafe is called a bar, and how different it is from its English homonym. No American bar would have wrought iron, or white tablecloths, or businessmen jabbering on work calls and lazily puffing cigarettes.

Only one person looks at her, but she does not look back at them. Their gaze lingers, but it is not sharp. It simply is.

She spends the afternoon wandering, marking the streets in her mind. A mental map.

One of her great mysteries will always be whether her propensity for memory is natural, or if it is a result of the serum.

It is most likely the latter, but she cannot help but wish it is the former. Something hers.

She returns to the cafe. The coffee was, admittedly, bad, but the servers seemed nice, and she doubts anyone will question her presence. Almost every table is filled, now. By the time she is sipping espresso, she is the only one with an empty seat across her.

Not for long.

This is how things start.

There is a tap on the table top and a quiet, “Scusatemi, signorina,” and she looks up. There is a boy there, no more than twenty, and he is undoubtedly American, though his Italian is so polished that even she would be unsure if not for his hesitant slouch— discomfort, it says I am out of place. He is small, lined with wiry muscles. He wears thin slacks that sit high on his waist, a wrinkled button-shirt with the sleeves rolled, suspenders. Loafers that look new, still stiff. His gaze is not demanding. It is not cold, either— but intelligent, distant. Not assessing, but calculating. As if she is made of code, and he is reading her.

“I speak English,” she tells him, “better than Italian.”

He slumps with something akin to relief. “Oh— that’s. That’s cool. Hey, so, I’m really sorry to ask—“ and he looks it, wincing and pulling at his own fingers, “but would it be alright if I sit with you? My mamma is in a formaggeria across the piazza and I desperately don’t want to stand in there and smell cheese for an hour so I was gonna grab an espresso but every other table is filled and I don’t want to impose but—?” He looks at her. He is sharp, ardent with a wisdom that puts her teeth on edge. No young man should look like that: as if he has stared straight into the barrel of a gun and laughed at the bullet, swallowed it whole.

Natalia is an expert at reading people, indisputably so. So when she detects that he is her equal in intellect, if not surpassing her, it sets her nerves alight with something like a challenge, something like interest, something like fear.

He looks old for his age. He just. He looks.

She looks back. “Okay,” she says, as if this is part of the mission (it isn’t, but that’s okay because she knows how to handle complications, how to untie knots with her fingernails and iron out creases with warm breath and a steady hand). “Yes. Go ahead.”

He smiles, and it sits mostly in his eyes. “Thanks. I’m Tony, by the way. Short for Anthony. Or, uh—“

“Antonio?” she says, knowing that it is the Italian derivative.

“My mother calls me Nino,” he admits with a nod, pulling the chair out. It scrapes against the cobblestone. He sits heavily, as if something in him is magnetic and the core of the earth is dragging him closer, cradling him to its crust like a babe to its mother’s cheek.

“Nino,” she repeats. It could not be more different than the Russian diminutive. Toshka is sharp. But Nino? It rolls off her tongue like a glass marble. “I like it.”

He smiles softly as he settles onto the metal chair, one of his shoulders jumping up towards his ear as if embarrassed.

A haggard waiter comes over and begins to offer a menu to him. He waves it off. “Solo un espresso per me, grazie mille.”

The waiter nods, takes a deep breath, brushes his hair out of his eyes, and marches back towards the entrance to the store.

“Is it wrong of me to feel guilty for asking him to do his job?” Tony wonders aloud. “He looks so busy. And tired.”

Natalia listens to his voice. His accent is not familiar, not immediately definable. It does not seem East Coast. There is no New York twist, no New England stop, no Southern twang. Perhaps he is from California? His skin is golden enough that it would make sense. But his mother- his mamma, he called her- is Italian- since she calls him Nino- so that could be inherited by blood.

She wonders if she should ask his last name.

“It’s not wrong,” Natalia says instead. “I, too, feel sorry for him.” She looks into her cup, an unimpressed scowl on her lips. “All of the bars in Napoli to work at and he chose the one with the shittiest coffee.”

Tony starts. Impressed, says the quirk of his lip. Happily so. “Well, aren’t you clever as the devil,” he tells her.

“And twice as pretty,” she says with a feline smile, because that is what men like to hear.

But Tony, for the first time but nowhere near the last, surprises her. He does not leer, lean towards her over the table, trace her ankle with the tip of his shoe.

He laughs so hard that his hand smacks onto the tabletop. Patrons turn with the intent to glare at him, but something about that face- with its dimples and the gleam of his eyes like bright copper pennies- stops them, and they sigh a huff of falsified frustration before turning back to their cappuccinos, begrudging grins quirking their lips.

“You’re something else,” he tells her, shaking his head. “I never picked up your name, by the way.”

“I never put it down.” He grins again. As if he has never met a clever girl. Maybe he hasn’t. American girls do not often honor their intelligence, she has been told. Madame always said, if you are playing American, you are dumb and have good teeth and that is all.

This is how things start.

“It’s—“ she almost slips, almost admits her real name. “Natasha,” she says, the diminutive of her own, which should make it easy enough to adapt to. She does not offer a last name. He hadn’t, after all.

“Natasha,” he repeats. “Where are you from, Natasha? I can tell your tiny hint- your gentle whisper- of accent isn’t Napoletana, though that is the great city in which we are making our acquaintance.”

Natalia quirks an eyebrow.

“It’s European, I can tell,” he prods. “Probably, hmm, Eastern? It’s the vowel sounds. They’re huskier. And something about your nose shape says I was probably not on America’s side in the Cold War. Czech? Polish?”

She will not hand him this. It is too telling. “You can guess, Nino,” she says, and feels pride in how the nickname makes him pout. “But I will not tell you, even if you are right.”

“What are you, a defected Russian spy or something?” he grumbles, and she cannot help but laugh.

“Wouldn’t that be exciting,” she says.

He hums under his breath, leans an elbow on the table and dips his chin into his hand. “Maybe. It would be quite a brave story. I could see it now: Natasha, Mystery Woman Supreme, with a kill number that surpasses her age. She has a youthful look to her, though, so you never know how old she really is. She could be seventeen—“ she lifts her eyebrows. “Twenty?” She lifts a shoulder noncommittally. “You’re killing me, Tasha,” he sulks. She grins evilly. Oh, Tony. If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead. “Anyway. She kills real well. Badass, she is. But the thing that makes her most powerful?” He leans towards her across the table, points an emphatic finger. “Her mind. This woman is a beast. She could outlap Einstein on his own mental obstacle course. She’s practically omnipotent.”

“Is that what you like in a girl?” Natalia asks.

Tony scoffs. “That’s what I like in anyone,” he says. “Girl or guy or whatever they want to be. If they have a brain then they’re automatically more worthy of my time than the other ninety-nine percent of the population.”

She makes a small sound of agreement. This is true. Why would she waste time on someone unstimulating? Her time is valuable- people would kill and die for it- so she must barter it wisely.

Needs and wants, needs and wants. Speaks to those she needs to, not those she wants to.

But, the thought stumps her, does she need to talk to Tony? Who she has allowed to sit at her table when she just as easily could have said no? Who she gave a name to, gave a conversation? Who she made laugh? Whose smile she continues to admire?

It is not want, not quite. But it is a distant cousin of it. And, even then, it feels like heroin in her veins.

Tony’s coffee arrives and he takes a deep, grateful sip. His eyelashes flutter in pleasure.

“Yours is good?” she asks.

“Oh, fuck no,” Tony assures her immediately, smacking his lips and putting down the cup, empty. “But I was having caffeine withdrawals and this stuff might be chalky but it’s stronger than piss, so it went right into my bloodstream.”

Natalia allows another smile to touch her lips. “Good. I was starting to think you might be crazy. Or have no tastebuds.”

“Well, as much as my mother might insist that I’ll have singed all my tastebuds off from smoking these by the time I’m twenty,” Tony starts, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tapping them against the tabletop, “I very much still have the ability to taste. For example,” he sticks his tongue out, then nods authoritatively. “Juss’ as I exspckd’d’,” he lisps, keeping his tongue hanging out between his teeth as he speaks. At Natalia’s grin, he returns his tongue to its place. “Napoli tastes like street piss, dead things, and smoke. God, I love this place.”

He pulls a cigarette smoothly from the pack and offers it to Natalia. She plucks it between two fingers. He peels his own out and sticks it between his teeth before returning the carton to his pocket, trading it out for a lighter. He brings the flame to Natalia first, then to his own lips, and they take a deep huff together.

They aren’t as strong as her contraband ones from Moscow.

She blows the smoke in rings towards Tony, who hums in appreciation.

She takes another drag before clearing her throat. “You’re not from here.” She says it as a statement rather than a question. They both know that she knows he’s as foreign as her.

“Born in Manhattan,” he says, and she hides her surprise. “But I spent a lot of time traveling when I was a kid. My dad is… a hot-shot. Owns a manufacturing company.” He doesn’t bother hiding his scowl.

Natalia paints on a sympathetic frown. “Before, you said your mother is here. Is your dad not?”

“Oh,” Tony snorts, and drags long and hard on his cigarette. “No. He doesn’t come on our trips to Italy. That’s why they’re always my favorite part of the year.”

“You come every year?”

Tony begins to fidget with his empty coffee mug, sliding a fingertip around the rim obsessively. “Yeah— uh. Yeah. We’re really lucky that we can. And mom grew up here, so we always have a reason to come back. She taught me the language and shows me around.” He drops the mug back onto its saucer, perches the cigarette between his lips and talks around it. “But enough ‘bout me. How rude I am to give you my whole life story without hearing a whit or whistle about you, my dear.” He removes the cigarette and settles it between his pointer and middle fingers, smoldering. “Will you tell me something about yourself, Natasha? We’ve got all the time in the world. Mamma can spend a disproportionately lengthy moment browsing cheeses. If I left her there forever, she would probably be grateful.”

“Grateful,” Natalia says, proud of herself for catching the pun when it isn’t even her language.

Tony laughs again. He has an easy laugh, a boisterous one. If they sold it in a bottle like a tonic, it would fly itself off the shelves. It should be a commodity, the way it makes the sun shine three degrees warmer, but he treats it like there's an endless supply.

He is the definition of reckless abandon.

“C’mon, Tasha,” he says. “Gimme something. Why did you come to Napoli, at least?”

She tilts her head to the side. “Why did I come to Napoli? Well. If I knew, I’d tell you.”

This only seems to intrigue him more, but she is strangely unbothered by it. She doesn’t mind talking to him. She doesn’t mind it a bit. In fact, she’s almost enjoying it.

“I’m in a schooling program back home and have been given a month’s leave before I start my profession,” she says. “They told me to go before I begin my work. I chose somewhere to go at random, and ended up here.”

There are stars in Tony’s eyes. “You just happened to choose the one place in the entire world where I’ll also be for the next month. Is this fate or what?”

Natalia hums, unimpressed. “Sounds pretty ordinary to me. People go to places all the time and run into friendly strangers.” Friendly, she feels, is neutral. It isn’t as committal as calling him smooth-talking, or charming, or fascinating, all of which are words she could use truthfully but dreads.

“Ouch,” Tony says mildly. “I firmly believe that if you didn’t want me talking to you, you would have killed me by now, so I’m gonna keep going.”

Natalia can’t really argue with that logic.

“What’s your favorite food?”

“Mm, strawberries.”

“Niche. I like it. The name of your best friend.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Dmitry. Why do you care?”

He shrugs. “It’s information to store. The more little stuff I get, it adds up into bigger stuff. This is my way of learning big stuff about you without you telling it to me. It’s, like, a compromise, since you don’t want to give me your life story- which is fine, we just met, I get it- but I like talking to you so far. I think you’re the type of coffee-shop stranger that’s worth getting to know.”

Natalia blinks, but finds a smile rolling slow across her lips. “Okay,” she says.

And that is how Tony learns she likes the number three best, and marmalade toast is her usual breakfast. He learns she has three random pages of As You Like It memorized and knows none of the context. He learns she knows thirteen languages, but doesn’t learn which ones.

And then he asks what job she is returning to after her break. And she pauses for a moment, unsure of what to say. Or whether she should just ignore the question all together. If she should push her chair out, stand up, and leave; return to her hotel room and book a connecting flight to England or Japan or Zimbabwe for the very next day.

Something in her is averse to that idea, however, because he was right. She is enjoying talking to him. Him, specifically, not just the human contact; he interests her, amuses her, listens to her as if she has important things to say.

Natalia taps her fingernails against the table in an anxious tattoo.

Tony raises his eyebrows at her, not unkindly. It is an invitation to speak. She likes that it isn’t a request. He doesn’t care either way, whether she tells him some secret part of her life or not, though he keeps asking. He’ll listen, might even deign her with a response. But won’t cry over it if she continues to sit there, composing symphonies with her fingertips, keeping time with the bouncing of her knee.

She takes too long. He assumes she will not answer. He gives a small, acquiescing nod, then bites on his lip. He drops his long-dead cigarette onto the stones and stomps on it. “What are you doing this evening? Anything? I’d love to have you over for dinner,” he says, sweet, genuine.

Natalia takes pause. “Well. I need to buy some clothing. I was planning to do that before the end of today.”

“I can take you,” he offers, suddenly excited. “Maybe if we finish soon, we can still have dinner with my mother. She would like you, I can tell.”

“Okay,” she answers, because it is.

This is how things start.

Tony has a funny sort of taste in clothes. He puts Natalia in an oversized blazer with shoulder pads that make her look top-heavy and bird-like. He pairs it with thick black combat boots- these, she likes- and a pair of stockings unlike her dance ones in that these are made entirely out of fishnet. She leaves her knives in the cubicle; she wouldn’t want Tony to catch a glimpse of her thigh holster- or her back holster, or her calf holster, or her shoulder holster- and report her to someone.

Tony is laughing. It is a nice laugh, she thinks, because his eyes squint and his nose wrinkles and it sounds like a duck honking. After a while, he laughs so hard that he leans forward over his knees and claps a hand down upon them, as if he is so filled with joy that it cannot be tampered.

He is fascinating.

“You just gotta perm your hair and you’ll look like goddamn Susan Sarandon,” he says, and he looks her up and down— but it is appraising rather than ogling. It is not the type of look that makes her stomach turn with waves of bile. It is a look that says I am looking at you for no reason other than I would like to.

Natalia doesn’t mind it.

“Who is Susan Sarandon?” she asks him.

His laugh cuts off abruptly and he claps a hand against his forehead. “Cazzo. Sorry. I forgot. Secretly foreign and all that.”

“It’s alright,” she says. “I will be a cultural expert soon enough if only I keep speaking with you.”

Tony’s gaze snaps back to her, and something about it softens. “Uh, duh. Of course you’re gonna keep speaking with me. You’re the only person with a brain cell I’ve met since leaving MIT- that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the college I went to in the States- and that was two years ago.” He rakes a hand through his hair and it stands on end, jumbled curls.

Natalia spares him a smile. She crosses over to the nearest table, which bears a hopelessly random assortment of garments, and sifts through blouses. They’re all quite large for her, as she’s short and narrow and hardened muscle with nothing to spare. She harrumphs.

Tony crosses and peers over her shoulder at the blouses. “I think you’ll look nice in this color,” he suggests, lifting a shirt in a rich cobalt blue. He grips it by the shoulders and, when it unfolds, it hangs so long that it would brush Natalia’s kneecaps.

Their eyes meet and suddenly they’re both snorting with laughter, Tony braying and Natalia’s shoulders shuddering with nearly silent amusement.

She lifts a hand to her lips, muffling her laugh as if it were indecent. Profane. Tony looks at her in wonder, still grinning, colored with awe. “Hey,” he says, and Natalia already knows, despite having met him only hours before, that he may be the boldest man she knows. “You should do that more often. Laugh. Don’t cover it up, it’s cute. That wasn’t me hitting on you,” he hastens to add, suddenly flustered. He runs a hand through his hair once more, tousling it even further. “I just mean. You have a nice smile. And, somehow, you being happy made me happy. The Circle Game. Keep it going around.”

“The Circle Game?” Natalia asks.

Tony groans and sways dramatically. “I must serenade you with Joni Mitchell’s entire discography.”

Before he can begin to sing, Natalia grabs a handful of whatever is closest to her and runs to the changing room, leaving him sputtering indignantly in her wake.

It’s a white blouse, this time. It is made of a thick cotton, and she runs her fingers over it possessively. She thinks it must have been a man’s, at one point. It is too sturdy for women's clothing.

Somehow she grabbed a pair of denim pants in her flurry. She pulls them on. They are loose around her thighs and fall slightly tapered to her ankles. With a belt, they’ll fit. She lifts her leg experimentally, bends her knees. They are soft from wear. She has her full range of motion. She nods approvingly. She will get them.

She pulls the black boots back on. Those, she has imprinted on like a hand in fresh snow. They are hers. They were made for her.

She ties a silken scarf in her hair. Dark blue. She twists to better see it in the mirror. She shakes her head, curses. Tony was right. It is a good color for her.

For some reason, she is nervous to reveal herself to him. This feels personal, choosing clothing. Liking clothing. Putting it on her body for personal, aesthetic purposes rather than to accomplish a mission.

It is more invasive than if she had been spread naked before him.

Under the curtain that separates the fitting room from the rest of the store, she can see him bouncing on the toes of the boots he is buying. They’re like hers, but brown. Thick soled. She wonders why he would need boots like these.

She opens the curtain and steps out.

He turns at the sound, a soft grin spreading across his lips. “Wow. Look at you. You look— great. Gimme a spin?” he asks, twirling his pointer finger in the air.

Natalia spreads her arms and spins on one heel, and thinks that it feels unnatural to spin this way. She misses her pointe shoes.

Tony whistles. “Bellissima, amo’,” he insists. “Casual, but refined. Cool, but classic. Edgy, but free-spirited. Very you.”

“How do you know what I am?” she asks.

Tony takes a surprised step back, and when he speaks, his words are calculated. “Well, I guess I don’t. Not really. Not well. Not yet,” he says. “That’s how you seem to me. Can’t be sure, though. I’d like to know. If you’ll let me?”

This is how things start.

She studies him. He does not blink, but he fidgets, fingertips twitching as if he itches to occupy them. Those nerves from earlier are still running through him; they never stopped. She wonders if they ever do.

Something about him. Makes her want to trust him. She thinks it is his blatant insecurity; he has no idea what to say or think of her, and yet he speaks, and thinks, and questions, and decides nonetheless.

“I will think about it,” Natalia tells him, but her lip quirks at the corner, so it feels like a blood oath. “But. I have a question for you now.” She pauses for dramatic effect before pointing at his feet. “What do you need with boots like these? Are your shoes not good enough?”

“They’re my stompin’ boots,” he tells her excitedly, marching in place for a moment. “They’re badass. Plus, now we match.”

Natalia shakes her head. “That, we do.”

That evening, Natalia showers at her hotel, and marvels at the scent of jasmine and orange blossoms as it clings to her skin. She leaves her hair tumbling loose around her shoulders— frizzy, wild curls like ribbon strips. She pulls on another outfit she had picked for herself at the consignment shop: long, loose, dark red pants, and an ivory top that ties around her neck. The shoes she wears are strange, slip-on things with pointed toes, provide no comfort, and are not at all durable. Their function is purely aesthetic, and this is strange to Natalia. What is the point? What is the point, if you cannot operate to your best ability when wearing them?

She wears them anyway.

Before they parted that afternoon, Tony had scrawled an address on her palm in blue ink. It had melted away in the shower, leaving her skin bruised and smeared in its wake, but she remembers it. It isn’t far at all. A townhouse with a door older than the modern Italian language, big and brown with a polished brass handle.

