Work Text:
Assimilation is second nature to a Widow. Natasha becomes and unbecomes many different things over the years. She's been a trained killer, a child, a hero, a sister, and finally, a human being.
Yelena is too young to understand that they are play-acting as a family. But Natasha is eight, and she knows that this is first and foremost a mission. They had put her through the programming for deep-cover missions; she can speak in an American accent and has become familiar with their media even if she’s never watched Saturday morning cartoons before.
She can see the uncertainty in Melina and Alexei’s faces when they are brought together to be briefed on the roles they will play. She is still a child, she could slip up. But, as Alexei would say to her years later on that Cuban airstrip, Natasha was younger than even three-year-old Yelena when she was brought into the program and forged into a weapon. She only looks like a child.
The first couple of months are difficult. Natasha is wary of the luxuries of suburban life, of presents that aren’t just empty boxes. Night after night, she sleeps on the floor instead of the bed with the soft mattress and the pink bedspread with flowers. She doesn’t know how to play with other children who aren’t her rivals, so she takes to sitting alone in her corner of the playground at recess. None of them have ever held a gun to a man's head or danced en pointe until their feet bled and been made to do it again. She silently scoffs at her classmates who can’t make it all the way across the monkey bars. A girl offers to let Natasha play tag with her and her friends, but Natasha always outruns them and they grow bored of always losing. When a boy tries to push her down, she puts him in a headlock and it takes two teachers to get her off of him. He's crying when Natasha is made to apologize to him. She doesn't understand why he isn't being punished for showing weakness.
After her parent-teacher conference, where Natasha’s teacher expressed concerns over Natasha’s lack of socialization, she hears Melina and Alexei arguing in hushed tones in their room. She’s supposed to be asleep, but she stares at the ceiling and listens from her spot on the floor.
“She’s going to blow our cover,” says Alexei. Natasha has sensed his annoyance at fatherhood, so she largely avoids him. Yelena hasn’t learned yet, can’t detect his exasperation with her.
“She’ll adjust, we already told her teacher that she’s having trouble with the move. She just needs a little time,” Melina argues.
They eventually stop talking, and Melina walks past Natasha’s room on her way to the kitchen. Noticing that Natasha is awake, she steps into her room. She doesn’t ask if Natasha has heard what they said, she already knows she has. Melina is stiff when it comes to mothering, doesn’t bother with pretense. Natasha has watched enough of the sitcoms they were assigned to brief them on American family life to know that she is going through the motions of being loving, but it's not in any of their natures.
“You know that we don’t know how long the mission will last. So there’s nothing wrong with trying to enjoy this time, as long as you remember that it’s not forever.”
She says the last sentence carefully, like it’s a secret. Natasha knows that Melina has cycled through the program many times, and she can read between the lines. This is the only time you can be a child and not a killer. Even at her young age, Natasha knows the hollow feeling you get in your chest from the performance, knowing you'll never be that girl. She wonders how many girls Melina has been, but she doesn't dare ask. Melina looks like she wants to say more, but instead she turns around and continues downstairs. Natasha waits a couple of minutes before climbing into her bed. She’s asleep in minutes.
After that, Natasha pays more attention to how the children at school behave, and tries to imitate them. She slows down when they play tag, and draws pictures of princesses up in castles. She even gets invited to a playdate, which Melina drops her off at with a smile and a kiss on the cheek. She yells out a quick, “Bye, Mom!” as she runs up to ring the doorbell, and from then on she lets herself fall into the fantasy of an all-American life.
It’s easier with Yelena around. She really believes it, and so Natasha can believe it too. She sees them all ease into their life, feels Melina’s mothering become less forced and more natural. Even Alexei gets a fond look in his eye when he sees Natasha and Yelena play. She stops anticipating going back to the Red Room. She allows herself to hope that Dreykov will forget about them, and they can live in Ohio as a family forever.
For her eleventh birthday, Natasha asks her parents to let her dye her hair blue. She’d seen a picture of a woman with blue hair in a magazine, and it was okay for Natasha the girl to ask for what she wanted. Natasha the Widow would not have been able to have hair that made her stick out in a crowd, let alone have control over her body.
