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The cut is shallow, to the side of her wrist, just above the jut of delicate bone. It’s nothing, nothing, but Natasha yells because she is surprised and hurt and stupid and young.
The next second, Vanya has her pinned to the mat, jamming the machete under Natasha’s chin. She’s vicious and none-too-careful, the blade cutting into the soft baby fat under Natasha’s jaw. This time, however, Natasha manages to swallow her cry, blinking fiercely to clear the tears from her eyes.
"Can anyone tell me what Romanova’s mistake was?" The Instructor’s voice drones as Natasha feels sweat drip from the back of the neck onto the gym mats.
"She was distracted by the pain," someone answers, and Natasha feels a flare of anger, impotent as it is in her position. Vanya is also older and larger, a brute with her blade. Natasha had been slated to fail from the start.
"It is the body’s natural reaction to flinch, to fail when it encounters pain.” The Instructor says, “And that is because the body is weak.” She motions for Vanya to stand, and when she does, the Instructor takes her pointer and brings it down sharply against the back of Vanya’s legs, hard enough to leave a welt.
Vanya does not even flinch, staring straight ahead with her hand around the handle of her machete, the edge pink with Natasha’s blood.
"Your will must be stronger than your body," The Instructor says, "Otherwise, you will not survive."
—
Later, Natasha finds a paper-thin cut on her neck, from ear to ear. For a week, the scar looks like a thin red thread pulled choke-tight against her throat, and everyone can see where Vanya marked her. Like a badge of weakness.
—
Natasha takes her first bullet at age fourteen.
She’s on a two-person mission, infiltrating a girl’s school with the intent of kidnapping a diplomat’s daughter. Her partner in this is Anna, who is older and thus should have taken command. But she is altogether too sweet-eyed and weak of will. She constantly defers to Natasha, and truthfully Natasha is a little disdainful of this.
They corner the girl, Yumi, after class. She spills a tray of paint and a cupful of brushes in her struggle, but no one comes looking.
"Should we sedate her?" Anna asks, taking a syringe out of her purse.
"No," Natasha hisses, "We can’t drag her out without raising suspicion." She turns to Yumi, who is whimpering and carrying on as Natasha points a small gun at her heart. "There, there," Natasha says briskly. "Calm down. If your father obeys our instructions then no harm will come to you."
"I thought you were my friend. Why are you doing this?" Yumi’s voice wobbles, and Natasha feels a pang in the vicinity of her heart. It’s just a pain, though, and pain is a distraction. She compartmentalizes it.
"Anna, grab her bags." Natasha tugs Yumi up by her arm and presses the muzzle of the gun to her back. "We’ll walk out, nice and easy," she says softly, "And everything is going to be okay."
It’s a jinx as soon as it leaves Natasha’s mouth.
They reach the edge of the schoolyard before the shooting starts. Yumi screams, of course, as Natasha yanks her down and returns fire. The bullets are coming from a large black van, its side panel opened to reveal two men in black. At first, Natasha thinks they must be Yumi’s bodyguards, but the careless way they're spewing bullets makes Natasha amend her deduction. Clearly, they want Yumi dead rather than in the hands of Natasha's organization.
They have no cover. None. Natasha grits her teeth and grabs Yumi’s hand as she runs for the school shed. Behind her, she can hear Anna yelling into a transmitter, then-
Then a sharp, searing pain in her shoulder. It’s dizzying, horrifying. Natasha doesn’t realize she’s stumbled to a halt until Anna shoves her behind the shed just in time for the newest spay of bullets to hit the dirt.
The transmitter buzzes. Yami cries softly into her knees.
"My magazine’s empty," Anna says. She sounds distant, tired.
Natasha reaches a shaking hand towards her own shoulder, her fingers coming away bloody. It hurts. It hasn’t started to hurt less. She shakes her woozy head, trying to clear it, aware that Anna is trying to tell her something-
"Give me your gun!" Anna is shouting, and the urgency in her voice is so foreign that Natasha obeys without question. "They’re coming," Anna says softly, angling her compact to show Natasha the black-clad men cautiously advancing on the shed. A field and a half away, the school is finally realizing the situation on their hands. Probably calling the authorities, which will come too late.
"We need to get to the woods," Natasha says, trying to push through the pain. Compartmentalize, compartmentalize.
"Right," Anna smiles. A genuine, gentle smile. "Take Yumi and run. I’ll cover you."
"Aren’t you coming?" Natasha asks, before her gaze slides downward to see the blood seeping through Anna’s shirt, the abdominal wound she was pressing her red-stained hand against.
"I’ll cover you," Anna says, no trace of the pain on her face as she staggers up, and aims.
—
Natasha delivers Yumi alive. Grey-faced, in shock, but alive. Her handler makes no mention of Anna, just takes Natasha back to her bunk and confiscates her uniform, backpack and weapons. Stripped bare to just a Red Room girl, again.
But Natasha managed to squirrel away one small notebook. It’s no larger than the palm of her hand, and she had to wedge it into the bandage on her shoulder, between the gauze and the tape.
As soon as she's left alone, Natasha retreats to her bed and pulls the cover over her whole body. When she tugs out the notebook with a wince, the whole edge is red with blood.
In the first, blank page of the notebook, with a stub of eyeliner, Natasha writes Anna.