Tony is waiting on the steps for her, gaze unfocused as it flits face-to-face like a bee from flower to flower in an endless summer field. When he finds her, he splits with a smile so wide it must pain him. He has wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, dancing across his forehead in strips, from grinning. As if each time he smiles, he is aged.

If that is the case, Natalia is sure that there is nothing more beautiful than growing old, becoming striped with winding creases where joy crinkles skin like tissue paper.

“My precious little murder spy,” he says, he beams. He rises to his feet, grabs her hands in his, and kisses each of her cheeks gently. She feels calluses all along his fingers, wonders where they’re from. The thin coating of scruff on his lip scratches her skin, but she doesn’t mind it. “Come ti sta bene, questo vestito,” he admires, then pauses. “Again, I don't mean that in a creepy way.”

Natalia smiles, brushes her hair off her shoulder. “Grazie, Nino,” she says. She knows the outfit looks good on her, but it is nice to hear anyway. He is kind like that, giving out compliments as easily as he passes out his smiles. “Dinner? Meeting your mamma? I dressed for the occasion.”

“Clearly,” he says, and prods her ribs with his elbow. “Come in, come in. The madame is waiting to meet you. There’s lots of wine and a massive, stinky-ass brick of asiago she bought while we were at the bar.”

Natalia swallows the bile the moniker raises in her throat. “Don’t expect me to kiss you goodnight once you have cheese breath,” she teases, because that is what she is supposed to say.

But, she is quickly learning, Tony never plans to stop surprising her.

“Don’t worry,” he says with a snort. “I promise I’m not coming on to you. If I was, I wouldn’t be offering you my mamma’s fancy wine and cheese and a home-cooked meal; I’d be taking you to a nightclub with a ceiling made of asbestos and buying you six shots of vodka while grinding on another girl.” He shook his head. “I like you far too much to do that to you, Nat.”

Nicknames, he is full of them. Pet names and shorthands. Natalia likes it. It makes it feel like she is his, like she has a right to his time.

Nat, she especially likes. Because it works not only for this new name, but for the one that is hers. Nat. Hey, Natalia. Hey, Nat.

The townhouse is quaint, but undeniably gorgeous. “This place has been handed down through the family,” Tony explains, running his fingers over the bright white walls. The floors are polished, smooth hardwood, and her shoes clack against it. The ceilings are tall, and speckled with languidly spinning fans. There are wide windows in every room and linen curtains swing from them. It feels like something out of a dream, a mirage, so white and clean and open as to be unreal. Heavenly, even. And beside her, an angel himself, with a goofy little grin and a hand gesturing towards a vase that is- apparently- historical and important and very expensive.

She becomes distracted, only half-listening to him speak about pottery and specialization and the Etruscans, instead examining the rivers his veins cut across the valleys of the backs of his hands, the mountains of his knuckles jutting out proud. They are grown hands, worker’s hands. She wonders why a boy wears them.

She zones back in when a woman’s voice calls, “Nino, togliti il tuo dito dal tuo culo e vieni qui.”

Natalia is grateful to every nonexistent deity for allowing her to have heard that sentence said aloud. An uncouth snort rips itself from her throat and she claps a hand over her mouth to stifle it.

Tony glares at her out of the corner of his eye. “How the hell did you learn Italian? You’re not even from here, can’t get anything past you, you goddamn spy,” he grumbles under his breath.

Natalia swallows her mirth. “Wouldn’t you like to know, little boy,” she says, then walks past him, checking his sharp hip with her soft one. “Buona sera, Signora,” she calls, before turning to Tony over her shoulder. “She does know I’m here, right?”

“Of course,” Tony says, affronted. “I had to make sure we got the good wine out for you. Wasn’t going to serve just any fermented grape piss for my guest of honor. And I had to warn Mamma to keep her wits about her: she can’t accidentally relay any important U.S. government secrets while a spy is over.”

Natalia rolls her eyes, marching further past Tony until she arrives in the kitchen area, black iron appliances and open shelves and strategically organized spice jars that seem to hold jewels and flames for the way the sunlight refracts off of them. The square dining table is sheathed with a white cloth, two candles dripping wax in the center, a bottle of blood red wine between them and a ceramic dish of cheese and crackers and aged meats in front. The pungent, earthy scent stings Natalia’s nose, traces a winding trail through her sinuses and settles heavy in her forehead, an ache already building there.

But at the sink stands a woman with a smile so beautifully, startlingly similar to Tony’s that nothing else matters, not really. Because the room is filled with something more than food: it is filled with a blatant, effortless love so potent that it nearly knocks her clean off her feet. The way Tony’s mother looks at him. With eyes so soft they could be melted chocolate. Subconsciously turning her face his way so that she can be nearer to him. With his grin painted on her lips, right down to the barely-there gap between their front teeth. His nose on her face, a little ski slope smattered with sun-spots like spilled cinnamon.

And she is looking at Natalia with that Tony-face, with a disposition sweeter than summer berries; she is looking at Natalia like she is a person, like she deserves this kindness, and Natalia’s heart is racing as if she has been struck, as if she is bleeding herself into a dry husk.

“You must be Natasha,” the woman says, peeling rubber gloves off her hands and letting them flop over the lip of the sink. She turns, smooths the silk of her skirt, and takes a slight step towards Natalia. “You can call me Maria. Tony’s told me so much about you already,” she says, and her voice is soft and proper, as if every word has been practiced before a mirror.

Natalia holds a hand out and is utterly shocked to find it trembling slightly from emotion.

Not even three days away from the program and she’s losing her touch.

She stares hard at it until it stops.

Good. That’s how it is supposed to work.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Maria,” Natalia says. “Your house is beautiful. Thank you for having me here tonight.”

Maria takes Natalia’s hand and shakes it firmly. “It’s no trouble at all, dear. When Nino told me you were here all alone for a month, well, I couldn’t stand the thought of that. Someone ought to take care of you for a while.”

Something in Natalia’s chest convulses and she cannot breathe around the lump for a second. She exhales until the pressure clears, one long, silent stream. “I appreciate that more than you could know,” she says. “You and Tony have already done more than enough. Opening your home to a near-stranger for dinner is a kinder deed than most would do.”

Maria waves her hand noncommittally. “The way Nino talks about you tells me you’re more than near-strangers, even if you just met today.”

“Like kindred spirits,” agrees Tony, sidling up to brush their shoulders together. He shoots her an easy smile and a wink. “Why don’t we break open the seal on that bottle and get down to it? Do you need help with prepping anything for dinner, Mamma?”

Natalia hurries forward to help alongside Tony and is met with a whack from Maria’s towel, blowing her hair and just barely skimming her nose. She blinks.

“You two go sit down, open the wine if you want. Get comfortable. I’m almost done.”

Maria grabs a wooden spoon and lifts the lid off of a metal pot. Steam pours out, along with a marriage of garlic and tomatoes and chili peppers that makes Natalia’s stomach mewl. Maria stirs, and Natalia aches for a life like this, and Tony pours burgundy wine into three long-stemmed glasses with the expertise of someone many years his senior. He hands her a glass, trades it for a smile.

Tony slips a rough-palmed hand around the bend of Natalia’s elbow and leads her to the dining table. He hastens to pull out her chair for her, to push it back in after she has sat and called him a sycophant in a strange, fond tone that she has never been inclined to use before.

He grins evilly and crosses out of her line of sight, into another room. She hears the soles of his sock-feet creaking on the wood, as if no one has ever taught him to step quietly.

She realizes, suddenly, that it’s likely no one has.

A song grinds its way to life, a man crooning in gentle Italian in the type of way that makes Natalia long for quiet days and peaceful nights and the hiss of bugs outside her window.

Tony sits across from her, satisfied, and lifts his glass. He holds it out before him.

This is how things start.

“Cin cin,” he says, and Natalia does not say it back. She says something else, because it lurks under her skin, and maybe, maybe because she doesn’t mind that Tony suspects. Besides, it feeds into the fake Russian spy story Tony has adopted for lack of knowing her real Russian spy story.

“Zazdarovje,” she whispers as the lips of their glasses kiss.

Tony blinks, not bothering to hide his surprise, but doesn’t comment on it. He lifts the rim of the glass to his lips and holds eye contact with Natalia as he drains it in one gulp.

Natalia mirrors him, smacking her lips and running the tip of her tongue over her teeth to glean every last drop of it.

It slips warm down the line of her throat, hotter as it nears her heart, hottest as it trickles into the pit of her stomach. She has not eaten much since arriving in Italy, and, that day, only had coffee and a biscotto before coming to Tony’s. The alcohol rises in a bubble to her head, like cotton wool between her ears.

A smile crawls across her lips from corner to corner, and Tony mirrors it.

“Ti piace?” he asks easily, looping an ankle around hers under the table.

“Mm. Yes,” she says. “I do like it. Do you?”

“I do like it,” he echoes, grinning widely at her. He cocks his head to the side. “Tasha,” he says. “Tasha,” he repeats, then snickers under his breath.

“What?” she demands, a self-conscious blush threatening to curl over her ears. No, she tells it.

Tony shakes his head, grinning at her with star-speckled eyes. “Nothing,” he says, and he is still laughing. “I’m just happy.”

Natalia spends the evening grinning. Eating Maria’s puttanesca sauce on spaghetti (I hope you can stomach spice, darling. Oh, Maria. I’ve kissed the devil and lived.)

Two weeks blow by in much the same way. Tony shows her around Napoli with the gall of a tour guide but the cleverness and propensity towards shortcuts and pedestrian-free alleys that only spending years as a street rat could give. “Back when I was a kid, my dad used to come on these trips,” he explains, “and I would spend a lot of time off alone. But the company got bigger, and he got busier, and now he doesn’t come.” Tony shrugs, trying for easygoing and almost getting it right. “It’s nice to spend time with my mamma alone, though. It was always her home and now it’s just. My favorite place on Earth. So.” He shrugs again, and this time his couldn’t give a damn is believable. Mostly.

They take a day trip to Rome. She sees the Coliseum. Tony tells her how the marble was stripped from it to build a basilica, and how he feels it to be ironically unsaintly to do so. Natasha, feeling an awful lot like stone carved into a new image, looks at him where he stands armed with an invisible chisel and thinks it might just be poetic.

Tony and Maria take her to the beach, the top of their bright red convertible collapsed so the wind blows wild through their hair and they can smell the salt before they can see the sea. Baia Murena, they call it. The beach, Lido Sport. It is packed from end to end with bright blue loungers, and children run and scream and build castles out of dust and crumbled rock. Natalia and Tony spend the day throwing each other into the water and letting their skin turn brown (or in Natalia’s case, red. She does not freckle after all, not like Tony does on the bridge of his nose and around the shell of his ears).

They have her over for dinner every night, and Natalia has never smiled so much or smoked so many cigarettes, and she thinks she has never been this happy, this free, this easygoing.

Her second Sunday arrives and she walks into Tony’s townhouse without knocking, slipping her shoes off and calling out a good morning to Maria.

This is how things fall apart.

Tony comes barreling around the corner almost immediately, his sock-feet sliding on the hardwood, hair sticking straight up from sleep and gaze searching for her with an almost-frenzied intensity.

“My mother and I are going to our second house out in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa and I want you to come,” is the first thing Tony says when he finds her, still in the doorway, dropping one cold hand on her waist and the other one fumbling to lace their fingers together. As she slips into his grip, she feels him trembling. His eyes are glazed, faraway, hold none of that flaming clarity that drew her to him before.

“Nino,” she says. “What is the matter?”

The hand on her waist squeezes, fingertips digging into the hardness of the muscles there. They contract, release. Contract, release. Like she is a toy. He suddenly lets go and backs sharply away, dragging a hand through his curls and beginning to pace in front of her.

“It’s not important. Will you come? That’s what matters, that’s what’s important, will you come? Will you?”

“Yes,” she says blinking, blind-sided. “Yes, I will come. But only if you tell me what it is making you tear your hair out.”

He pauses mid-step. Scowls. Rubs his hands up and down his face, pushing at his sun-browned skin.

He grabs Natalia’s hand and pulls her inside the house. She follows as if there is a string tied to her, tied to Tony, connecting them, keeping her in his orbit. She shares a wave with a tired-looking Maria when they pass the kitchen.

He collapses onto the couch and she follows, burrowing into the crease, angling herself to watch Tony. Tony turns towards her full on, drops his sock-feet in her lap. She grabs one of his ankles to weigh him down, keep him with her. Stop him from drifting away.

“My father is coming to stay for the rest of the month,” he says. “He arrives on Monday.”

“You don’t get along with him,” Natalia recalls.

“That’s putting it lightly,” Tony says with a snort, rubbing his jaw with heavy fingers. He exhales a stuttered puff of breath. “I probably won’t be staying indoors much. If you want to do some touristy shit or go explore the town…. We could dress up real fancy in silk and my mother’s jewels and pretend we’re a couple of young burghers on our honeymoon, our last wild hurrah before we settle down for a life in the countryside, you, growing grapes, and me, off to the army, where I will serve until my left testis is blown off in an explosion and I am sent home to you on an honorable discharge and we spend our days surrounded by puppies instead of children since I have been so bravely, so boldly unmanned.”

For a moment, Natalia’s insides freeze. The clink of metal tools on a metal table, a needle slipping under her skin, finding her veins, sedatives sidling their way in. Her eyelids are heavy and already there is a stinging pain she cannot put her finger on it- oh, she can- and then it is gone.

Natalia leans a little closer to Tony, blinks hard to clear the image from her mind, to swallow down the horrible joke she wants to make about unmanning and her graduation ceremony and matching, again. Ignores his rambling (this is easier, helps her reach her objective faster. If he ambles in witless circles, then she must be the straight and narrow.). Gives him a small, real frown. “Toshka,” she says, the nickname slipping out unheeded. Shit. “If you are not safe when he is around, you can stay with me, here, instead. If it upsets you so. You shouldn’t have to endure it.”

His gaze slices to her. “I don’t need to be protected,” he snaps. There is a moment of tense silence, and he crumbles forward, face between his knees. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get cross with you. I’m just. Tired. I’m tired of him.”

Natalia lets a hand fall against his back, rubs tentative circles over his tense muscles. She does not know how to do this. She does not know how to do this.

What would she need? If she were Tony, what would make her feel safer, calmer?

What does Dmitry do for her when she is shaking and electricity still buzzes in the marrow of her bones after she is marched out of the room with the chair?

This, she supposes. This is what he does.

She continues to run her fingertips over his spine. She hums tunelessly under her breath. Oh, Toshka. If she could take this bitterness from him with a siphon, she would.

How does he smile the way he does when there is something so terribly mournful in his soul? She dreads the day he lets it take him over, an illness usurping him.

“Have you ever loved anyone?” Tony asks suddenly, turning his face where it rests against his thighs to look up at her. His ear folds beneath his head.

“No,” she says carefully. “I haven’t.”

Tony nods. “You probably shouldn’t, ever.”

“Why?” she asks.

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” Tony murmurs.

Natalia prods him. “You have memorized Shakespeare?” she asks, for the diction is not unlike those three pages of As You Like It that bounce around her brain heedlessly.

“That’s not the point, Nat. The point is that it’s better to never have loved than to love someone and have it turn bad. It hurts more to know what love should be and have it ruined than to be blind to it.”

Natalia frowns. “If I didn’t know that you are a genius, I would think you an idiot for that,” she tells him. “Is the blind man who once saw more damned than the man who never saw at all? Isn’t it more fulfilling to have spent time seeing, feeling, doing, than to have never done? Why does the loss of something make it less worthwhile?”

Tony does not meet her eyes, and when he speaks, his voice is strained like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. “Because it hurts, Tasha. Losing things hurts. Especially when they’re something that, by definition, is supposed to be constant. Isn’t love supposed to be constant?”

“Nothing is supposed to be constant,” she says. “Everything is fluid, constantly changing. Why would you want it to stay the same? If you change, so should your surroundings to accommodate you—“

“But if I’m moving forward- creating, becoming- and love is moving backward- unwinding, undoing- then what’s the point?”

Natalia leans over her knees so she can meet Tony’s eyes, scooting so her kneecaps press into his. “Some love will undo itself, I cannot promise you otherwise,” she says quietly. She can feel Tony’s breath- coffee-warm and still uneven- against her skin. “But where some love disappears, other love grows. Look at you and Maria. That love is indisputable, Nino. You have lost things, yes, but you have also gained so much, have you not?”

“I gained you,” he says quietly, after a moment. “But I’m going to lose you, too, aren’t I?”

She does not answer.

This is how things fall apart.

“Natasha,” he begs, and for some reason, the use of her full name grabs her innards tight in that proverbial fist and twists them, unrelentless, knotting and pulling and stretching until they’ll never, ever function properly again— like overworn stockings grown pellucid. “Please,” he breathes, “please.”

She wants to stay. She wants to stay. She wants, it aches, it is a single ember smoldering in her chest and it is too hot, too hot, she burns. This is want, this this is what the Buddhists and the Amish and Madame work to eradicate, and she gets it, because how will she ever function again when her veins are knotted and her blood can’t flow for the cancer of desire suckling her very soul until she is grey? How can she live for herself when her heart is beating for something- for someone- else?

How will she ever look at big brown eyes or stiff leather shoes or crashing surf or copper statues grown green with oxidation and see anything but him, the one who wrangled something akin to life out of her lethargic atoms?

Now that she knows what people can be like? What she can be like? What makes her heart sing arias in an echoing soprano, riffing out melismas and sending tremors through glass?

How can she know this- feel this- and look someone in the eyes and kill them?

The seat pitches under her. Everything is spinning, it’s too fast, she’s falling. She stands in one sharp movement. “I have to— I… have to go,” she whispers.

She turns on her heel and all but flies, pretending she doesn’t hear the sob that crawls its way out of Tony’s throat.

It is two days before she collects herself enough to seek him out again. Two days that bring her to the morning he leaves for Tuscany, and, for some reason, she cannot cannot let him go. Not yet.

She showers, scrubbing her skin until it is red and then scraping even harder, burgundy stains like wine dribbled upon a white tablecloth. Her fingernail catches on the skin of her thigh and it bleeds, weeps fat crocodile tears down the curve of her muscles and puddles on the porcelain beneath her feet. Her hands shake as she rinses it and rinses it and rinses it and it bleeds and she bleeds and somewhere down the street Tony is bleeding, too, and she needs to go staunch it for him.

She cannot put her finger upon the moment he became her responsibility. All she knows is that he is. He is hers, and she is his, somehow. They do not kiss. They do not fuck. They certainly do not make love. And still, he is hers. He is hers. He is hers.

Every beat of her heart sings it.

So she pulls back her sopping wet hair in a pair of braids, too tight, scalp aching. She laces up her stompin’ boots and grabs her trunk and her key and her packet of cigarettes and she marches down the street to his apartment and when she gets to the door her hand trembles too much to knock so she taps her shoe against the wood three times quick, then twice more slow, and she waits with bated breath and rolling stomach and is she going to vomit and she is going to vomit and she swallows compulsively and she hears footsteps and the door opens a crack and he is there, with loose strands of hair hanging in front of his keyhole glasses and his hands tucked into his pockets to hide the trembles and all she can say like a broken faucet drip drip dripping is, “sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” in an unholy litany, like a psalm, like she has never believed in God but is waiting to be sprinkled with holy water, like this is her penance.

And he melts, like any gracious and forgiving god would. “Tasha,” he whispers. “Natasha. Come here. Come here,” he says, and his arms are spread and she is folded against his chest, trembling like a babe, eyes scrunched closed and hands fisted in his shirt as if she never plans to release him again.

He holds her until the tremors are gone, like the reverberations of a gong dissipating into the atmosphere. She listens to the quick pace of his heart beneath his ribs and he runs his fingertips over the topography of her braids and everything, for a moment, is okay.