Melina helps her bleach and dye it in the bathroom, and they laugh even when it stains their hands and the tub. For the first time, Natasha looks in the mirror and sees herself, not a role she plays.
It all comes to an end a couple months later. A normal girl would be scared if she were shot at while fleeing the country. Natasha wants to be able to be scared, but she has to fly the plane. She knows she’ll never be able to be just scared again. She watches a bleeding Melina be taken away, and Alexei hands them over to Dreykov on the airstrip. She doesn't hesitate to protect Yelena, but it's not enough. As they stick the needle in her neck, Natasha laments what a fool she’s been. She had forgotten that it was a mission, first and foremost. This wasn’t her family, this was her cover. She promises herself that she won’t make that mistake again.
It's all she can do to press half the photo strip in Yelena's hand before they are torn apart. Later, part of her wants to fight her way out and find her, run off together, but that part is the girl Natasha has been feeding for three years and there is no more food for her. Widows are brought up in the Red Room, not girls. They live alone, hunt alone, die alone.
Natasha is forced to dye her hair back to red. She supposes she’s lucky they don’t shave her head. It’s not a perfect match, and if she looks closely enough, she can see the delineation between the child she was and the Widow she is becoming.
In the years after her defection, Natasha adapts again. She mimics the mannerisms of civilians she’s seen on missions, and tries to learn how to act like someone who’s not waiting for a fight. She finds that it’s easier to move through civilian life when she speaks in an American accent, and she obliges even if something aches in her chest every time she hears herself. She gets an apartment, and when her neighbor asks her where she’s from, she says Virginia, that she was an only child. She smiles a little more, but never with teeth. They’re still intimidating. She has a reputation to maintain, after all. For the second time in her life, she learns to be an American. Romanova becomes Romanoff, and so it goes.
Despite her best efforts, Clint manages to become her friend as well as her partner. He trusts her, lets her meet his family. She still hasn’t told him about the deep-cover mission, but he seems to understand the wistful look in her eyes when she sees the kids play. Slowly, the wounds from the Red Room scab over, and Natasha again lets herself slip into this life. She knows that many of the Avengers consider each other coworkers at best, but she’s built a family from fellow agents before. She ignores the nagging thought that it will one day come to an end. And, of course, it does.
She’s ready to leave it all behind after Leipzig. The lies, the deception, the ledger. The veneer of being a good guy, an Avenger, drowned with the Triskelion in the Potomac, burned when she distributed the files detailing every reason why Widows aren’t heroes. The scabs are ripped off. Beneath it all, she’s still the stateless triple imposter, ready to cut and run to save her skin. She only chose to back the Accords with the chance that they could continue operating legitimately. Now Clint is in the Raft, but he made his choice. Her heart aches for him and his family, but Natasha knows when to drop the knife. She’s not ready to pick it back up.
But it doesn’t matter. She gets the message from Yelena, and she goes to Budapest.
She finds Yelena in the safe house, freshly deprogrammed and still just as fiery as the girl who played her sister. Natasha thinks she would have recognized her anywhere. She quickly swallows the guilt of leaving her and all the other Widows behind. She thinks of Clint in the Raft, Yelena still cycling through the Widow program. She’s not like the other Avengers, it wasn’t innate for her to not leave people behind, she had to learn later on. She is still learning, she realizes. You can take the girl out of the Red Room, but you can’t take the Red Room out of the girl.
While they’re driving to meet Mason, Yelena asks about her accent.
“Why do you still talk like an American when it’s just the two of us?”
“I haven’t been Russian in a long time, sestra.”
“So you think you blow up Dreykov and you can defect and leave it all behind, like it never happened?”
Yelena isn’t just talking about the Red Room or the missions she ran when she was a part of it, Natasha knows. She’s spent the last twenty years trying to forget the three she spent living a normal life, being a human instead of a machine. But she remembers when she, too, was trying to figure out who she was when she first tasted a freedom she hadn’t had since she was eleven years old. For Yelena, it has been longer. She sighs.