She stares at it for a while. It looks so empty without a surname, but Anna had never introduced herself with anything but an alias, so eventually she writes Anna, who was stronger than me.
Natasha just wants. To remember her. Because no one else will. Because Anna doesn’t have a family and her records are at that moment probably being pulled from some file room far away and shredded. Every last person who knew her being warned never to say her name again. Because her body will be dragged away and disposed of like some trash, with not even a headstone to commemorate her.
So it’s Natasha’s burden, now.
—
When Yumi’s body turns up, a week later, floating in the Moskva river, she adds Yumi, who thought I was her friend.
They are the first names in Natasha’s ledger.
—
Twice, Natasha slams her own shoulder out of its joint so she can squeeze out of a pair of handcuffs.
Three times, Natasha slashes open her wrist cutting free from some binding. Glass on duct tape, razor blade on wire, exacto-knife on nylon rope.
Once, Natasha crushes her elbow trying to break out of a ziptie. To be fair, she’s heavily drugged and off-balance because of a broken heel.
Times change. Restraints change.
Natasha knows the feeling of a trapped animal, gnawing off its own limb to escape.
—
In Panama, a man stabs a knife through her hand and pins it to the table.
Natasha could’ve avoided it, but then she would've had to deal with drawn guns and flying bullets, and the nice restaurant owner and his scared family were completely uncovered. So.
She sits and watches rather dispassionately as Nidio Carillo Garcia, second string general of a second string cartel, tries to intimidate her into submission. The knife sinks through her spayed hand like butter, sharp and slick. She begins bleeding almost immediately, the blood welling around the wound and running in rivets down her knuckles, her wrist. A map of some river line, drawn on the back of her hand.
When she doesn’t blink an eye at the violence, Nidio’s expression shifts from vicious to confused.
"What the fuck?" He demands, reaching for the knife, "You’re a fucking monster!”
"I know," Natasha sighs, as the sound of helicopters fill the air.
—
There’s no permanent damage, though sometimes when she flexes the fingers of that hand she’ll feel a pop, not unlike cracking a knuckle.
—
Clint rendezvous with her outside Odessa. He’s still new to her. At this point, he’d only turned her to SHIELD a year ago. And now she’s failed.
Natasha readies herself as Clint jumps out of the truck and runs to her. She's memorized a dozen identifying details of the Asset that got the jump on her. She’ll track him down. She’ll make him pay. She can convince Clint of that, she thinks.
But the first words out of his mouth are,
"Jesus, you’re bleeding!"
Natasha blinks, looking at her side. “Yes, the medics dug out the bullet,” she says. “It’s a Soviet slug, no rifling-“
"I mean, are you okay?" Clint demands. "We need to get you to a hospital!"
Natasha is confused and rather taken aback by Clint’s concern. “I’m not in immediate danger,” she tries to tell him, “I can go to debriefing.” But he’s calling over a medical chopper, his voice raised in worry.
—
Natasha pens the Iranian engineer’s name in her ledger.
Massoud, who trusted me to cover him.
—
Sam is. Legitimately livid.
"Why didn’t you say anything about your shoulder?" He hovers at her bedside as the doctor’s stitching her up. "You could’ve died if I didn’t notice you bleeding all over me!”
"Don’t hyperbolize," Natasha says tersely. From his hospital bed, Nick is watching them both with a bemused expression. "I wouldn’t have died.”
"She had about twenty minutes of consciousness left," the doctor supplies helpfully.
"Oh," Sam throws up his hands. Natasha thinks that today might have been a bit much for him. "Twenty minutes. What was the plan for those twenty minutes?"
"Hydra was planning to shoot us," she says, "Revealing a weakness in front of them would not have have gotten me medical treatment or done us any good."
Sam sighs, shaking his head shortly. “In case you ever wanted to know what kind of information is kind of need to know for soldiers fighting together: this. This is need to know.” He walks out of the room.
Natasha sighs, thumps her head back against the headrest as the doctor presses a gauze pad to her shoulder.
"You were thinking like a spy," Nick says, which, rich. Concerning his situation.
"No," Natasha says softly, staring at the flickering white florescent lights. "I was thinking like an asset."
—
Predator animals in the wild have evolved to show no outward expression of pain. A wolf can drag a broken leg for miles without a wince or a howl, until infection or starvation takes its slow, creeping toll. Because weakness, in the wild, is a bared throat. An invitation of teeth.
Natasha decides that perhaps she has spent enough of her life suffering in silence.
—
"Ow!" Natasha shrieks, pulling back her hand.
"Oh man, is he doing that again?" Steve rushes over to pull Buchanan off of her, the black Labrador puppy’s legs pinwheeling in the air as he licks Steve’s face. "Did he really hurt you?"
Natasha glances at her finger, which is very much in one piece, not bleeding, not even bruised. “It’s just a nip.” She says.
"It’s something we still need to train him out of," Steve sighs, releasing Buchanan, who bounds over to bother Bucky, waking him from a doze on the couch. "Sorry about that."
"It’s nothing," Natasha says, smiling as she climbs to her feet. Sam’s opening the door with takeout. Bucky’s snapped on an Animal Planet show in an attempt to distract Buchanan from snacking on his toes. Even the memory of teeth has faded fast, and soon, it’s gone.