“You were right,” he says, pressing his nose into the top of her head, swaying them gently. “You were right. It’s all I could think about when— when you weren’t around. I couldn’t stop picturing you, just sitting there at that table the day we met with the sun in your hair and— and your laugh, at the second-hand store. It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I never felt it so I never understood. How could I?” He tightens his arms in a pulse. “And, more importantly: it isn’t fair of me to ask you to stay, to remember me, even. I know your work is complicated, whatever it is. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s just how it is.”

It makes Natalia sick to her stomach, but she nods, and savors the feeling of his lips dragging against her scalp. Because he is right: it is how it is. There’s nothing either of them can do about it, or they’ll end up as loose limbs in the bottom of a chasm in Turkmenistan below a star painted in their blood. No matter how loud her chest is shouting, stomping, I want, I want, I want.

“So, let’s make the most of our time, yeah? Can we do that?”

She pulls her face out of his chest to meet his eyes. Just as big and brown and crinkled as always. Comfortable eyes. They are safe eyes.

They look sadder.

This is how things fall apart.

“Yes,” she says quietly, and aches, because she is hurting him. “Let’s make the most of it.”

He explains the second house to her along the way: it was where his mother had spent her summers growing up, though the townhouse was where she lived permanently. “It always smells like baked grapes,” he says earnestly, “and the hills go on as far as you can see. There are lemon trees, and olive groves, and this perpetual bee’s nest that Mamma and I always feel too guilty to get rid of.”

Natalia holds his hand, tracing patterns into his palm with her fingertips. When the shaking becomes enough that Natalia fears electric currents are running through the wires of his veins, she presses her thumbs into his palm and rubs them towards the core of his hand. Like ironing out creases. She hears the moment when he starts timing his breathing to match the slide of her fingers.

This time, they drive with the roof down. She thinks it is telling that Maria is covering her face with thick-rimmed sunglasses, has wrapped her soft brown hair in a black silk scarf. Mourning.

They are easy to read, Tony and Maria.

It makes Natalia dread meeting Tony’s father, only for the fact that she will need to be hypervigilant not to lose herself and rip him apart, digit by digit, for so much as looking at either of them the wrong way.

Tony fumbles with the hem of her dress in his free hand, rolling it between his fingers. It is made of a thin crepe, brown buttons freckling up the front. He drums on one of them. Natalia bounces her shoulders to the beat, almost like dancing, and a ghost of a smile appears on Tony’s lips.

They drive on. Eventually Tony stumbles into a fitful sleep, head dangling loosely towards his chest. Natalia presses two fingers along the far side of his jaw and slips his cheek onto her shoulder. His breath is warm and damp against her collarbone. She tucks her chin over the crown of his head and frowns.

“Sleep, dorogoy,” she breathes.

“Mm,” he hums, and a blush floods across Natalia’s face, thick and sweltering. “Wh’s th’t mean?”

She pauses. “It means darling,” she accedes, shutting her eyes. This feels like sharing. It feels like danger. It feels like she loves him, no matter what she told him only days before. “For a girl, it is dorogaya.”

“Dorogaya,” he mumbles, eyelashes fluttering against her neck. “You rest too, dorogaya,” he says, and then he is out.

Natalia’s heart is hammering, painful. Each beat aches. She is so grateful for him.

I want, I want, I want.

“We’ll be on the road for a little under five hours,” Maria whispers from the front. “We’ll stop in two for a pick-me-up, but you should rest until then.”

Natalia does not tell her I cannot sleep, does not tell her if I sleep, I will dream, does not tell her I must stay awake to protect your son, for if I close my eyes for even a moment, everything will splinter.

Instead she coaxes a grateful hum from her throat and says, “wake me if you get lonely.” She shuts her eyes, buries her nose into Tony’s hair, and feels.

It hurts, all of this emotion hitting her. It does. It’s new, like stretching stiff muscles into a semblance of use. But what hurts more is the realization that, before, everything had been absence. She had been proud. She had been scared, God. She had been upset. She had laughed at jokes, had smiled when praised.

None of that holds a candle to what is roaring through her now, like the ferocious howling of the winter winds and the pummeling of snow and sleet upon the windows and rooftops. Strong enough to crack glass, merciless enough to slice through skin.

She lets it wail down onto her. Lets it carry her in its gall, lets it sweep her feet out from under her until she is sprawled, limbless.

I want, I want, I want, she thinks.

I know, answers her heart. I always knew you could.

She feels young and old. The duality of man.

When Maria pulls over into a gas station, she pretends to be awakening from a nap, stretching her shoulders and cracking her neck. Tony does not stir where he leans on her.

“Maybe I’ll go in alone,” says Maria, looking at him fondly. “I haven’t seen him this peaceful in a long time.” Her gaze flicks up to Natalia. “He never sleeps back home, you know. Working all the time, tinkering with his little projects.” She leans a hip against the open car door, and continues more quietly. “I think he has nightmares, but he never says it. The nights he doesn’t sleep, he looks tired but at least he’s here. But there are some nights where I’m sure he’s slept but he walks into the kitchen looking like he watched a murder play out before his eyes.” Maria shakes her head. “Maybe I’m just mothering him too much. I could be wrong.” She leans into the car and presses a kiss against Tony’s shoulder, pats Natalia’s head, and strides off into the gas station.

Natalia blinks owlishly, still thrown off by the reckless affection that bounces clumsy between the pair of them, but more interested in what it could be keeping Tony from a good sleep.

As if he could hear her think, a quiet, heartbreakingly scared keen comes from the back of his throat, and one of his hands tightens into a fist.

This is how things fall apart.

Natalia drops a hand onto the back of his head and scritches her nails against his scalp, hushes him, not bothering to think about how she has never made this sound in her life, and here it comes pouring out of her as natural as anything. “Shh, Toshka,” she whispers. “You’re safe.” Then, more fiercely, as emotion overcomes her, “I won’t let anything hurt you. I promise.”

She drops the hand from his head to lace around his back, holding him more firmly against her. She can just hear the sound of his heart, pulse fluttering weakly against her shoulder where it presses into the junction of his throat.

His jeremiad cuts off in a strangled gasp as Tony jerks awake. His head snaps up and he skitters backwards across the seat until his head thumps into the far window, his eyes wide and panicked as he struggles to comprehend where he is.

Natalia pushes herself into the window on her side of the seat to give him space, raising both hands to show they are empty, not going to hurt him. She ignores how they shake. Doesn’t bother hiding it from him. Maybe it will mean something to him, knowing she is scared for him.

“Nino,” she breathes, like calming a wild animal. Like talking one of her classmates down from a panic when the Wiping goes wrong and she is drowning and bleeding and burning in fragments.

Tony lets out a strangled noise and drops his head into his hands. “Sorry, dream,” he says, the sound muffled. “Just. Give me a sec. Sorry. That was dumb.”

“It wasn’t dumb,” she says. Scowls at him. “Of course it wasn’t dumb. How do I help?”

“You don’t,” he says, and she resents the fact that it strikes her like a flechette. “You can’t,” he amends, still speaking into his hands, “because it’s nothing.” He looks up, hands clattering into his lap. “I’m fine now, see?” he says, and paints on this horrible fake smile that stretches his lips and quirks his eyebrows and is charming as sin but faker than anything she has ever seen.

“You do not need to pretend,” she says, and it feels like a lie, since her entire life has been playing pretend. “Not to me.”

A moment of thick silence, and his face folds. His eyes screw shut and his lips tremble and his next breath stutters and Natalia’s very soul implodes.

“Can I—?” he mumbles, and gestures coming closer.

Natalia holds her arms open to him, but realizes that waiting for him to come to her will take too long too long when he needs her so she scoots and meets him in the middle, their hips slamming hard, and she pulls him down onto her lap so his face presses into her thigh. He is quiet, but she feels the tears warm against her skin, and she drags her fingers through his curls and wishes she could take this from him.

When Maria returns, the tears have ceased, but Tony continues to lay with his arms wrapped around Natalia’s thighs and his cheek pressed right past the hem of her skirt, which he fumbles with lazily between two fingers. His scruff itches Natalia’s legs, but she wouldn’t dream of asking him to move. His breath still hitches with each inhale, and Natalia finds her own breath hitching with it.

Maria gives them a soft smile. She has yet to question them. Natalia doubts she ever will.

“Ho comprato dei panini,” Maria says, and lifts two paper-wrapped sandwiches in her hands. Natalia can smell the warm meat, the sharp cheese.

They take the sandwiches. They eat. Maria drives.

This is how things fall apart.

When Tony has finished his sandwich, he balls the paper and collapses sideways across Natalia’s lap once more.

Natalia considers gesturing to his seatbelt, imploring him to use it, but the look on his face- vacant as if he’d been clobbered over the head- convinces her otherwise.

He doesn’t sleep again; just repeatedly fists his hand in Natalia’s skirt and chews his lip. She cannot think of anything to do except be there, so that’s what she does. She sits, and he lays, and sometimes she irons the frown-lines out of his forehead with her thumb but mostly she just leaves them be since they crop back up after anyways.

Tony’s father is already there when they pull into the driveway. Natalia knows this because there is another convertible parked waiting, the late afternoon sun reflecting off it and stinging her eyes something awful. The driveway is long, and it feels like a purposeful fuck you from the universe; prolonging the inevitable; stringing Tony up and letting him strain before knocking the stool out from under his feet.

Natalia holds Tony’s free hand while they walk along the gravel path if only because she wants to mask its shaking. It is always better to hide your weaknesses from your enemies.

Tony was right. Everything smells like grapes. The house is at the top of a hill, and Natalia takes the walk as an opportunity to scope out the scenery before what she suspects to be a probable shit-show. The sun is low in the sky, and the light glistens off of the hills where they make a patchwork quilt of yellowish tilled soil, faded green bushes, and fluorescent expanses of neatly shorn grass. The heat bakes her skin, a type of warmth she could never get her fill of. There are beds of lavender lining the walkway and Natalia takes deep lungfuls of it. It reminds her of soap, of Madame’s perfume, of something so buried in the overflowing drawers of her memory that she has no hope of finding it.

Tony’s hand is cold in hers. His walk is lilting, and their elbows knock together. His shirt is off-white, loose, and he has grown sallow to the point that he matches it.

She nudges him to grab his attention. He turns, and, God, he does his best to focus on her.

“Nice, eh?” he asks, painting on that false, cocked-lip grin.

Natalia shrugs, looks around. “I’ve seen better,” she lies, and relishes in the scowl Tony gives her in response.

“Where could you have seen better than this?” he asks, gesturing with a shoulder towards the hills, so wide and endless that she’s sure if she rolled down one, she would never stop for as long as she lived, on and on over the edges of the horizon.

“Up yours,” she answers smartly, and, oh, there is the real grin. That’s much better.

“Maria?” comes the voice, before the man strides into view. And Maria takes a deep breath, hikes her skirt, and scurries toward the call.

“Ciao, amo’,” she calls, and there is a whisper of a smile in her voice.

Not fear, not from Maria.

This is how things fall apart.

Natalia slips her hand from Tony’s and hooks it through the crook of his arm instead, thinking it might make a better impression.

As they turn the next corner, the villa comes into view. It is large, but not overwhelmingly so, with cream colored stucco walls and a crimson shingled roof. The grounds are pristinely manicured and a swimming pool dominates much of the fenced-in yard.

On the deck stands Maria, one hand delicately resting against the chest of her husband as he talks to her, a small smile on his face.

He is older than his wife, with lines dragged across his forehead and heavying the corners of his lips. He has Tony’s chestnut curls, but his are striped through with grey. He wears a crisp suit and holds himself so stiffly that Natalia thinks it must be a challenge for him to wrinkle it.

Natalia is terrified of him.

Those who look normal are always the most powerful, most dastardly. That is why she is so successful.

A full-body twitch runs through Tony and, for a moment, Natalia is sure he is going to run. She doesn’t think she would have stopped him.

This is how things fall apart.

The man turns to them, then, and descends the steps. “Heard we would have a guest,” he says in a wry tone that reminds her too much of Tony. “You can call me Howard. Here, let me grab your bags.”

Natalia gives him a glimmering smile, toeing the line between sweetheart and clandestine murderess. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Natasha.”

Howard blinks as if unsure whether he had seen the glare of the devil behind her eyes, and takes their bags. He starts to turn, to head back towards the house, and Natalia considers taking off her shoe and whaling it at him. He pauses, and then sends a nod Tony’s way. “Good to see you,” he says stiffly, as if talking to a stranger, someone who he met once and then forgot about.

“You, too, father,” Tony says. His voice is more even than it has been all day.

Howard nods again, then continues onward, up the stairs and into the house.

Maria sends a helpless, apologetic sort of smile their way and signs for them to follow. “He’ll warm up,” Maria says, squeezes Tony’s shoulder as they crest the doorway. “Once he gets a few drinks in him,” Maria adds in a mumble that she clearly doesn’t expect Natalia to hear.

Natalia prides herself in few things. Reading people is one of them. And the dynamic, now, makes sense to her.

Howard is not a villain— not in the traditional sense. He is a man with a wife he maybe loves, and a son that he doesn’t know what to do with. Maria— she loves him, or the idea of him, or who he could be, or who he was. She orbits him. He is the center of her everything, because that is how she wants it to be. Tony craves him, craves to be recognized with more than a good to see you and a nod, and, based on the way he’d been acting? Agitated to the gills, but aloof in his presence?

Tony fears him like he fears life itself: inevitable, ongoing, tempestuous, erratic. Unpredictable. Anticipation will be his end. Waiting for the apex, the minor chord and the horror-film shriek.

Waiting for the blow.

Well. Natalia is there, now. Natalia is quite good at getting in the way of things, she thinks. So, if she needs to put herself between Tony and whatever turpitude is thrown his way, she will. She will, of course she will. With a goddamn smile.

They set up a guest room for Natalia, modest but still bigger than any place she has slept before. The bed sits in a nook with a window to her left side, looking out upon the garden. The roof outside of it is flat and she can’t help but be reminded of her perch in Moscow and how unequivocally different the two are. One, she only sees by the silver light of the moon. But this one seems to catch aflame under the slanted sun. She’s sure the tiles would be warm if she were to touch them. She thinks she will make Tony sit there with her that night.

Tony collapses face first onto her bed once it is made, his face on her pillow and his feet hanging off the other end. She throws herself down beside him, bouncing the mattress as she lands, and turns her face to look at him. An exaggerated pout crawls across her lips and she reaches over to tweak his ear.

“Won’t you smile for me, Toshka?” she whispers.

He plasters a grimace-like one across his face, so wide as to be painful.

Natalia pinches the apple of his cheek and pouts more deeply.

He winces and rubs the spot, scowling balefully. “Ow.”

“He speaks!” she exclaims, and rolls over to lay on her back. She folds her arms beneath her head and grins lazily at him where he rests his chin on his arm, rumpled. He looks tired. Like he’s thinking.

Natalia wants him to stop.

“Tony, dorogoy,” she says. “We can spend the rest of our time here alone. That vineyard is aching for us to be lost in it. It stretches on for years and years, endless. Or we could go into the town, as you told me, and go shopping. You can wear me on your arm like a diamond-encrusted watch,” she offers, waggling her eyebrows.

Not even a smile touches his lips.

Natalia sighs. “What do you need of me? Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

He shuts his eyes, shakes his head sharply. “No, no. Nothing. Just. Him being here. It’s been a long time since he has been, and now it feels like he’s intruding in this— holy place— this place that was just me and Mamma’s. And I wanted my memories of here to never have him in them.” Tony shakes his head again. “I’m just being selfish. He’s my father, my mom loves him. He should be here. Whatever. Christ. I’m being everything he always says I am. Immature and selfish. Fucking hell.”

“You’re lying to yourself.” Natalia squints dangerously.

“You come into my house and call me a liar?”

“You’re a dumbass, at least.”

Tony blinks. “Literally no one has ever called me a dumbass before.”

“Glad I could be the first,” says Natalia, and she shimmies down on the bed so they are on eye-level. “Tony,” she starts. “Toshka. You are not so good at hiding your feelings. You know what I see when I look at you?” She gives him no chance to drop a self-deprecating piece of wit. “I see someone who knows his weaknesses and yet is blinded to his strengths. This makes you as much a fool as the man who thinks he is infallible.” She reaches out a hand and squishes his cheeks, puckering his lips. “You feel so much. This does not make you weak.”

He scoffs.

Natalia’s chest flares with anger, immediate, blazing. She pushes herself up onto her elbows so that she can be above him. “Take that back. That it back. You are strong, Tony, because you have empathy. You are courageous because you feel fear and spit in its face. You are protective because you know what it feels like to be ignored,” she finishes in a fierce whisper, before letting her elbows collapse beneath her so she is laid flat once more. “If you think for a moment that you are weak, then you are more stupid than I ever could have imagined you to be.” She exhales heavily, lets her anger fizzle out like a snuffed candle. She feels like a smoldering wick.

Tony reaches a hand out, tentative.

She hates when he is tentative.

She seizes his hand in both of hers and presses her face to it, cups her own cheek in his grasp. She blows warm breath on it and fiddles with his fingers, tries to bring warmth back into them. The very tips are purplish. It hits her like a crossbreeze, like a rip current.

“Thank you,” he says after a moment.

She meets his eyes. “You’re welcome,” she says.

The night passes without incident, which is to say that Howard largely ignores Tony and disappears to his room the moment the dinner table is cleared off. He asks Natalia where she is from, what she plans to do, and, because he is not nearly as intuitive or observational as Tony, she is able to pull off telling him she is from Vermont, studying abroad before returning home to work as a law intern.

It is an easy lie. She is entirely remorseless when she tells it.

Tony and Natalia stay to help Maria clear off the table, put away leftovers. She thanks them profusely and drops a lipstick-sticky kiss on each of their cheeks before heading off to bed.

Natalia cannot help but brush over the mark with her fingertips, afraid to move it, to erase it, to forget it.

Tony catches the moment. Her awe. She sees his eyes soften with it.

He throws an arm over her shoulders and leads them back to her room. He unbuttons his shirt all the way to the bottom and sheds it, wearing just a wife-beater with his pants and a pair of mismatched socks. One blue, one grey. Natalia smiles when she notices.

She grabs two blankets and her pack of cigarettes. Then, most importantly, she grabs Tony’s hand. He follows her, listless, and quirks an eyebrow when he sees her climb expertly through the window. She looks back over her shoulder at him and grins. “Come on out, the temperature’s swell,” she says as a shudder from the night chill wracks through her. Her arms and legs paper over with gooseflesh.

Tony shakes his head in exasperation but follows, which Natalia thinks has become a rather fitting generalization for their dynamic.

He crawls ungracefully to her side and sits heavily before looking at her expectantly.

“Up,” she says, and grabs the smaller blanket.

He frowns in confusion, and she taps the nearest bit of his ass to get him to lift it. “Up,” she repeats.

He lifts himself up and she spreads the blanket down underneath them. She then takes the second blanket and drapes it over their shoulders like a cloak, holding it closed around their chests.

“Oh,” Tony says, then squirms so their sides align. The feeling of the skin of his arm all pressed against hers stirs some long-repressed yearning in her. Not sex. God, no. Not with him. Never with him. But, simple touch? For the sake of camaraderie, of love, of being near to someone? She wants it. She wants it.

She leans bodily into him and he takes the hint, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. He drops his chin on top of her head.

They are silent for a moment, allowing the tension from the day to melt away like ice under the sun’s kiss.

“Would you like a smoke?” Natalia asks him.

“Why, thank you, m’dear,” he says, and takes the one she offers. She feels him squirm as he digs in his pocket for his lighter, smiles when he lets out a triumphant little ha! upon finding it. She perches the cigarette between her lips and he reaches forward to light it for her. She looks up to aim the end towards the flame and stops.