“When I first got out, and I was trying to figure out who I was. You get to make choices that you never dreamed of being able to make. I got to decide what my favorite food was, what clothes I liked to wear. I decided I wanted to be a new person, and it’s easier to fit in when you act like everybody else.”
Yelena keeps her eyes on the road when she answers.
“I don’t think you can leave it all behind. How much difference is there really between working for the Red Room and being an Avenger? Sure, you work for different people, but you do the same thing.”
She’s not wrong. No matter who Natasha’s working for, the dirty work is the same. She could just sleep a little easier at night knowing it was for the right people this time. (Of course, it wasn’t really.) Nonetheless, she finds herself annoyed at Yelena for pointing it out.
“I was trying to be better,” she snaps. “Nobody knew that HYDRA was in SHIELD.”
Yelena looks over at her this time, laughing bitterly.
“Yeah? It didn’t come as a surprise to me. While you were out cleaning the red from your ledger and stopping alien invasions, I was being forced to get blood on my hands, over and over again. I saw untouchable Natasha on TV, hailed as a hero. But I knew better. I grew up with you, and I knew that you and I were the same. They unmade us, you can’t put that back together.”
Natasha doesn’t grant that an answer.
In the end, she wishes they had more time. It’s necessary for her and the rest of those opposed to the Accords to keep moving, but it means that contact with Yelena and the rest of the family is sporadic at best. They are also moving, taking down the remnants of the Red Room and freeing Widow operatives around the world. Some of them have continued working in intelligence using the only skillset they have, others have gone on to live normal lives. Some have even taken in the younger girls who can’t go out on their own yet.
Yelena tells her about the new foods she’s tried, the odd fashion she’s seen around the world, the movies she’s watched. She likes romantic comedies, and her favorite song is still American Pie. Natasha gives recommendations, and she’s just as happy to hear that Yelena doesn’t like them as much as she is when she does. Yelena’s giddy with the excitement of being able to choose, and it makes Natasha’s time on the run more bearable. On the rare occasion they’re in the same city at the same time, they meet up for dinner, all of them. They are still incredibly dysfunctional, Alexei and Melina are still trying to atone for their part in the program, but they are Natasha’s. She thinks they might just turn out alright, until she gets the call from Steve.
For several weeks after the Blip, she tries to reach out to them all the usual ways, sending one coded message after the other, until she finally reaches Melina. Alexei and Yelena were gone, too. Natasha had thought she’d be used to loss by now, but she was wrong. There is no body, no grave for her to visit. It stings worse than leaving Ohio had, worse than watching the Accords tear her second family apart. Clint goes off the rails, but Natasha throws herself into heading up what’s left of the team.
She lets her blonde hair grow out without dyeing it to match. She lets it be a delineation between Natasha who had her family and Natasha who has nothing. Yelena had laughed when Natasha debuted the blonde with the vest. Now we’re really the same, she’d said. Steve asks her why she doesn’t cut it off, and Natasha doesn’t answer. Red and blonde, for two sisters, she thinks. She braids her hair and remembers Yelena trying to learn when they were children. Her fingers were too small and the braids turned out lopsided but Natasha wore them all day anyway.
She says whatever it takes and means it. If there’s a chance of bringing them back, she has to take it. She deduces from Nebula’s explanation of the Soul Stone that it requires a sacrifice, one that Natasha is prepared to make. Nebula gives her a look but doesn’t say anything when Natasha readily agrees to be the one to retrieve it, and Clint volunteers to go along with her. She doesn’t think he knows yet, but it doesn’t matter. She’s made the choice already.
They get to Vormir, and Clint realizes what must be done but Natasha has been preparing for this eventuality for weeks. She thinks of Yelena driving her staff into the turbine of Dreykov’s jet, sacrificing herself for the other Widows without a thought. She didn’t know that Natasha would jump off the station to catch her, but maybe she did. Natasha hadn’t really known, not until she saw Yelena flying through the air, until she saw Dreykov on that airstrip all those years ago. She thinks of herself, accepting Antonia’s death as collateral damage, a price to pay for getting out. Natasha has lived many lives, but it was Yelena who taught her to be a person, in 1992 and in 2016.
In the end, it’s not even a question. She’s always going to take the leap to save Yelena.