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There are very few things Natasha remembers from her early days in the Red Room, and there are days when she can’t trust her memories to be real and not a fabrication. A tutu—true or false? A cattle prod—true or false? Curling up with her sisters after a long training session—true or false?
(False. She has no sisters. Only competitors.
(False.) )
But years—decades—later she will always, always remember the bone deep bite of the cold.
She is always cold—when they train, when they sleep, when they get sent on their first missions to places that are warmer than anything she could ever imagine. But still, she remains frozen. It is what makes her a good operative, the handlers say when they know she can hear them.
When they think she cannot hear, they whisper about other things; primarily soulmates, a person made to complement you completely, that you are linked to inextricably. She does not know if soulmates apply to her and her fellow operatives (sisters) ; she does not know if operatives have souls.
She learns about the Soldat in her lessons, the first of them and the best. She learns that they keep him preserved when his skills are not needed.
She wonders, briefly, foolishly, if the Soldat is her soulmate.
But the handlers unfreeze the Soldat and she remains cold. He hardly glances in her direction when they encounter one another in the training facility.
She puts the thought away with all of the others that will only serve to make her a poor operative, or will kill her. There is no room for such things in her training.
Natasha burns the Red Room down, but still she is cold, even as the flames lick her skin.
True or false: she is a person, and she has a soul mate .
(True?)
SHIELD folds her into their operations and even, eventually, they learn to trust each other. At least, as much as Natasha knows how to trust.
With SHIELD, she learns.
Natasha is somewhere classified, doing something redacted from official records, with only Barton as her backup, when she stutters—hesitates—gasps—
And takes a bullet to the shoulder.
Barton drags her out of the line of fire and presses one hand to her shoulder, the other hand occupied with shooting her gun at the idiots who have them pinned here. He is muttering something, but the words slip through her mind before she can grasp their meaning.
For the first time in all the years that she has been alive—in all the memories she clings to with aching fingers—she is thawing.
Objective complete, Fury recalls them to New York to simultaneously debrief with them on the mission and give Natasha a dressing down for getting shot on what amounts to an agent’s version of a milk run. She folds her hands behind her back and takes it, because she deserves worse for allowing herself to be distracted in the field like that. Even if it was, in theory, understandable.
She’s still off kilter from the warmth flowing through her, something she would hardly have the words to describe even if she tried. She feels as though every part of her has broken free and is sloshing around in the sea that she has become.
Then Fury dismisses Barton and eyes her in a way that she knows means nothing but trouble.
“Two years ago, you were shot in the hip.” It’s a statement, not a question. SHIELD knows her body as well as she does. “Any other scars?”
Not many. The cobwebbed lace of a burn on the back of her leg, from the death of the Red Room. A rough patch on her elbow, usually indistinguishable from the rest of the skin there, from a fall that should have killed her. A tiny, straight line on her scalp where hair won’t grow.
She doesn’t remember getting that one.
Natasha tells him, though he already knows. All the while, Fury keeps his eye trained on her, placid and unreadable. Then: “Walk with me, Agent Romanoff.”
She does, because she learned better than to argue long before she met Fury, or even Barton.
“I believe you’re aware of Project: Rebirth?” Fury asks, stepping into a glass sided elevator. Natasha doesn’t flinch to be so exposed, even though a small part of her mind wants to press herself into the corner.
She nods. Something the United States government cooked up during the war, when she was nothing more than a twinkle in the Red Room’s eye. And everyone, even in the Red Room, learns about Captain America eventually.
The elevator descends, disappearing beneath the ground level and continuing, deeper than she has ever been in the New York base of operations. It shudders to a halt and deposits them in a sterile, blank hallway.
Fury takes the lead, directing her to a nondescript door among a multitude of nondescript doors. He turns to her, one hand hovering over the fingerprint scanner. “Needless to say, Agent Romanoff, this is highly classified. And I’m only telling you due to, well, let’s call them unforeseen circumstances.”
He presses the pad of his thumb to the scanner and the door clicks open. He pushes it open and steps aside, allowing Natasha to step in the room first.
She couldn’t say, later, what she processes first: the stink of antiseptic, the dull beeping of hospital equipment, or the large bed taking up most of the room, which looks to be converted office space. The man on the bed is almost an afterthought, because he is not a threat. He’s large, blond, and completely unconscious in the way that only coma patients are.
There’s a scar on his shoulder. She knows her body too well to pretend it isn’t in the same spot as hers.
“Agent Romanoff, meet Captain America.”
Natasha knows Fury. He wouldn’t have shown her what he’d shown her without reason. He plans to use her, and this bond—and whatever it means—to SHIELD’s advantage.
She stares at her reflection in the mirror, in the few precious moments she has to herself before she’s set to board a quinjet to Russia. Barton has been pulled for babysitting duty on Hill’s latest project, so Natasha is going in without backup.
It shouldn’t bother her, but it does.
Her cheeks are flushed pale pink; gone are the days of bloodless skin and purple-blue nail beds on fingers that won’t warm.
Fury will use the bond to SHIELD’s advantage. Natasha knows she will let him.
But that doesn’t mean she’ll smooth the path.
Natasha turns around on the deck of the helicarrier and sees Coulson with a tall, blond man she would recognize, even without having seen him unconscious a week before. He would be intimidating in his size and strength—the implications of his genetic alterations, if he’s already conscious and aware after seventy years in the ice—if he didn’t seem to be trying to shrink in on himself.
She steps forward, hands folded together behind her back, as Coulson introduces them. Nothing is mentioned about soulmates.
So it’ll be the long game, then. That’s alright. She’s a patient woman.
“Ma’am?” he says as they shake hands.
Fury got one thing wrong, she thinks, mouth taking over on autopilot, as she steers him and Banner toward the interior of the helicarrier.
Captain America (whoever he is) isn’t her soulmate (whatever that means).
Steve Rogers is. And she has a feeling that that miscalculation is going to make a difference.