Bats his hand out of the way because it is obscuring her sightline.

Because. Holy shit. Holy shit.

“Holy shit,” she chokes, and sits up further. She has been blind. She has to have been, before, not to notice what is spread out above her like a masterpiece. She is looking onto the face of the universe, of the long-dead gods, and she is awestricken. “There’s so many,” she croaks, and rises up onto her knees. They’re all around her. A sheet, bullet holes, a flashlight, she can see pinprick Orion.

Tony settles a hand on her waist from behind, steadying her. “Have you never seen the stars before?”

“No,” she says. “Not like this.”

“City girl?”

“Mmhmm.”

“You like them?”

“Mmhmm.”

“You want me to stop asking you questions so you can enjoy them?”

“Mmhmm.”

Tony laughs, leans his forehead against her hip. Gives her a gentle squeeze. Lets her look.

He smokes quietly, and he laughs again when Natalia shoos the soot out of the way so she can see the sky in all its splendor with full clarity.

When she has drunk her fill, she rocks back onto her heels, then keels back further until she collapses into Tony’s chest. He huffs out a surprised breath, the air pressed out of his lungs by her weight, and shifts back until he’s leaning against the side of the house. He adjusts, bringing the blanket tighter around them, and holds her flush against his chest, cages her there between his thighs. She finally allows him to light her cigarette. She reclines, her head against his collarbone, wraps a hand around one of his thighs like an anchor, and says, “thank you.”

He presses his nose into her hair and says, “you’re welcome.”

They wake late, pushing midday, the sun chasing them out of their crypts. In the kitchen, they find a note reading that Howard and Maria will be out luncheoning with friends that day and there’s food in the fridge and be safe and we’ll be back by midnight.

Tony drops the paper in overjoyed relief, turns around with that luminous smile that Natalia had been aching to see, and sweeps her up in his arms, spinning her while she laughs unrestrainedly.

They spend the entire day in the middle of the vineyard, spread on a blanket, enjoying the cool, dry breeze and bundling in sweatshirts to fend off the chills. Pink wine is lazily sipped; berries are smushed onto each other’s lips. Tony lays down on his back, one knee bent, and Natalia rests her head on his stomach, and he reads to her from his copy of The Great Gatsby. The book holds all the signs of being well-loved: snapped, peeling spine, nearly every page with the ghost of a past dog-ear. He uses different voices for all of the characters, and stops to drink at all of the suspenseful moments just to frustrate her.

They return to the villa at six for dinner, which ends up being just bread and dry cheese because they have no intention to cook the chicken breasts that sit waiting for them.

They drink three bottles of sour red wine between the two of them and, in between giggles and touches and Natalia pressing the arch of her foot into the softness of Tony’s thigh for no reason other than to see him squirm, he says, “’s been two weeks since you’ve gotten here. Isn’t it time you get a new disguise, dorogaya?”

She looks him in the eyes as intensely as she can manage as the world whips around her like a carousel, and brushes her toe closer to his crotch.

He wiggles out of the way and glares at her. “You’re a mynx, Tasha. But, really. We should… we should dye your hair. Right now.” An evil sort of grin crawls along the curve of his lips. She likes it. Imitates it. They smirk at each other, like and like, with their intelligent eyes and these dastardly, wine-stained grins and Natalia feels as if maybe she is quite happy. “My mamma used to color her hair. I bet she has an extra box of the stuff lying around somewhere.”

“Okay,” she tells him. “I’ve always wanted to go blond.”

Tony whoops with excitement, scrambling clumsily up from the crease he has made in the couch.

They stain the tub in the bathroom, their hands, and one bath towel beyond repair.

But, when they are done, Natalia is blond and Tony is in shock that they were able to accomplish such a thorough dye job while flying three sheets to the wind.

He has this glint to him- all saint and all king and all of the great power that thrums through the universe manifested in one scrawny, twitchy little body- and Natalia feeds off of it.

“We are co-emperors,” says Tony, hungry-eyed. “Diocletian and Maximian, dorogaya.”

“Our empire shall live forever,” she says, and he ruffles her hair.

They fall asleep sprawled on the couch, the kind of drunken sleep that is an awful lot like death in that neither hell nor high heaven could wake them until their bodies deemed them ready.

Ready is the next morning, when Tony scrambles off the couch, still a little drunk, and retches his guts out into the kitchen sink while Natalia groans and massages her forehead, cursing the sun for rising and the birds for chirping and man for discovering the fermentation process.

They spend that day napping in the fields.

In fact, they spend every day for the entire week in the field, picnicking and reading and, on one memorable occasion, attempting to draw portraits of each other until they howl with tear-stricken laughter.

Howard and Maria go out into town again that weekend, so Natalia and Tony spend the day inside. He shows her all of the rooms she has not yet seen: a sunroom, an attic where a bird has made a nest, and a library lined wall-to-wall with books. An enormous, brown piano stands in the center of the latter, and Natalia cannot stop herself from approaching it, running her fingers over the polished wood.

“Do you play?” she asks.

Tony shrugs.

“Play,” she demands.

“No.”

She stares.

He plays.

She drops beside him on the bench and watches as his fingers dance deftly, expertly along the keys. Worker’s hands, but delicate. Feathers and eggshells and broken glass. The song, she recognizes. Gershwin something. When she closes her eyes and listens, she can see bustling city blocks and bumper-to-bumper traffic; scalding coffee spilling over the rim of styrofoam cups and children crossing the road in hand-holding chains.

He stops playing mid-song.

“Fuck,” he says.

“What?” Natalia demands, concerned and a little peeved that he has paused. “What, what?”

“I think you’re kinda my best friend,” he scowls. “Goddamnit.”

“Well,” Natalia says, feigning the same frustration as her throat closes and her eyes sting. “Now that I think about it— hell, you’ve got to be mine, too.”

His gaze snaps up to meet hers and it melts into some semblance of awe that Natalia cannot comprehend.

“You didn’t have much competition,” she says dryly. “It was either you, the man who delivers the milk, or the ugly earless cat that haunts my street back home. It wasn’t a hard decision.”

Tony sniffles. “I’m honored to beat out the cat.”

He continues to play.

Howard and Maria call. They’re staying at a friend’s that night, too wine-drunk to drive home. Tony has never looked so thrilled.

They fall asleep in Natalia’s bed, his head on her stomach as she twirls strands of his hair around her fingers. When she wakes, he is still there. And he is calm. And, thus, she is happy.

This is how things fall apart.

“Buongiorno, Principessa,” he beams.

It isn’t the same as being Dmitry’s Tsarina. It isn’t, because it is not a stolen, whispered wish. It is a promise sung out aloud from rooftops, proud and candid and wholehearted. It says you are brave, and you are strong, and you are mine, and I am not ashamed of you. It says I put my faith in you. It says where you point, I follow.

Her eyes sting, locked on him, unable to look away. Her lip trembles. She starts to weep.

“Oh, no, honey,” Tony breathes, and scoots up on the mattress. One of his big hands, still warm from sleep, cups her cheek, the pad of his thumb swiping at her tears. “What’s got you so blue, green eyes? Hey, I’m here. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay, I promise.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasps. Wraps a hand around Tony’s wrist, finger atop his pulse point, and holds him in place. I want, I want, I want.

How could she ever let this go?

She, who has sipped from the Lethe and lived? Who can find, name, and break every bone in the human body without breaking a sweat? Who has become voracious, insatiable, impetuous with want?

Or is this need? Is Tony need?

She went from nothing to everything to too far and now, the lines are blurred.

All she knows is he is hers. She is his. He is hers and they belong to each other, now. And leaving him would be the same as severing her leg. Disposing of it. I do not need. I do not need.

She cannot even think the word goodbye, though she knows it will come far too soon. A week, she remembers. A week. Three-quarters done. One quarter left, and, then, goodbye.

Goodbye, want.

Goodbye, Natasha.

Goodbye, Tony.

She weeps for herself, for her loss.

This is how things fall apart.

She lets Tony cradle her as she shakes.

They spend the day locked in the library, together on an arm-chair meant for one. He reads. She stares. They rise only for dinner, and drink vodka dry instead of wine.

This is how things fall apart.

She is in the shower, wondering how drowning would feel in her lungs, when she hears it.

She should have expected it. She should have, because she is Natalia Alienovna Romanova and the signs were all there. But she let her guard down, left him alone, and now?

The sound of a pained breath pressing from Tony’s lungs could not have been louder than a whisper, but it howls like blizzard winds between Natalia’s ears, even over the pattering of shower water against tiles and skin.

She wonders why a hit landing its mark upon her is a sign of her failure, but why it shakes the foundation of the earth’s very core when it touches Tony (rattles her teeth, trembles in her bone marrow, stops her blood from flowing as if she is turning into ice, slowly, then all at once).

She flicks the water off and exits the tub in one smooth movement, superficially dries off, and yanks a dress over her head. She lobs her sopping curls into a messy knot and marches out of the bathroom, not bothering to marvel at how quickly she can accomplish things when she is pursuing a mission objective.

Mission intel: Howard is a jackass.

Mission objective: let him know he’s a jackass.

Mission objective: save Tony. Protect Tony.

A door slams somewhere in the house. This is all the impetus Natalia needs to run, leaving little wet footprints on the terracotta tiles and not giving a rat’s fart about it.

She nearly knocks into his back, where he stands like a wraith. Part of the decor.

This is how things fall apart.

“Toshka,” she breathes, so he knows it is her. No one else would call him that. This, is hers. He, is hers. She takes a step back, waiting for the flinch that never comes.

He turns on his heel in a smooth motion and Natalia needs to stop herself from grabbing him between her hands, pulling him into her chest, and allowing the chasm between her ribs to swallow him whole, never let him free again.

His jaw is clenched, a muscle spasming, the flesh a fierce red. It will bruise. She is surprised the skin didn’t break.

He has a challenge in his eyes. These are my cards. What do you say? Run off, I dare you.

This is how things fall apart.

She walks forward.

She brushes past him.

She thinks can hear the stutter of his breath. She can undoubtedly hear the sound of his knees giving out, the sound of his shoulder hitting the wall, the sound of his shirt sliding against the stucco until he is bunched on the ground like a pile of dirty laundry, waiting to be disposed of.

She rummages through the freezer. Grabs a handful of ice, wraps it in a towel. Slinks back into the hall. Stops five feet away from him and waits for him to look at her before offering the bundle. He stares at it, uncomprehending, and Natalia drops it on the floor, slides it to him. He prods it unsurely, and only then does understanding flood his features. He lifts the towel to his face, holds it against the welt. Stares Natalia right in the eyes. He has never been one to waver. Not even when he hurts, when he aches. He does what he thinks. He does what he feels. He is still, after all, the boldest man she knows.

They sit in silence, a hallway length apart, for an unidentifiable period of time. There is no urgency, no pity, no confession spat out in a fervent moment of passion. Just Tony. Just Natalia. Just a brief respite.

This is how things fall apart.

Only when the ice has melted to water does Tony rise, and he is steady. He walks into the kitchen, wrings out the towel, and goes into Natalia’s room. She waits a bit longer before following.

They smoke an entire pack of cigarettes on the roof in the broad light of the Italian winter, because this is how things go.

This is how things end.

The days grow to twenty-aught and the nights become more melancholy. They forget to laugh, then they forget to speak. But, always, they are pressed up against each other, and this is enough. This is enough.

They are enough.

Except they aren’t. Because Natalia needs to leave behind the sun that defrosted her, that awakened her, that taught her feel and ache and desire, and now she runs rampant with all three, and how could she leave him after that, when she doesn’t know how to navigate these things yet?

An artist thrown into the wild sea on a raft and told find your way home.

A botanist thrown at a tiger and told tame it.

A murderess given a glimpse of a life so imperfect as to be dreaded if not for the rawness, the inexplicable sensation of it. How, how, how could she leave him behind?

Detach, she tells herself. Detach.

This is how things end.

Tony drives, this time, so that they are alone, the two of them. Last rites. Last moments. Snuffed out. Last heartbeat.

This is how things end.

They end in an airport terminal with a small crowd pretending not to watch as Tony sniffles into her scalp, twin braids in place and black workout gear replacing the easy dresses and light lace she had claimed as her own while away.

Her trunk sits at the floor beside her feet. Her cigarettes sit heavy in her pocket. Her knives are cold against the remnants of sunburn on her thighs, on her back. She had almost forgotten the imminence of their outline pressing into her skin.

“Maybe we could write,” he says, desperate. “Even if you can’t answer, maybe I can write to you? Will you have, like, a P.O. box I can mail to or some shit?”

She has to press her lips together to hold in a sour laugh. “I can make no promises, Toshka,” she says, and they both know what that means. It is a promise, it is. It promises this is the end.

The scent of gasoline from driving with the top down clings to his skin like cologne and, for the first time, Natalia does not want to retch it away.

“Stay, I pray you,” whispers Tony.

“I must go,” she answers, but she mourns.

“So this is how things end,” he mumbles, and presses a kiss to her forehead. He gives her a wan smile, taking her cheeks in his hands, thumbs running over sharp bones and palms pressed against soft roundness. “And whether we shall meet again I know not. Therefore our everlasting farewell take: For ever, and for ever, farewell, dorogaya! If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then, this parting was well made.”

“Fuck you,” she says, and jabs an elbow into his ribs. “Fuck you and fuck your Shakespeare.”

“It’s my way to get my point across while distancing myself from how much it hurts,” he says.

She looks at him hard, memorizing, though she knows her memory could never be so devious as to lose him. Scruff on his jaw. Crinkles at the corners of his lips. Freckles on his nose, kisses from the sun. His eyes, she will never forget. Their innate aptitude; their soft, sunbaked color.

She leans upward and brushes her lips against each of his cheeks. Leans back. A desperate, keening whine tears free of her chest and she presses a kiss on his lips. The beard scratches her. She counts to three. Closes her eyes. Opens them again. She wants, she wants, she wants.

This is how things end.

With a kiss and a tearful wink from Tony that she will carry like souvenirs, the only paraphernalia she may keep from this trip.

This is how things end, with the roar of an airplane jet and an echoing in her mind that no wipe could ever erase:

(I want, I want, I want).

Chapter Text

This is easy. This is control. This is step, spin, arch the back, flex ankle, arms sweep, third position. This is eyes closed, music dictating, follow the leader. This is nothing, it is everything, it is the thrum of a bass vibrating in the floorboards, under her toes; this is a violin trill and she tenses her fingers, like reaching, like grasping; this is the itch of her stockings and the puff of her skirt and the terrible pull of her hair from her scalp. This is familiar. It is bone marrow and blood. It is the carbon that builds her, the carbon she will decompose into. It is everything.

It is nothing.

Everything is nothing, now.

She hears footsteps coming. Tries to tune them out. It is easy; he walks to the beat of her music, intentionally or not.

The door creaks open and the music spills out, quieter around her. It’s loose. It’s running away. It’s gone.

When Widow opens her eyes and Dmitry is frowning at her instead of scowling, she knows something is wrong.

“What’s got your ugly mug in a twist?” she says, and her voice is drier than it used to be. Before.

“Your wipe,” he says. “Your last wipe. What do you remember from before it?”

Here is the thing. Widow knows how to lie. Can do it easily, with a cock of her head and a narrow-eyed glare straight at him, straight through him. She has no tells. She has beaten them out of herself. Shocked them and bitten them and filled her lungs with them. Balled them up like the soft inner part of bread and swallowed them.

She is perfect. She is marble.

She lies like she was born to do it.

“It was— almost a year ago, da?”

Dmitry rolls his eyes. “Yes, Widow. Right after your return. Right before Soldat.”

Ah. Soldat. Another partner. Another person she became too close to, too quickly. Another gone.

She hasn’t used their sign language in the month he has been gone. She wonders if she’ll ever forget it.

She wonders if he can hear while in cryosleep. She wonders if he can miss her there.

“Hmm.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I remember the ceremony. I remember going away. To Italy, I told you. And I remember coming back here, training with Soldat, missions with him. Was it— Berlin? And Paris, and one at the Velvet Revolution.”

Dmitry looks at her intently. Some of the softness of his eyes has melted out, left something brittle in its wake. “Natalia,” he says, like a curse. “I need you to be truthful with me now. Is there anyone specific you remember from your trip to Italy? Anyone… strange, who would have left a mark?”

She is quiet a moment. Looks at their reflections. Tens of them, a hundred, captured in the mirrors around her. A moment. A second, eternalized, emblazoned. Him, tall, with a hooked nose and hunched shoulders. Her, short, round muscles, hair a shock of color.

She thinks- if she squints, turns her head, maybe- maybe the image could almost look like—

No. Dmitry is too tall. Too broad. It could never be.

She pulls the ribbon out of her hair in one sharp motion. Disgusted. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders, smoothed back with serum at the top but frizzy and knotted near the ends. The blond has faded, grown out, from the sun on snow to strawberry summers to the viscous red of cough syrup. She is red. Everything is red, everywhere.

She doesn’t like it as much. It does not feel like her, not anymore.

“Why would you not believe me?” she says. “I never lie.”

“Not that I would know of, at least,” he says. He drops it, then. He knows her limits— has to, intimately, in order to know when to push through with another ten seconds or if those ten will be the ten that fill her lungs with water and kill her. He gives her a small salute- a joke, she knows by the quirk of his lips- and turns on his heel. She watches him leave, every step sharp on the polished wood, echoing between the mirrors, she watches the sound ping like clumsy bullets.

She sits on the floor. It’s cold beneath her thighs, through her tights. She lets a tear slip free, then two.

The music trails off. The moment is over.

The song changes. She rises. She dances.

---

There is not a night that she does not dream.

Sometimes, he is there.

Tonight, he is the one who straps her wrists, her ankles, her neck to the Chair. He does so with a smile, but it is not his. There are no soft lines at the corners of his eyes. No freckles on his tan nose. No tiny little gap between his front teeth.

His irises are a horrible carmine. Where his fingers brush her skin, they are frozen. Like marble. Like marble. Everything is marble and she just wants a hammer, for God’s sake.

“Dorogaya,” he says. His voice is not his. Not his. A demon wearing him like a suit. Shoulders too stiff. The curl in his mouth is not right. “Be a good girl, now. This is how you become great.”

“No,” she says. “No. No. You are not mine.”

His eyes gleam dangerously, fingers crawl to the switch on the circuit board to her left. She can see him flick the lever before she feels the pain, seizing and clenching and burning up her spine, at the base of her neck, tingling like pins and needles in her toes, spit and bile filling her mouth like sour candies, and, above her screams, she can just hear him say, so softly, “Not yours? Darling. Of course I am. I am you.”

She wakes up screaming. Her door opens with a bang, bounces off the wall behind it.

She gasps his name. He is there, beside her bed. No, he isn’t. This is Dima, Dmitry, Handler.

She blinks, hard. Shakes her head. She massages her chest with her fingers, tries to remember the flavor of oxygen.

“I need a smoke,” she tells Dima. His hair is flat on one side from sleeping on it, far from his normal slicked style with the part on the right. His pajamas are rumpled. His chest ripples with every heavy breath. He had run to her.

She feels nothing, knowing that.

“Okay,” he says.

“Close your eyes,” she orders, and slides off of her bed. The floor is cold through her socks, and smooth. She comes to her knees, pries up that same loose floorboard she has always used, and removes a carton of cigarettes from the cavity.

She doesn’t need to hide these. Not now that she’s a graduated Widow. Not now that she’s doing missions with the precision of someone much her senior. Not now that they have her wrapped around their red-tipped finger, unable to deflect and live.

Sometimes she wonders if it would be worth it, to escape. For them to have to send Soldat after her, to kill her.

She thinks of a bullet slicing through the base of her skull. Sick pleasure. She would deserve it.

“Tsarina,” Dima breathes. His eyes are still closed.

She starts; she had forgotten he was there. In one motion, she stands. Her knees crack.

The serum slows her aging, but she feels like she’s the stuff of Olympus. Ancient. Stepped on and worshipped and cracked and left behind. Forgotten. Everyone has changed their religion, and what is God if no one believes in it?

She shucks two cigarettes from the package. Pokes Dima on the shoulder and hands one to him. He has a lighter in his pocket. She watches the flame with interest she has not felt in a long time. It paints black spots on her eyes. That is power. Carrying destruction in his pocket.

She perches the cigarette between her lips, dips her face to the flame like she is all of humanity, grateful at Prometheus’s feet. She knows the gods will punish him- she knows- but, until then, she will have this.

They open her window and lean out of it, arms dangling towards the street below. The air is frigid, Moscow winter afoot. Everything is covered in grey snow. Dirt, ash, shit in the streets. She hears a siren— the Municipal Militsiya, she assumes. She wonders why the fuck someone is committing crimes under the light of the moon. Shitting on something so pristine. (Sanctity, holiness, the religion of these winding roads. God in every footfall. Where is He? She has never known him.)

Then she remembers herself. She almost laughs.

Dmitry bumps her in the ribs with an elbow. She gives him a sidelong glance and he grins at her around his cigarette. He is framed by silver moonlight, streaks of stardust painted along his hairline, the bridge of his nose. Smoke hangs in the air around their heads and she imagines, for a moment, that they are in a dream.

“Are you alright, Natalia?” he asks her.

She thinks about it. Nips the cigarette between her teeth and blows out the smoke without taking it from her mouth. Like fog from the lips of a dragon. “No,” she says. “But why must I be?”

He nudges her again. “Because. This is your life. Should you not accept it, at least?”

She lets her head hang loose out of the window, chin against the brick of the outer wall. Rolls her eyes to meet his gaze. “I must not accept anything,” she says. “And all things change them to the contrary,” she quotes, and pretends it doesn’t ache to speak Shakespeare like her lips are honey-dipped instead of blood-smeared; pretends it settles gently in her chest to think of literature without him at her side. “Everything goes, Dima.”

“Not me,” he says. “I have not gone.”

“You will,” she promises.

“I will rue the day,” he answers.

“I know.”

They fall silent, leaning out the window and watching the languid light of the moon smother their Moscow.

---

“Soldat has been pulled from cryosleep,” says Dmitry conversationally as they pick over apples and slices of stinky cheese. Widow’s feet are shoeless. She has come to like the texture of the floors under her socks.

“Another mission?” she asks. Duty-oriented, still. That is her.

“Da,” says Dmitry. “In America. That is all I have heard about it.”

“Mm,” Widow says, and crunches a slice of apple between her teeth. It is nothing like the soft fruits she ate in Italy. Even in wintertime, the grapes were crisp and tart. The oranges sweet. The pears nutty and mealy and warming. These Russian apples, these November apples, they are disgusting. Flavorless. Riddled with bruises. Red. Red. Red.

She stands on her chair as if taken by a spirit. Squeezes what is left of the apple core in her palm. Throws it as hard as she can. It splatters against a window, juice dripping streaks down the glass pane. The core falls to the ground. Dust enrobes it.

She sits back in her chair. Nibbles a slice of cheese. “Do you think the snow will come tonight?” she asks, as if nothing happened.

---

His face is on the news.

His face is on the news.

She is on a mission when she sees it. In a bar. On the trail of two Camorra brothers who had been selling HYDRA information. Three short glasses of vodka, dry, simmering in her stomach. And then he was there.

Howard and Maria Stark Die In Car Accident; Stark Industries Left To Twenty-One Year Old Son, Tony Sta—

Her vision blacks out.

She doesn’t know how, or when, but she is in the bathroom, curled over a toilet, porcelain slimy beneath her fingertips, ralphing up whatever measly breakfast she had managed that morning. The shock ripples through her like a rock dropped in pond water and she heaves again, so violently that sick comes out of her nose. Everything is burning. Vodka from her stomach seems to be pulsing through her sinuses. She’s shaking. She’s crying. She’s—

Laughing.

That was him. That was her Tony’s face on the screen, proud set of his eyebrows and grin quirking his lips and that horribly intelligent gleam in his eye. The one person that no wipe could remove from her. The one who turned her into a person. The one who had taken a two-pronged key and slipped it into the spot between her ribs, unsheathing a full cabinet of feelings and personality that was hers, not Widow’s.

Tahsa. She can hear his voice. Tasha. Tasha.

She wants to say, I’m coming.

She cannot say, I’m coming.

She is puking again and, this time, someone is holding her hair. A long-legged girl, clumsy on her heels, black makeup smudged around her eyes.

“Bist du in ordnung?” asks the girl.

Natasha’s brain short-circuits. That is not. Russian. That is. Not English. Not Tony. Not— Italian.

German, some quiet voice supplies. It’s German, because you’re in Austria, dumbass. It sounds like Tony, dry and sarcastic. It gives her the strength to speak.

“Ja. Dankeschön,” she says, and it is almost a gasp. Like her first breath.

She’s laughing again. Oh, what a thing. Her Tony, heir of an international fucking weapons corporation.

She’s crying. Oh, what a thing. Her Tony, mourning the loss of sweet Maria and his sharp father, thrusted into a business that must take his heart like a smoldering cigarette butt and smother it under the heel of a boot.

She needs him. He needs her. Oh God. He needs her. Right now.

Surely she can go. To the funeral at least. Surely she can say there was a lead, a whisper of a follow-up in America, enough for her to go check it out incognito before continuing to trail the two dumbass men sitting at the bar and throwing back Ouzo like it’s sugar water.

She can fly there. Two days, total.

One to get there and go to the funeral. Pay her respects to Maria. Take a piss in Howard’s casket. Hold Tony for all she’s worth.

One night before flying back to Austria. Or Poland, or wherever these two are when she returns. She can track them easily. Their phone trail was so blatant that a four year old with a walkie talkie could have followed them.

Oh, to hold him again. To hear the song of his voice. The scratch of his beard against her hand. To feel, for a moment, a semblance of something like family.

She wants it. She wants it. She wants it.

She wants him.

She’ll go, then. This isn’t the vodka talking— it’s not— this is—

“Shit,” she whispers.

This is a terrible idea. It hits her like a swift smack between the shoulders. He must hate her. He doesn’t want to see her. He’s far too prideful to want her to baby him while he’s mourning. He’ll prickle. Poke her. It won’t be worth it for either of them.

How could he ever forgive her for leaving?

How could she ever explain why she needed to go?

How could she ever return to this life after seeing him again? Mapping the calluses on his hands? Smelling his cologne, like embers and dusk and cinnamon? Sleeping on his shoulder to the steady thrum of his pulse, so solid and secure?

She won’t go. She can’t. She’ll mourn him from afar.

---

She goes.

She stands at the very back of the group of mourners in front of the two closed caskets, beneath the cover of a trench coat and a black umbrella.

Everything is dusted with snow, like powdered sugar on a moment so sickly sour that she cannot stomach it.

She cannot find it in herself to look away from him.

He is drunk. She can tell. He is doing a good job of hiding it with his stiff lip and his hands clasped in the grip of a man with skin like ebony and an Air Force jacket over his suit. But his eyes wander. Like he’s searching for ghosts. The whisper of souls too soon departed.

She kneels beside the grave of someone she doesn’t know. Ruggeiro, says the headstone, Alberto and Olga. Italian. Like Maria. She pretends to pray. Really, she just apologizes in her mind, over and over.

The crowd disperses until only Tony is left, on his knees before the caskets, shuddering like there is electricity running through him. Like he is on the Chair. Like there is something dreadful inside him and he needs to expel it. Like he can weep life back into the corpses.

Air Force waits, one hand on each of Tony’s shoulders, tears dripping silently over his cheekbones.

You should go now, a voice tells Widow. You can do it. Go to him. Go to him.

Tony rouses, stands. Wipes his tears and snot on the sleeve of his jacket. Air Force claps him twice on the back, wraps an arm tightly around his shoulders, and leads him away.

Widow waits for them to be gone, waits five more minutes. Watches some men drop the caskets into two parallel holes in the ground and cover them up with soil, hard from the chill.

When they, too, are gone, Widow crosses over to the fresh plots. Comes to her knees. Collapses forward. And sobs like Tony had.

She imagines each tear will propagate a flower on the fresh earth. A garden of sorrow. She hopes Tony finds it the next time he comes.

“Maria,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Oh, Toshka.”

Her hands fist in the dirt. It crumbles between her fingers. She feels childish, petulant, playing in the mud.

There are corpses beneath her knees. She stands on death like Persephone. Where is her fucking crown.

She spits over the spot where Howard’s casket lies.

She rises to her feet, knees and hands streaked with mud, and goes.

---

This is not her last time in America, no matter how many times her brain tells her it should be, don’t be an idiot, you’re hurting yourself.

Now that she knows who Tony is, she sees him everywhere.

He is constantly on the news. Name carved onto the headlines of newspaper articles. Tabloid stands are speckled forehead to toe with pictures of him.

She has always missed him, has always wanted to see his face, but. Not like this. Not like this.

With a clever tongue, she convinces them to send her to New York, to Miami, to Nashville. Always people to kill. The blood she has washed off her hands alone, if collected in a tub, would be enough to drown her seven times over.

It is not enough. She is never close enough. Never can be.

She does not try to contact him but, sometimes, when things are moving too slowly and she has time to kill during a job, she looks for him. If he’s shopping, she’ll stand across the store and watch the way the skin of his hands ripples over his tendons, his knuckles. If he’s doing a presentation, she’ll paint on a new face and sit towards the middle of the crowd and clap louder than anyone else at the end.

One terrible day, he’s sitting alone at a cafe table.

A woman comes, a thick stack of papers in her hands. She is tall and lithe where Widow is short and round with muscles and curves. Her hair is red. Red. Tony looks at her like she painted the moon. Hm, Widow thinks.

The next day, she knows all there is to know about Virginia Potts. All of it is good. She approves, and flies back to Moscow with a bitter sort of spring in her step.

---

She wakes up screaming for the fourth time in three nights and Dima says that is enough.

“Natalia,” he says. He is begging. She is sat on the edge of her bed with her head in her hands and he is kneeling before her like she is an altar. One of his hands rests on each of her knees.

“Dima, you don’t understand,” she grinds out, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. It hurts. Spots fill her vision.

“Then help me to,” he says.

“No.”

“Natalia,” he says. “Don’t be like this. You know you can trust me. Above anyone. Above everyone you’ve ever met, am I not the one who will care for you most?”

The words fall out before she can stop them. She is too raw, too tired to bite them back. “Here, maybe, but outside? No.”

He freezes. His hands slide off of her knees, fall loosely to the floor. His knuckles smack against the wood. “You didn’t.”

She pulls on her hair. Jumps up to her feet. He careens backwards as to not get stomped on. She paces back and forth. “I didn’t what, Dima? What did I not do?”

“Fall in love!”

She stops sharply, mid-step. “You’re right. I didn’t fall in love.”

He almost seems to relax. “Then what, Natalia? What is it that torments you so?”

She takes a deep breath of the stale, dusty air, and steels herself. Feet planted. Shoulders back. “I met someone who quickly became a person who matters very much to me. That is all.”

Dmitry rises to his feet, walks over to her. Gently reaches for her hands, enrobes them in his massive ones. “Is that where you go?” he asks quietly. “Sometimes they talk. They say you take routes more roundabout than you used to. Some say you’re just covering your trail. A few wonder if there is an ulterior motive.”

She stares.

“I promise, Natalia, that I will not spill this secret. Do I not keep your cigarettes quiet? And that candle you used to have? And the—” he snorts a laugh, and it is fond, “the little mint candy I gave you for Christmas a few years ago. Did I not keep you safe?”

She pulls her hands away and turns on her heel. “This is a lot bigger than some smokes or a candy. This is terrible. He will die for this.”

“So, it’s a he?” says Dima.

She rounds on him, a glare like two smoking gun barrels a moment after a shot is fired. “He is nothing to you, and that is all you will hear.”

He raises both hands to her. Truce. “I’m sorry, Natalia. I didn’t realize it would be such a sore subject.”

“Of course it’s a sore subject,” she hisses, stepping closer to him. “I don’t want him dead, Dima.”

“Do you love him?” he asks.

She thinks that is a stupid question. “Of course I do,” she says. “It is impossible not to.”

He grabs her hands again. Squeezes them. “Then I am happy for you,” he says.

She meets his gaze. “I know you are.”

“I will protect you.”

“I know you will.”

---

Widow is in California when she kills Arnold Turig.

There is no reason for her to be in California except to kill Arnold Turig.

There is no reason for her to know who Arnold Turig is, except he was planning to assassinate Tony Stark.

So, she killed him first.

It was quick and clean, by Widow standards.

If there is a seismic scale of murder magnitude, this is maybe a six.

She can still identify each of his severed limbs after she is done with him, anyway.

---

She is sat at a desk. She is facing Madame in a way she hasn’t had to in years. Her left arm is still healing from the knife she took while fighting hand to hand with the deflected (defective?) Widow In Training she had to chase all through the fucking Andes earlier that week.

Madame stares at her, so calm. If Widow is marble, Madame is a sheet of thick ice. It takes years of pounding, melting, chipping to shatter her. But once she breaks?

Tsunami.

“Why did you kill Arnold Turig?” Madame asks.

“Bloodlust,” says Widow dryly.

From behind her left shoulder, Dmitry stifles a snort of laughter in his sleeve. Frames it as a cough.

Madame stares at her steadily. But, here is the thing: Widow has been chipping away. Hammering, balled fists, screaming, for years. Since she was toddling around the Academy in tiny striped stockings and beanie hats to cover the fine down of her hair.

Madame will break. Gods always belay their wrath upon their worshippers.

“You do not have bloodlust,” says Madame. “Hasn’t that been your problem from the beginning? You perform excellently, better than anyone. But you have a stupid propensity to feel for your victim.”

Widow grits her teeth. “I’m so sorry that I’m too human for you.”

“You are not human,” Madame spits. She leans her elbows on the table and tilts closer to Widow. “You are machine. You are carved by my expert hand to be perfect.”

“Well, you must have messed up somewhere along the way,” she says.

“One more chance,” says Madame. “Why did you kill Arnold Turig?”

“He was in my way,” Widow says. “I resent people who make my job harder.”

“So you resent yourself.”

“Of course I do. Beyond all else.”

Madame stands in one sharp motion. Her chair grinds across the floor, tilts over, falls backwards. She reaches into the folds of her sweater, pulls out a Glock, and shoots over Widow’s shoulder.

She knows, somehow, before the bullet even kisses the mouth of the barrel goodbye, that it has buried itself right in the middle of Dmitry’s throat.

A swift shot. A short-lived gurgle.

Snuffed out.

Goodbye, Dima.

She turns in horror. His blood spurts, speckles her shirtfront. The skin of her face.

It is- oh, God- it is on her lips.

Madame stalks past her, heels of her boots far too loud on the floor, echoing in the empty space between her ears.

“Goodnight, Widow,” says Madame.

“Goodnight, Madame,” she breathes back because she has to or she will be wearing rubies to match her Dima’s.

Finally, his legs give out beneath him.

She rises from her chair slowly, as if afraid to rouse him. It’s just a nap. Just a nap. Resting. God. No rest. No rest.

She brushes the hair off his forehead, sings to him under her breath about ringing bells and Brother Ivan. Lets his blood soak into her socks.

---

When Clinton Francis Barton stares at her with this look like he’s seen hell and it’s in her eyes, holds his hand out, and offers her a new place to call hers, she almost says no.

America. They can find her there. It is the first place they will look. Even here, perched on the edge of a balcony on a high-rise in Cleveland, her braid whipping about her, smacking against her back, her skin so cold that her eyelashes feel as if they’re frozen stiff, they will find her. She can’t be tricked by his promise of safety. She will never be safe again.

“Aw, don’t look at me like that,” Clint says, watching her. “I don’t wanna kill you. You wanna kill me, I know that. You look like you could do it with, like, two fingers and a landline telephone while it’s still attached to the wall. But haven’t we seen enough blood? Can’t we skip on it this time?”

Haven’t we seen enough blood? he says. Of course. Of course they have. She can see it under his nails. There’s some crusted on the back of her head. It isn’t hers.

Does she want to leave? Fuck. Good God, she wants to leave. She wants out.

How could she not? She can still taste Dima’s blood on her lips.

She looks at Clint. “I don’t deserve a second chance.”

His eyebrows beetle. “Uh, sure you do. Everyone does.” He huffs a sigh, brushes back his hair. Blond. Thin. Straw-like. “I don’t judge people on their worst mistakes.”

He shifts his weight, leaning on the leg she didn’t break for him. The sun shines bright white on his face. Pale. A band-aid across the bridge of his nose. For the first time, she catches the glint of hearing aids in his ears. Oh, she thinks.

So, the next thing she says, she spells in sign.

Okay.

As long as she lives, she will never forget the look that grows on him in that moment. A smile that could rival sunflowers opening and stretching their faces towards the midday sky. A smile like an extra spoonful of honey in her tea. A smile like digging through dirt and finding a diamond.

A miracle.

A tentative smile quirks the corners of her lips.

“What should I call you?” he asks her.

The name jumps to her tongue as if she had never been called anything else. “Natasha,” she says. “My name is Natasha.”

“Clint,” he replies. “I think this is the start of something beautiful, don’t you?”

“If I am involved, then yes.”

He has a laugh like a squeaky sneeze and it echoes over the rooftops. He shakes his head at her. Waves his still-extended hand impatiently, once more, grinning like he had made it big.

This time, she takes it.

---

He’s on the news again.

She keeps track of him when she can, but she’s almost always somewhere remote and smelly- usually Clint’s apartment in Flushing, the most remote and smelly place she’s ever been- and it gets… hard.

She loses track of time. She loses track of him. It’s been nearly twenty years, after all. He probably doesn’t remember a hair or hind of her. He has wrinkles, now, in the pictures. Real ones, that make the ones he used to have at the corners of his eyes look like little rumples at the edge of a tucked shirt. He’s renowned for drinking, fucking, and being a general dumbass. Sometimes she’s sad for him. Most days she understands. Knows that if it had been her, she most likely would have become the same thing.

She, on the other hand, looks frighteningly similar to the way she did when they met. Her best guess is that she’s somewhere around twenty-three bodily, twenty-five at most, meaning the serum had given her five years where the world gave her twenty. Sometimes, if she laughs at Clint for long enough, the lines stay carved at the corners of her lips. She wants them to stay. So when she sees Tony, she can chuckle and say we match, remember? Do you remember?

She’s doing— okay. She’s okay.

Things are still hard. Everything is. She’s relearning how to be a person. How to not stand with her heels together like she’s at attention. How to stop listening over her shoulder when she’s not on a mission (she never hears the sound of Madame’s boots on hardwood ever again. When Clint has to shake her out of a nightmare for the umpteenth time- somewhere near the end of their first year as partners- and she wakes up in a flashback so intense she vomits three separate times and then immediately faints back out again, she breaks like a porcelain vase and spills. He disappears for three days and, when he returns, he is in a lower body cast for two months and Madame is dead.).

Clint is kind, and good, and by far the dumbest person she has ever met. She kind of loves him.

They talk in a fluid combination of sign and vocal English, and they order from the same pizza place every Friday night. Clint has a dog- it is decidedly not at all her dog- and it’s named Lucky the Pizza Dog. Colloquially, he refers to it as Lucky. She calls it Thing. Or Monster. Or sweetsweetbabyIloveyoudon’ttellClint.

She has a life here. She does.

But when he’s on the news again, and the news says he’s missing, she leaps up from her seat like someone started a fire under her ass and thinks she’ll never quite sit down again.

She closes the distance to the TV. Sits slowly before it. Raises a hand. Presses it to the screen. The image is fuzzy, but discernible. Tony Stark Reported Missing: Taken Prisoner At Demonstration of His Jericho Missile in Afghanistan.

There is something thick in her throat, like a glob of phlegm she can’t break through. She keeps swallowing, but it won’t go down. She’s choking. Wheezing.

“Natasha? Hey, you’re— uh, I’m right here. That probably doesn’t help. Okay, shit. How do I. What can I. Help?”

That’s Clint, over her shoulder. She does not know how to say I will never be okay again or I can feel my heart tearing itself into pieces and lighting the shards aflame or my world is falling and I am staying still in the center as it breaks breaks breaks around me in sign language.

Clint. Her big, lumbering, idiot partner. Who is freaking out. Because he’s emotionally constipated.

They make a good pair.

“I’m okay,” she says as snot dribbles down towards her lips and she chokes on a stuttered inhale.

He grapples around behind him and grabs a half-smushed tissue box from an end-table that’s really just an upside-down wooden crate with a banana-shaped lamp on it. He then literally holds the tissue up to her face and tells her to blow.

She blows. He doesn’t even say ew, which is more concerning than any other part of the situation to her.

“Was that, like, a PTSD thing?” Clint asks as he mops off her cheeks. “A fun little trigger moment?”

She appreciates and resents his attempts at levity in equal parts.

“Remember that time I told you I stayed a month in Italy once? Back in the eighties?”

“Wine and cheese and field-frolicking, oh my! Yeah, I remember.”

“When I got there,” she says, “I met someone. We spent a full day together and we really hit it off. He was the smartest person I’ve ever met. And kind, and funny. I ended up hanging out with him and his mother every day for two weeks in Napoli.” She brushes a puff of frizzy hair out of her eyes. Clint is looking at her like he knows how the story ends. She continues anyway. “Then we went to his other house, in another part of Italy, and spent two weeks on his family’s vineyard. A full month. We were inseparable.” This hurts. “He quickly, easily became my best friend. The only person I ever truly trusted. But I had to go back to the Red Room. So. I left him. And didn’t see him for years. And then I heard his parents died, so I crashed the funeral and hid in the corner and didn’t tell him I went. I’ve been doing my best to keep tabs on him but I’ve been… slacking, recently, I guess. Obviously.” She gestures to the screen. “If I hadn’t been slacking, he wouldn’t have been fucking abducted.”

Clint is silent for a moment. “So, you knew Tony Stark.”

“Yes. I didn’t know who he was at the time, though.”

“He was your best friend?”

“Yeah.”

Better than me? he signs.

“I kissed him.”

“We have Budapest!” Clint exclaims aloud. She cuffs him over the shoulder.

“Budapest doesn’t count. It’s, like, a liminal space. It’s not on this plane of existence.”

“Oh, sure,” Clint deadpans. “Say that now, after the fact. I didn’t hear you complaining while we were there.”

“You wouldn’t have heard me even if I was,” she says, tapping her ear. He sticks his tongue out at her.

Clint lays himself flat on the ground. She elects to ignore the scrabbling of old candy wrappers and chip bags as they shift around him. “So, you saw him again. And you didn’t go talk to him?”

“How could I? He must hate me. I left him behind.”

“Did you explain why you had to leave?”

“Very loosely.”

“So he doesn’t know you’re an infamous fuckoff spy from Russia. And he was still your friend?”

She kicks his leg, but he has managed to wrangle the slightest of smiles out of her. “He actually did guess that I was a spy. I never told him he was right. I never told him he was wrong, either.”

Clint raises his hands straight out and signs, do you really think he would hate you?

She chews on that for a long minute.

Tony is not the type to hate. Not truly. He is the type to turn anger into pain, and pain into wallowing, and then ache in his misery until he becomes a husk of himself.

Maybe he would resent her. That is more likely. Hurt and resent, those two are interlocked. She caused him pain. She abandoned him. She picked up and left and she felt like endless miles of desert, dust in her lungs, cactuses for ribs, from the moment she went. A technicolor world thrust suddenly into black and white. Coffee without cream, cakes without sugar. What was she without him?

But what was he without her?

Successful. Genius. Mogul. Company thriving, inventions reeling in money like a fishing line made of baguette.

Drinking himself to death, known for sleeping around, soulless eyes in every picture and video of him.

Her Tony, but not Her Tony.

“No,” she finally decides. “He would not hate me. But he should. I hurt him. A lot.”

Clint flicks an eyebrow up. “Beyond fixing?”

She frowns. “I… don’t know.”

He levels her with a stare more coherent and intellectual than any she has ever seen from him. “Then shouldn’t you go and try?”

“Clint, he’s missing.”

He blinks. “Oh. I forgot.” There is her Clint. “Well, should we go look for him?”

She almost chews her lip. Stops herself, because that’s a tell. Remembers she’s with Clint, and fuck the Red Room. She chews her lip. “We have a mission in Mexico in two days.”

“So, take the two days. If anyone can find him in two days, it’s you.”

She glares at him. Leans forward and drops a kiss on his forehead. Rises to her feet and leaves the room.

“Wait, where are you going?” he calls.

She pauses, turns over her shoulder. “To pack for a brief stint in Afghanistan.”

---

She looks for him. She does not find him. It is the first time she fails a mission.

She is so distraught when she arrives in Mexico that Clint locks her in their bedroom so he can complete the mission alone, and she lets him.

She lays in bed and drinks overpriced vodka that tastes like gasoline. She sleeps. She pukes, twice.

When Clint comes back, she’s in the bathtub, fully clothed and completely dry. Without another word, he shoves her legs aside and climbs in next to her.

He holds her head against his chest. She listens to his heart beat.

---

Three months. It takes three months to find him. And, when he’s found, it’s not even her who does it.

It’s Air Force Jacket, from Maria’s funeral.

She is sitting on the couch in Clint’s apartment, which has quickly become her and Clint and Lucky the Pizza Dog’s apartment. They’re roommates, and they pay taxes, and rent, and, sometimes, they buy groceries. They’re horribly domestic. She’s wearing one of Clint’s flannels and has half a packet of Strawberry Pop Rocks on her tongue when the picture of a bloody Tony in the arms of Air Force Jacket appears and the headline crawls across the screen: Tony Stark Found In Afghan Cave Three Months After Disappearing.

Her jaw drops.

The candy tumbles off of her tongue and onto her lap.

Some strangled noise sounds itself from the deepest, most untouchable pits of her chest. Things she has buried like corpses. With stiff, damp dirt. She is trapped heavy-toed in the purgatory between winter and spring. She can feel in the marrow of her bones that something warmer is encroaching, and it tells her to stretch out her fingers, to perk up, look to the sky. Feel that? That’s the sun. She had forgotten it.

She is staring blankly when Clint shoves the door open with his hip, two bags of Chinese takeout in his arms. Lucky is sat on top of her feet, yapping and being a general nuisance. And she can’t even blink.

Clint is knelt in front of her before she can comprehend his arrival. One of his hands finds her cheek. She doesn’t jump. “What’s wrong, Tasha,” he says, and that breaks her.

He doesn’t call her Tasha. No one calls her Tasha. Clint, and Fury, and Coulson, and wonderful badass Maria Hill call her Natasha, or Agent Romanoff, or Widow. No one calls her Tasha.

She is only Tasha to Tony.

Tony is alive.

Tony is back.

“Tony is alive,” she says aloud. She gasps, the breath catching in her throat. She meets Clint’s eyes with startling intention. “They found him. He’s alive.”

A relieved grin crosses Clint’s face. He has a scar through his upper lip, and it pulls into a shiny crescent moon. “That’s great, Nat. Are you gonna go to him?”

She pauses. “Yes. Yes. But not yet. I’ll wait just long enough so that he does not think it’s pity. Long enough for him to start recovering.”

Clint chews on that. Tilts his head to the side. Are you happy? he signs.

I am relieved, she signs back.

“That doesn’t answer the question,” he says dryly.

She stares at him. She doesn’t need to consider her answer, and, yet, she does anyway. It feels as if she’s had this conversation before. Really, she has. Dima is not so long dead that she cannot remember it. “I have not been happy for a long time,” she tells him. “I can feel happy, but I cannot become it. Right now, I feel happy for him. Is that not good enough?”

“No,” he says emphatically, and signs it for good measure. He shakes his head so sharply that she wonders if she’ll hear loose screws bumping into the walls of his skull. “Why won’t you let yourself be happy?”

She squints. “Let myself? I don’t let myself be anything. I just am. Isn’t that the way things are?”

“No,” he repeats, and he moves to sit on the couch across from her so that she isn’t looking down at him. The scent of their Chinese food wafts from the kitchen, saline and sour. It churns her stomach. “Natasha,” he says. He lifts Lucky the Pizza Dog off of the floor and drops him in her lap like a stress toy. “What if you take the happy moments and hold onto them longer? So they’re all spread out over time. Then you’ll be— feeling happy. But, like, always.”

“Won’t that make it mean less? If I have it all the time?”

Clint wrinkles his nose. Do I mean less to you because I see you all the time?

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Of course not.” Then, but it is not the same.

“Why,” he says.

“Because I know you won’t leave,” she says. “If you leave, I’ll kick your ass and then garrote you with the cord of your hearing aid. If happiness leaves, I can’t kick its ass. It has no ass. It’s the crack-addict white boy of emotions.”

Clint snorts, then smothers his face with his hands. When he drops them, he looks like he’s trying to pass an acorn-sized kidney stone right there onto their corduroy couch. “Okay. Okay. I’m really trying here but I’m so bad at this. What I’m saying is. You think too hard about feelings. And I get it: you were trained to. Forever. And you’re doing really well with this whole becoming a human after being programmed to be a soulless murderess thing we’ve got going here. I know you watched the new episode of Barefoot Contessa without me yesterday, and I can tell by the look on your face that you’re guilty about it. See? Progress. You’re, like, killing it. Metaphorically. And it’s a lot of stages. Getting better, I mean. And I’m gonna be here for all of ‘em. But. I think it might help you. If you try to not think. Don’t think about how your happiness is gonna go away while you’re in the middle of laughing. Don’t think about the next mission when we’re, like, rollerblading in the park, or whatever. Don’t stop yourself from feeling good things because bad things come.”

She listens to every word. She thinks it makes sense. Maybe it is because Clint looks so desperately unsure that it doesn’t chafe against her. The idea of it is— soft, almost. Wonder. A strange flame in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t need anyone to be happy. Not Clint. Not Fury. Not— Tony.

Not Tony.

She can find happiness in other places. She will. She’ll do it. It’s her next mission.

Objective: find happiness.

Objective: enjoy it while it’s here.

Objective: let it slip through her fingers.

Objective: put a tracker on it so she can find it again.

---

She waits to go to him.

She waits four days and then she cannot wait anymore. Her muscles are sore from how tense she has been. She is sloppy on a mission in Midtown, wanting it to be done quickly so she can return to their couch and wear an indent the shape of her ass into the old springs and frayed fabric from watching the news so much.

He has shut down the weapons division of his company.

A little voice in her says oh, Tony.

A louder voice, a vicious one, says good, Tony. It took you long enough to find yourself again.

It is too perfect. The place is— unreal.

He is outside at a restaurant table, in a shitty but effective disguise of a baseball cap and hoodie. He taps his fingertips on the rim of his dish as if there is a nervous energy he just cannot manage to expel. He drinks three cups of coffee in the first ten minutes she watches him.

As he goes to pour the fourth, she stands. She takes a breath so deep that her vision spins briefly. This whole being human thing was a mistake. She should have waited until after. So she wouldn’t feel this so much. She’s terrified. Oh, God. She’s about to cry.

She walks over to him. Is careful not to use her silent feet.

She left her hair loose and frizzy down her back, the same dark red as it usually is. She does not wear makeup. No disguise. This is her, and this is Tony, and this is nothing in between them. There has never been anything in between them. They were real. They were crude, and organic, and callow. Apart, they are not that. They are diamonds drilled into the face of a watch, and satin fabric dripping like golden floods over the angles of their bones.

On her feet are the black boots she bought by his side. We match. Do you see, Tony? Do you see me? Can you tell how we match? That broken look in your eye, do you see it in mine? We are the same. We always have been.

Her heart pounds like the fucking Battle Hymn of the Republic is playing behind her. Like she’s an orchestra, with violin fingers and the elegant neck of a bass along her spine and timpanies thrumming as she floats over the pavement.

She reaches the side of the table. She taps a finger on it. “Scusatemi, signore,” she says, and his gaze shoots up. Brown eyes so bottomless that she tips into them and sinks like quicksand. “Is this seat taken?” she says weakly.

The coffee mug slips from between his fingers.

---

Reality is strange. It is defined by the experiencer. There is no truth, and there is no falsity, until a ground rule is established.

The circular bound of reality is a thin sheet of metal. Tin, perhaps.

In this moment, a dead blow hammer kisses the cheek of reality and bruises it, bends it, who made it, who owns it, it is tangible, it is smooth and its bones jut out like it’s starving, it’s voracious, it’s. It is.

In this moment, there are stars bursting like chocolate milk bubbles. In this moment, a baby is yelping out its first cry. In this moment, waterfalls are weeping and trees are splitting mid-trunk and someone has been told they are going to die and someone has been told they are going to live. In this moment, that is their reality.

In this moment, there is no reality. Only gritty perception.

---

“Am I seeing things?” he breathes. (His words are fake. There is no reality.) “I just got back from a torture cave and I have a timebomb in my chest and I’ve been seeing people that aren’t there for the past thirty-six hours, so forgive me if I think you’re someone else.”

“Toshka,” she says.

His expression does not change. He reaches one foot out without looking at it and pushes the empty chair away from the table. “Sit.” It is not a question. Somehow, his voice manages to waver through the one syllable.

She sits.

There is a long moment where time elapses in beats instead of silent seconds. Like John Cage’s 4’33”. It is not moments; it is bated breath. It is bare toes curled over the edge of a rocky edifice and the smell of salt as the ocean beats the cliff face below and the way your stomach drops a half-blink before you do. This is nothing.

This is everything.

They cannot stop looking. Just looking. Hello. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile, he said. Shakespeare said.

They aren’t smiling.

“Do you,” she says. Cuts off. “Do you remember me?” She cannot be sure what his reality is.

“Do I remember you?” he repeats. Tony’s composure cracks then, and something terrible passes over his face. “Natasha,” he says. “Natasha,” it is a prayer. He is leaning over the table and his hands are around hers and they are big and warm and calloused and the knuckles are split and there’s a burn across four fingers on his left hand. “Natasha,” she is a psalm, the song angels sing as they fall headfirst into Hades. “I have thought of you every day for twenty years. Wondering where you are— what you’re doing.” He bristles quite suddenly. “What are you— what are you doing here? Now? After all of this?”

She looks at him. She sees something in his eyes. So familiar. She despises it. “I’m here to tell you the truth,” she says, “because I have had enough of preventing myself from being happy. I’m here because I want you to be in my life, and I am willing to do anything to make that happen. If you will it.”

He blinks. She likes the wrinkles on his face. She doesn’t like the half-healed scars. “If I will it,” he parrots. She seems to have snipped one of the cords of his brain matter. He repeats as if he cannot think for himself any longer. “Natasha,” he says, and she almost asks him to say it again. “If you’re telling me the truth right now… then there’s nothing I want more in the world.”

Her eyes fill. She lets them. The tears settle at the rim of her lashes. They hang on.

She hangs on.

“I am here for you now,” she says. “And I am not going anywhere. Is that okay?”

“That’s okay,” he says weakly. He’s looking at her like she wrote him sonnets, a folio of sonnets, and a garden sprung from her words and now it’s growing all around them, ripe with buds and blossoms and hummingbirds and honeybees.

A waiter materializes beside them. (Is he part of their reality?) “Another menu, sir?”

Tony startles. She can hear the way his breath catches in his throat. Tumbles down like he swallowed a ladder. She turns her hands in his so she can squeeze them.

“Please,” Tony says (Tony says, Tony says, Tony says). “You know how it is. People hear free eats and they come running.”

The joke is weak. It is not funny.

Natasha laughs because it is hysterical. It is the funniest thing she has ever heard in her life.

And that sets Tony off snorting, and that builds into chuckles, and then he’s laughing his full laugh with the wheezes and the croaking and the waiter just nods like he’s seen weirder and leaves.

This doesn’t last long because Tony’s chest has a gaping cavity in it now, plugged with a core of something blue. She sees the outline of it against his skin, metal on man, and decides that this is not the time to ask. Not while he’s coughing into his napkin and, when he pulls it away, there’s blood speckled there.

Her eyes lock on it.

“It’s nothing,” he says quietly.

It’s everything.

“Lunch,” she says, “and then you tell me. And I tell you. Yes?”

He looks at her. He just. Looks at her. Keeps looking like he’s never seen her. She wonders if he thinks she looks too young. Too old. Taller. Is she? No. But maybe he thinks she is. Her hair is the same. Her nose is shorter, straighter. The KGB shaved it down. She looked too distinct when the nose was hers.

“Yes,” he says.

The ravioli she eats for lunch are mediocre at best.

---

He is different, now.

His pulse is not so steady. His hands tremble. He is almost a cyborg. Metal in his chest. Metal in his heart. Daggers poised. Clipping the skin. Just push. He’ll die if you just push.

She can’t stop thinking about it. It makes her nauseous. If something hits his chest too hard. Bye, Tony.

He has a metal suit, he tells her. He made it after the Ten Rings waterboarded him and cut into his skin and after he had open heart surgery while fully awake, but before the Ten Rings shot and killed the man he had grown to care for during the three months of his captivity and his friend Air Force- Colonel James Rhodes- collected him the way a mother gets paged to collect her lost-and-found kid from the counter in a supermarket.

He tells her this while they sit cross-legged on a desk in his lab. His experimental lab. The place where all of his calluses are from. Not from guns— though he knows how to use them, too; had to in order to build them; he knows them as well as she does and shoots them almost to the same degree— but from building, from welding, from creating things that change the world.

“Save it, now,” he amends. “No more weapons. Only world-saving things. It’s my mid-life crisis. Well, based on my rapidly deteriorating health, it’s probably my three-quarter life crisis.”

She punches him in the shoulder. He tears up and she says “what the fuck, I didn’t even hit you hard,” and he says, “I missed that.”

When he finishes (and these are my robots, DUM-E, U, and Butterfingers; they’re my stupid dumbass children and I love them but I’m also nintey-eight-point-six percent of the way to donating them to a local grocery store to be shelf-stockers) it is her turn.

When she realizes this, the color melts from her face like wet wax. Tony offers vodka. She says no. He offers red wine.

“Eh,” she says, which is as good as yes.

She waits to start talking until he is sat back beside her on the countertop, screws and metal shards around them like confetti. She thinks she is sitting on something. She lifts up and pulls a very small wrench out from under her. She glares at it as if it has personally offended her, then wields it towards Tony, saying, “this was halfway up my ass.”

He nods knowingly. “We’ve all been there.” He takes it, sets it down beside him. Knits his fingers. Looks at her expectantly.

She tosses back her full glass of wine, waits a second, and then speaks. It all comes spilling out. Dead parents; house fire. Picked up by the Red Room, trained from age three. Bootleg serum spitting embers in her veins. She dances, she knows the feeling of a garotte better than how to hold a fork, she doesn’t know her real birthday. She talks about water and electricity and drugs. She talks about her mind being wiped and what rebirth feels like when you can remember rattling fractions of your past. She talks about a loose floorboard and how she once stitched up a wound with zigzags because she was bored of straight scars (she shows him the mark, white and shiny, around her ankle like jewelry). She talks about killing the girls she knew. She talks about Dima, and it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore. She tells him about the ceremony and he is green in the face. She can hear his heartbeat stuttering, so she stops using so much detail.

She tells him about Arnold Turig. She tells him about Clint Barton and Lucky the Pizza Dog and their shitty apartment that smells like cat piss even though they don’t have a cat.

Above all, she tells him she missed him. She tells him in a hundred different ways. I thought of you while on this mission because there was a mannequin wearing a linen shirt outside the store I stabbed this ninja in. (He doesn’t wear linen shirts anymore; he traded them out for black ones with band names and stupid jokes.) There was this one kebab in Kazakhstan that you would have hated because it had chunks of onion. I once bought a pair of socks that had the Davide statue on them because I thought you’d laugh at me having dicks on my feet.

It’s almost an hour before she runs out of things to say. And when she does run out, it’s like she’s out of gas. The words trail off into nothingness.

He looks at her. It is nothing.

It is everything.

He opens his mouth as if he’s going to speak. Lets it flop closed. Opens it again. Says, “so, what I’m getting from this whole thing is that I was right this whole time? You are a spy?”

She throws her head back and laughs.

---

She stays close, after that. It is not like before, not yet, not really, because it is like introducing themselves all over again. Hi, my name is Natasha Romanoff. Oh, you have a last name? It’s fake. So is Natasha. What the fuck. I go by Natasha now, don’t worry. But it was Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Natalia. Natalia. No. Natasha.

It is hard, trying to fit herself into a puzzle that is already completed. To wedge her piece somewhere despite there being no space.

It is hard, remembering that Tony wants her around when he is always so busy with weapons and not-weapons and glorified prosthetics.

Tony’s oldest companion and business partner tries to kill him and Pepper while she is in Prague, shooting at a group of Irish mob members like it’s hunting season. Clint sees the news before she does.

He is Iron Man.

He was always a sucker for dramatics. Even back then. Him and his goddamn Shakespeare. Jesus.

When Nick Fury comes to her and tells her she has a long-term, incognito job coming up, she says, “if this is boring I’ll defect back to Russia.”

He drops a file in front of her. It wears Tony’s name.

“I’ll take it,” she says.

“He’s dying,” Nick tells her, and her world pitches violently leftwards. She has to throw a hand out to catch herself from a movement that was never really there.

“He’s what,” she says.

“Did they have irony over in the Motherland, Agent Romanoff?” asks Nick Fury.

“Nick.”

“That thing keeping him alive is poisoning his blood. He’s going to die.”

So she goes to him. Socks him in the shoulder with maybe half of her strength, but it’s enough to bruise. Then she grabs him and holds him for all she’s worth, wondering if maybe she squeezes hard enough she’ll be able to push some life into his weary bones.

The collar of his shirt shifts. His veins are black.

“I’m working on it,” he tells her.

“Drinking chlorophyll and- what are these? Grass pubes?- isn’t going to fix it.”

“They’re alfalfa sprouts, thank you very much. Give them back.”

“We’re working on something that will stave off the reaction. You work on a cure.”

“I told you, I am working on it.”

“Well. Work faster. Okay?”

“Of course.”

He gives his company to Pepper. He lets Rhodey take a suit.

He is preparing to die.

He is— trying to die?

He is so wildly not okay that she doesn’t know what to do. She can’t even handle her own fucked up mental shitshow: up there, it’s like a group of squirrels pulled on fishnet tights and are trying to put on a full production of Cabaret at all times. She doesn’t know how to handle his except by letting him do what makes him happy. Because if he’s going to die. Shouldn’t it be after a life of good moments?

She doesn’t know what to do.

Nick Fury does. He takes them to a donut shop and has her plunge a needle full of something into a hungover Tony’s neck. She kisses him on the cheek before Fury whisks him away.

---

Tony and Pepper are going through it, as Tony so eloquently puts it.

Natasha brings him a bucket of blueberries and a carton of Greek yogurt. Two spoons.

“You don’t know me,” he says, but takes one of them.

She thinks she is the only one who knows him, maybe.

She sits cross-legged on his desk. They eat. He ignores his paperwork. She is glad.

---

“I can close it!” she yells. Her ears are ringing. The marrow of her bones is vibrating. “Can anybody hear me? I can shut the portal down!”

“Do it!” yells Steve. He is a meatsack with a good heart, but he is too willing to lose soldiers.

“No, wait!” comes his voice, focused and so taught that she wonders how it is his vocal chords don’t snap.

The missile. Everything else blacks out. She can see it papered onto every blink. She’s half listening as Steve cautions Tony. Her knees give out. She’s supporting herself by her elbows on the tabletop. The flashing buttons before her become a sea of red. Everything is red. Red. Red.

He disconnects his comm.

“Come on, Toshka,” she breathes. She uses her will like a weapon, forces him out of the sky.

“Close it.” That’s Steve’s voice. Captain. Oh, Captain.

She hesitates. No body to bury?

Could she manage to look at his cold, stiff corpse?

Probably not.

She grabs the scepter and cuts off the beam. The portal closes.

Tony is not a soldier. Consultant. She made him consultant to protect him and now he’s—

hurtling towards the ground in a dead suit like a stone dropped from the hand of a disinterested God.

The Hulk catches him. Natasha thinks, wildly, for a moment, that it should have been her to catch him. Place him gently on the ground. Rip off the face of his mask and knock his lights out.

Relief is flooding her. It’s a hell of a drug. Blood rushes to her brain and she crumbles to the floor. Her hands find her cheeks and she squishes them inwards, like a pucker-lipped fish. Oh, God.

He’s alive. She’s gonna kick his ass.

---

They have shwarma first, all of them. She falls asleep at the table, her head on Tony’s arm.

He remodels his tower: a floor for each of them. Not all of them stay. Clint goes back to Lucky. Steve goes to D.C. Thor goes back to fucking space. But her, and Banner, they stay.

The best thing that comes of this- this Avengers, this battle, this destruction, this ridiculousness that is Gods and soldiers and imminent wars and aliens made of metal- is she is now living with Tony. And she has friends with more brain cells than Clint.

It is two weeks before she drops out of the air vents and lands on his shoulders. Wraps her thighs tight around his throat. Punches him in the ribs hard enough to bruise but not break, and says, “that’s for scaring the shit out of me, you pezzo di merda.”

“I love you too, dorogaya.”

---

She is awake when JARVIS speaks to her. She isn’t used to it yet and she chokes on her own spit as she startles.

People can’t sneak up on her because they have feet. And heartbeats. But AI’s can, because they have neither. And it’s odious.

“Yeah, J?” she coughs, hammering on her chest.

“I do apologize for frightening you, Miss Romanova.”

She really isn’t surprised that he knows her name. The non-Americanized version, that is. He’s about as intelligent as she is.

“Sir is currently in a panicked state, exhibiting a heart rate over one-hundred-and-twenty beats per minute, which is dangerous for him in his condition. I thought it best to alert you, and, perhaps, request you to search him out and provide comfort to him if it is not a bother.”

She is on her feet before he is done speaking. She wrestles with her belongings for a moment, and settles for grabbing a big, pink, puffy blanket, a bottle of lavender oil, and an extra pair of socks. They are blue and have rubber ducks patterned upon them. She starts to leave the room, pauses, and then grabs a plastic bag from her fridge at the last moment.

He is in the common living room when she finds him. The room is ripe with the scent of anxiety. It’s like wet concrete and stones in the summer, baked under the sun. The room is cloaked in shadow, the harsh white of the walls becoming grey-tinged. He is pacing, one hand in his hair, pulling sharply. He breathes like his lungs are raisin-sized and just as shrivelled. She manages to put most of her load on the coffee table before he even notices her, but keeps the blanket draped over her arm.

She walks into his path. He stops sharply, bobbing in place as if a string had been pulling him and it was snapped. His eyes are wide, pupils blown so that the irises look black in the low light. In the shadows, the lines that slice across his face are like canyons, rivers, carved out by natural disasters.

“Hey,” she says. “Can I put my hands on your shoulders?”

He sucks in another stuttered breath and gives her a look like she’s the dumbest thing since the mini grill created for stupid rich men to attach to the exhaust pipes of their Ferrari’s and then get cancer from red meat and gasoline fumes.

“Fair,” she agrees. “So, I won’t touch you. That’s cool. Can we sit down, maybe?” She holds up the blanket. “I brought you some goodies. Do you want to see? I’ll pretend you said yes. Let’s sit and then I can show you.”

She walks to the couch and melts, wiggling herself into the crease. It takes a long moment for him to follow, but he does. Eventually.

He’s staring at her like he’s a wounded animal, but an angry one. Shoved into a corner. A cornered, wounded animal who is so pissed about being cornered and wounded but can’t really do anything about it because, as established, he is cornered and wounded.

She lobs the blanket at him and it hits him in the face. His arms come up as if by knee-jerk reaction alone and he attempts to bat it away. A wheezy, frustrated growl comes from underneath the blanket.

“Want help?” she says. “If you want out, you gotta let me help you calm down. Deal?”

“Fuck you,” comes the gasp. It’s rough, like he’s been gargling with cardboard and salt all evening. She wouldn’t put it past him, really. Some new health kick. Lemon juice to even your skin tone! Mud to exfoliate your pores! Cardboard and salt to stimulate the nerves of your laryngopharynx!

She scoots over anyway, carefully detangling the blanket from his head. His gaze locks sharply on her body once it’s gone. The look in his eyes says too much too much. She backs up. He visibly calms, managing to pull in a breath.

“Hey,” she says, and he looks up from her knees to somewhere around her forehead. Close enough. “I’m gonna breathe really loud- like, if an elephant had hay fever, that’s how loud- and you’re gonna breathe with me.”

He doesn’t address the fact that she has spoken, but that’s fine. She knows he’ll play along.

She counts and huffs in intervals of four until the numbers seem fake. When he sucks in a breath that doesn’t hitch, she gives in. “Good, Toshka,” she says. “There you go. Better?”

He nods a little, then squints at her. Breathes through his mouth. That gap in his teeth is gone. She wonders when it closed.

“You want the goodies now?”

He continues to stare.

She picks up the blanket once more. “This right here is the best blanket in the history of bed linens. It is from a flea market in Marrakech, cost me a hundred-and-twenty darahim, and has been accidentally submerged in Gatorade, detangling serum, and the Pacific Ocean. It is the softest blanket ever created. I am letting you borrow it and if you so much as breathe on it I will rip off your fingernails one by one and use them as decorations for my scrapbooking pages.”

She drapes the blanket over his shoulders like a cape. That bewildered-yet-frustrated look on his face melts into something softer as he watches her. When she backs away to grapple in the dark for the socks and the lavender oil, he takes two tiny handfuls of the blanket and pulls it tighter around his shoulders. She twists her lips to mask the smile that threatens to peak through.

She grabs the oil next and brandishes the bottle in his face. “This is lavender oil. I’m going to hand it to you and you’re going to smear a little on your pulse points. It should help calm you down; it’s a natural relaxant.”

He stares at it for a moment that feels heavy. Like it’s suspended in tar. Like he’s not sure he’ll come out on the other side of it.

She knows the feeling. She’s immediately enraged that he does, too.

He takes the bottle. His hands tremble so badly that the liquid shakes. She tries not to count the seconds it takes him to fully unscrew the cap. It’s a lot of seconds.

She waits as he dabs the oil onto his wrists and rubs them together. Watches him blot it onto the side of his throat. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath of it.

“You can rub some on the tip of your nose,” she says, “if you want to smell it more strongly.”

He nods at the suggestion and does so. He wiggles his nose. Sneezes.

He has a sneeze like the sound a cat might make while getting squeezed around the middle.

She brings her sleeve up to her mouth to cover her smile. “Okay,” she says, muffled by the fabric. “Okay.” She drops her hand. Knots them together to keep from instinctively grabbing a handful of his shirt or drawing circles onto his kneecaps. A grown ass man has no right to look that precious. Jesus. She wants to punch him.

“Now, you’re going to pull these rubber duck socks on,” she tells him, “and you’re going to love it.”

He blinks. “I already have socks on,” he croaks. That’s progress: it’s speaking, and it isn’t cursing! Wow.

“Yeah, and you’re going to put these on over top of those. Double socks, double smiles.”

“Redundant.”

“Do your current socks have rubber ducks on them,” she says. She crosses her arms. “I didn’t think so. Put on the duck socks.”

He puts on the duck socks. One of his eyebrows crawls closer to his hairline with every passing second. The look in his eyes is less— tormented. Neurotic and on the precipice of another breakdown, perhaps. But not as drastic.

She gives an approving nod. Good job. She handled this way better than she expected to, considering Clint is the one giving her lessons in humanity.

Tony squints at something on the couch. “What’s that?” he asks.

She dives sideways to grab it, pulls it closer. It’s the plastic bag she brought down with her. “Oh,” she says. “It’s a weed brownie. You wanna split it?”

He shrugs.

They split it. They turn on Chopped and watch five episodes before the THC starts to really metabolize.

She feels like there’s a massive rubber band in her body and, every time she moves, it snaps. She can’t stop wincing. It’s great.

She can feel everything as if it’s magnified. Every fold in the fabric of her clothes. The place where her thighs are touching. A strand of hair dangling onto her forehead. The zing of the zipper of her sweatshirt where it touches the skin of her stomach.

Somehow they end up flat on the ground, facing the ceiling, shoulders pressed together, directly underneath the coffee table. “I can’t believe this worked on me,” she marvels as everything bends. It’s like watching the warp of heat coming off of a toaster.

“Why wouldn’t it?” he asks. “Your frankly terrifying vodka tolerance would not affect your metabolism of ganja.”

“Serum.”

“Oooooooh,” Tony says. “I forgot you have the same mythical potion as Mister Incredible.”

“No,” she says. “Nuh uh. I have the diluted, moonshine version: not as strong and feels two hundred percent worse going down.”

He blinks. “Well, dress me in pink and call me… Kristin Chynoweth.”

“Is that a Wicked reference?”

“Did you just recognize a Wicked reference?”

“I am so down with the times, Toshka,” she tells him. Her vision is speckled as if her eyes are pressed firmly into the hide of some mottled, sun-stained animal. She feels like she’s going crazy. She feels like she’s falling asleep. “I’m the one who had an extra edible lying around for us to eat at ass o’clock at night. I didn’t even… have to go bully it out of some. Poor drug dealer on the street. I just had it. I’m so cool.” She sits up and immediately regrets it when the rubber band that has taken the place of her bones snaps aggressively. She winces wildly against it and the flare of spots it brings to her vision. She decides to lay back down again, but she turns so that her feet are at Tony’s head. She has to move very slowly as to not brain herself on the bottom of the coffee table. They wouldn’t be able to deal with that right then. “Hey, J? Can you turn on the lights? And make them orangey?”

“Certainly, Miss Romanova.”

The overheads slip on, go golden. Tony is still bundled in his blanket burrito. His expression is slackened. Like he can’t feel the muscles in his face. There is no smile, but no frown either. She wonders if this is a success.

She grabs one of his calves and cradles it to her chest, one double-socked foot tucked over her shoulder. She cracks his toes. He keeps whispering woahwoahwoah under his breath. She can only imagine the rubber bands bouncing in him while his toes crack.

“Natoshka,” he says thinly. “That’s our names together. Tasha and Toshka. Tosha. Tashka. A tisket, a tasket. An assassin in a basket.”

“You’re cute,” she says.

“You’re cute!” He boosts himself up onto an elbow so he can look at her. He’s all mushy. She’s never seen a pair of eyes look so soft. She isn’t sure if she should preen or squirm.

“I could kill you with one finger,” she settles for.

“I know,” he says gooily.

“Hey,” she says. “Should we have asked Bruce if he wanted in on this?”

Tony hums, then lets his arm slip out from under him. “Probably. Bet Brucie would love getting shmacked and listening to Chopped with us.”

“Imagine if Chopped was a podcast.”

“... I can’t decide if the reviews would get better or worse.”

“I like watching when they accidentally burn their garlic. Or. Slip the knife and nick themselves. Or drop trays of cookies.”

“Ah. That is because you are, as the kids say, crazy.”

“Mm. You bet.” She rolls over onto her stomach. Her eyelids are glued shut. Literally, maybe. “Y’know what we are?”

“High?”

“No. Well, yes. But that’s not… what I was gonna say.”

“What were you gonna say?”

She taps a fingernail on the floor, then starts to draw a flower there. She wishes it left marks so she could see it.

“Tasha.”

“Hmm?”

Tony snorts. “You were in the middle of telling me something.”

“Oh!”

“We remind you of something.”

“Oh. The- the fuckin’. The Twitches. That’s us.”

“The what?”

“Like the Disney movie? With the Mowry sisters? They’re twins and they’re witches?”

“I… cannot say I know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh my god.” She sits up and bangs her head on the underside of the coffee table. She claps a hand to it. No blood, but those rubber bands are going crazy, like every part of her body is her funny bone and she nailed it on a corner. “Yup. Ow. JARVIS. This is urgent. Put on the Twitches movie.”

“It would be my absolute pleasure,” JARVIS says. He sounds terribly amused.

“Don’t show Pepper these videos,” Tony tells the ceiling, squinting up at the imaginary body of JARVIS as he inches his way off the floor and back onto the couch. It’s like slipping in reverse.

“I’ll make sure I forget that command, sir.”

She barks a laugh.

The Twitches are twins separated at birth. This astounds the two of them. They make JARVIS scan their DNA to see if they are twins separated at birth. They aren’t, but that’s okay. They’re, like, the inverse of it: people who were born different, but came together as one later on.

She thinks it’s much more poetic this way.

---

Steve and Tony are fighting and she isn’t sure why.

Well. Okay. Rephrase.

Steve and Tony are in the lab, which is soundproofed. Steve is very blatantly yelling about something, arms waving wildly around his head, lots of emphatic pointing, very not chill.

Tony is leaning against the lab table, arms crossed, a horrifically fond look on his face— as if being yelled at by Captain Cool Ranch is one of his favorite pastimes. Frankly, she won’t be surprised if that is the case.

“Hey, J? What’s going on?”

“The Good Captain seems to be throwing a tantrum, Miss Romanova.”

Steve picks up a screwdriver and drops it onto the ground for seemingly no good reason.

“Gee, I’ll say!” she agrees.

Steve throws his arms up and stomps out of the lab. She doesn’t bother hiding. It’s not like she could hear them, anyway. She stands smack in the middle of the hall and grins like the Cheshire cat. She loves petty drama.

Steve is so distracted that he barrels into her. A curse slips from between his lips as he reaches out his enormous paw hands to grab her shoulders, steadying her. She pats one of his biceps twice in thanks. “Man with a plan,” she observes.

He scowls, but it is far more frustrated than angry. His big bushy eyebrows squish together into one fat, blond caterpillar. “Big plans. Tiny little man in the way of them.”

“Did he put rocket boosters in the boots of your suit? Experiment with arc reactor tech to make your shield come back like a glorified boomerang? Oh, oh, did he drop all your fruit into cups of water and then freeze them again?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “No. And— I didn’t even know that last one was him.”

“Oh.” She is careful to swallow the urge to shift her weight. She doesn’t want him to know it was actually her who performed Operation: Fruitsicle. “What did he do, then?”

Steve’s big face goes pinker than it usually is. He’s adorable. He mumbles something that she can’t catch.

“I don’t know how you did it in the thirties but these days you’ve gotta open your mouth when you talk, Cap.”

“He bought me a new shampoo because he said my other one smelled like old man,” Steve whines.

She blinks.

The force of her laugh catches her entirely off guard. It folds her in half, face screwed up in mirth so intense that it is silent, arms wrapped around her stomach, painful happiness.

“Yeah, laugh it up, Nat,” Steve grumbles, mussing her hair as he walks away. She careens into the wall to support her weight.

She taps a hand on the glass weakly, still wheezing.

Tony looks up at the noise, concerned when he sees her there, half-smushed and having an episode.

She gestures towards Steve’s retreating form and then shoots him a wavering thumbs up. He’s blurry through the tears in her eyes, but she thinks she sees him wink.

---

She spends a lot of time in Tony’s lab. It’s not like she’s helpful or anything; she just curls up on the counter like a nosy cat and reads, or plays Mario Kart on the D.S. she found in a dumpster while rescuing Clint from an Op gone wrong and restored, or cleans her guns and knives.

Today, it is the latter. It’s a not-good day for her. She feels it like a boulder in her chest, diverting the path of her breath. Like stalagmites sit in her lungs. Like her body is Dante’s hell and the ninth ring sits in the pit of her stomach. Ice and melancholy so enormous that even three-headed Lucifer cannot help but weep.

She methodically scrubs her blade with a soft toothbrush. She likes doing it this way. It feels like she’s taking care of something small, something hers, something that needs her as much as she wants it.

Tony has been staring blankly at something on the screen for almost ten minutes. She hasn’t said anything yet because she sympathizes.

But the circles under his eyes are like craters, like blue bruises on the face of the moon. She listens carefully to his heart. Not quite steady, but not fast, either. He’s just thinking. Or maybe he isn’t.

She wonders what it’s like to not think. She pulls the sleeves of her sweater further over her hands. It’s bright green and fuzzy and could fit four of her in it, easy. Tony said she looked like a teletubbie when she wandered her way into the lab. She had flipped him off and climbed up onto the little area of tabletop he keeps clean for her.

She wonders when he last slept. She wonders if he ate today, or yesterday, or the day before. She tries to keep track, but. Bad days aren’t so random with her. The buildup has been hell. Preemptive blankness.

She realizes that her hands have stilled. She starts to scrub again.

She moves one foot as if it weighs a thousand tons and prods Tony’s elbow with a toe. “Toshka,” she says.

He jumps, smacking his knees on the underside of the table. “Ow. Yeah, honey?”

She looks at him. She can watch him physically place the mask over his face. It’s like, oh, I was just zoning out. It’s like, don’t worry, just got overwhelmed by Schroedinger’s Rabid Chicken. It’s like, painting the curve of his lip and the soft skin around his eyes into something semblant of natural, but she can see the brush strokes. It’s an art that he has mastered, but not to her. She is better. She sees through it. Find the chink, Tsarina. She always does.

He’s not even looking at her. He’s looking over her shoulder. “Uh oh, uh oh,” he murmurs, swatting at her knee.

She looks up and watches Pepper Potts strut down the hallway towards the lab, positively livid, her cheeks flaming red and strands of her hair tumbling in front of her eyes from her ponytail.

“Ooo,” Nat says. “Someone’s gonna get shanked.”

“You assume it’s me?”

“Yes,” she says. “Pepper loves me.”

Pepper finishes entering her passcode and marches right up to them. “Natasha,” she says shortly.

“Oh, no,” says Natasha.

“That’s new,” agrees Tony.

“Will you and my idiot boyfriend please, please go sleep. JARVIS just showed me a security broadcast of his own volition because the AI was concerned, and I look and there you two are, sitting in the lab, staring into space, borderline catatonic. I thought you were the responsible one! Aren’t you supposed to have the functioning brain cell between the two of you? Like, at least one. Please tell me that you can scrounge up a brain cell. When did you last eat? Don’t answer that. Go. I’m making JARVIS lock you both out of the lab for twenty-four hours. I ordered Indian takeout for you; someone will have it up in the common kitchen in thirty minutes. I expect you to both be showered and waiting there when it arrives.”

Pepper turns on one stiletto heel and marches away.

“Be still my fucking heart,” says Tony.

“I might fight you for her one of these days,” she says.

“More likely she’ll fight me for you. She doesn’t get that invested when you’re not involved in the depression spiral.”

She thinks about that for a moment. “Would you fight her for me?”

“No,” Tony says immediately. “No. I’d lose. She would cut my balls off and then wait for me to bleed out. I would let her adopt you and then petition the court for visiting hours.”

“Hmm,” she says.

They shower. They eat their Indian food. They fall asleep on the couch while watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

They wake up the next day and everything is a little bit better.

---

Her and Steve are weird together. Sometimes they get along right as rain, and sometimes he shoves her against an elevator and grills her because he thinks she has no feelings, no morals.

He’s wrong. All she is is feelings and morals. She just doesn’t share them with everyone.

The weirdest moment her and Steve have ever shared comes after SHIELDRA and Insight and the data dump. Like, right after. Like, he’s in his hospital bed, fumbling to remove his IV because he’s fine, Nat, Jesus, and she’s slapping at his hands to stop him, and the little TV in the corner that has been prattling on with the news for hours finally says something worth listening to.

Tony Stark Assumed Dead After Terrorist Attack Upon Malibu Mansion.

Her knees drop out from under her. Sam Wilson has one hand around her shoulder and the other on Steve’s chest, trying to get her up and keep Steve down all at once, and everything around her is blurred, slow motion.

“Is this a flashback,” she says.

“No,” says Steve weakly, eyes glued to the screen.

She thinks for a second. Grapples within herself. “He’s not dead,” she says. “If he was dead, I would feel it. This,” she pounds a hand on her chest, “would feel different. He’s still alive. I know it.”

The boys are looking at her. Steve, like he’s seen a ghost. Sam, like he pities her, but in a nervous way.

“Every time I leave him, bad things happen to him,” she realizes. “Oh, God.” She drops her head between her knees on the floor beside Steve’s dinky hospital bed and listens to the crackle of her world burning.

---

Her Soldat is alive. Her Tony is missing. Things are funny, in this way: they always flip-flop.

---

Tony comes back in a dilapidated suit with Rhodey on one side and Pepper on the other. They all smell like ash. Like smoke.

Tony breaks down three separate times while telling her about a blond smart-ass from Tennessee named Harley Keener. He professes the kid will be able to run laps around his brain in five years, and that he’s the best tuna sandwich maker he’s ever met.

She doesn’t stop holding his hand for a very, very long time.

Pepper has fire in her, now, more than she did before. She wears tank tops made of crepe material instead of her usual smart suits. It takes some finagling from Tony and Bruce, but they find a way to neutralize the Extremis.

It doesn’t put her out. It’s like she’s found this reservoir within her, and, with some consideration, it’s flared up into the full Phlegethon. She burns. It is life-giving. Blood and bold and brash.

Pepper is equally as badass with and without it. Natasha is so proud.

---

A lot of things have happened.

Soldat aka the Winter Soldier aka Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is no longer under Hydra control. She wonders, fleetingly, how he managed to detox himself from the drugs, from the serums. If he can still taste the rubber mouthguard when he thinks about the past. If, when he blinks, sometimes it’s blue with electricity.

Steve doesn’t sign the accords.

Peggy Carter dies. Natasha goes to the funeral. She had whiled away many hours studying Carter’s life and achievements once Clint recruited her for SHIELD. She made it her personal mission to introduce herself. They only spoke the one time, but Natasha will never forget the silent dignity that Carter held herself with even as she started to lose everything, even as her skin turned to worn leather and her brain turned to overcooked oatmeal and her muscles turned to dust.

King T’Chaka of Wakanda dies. King T’Challa is an Avenger in his heart, if not his title. Natasha respects him very much.

Things soon turn grey.

She believes they need to be controlled. She believes it with every ounce of her heart. And yet. She feels. Soldat. His actions were not his. They were never his. They were HYDRA’s. He was HYDRA’s. She was HYDRA’s once, too. She gets it. He needs to hide. It is the right thing to do.

Tony takes a while to understand this. There are two weeks where things are quite bad between them. The worst they’ve ever been.

It’s like back when they first met, and she told him they wouldn’t be able to stay friends. They both know what is right, and they’re both mad about it. Sometimes, people need time to stew, to settle.

When they make up this time, it’s not desperate. It’s Tony knocking on the door of her bedroom while she’s curled under her duvet, marinating in the relative emptiness of her life, and bringing her a pint of her favorite: Ben & Jerry’s Non-Dairy Peanut Butter Half-Baked. He drops a spoon next to it. Lets one of his hands skim the hair off her forehead. And then leaves the room.

And that’s it, really. They’re fine.

She’s in and out more than she used to be, but they both understand. Steve and Sam are out there giving shit to HYDRA but Barnes is playing abominable snowman in a Wakandan walk-in freezer; the idiot twins need one competent human to help them out. Their spy-brains aren’t quite up-to-date. She has to teach them that their deleted texts can be recovered. It is a difficult moment for her.

Tony works harder than the devil and gets them all pardoned relatively quickly. It takes a lot of aggressive yelling and accidental spitting in court rooms, but it happens. He never meant for them to be locked up, after all. And neither did she. The government is fucked no matter who is in power, it turns out.

Tony doesn’t sleep anymore. Not since he came home from Siberia and his ribs were crushed and hypothermia had him sitting solidly in the eighth ring of hell. She spends a lot of time trying to get him to rest, and even more time failing at it. She sends him a lot of meditation videos and supportive text messages. He responds to them with the middle finger emoji at first, but, as time goes on, it upgrades to a live picture of him flipping her the bird.

There is a boy, now. His name is Peter Parker and he is Spider-Man. Tony does not tell her this, but. Come on. She’s not stupid.

Peter Parker is short and wired with muscles, but he hides this fact beneath enormous sweatshirts that hang halfway down his thighs. He has curly hair that he gels to keep out of his eyes, which are so wide and brown and keen and so like Tony’s that she asks him, once, if he’s sure they’re not related. Tony is quite sure.

(She then asks FRIDAY, just for backup. They’re not related. Really. Hmm.)

Tony gripes about the kid, in the way that tired parents might. Yeah, he broke his wrist last week and I can just tell it’s still aching- this place is damp as crap, of course it’s aching- but he refuses to admit it or take a pain pill. It’s ridiculous. And, last night, he made me watch Star Wars: A New Hope with him for the fourth time. Four times, Natasha!! And then he had the audacity to fall asleep clutching my arm- we’re not otters, we don’t need to hold hands so we don’t float away- so I couldn’t even get any work done. Horrible. He’s a goddamn menace.

She thinks Peter is the best thing to ever happen to him.

---

They don’t get very long. Peter and Tony, that is.

The aliens come, and it is too much.

She doesn’t even know how it happens, but Tony ends up in space. With Peter, who followed him, as always. (Peter doesn’t like it when Tony risks himself. Peter has a tendency to do stupid, wonderful things to protect Tony Stark. Her and Peter bond over this while she teaches him to spar. Sometimes they get so frustrated about Tony’s lack of self-preservation skills that they end up injuring each other by mistake and then laughing about it as blood drips into their mouths, or whatever. Peter is another one she kinda loves. She’s got a lot of people she kinda loves now.)

Except, not anymore. Because half of them are dead.

Not for the first time, Tony doesn’t come home.

She isn’t surprised, but it still takes the breath out of her chest every time she thinks about it. Every day, she hopes. She is screening the sky. Pepper Potts is managing— everything. The company, the remaining Avengers, the aftermath of the simultaneous combustion of half of the population of the earth.

She has already been mourning the loss of Tony for twenty-two days when a fuckoff mothership shows up and Tony is lead off of it by a blue girl.

What else did she expect? Tony always finds a way home. Especially when there isn’t one.

There is no Peter Parker tucked under his arm. This is shocking. Like a phantom ache. No Peter. Another piece of her breaks off from the whole. She is losing too many pieces. She is going to have none of herself left.

Somehow, Steve gets to him first. He has not moved with such intention since the Snap. His relief is so strong that she can taste it, smooth and fizzy like cream soda bubbles popping in her stomach.

Pepper gets there next. Holds him for all she’s worth. Thanks God eight times over, plus one more for good measure. A few of the tears dripping down her face are for Peter Parker, some are thankfulness, and some are a promise of vengeance. Pepper Potts does not sit down and let the universe do her wrong. This will be righted. She knows it.

It takes until Tony looks over Pepper’s shoulder with his bones like broken pieces of piping poking out from under his skin and rasps out a thin little, “Tasha?” for her to realize she has been frozen at the edge of the grass ever since he dismounted the ship. Rhodey is at her side. He’s silently sobbing.

“I’m here,” she says. “I’m here.”

Tony collapses while he’s trying to make his way to her. She collects him carefully out of the dirt, and doesn’t let anyone help her bring him inside.

She settles him in a hospital bed. She hooks him up to an IV, scans his wounds. Dissolves the sealant on the half-healed puncture in his gut. Cleans it, stitches it. She gets a cup of ice chips and sets it beside his bed.

She, and Pepper, and Rhodey mush themselves into what can only generously be called a small loveseat. Their legs are lined up from hip to ankle. Their shoulders are stacked. They sit there, and they fall asleep there. They are there in the morning, when Tony wakes. There when Tony breaks down, first silently, then grasping at the air and murmuring, “my kid, my kid, Peter, I‘m sorry. I’m sorry. Come back. I need you. Come back to me.”

Natasha is the one who needs to sedate him when his heart starts to stutter.

They return to their bench. They sit Shiva.

---

The third day of their sentinel, Pepper speaks. “I’m pregnant,” she says, no prelude, no postscript. Two words.

They all cry, and it is happy-sad. Pepper sits on the bed, now, at Tony’s side, instead of pressed between her and Rhodey. Tony always has a hand on her belly, or is otherwise leaning forward to whisper at the thing that is really just a tumor, now, but will become much less tumor-like as time goes on, surely. It’ll grow a tiny little heart, and a pair of little lungs, and frog-like hands and feet.

It makes Natasha’s stomach squirm with something like repulsion, something like curiosity, something like desperate want.

---

“I’m having a baby, Nat,” Pepper reminds her one day when she is elephantine and swollen, standing in the kitchen with her back arched and a hand pressed beneath the massive lump of child inside of her.

“You are,” she says, and takes a sip of her tea. A small smile plays on the corner of her lips. She is so, so happy for them. It still aches. “I hope it looks like you and not your ugly husband.”

“Me too!” comes Tony’s voice from the other room.

They laugh. Pepper’s laugh is the most uncouth thing about her. It’s a shout. It’s downright ugly. It is Natasha’s personal mission in life to make her laugh as much as possible. It’s for her own benefit, really.

Pepper’s crowing cuts off suddenly with a tiny little uh oh.

“Uh oh?” Tony yells, and the sound of his feet hammering on the hardwood follows. His socks slip as he tries to stop and he catches himself on the kitchen counter. “What do you mean uh oh?”

“We’re having a baby,” Pepper says.

“Yeah,” Tony says, but Natasha gets it.

Natasha runs to Tony and Pepper’s bedroom and grabs the duffel bag they’ve had sitting ready for two months, waiting for this exact moment.

She hears Tony’s oh my God, you mean now?? just before she gets back to their sides.

She has to drive the car, because Tony is blubbering so intensely that he can’t even see the road.

It takes forty hours. Pepper is in labor for forty hours. For the first time, Natasha is not jealous of her.

Morgan Pietra Stark comes into the world screaming, swinging her little fists around as if she’s good and ready to fight.

She is shoved into a little pink knitted hat. Natasha almost brains herself tripping over a loose cord while struggling to take as many pictures as she humanly can.

“Hold her,” Tony orders, once everything has calmed down and Rhodey and Happy are snoring under the window in matching dwarvish plastic chairs.

She says, “um.”

Pepper grumbles, “take the fucking baby or I’ll fire you,” before falling asleep.

Natasha doesn’t even think to say I don’t work for you. She takes the baby.

It’s really not that cute. It’s got Tony’s little nose, she can already tell, but her skin tone is creamier, like Pepper’s. She bets the baby will freckle up in summer. Her ears are too big for her head, and her eyes go a little bit crossed every few minutes. They’re Tony’s eyes. Her hair is Tony’s, too, a shock of brownish curls.

She’s really not that cute, Natasha tells herself, but then Morgan flails her little hands around and grips onto the front of Natasha’s shirt like she has the full intention to rip the damn thing or die trying, and she gurgles up a gummy little bubble, and Natasha thinks oh God, I’m fucked.

---

She learns to dance again.

It doesn’t come easily. Partially because her bones have grown differently. Her hips need to be opened again. Her elbows and knees don’t overextend as far. But it’s also because she’s running a full-time program trying to place children with dusted parents in the care of those who will give it.

That expression on Tony and Pepper’s faces while they looked down at Morgan when she was born. That wide-eyed, stunned thing that took Rhodey when Morgan spit-up onto his Air Force jacket, and the way it melted into a snort of laughter that made Morgan let loose a giggle- this incredible, pealing thing- in turn. The way Natasha’s heart stuttered and fully stopped for a second when Morgan burrowed her head onto her chest and fell asleep there like there was nowhere safer.

She wants more of that in the world.

---

There is a cliff, and there is a fall, and it’s going to be either her or Clint.

She knows this from the moment they get there, when that man from Steve’s nightmare-screams is floating inches above the ground, his ugly cloak swishing around him like this is a poorly written action film and the hardened woman is supposed to make the sacrifice to save the morally ambiguous man, to complete her character arc, or something stupid like that.

She won’t die for that. She’ll die because she is finally taking charge of her destiny. Not inspired by fear of death, or altered memories, or the promise of love. Not by Clint’s stammered charm, or Steve’s wounded sea lion face, or Morgan’s pleading, can we dance, Aunt Tasha, please, teach me?

She will do this because she wants to.

She wants to. God, she wants, she wants, she wants.

They do a lot of ‘thinking.’ They do some sparring. She manages to slip off her necklace- the one with the little arrow charm, she will never not love him- and lets it fall into the mouth of his boot, safe. It’s one of her most impressive maneuvers to date, if she’s being honest.

She is dangling, and he is too. But she’s on the bottom, and she won’t let him follow. There is only one way this is going to end.

God, his face. The look on his face.

She is so, so glad that it is not Tony here with her. Tony, who is- God bless them both- about fifteen times smarter than Clint, who would match her in wit, in strength, in sheer stubbornness. Her beautiful, wonderful Tony, who would never let her fall.

Clint. Her Clint. Who can try all he wants, but who will never best her. He’s tried. He’s failed. He’ll fail again. Only one man could match her. Earth’s best defender, and her’s, too.

Clint? She can take him.

But he (his eyes, he’s burning, he knows, they both do) will hurt. This will make him ache. A life with no family, not truly, but her.

After all, who will feed Lucky if he goes? Not her. He must stay. He must.

She looks at Clint. She thinks of Tony. She thinks of Peter, and Morgan, who will grow up with the best older brother a kid could ask for. She thinks of Steve, who will finally get his chance to rest with Bucky. She thinks of Sam, who she has come to adore, in a weird way, and of Wanda, who she doesn’t mistrust anymore. She thinks of King T’Challa. She thinks of the Dora Milaje, who fought alongside her, ferocious and gorgeous and indomitable, even in death.

She thinks of Dima. Of her parents. Of Madame. Of every Handler who laid a glove on her, of every person she ever shot or stabbed or beheaded or ripped apart for something like the greater good (what good what good is there greater than this?).

She thinks of every life, every soul, who lived and died.

She wills them all to live again.

“It’s okay,” she assures them.

This is nothing.

This is everything.

She kicks off the cliff face and falls.

---

Agent Romanoff, says a voice, and it seems as if it is coming from the pit of her very soul. You miss me?