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2015-05-06
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2015-05-13
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2/?
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She Wasn't Herself (Age of Ultron Fix-It)

Summary:

The God of Mischief couldn't help but have his revenge on Natasha Romanoff for spoiling his conquering of Earth. Loki left a certain hex to work slowly upon her, until Natasha could hardly recognize herself or what she felt for Bruce Banner.

Thankfully, the Vision and Wanda Maximoff are here to help their new Avengers team leader remember who she really is.

(Trigger warning / TW : A mention of self-harm/cutting. Not carried through and positively denied and rejected).

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This fic is a BLATANT 'Fix-It' for the terrible characterization Joss Whedon gave of Natasha / Black Widow in Age of Ultron. It is compliant with AoU, but certainly isn't sympathetic to it at all. Sorry, Loki; you are a bad-bad guy in this, but at least I hope to keep your characterization intact.

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Natasha stared out the broad window of her suite at the rolling woodlands outside the new Avengers facility. It was an eastern view, and she watched how banks of fog interplayed with the light of the sun. In her hand she cupped her tea in a ceramic demitasse, steaming and dark.

Something’s wrong. Her thoughts looped back again and again over the whole Ultron incident, trying to come to some understanding as to how her common sense had utterly deteriorated when it came to Banner.

Natasha could slip into a persona as one may slip into a pair of shoes, let the role even color her thoughts and have weight on her emotions; it was how she could trick even the best of lie-detection technologies. But never once had she been so completely lost in some sort of love-sick haze that she would abandon Clint, desert Steve…not in the middle of a crisis.

Even to this hour, whenever she thought too much on Bruce...

Something’s definitely wrong.

A pleasant, electronic chime announcing a visitor pulled her back from her introspection.

Was Cap early? He and she were still ironing out the individual and collective training exercises for each new member of the team. Sam and Rhodey were well-accustomed to the military-like structure, but the others were not. So they had to get creative.

“Come,” she announced to the room’s AI, amused at how very ‘Star Trek’ her world had become when the door opened and admitted Wanda with the Vision not a few feet behind.

Natasha offered a smile to them, setting her own concerns aside. “Would you like some tea? A scone?” The tray with its pot and baked goods sat on a low coffee table surrounded by a few modern, leather lounge chairs.

“I have eaten, but thank you,” Wanda spoke, her accent soft, her eyes not quite meeting Natasha’s. The young woman instead looked to the synthezoid that stood now at her shoulder. “The Vision. He lets me into his mind often. Last night, I saw something of you and the Sceptre and a smirking man in green and gold. It was disturbing.”

“The Battle of New York,” Natasha clarified. “I used the Sceptre to close the Chitauri portal.”

“There is more,” the Vision interjected. “Loki bears a particular hatred of you.”

“Well, I did kinda beat the Liesmith at his own game,” she recalled back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier years ago. Then suddenly the floor was dropping from her feet and the words filling her skull, echo-upon-echo, until it became a cacophony.

You’re a monster.

Oh, no. You brought the monster.

Monsters. The thought seeded and growing in her like some sort of parasite.

Now who’s the monster? she asked of Banner when she was gripped in despair, memories of the Red Room. The question spilled from her lips, as if she believed it, as if it was some sort of horrible truth that could convince Bruce to...

Her teacup shattered as it slipped from numb fingers, breaking her from the horrid mental downward spiral. She blinked, trying to clear her head, banish the noise.

Wanda’s spoke, probably to her companion, as the mindbender rested a hand on Natasha’s shoulder. “See, it is bad. His hex toys with her. Just enough no-one noticed. Not even her at the time.”

Fuck. More mental twisting. No wonder she had felt completely off, uneasy in her own skin for weeks. Was this the root of it?

Natasha felt both of her guests ease her into a seat, but she was half elsewhere thinking she wasn’t supposed to be weak, not in front of her trainees.

Natalia was supposed to be unbreakable.

The Red Room did not suffer fragility.

Natasha watched transfixed as scarlet glowing tendrils of Wanda’s gift gathered up the pieces of fractured vessel and lowered them gently onto the tray. The young Sokovian woman then lowered herself down in the seat next to hers.

“When did Loki…? How?” Natasha finally was able to gasp.

“It would be best, Miss Romanoff, if we showed you,” the Vision offered, a little antiquated remnant from JARVIS showing through. “Wanda can provide an interlink with the Mind Stone.”

She didn’t want anyone more in her head, playing around. Never again. The Natasha of a month ago would have told them both to leave, keeping her fear to herself. But the two were Avengers now. They all had to build trust in each other. If she couldn’t place her own faith in Wanda, how could she trust her with the others? With Steve? With...maybe, one day, a certain brain-washed assassin still in hiding?

The thought of James remembering more than tiny fragments of the past encouraged her.

“Alright,” Natasha agreed, nodding slowly, then called to the facilities’ AI. “Jocasta. Patch me into Rogers.”

”Calling Captain Rogers now,” the system agreed. While they waited, Natasha finally spared a look at her two guests. The Vision, as usual, had a neutral face. But Wanda’s eyes glimmered with concern.

Another signalling tone, then overhead:”Steve here.”

“I’m gonna have to cancel our date, honey,” she responded playfully, aware that many in the facility joked that she and Rogers were now ‘work spouses’.

”What’s going on?” he asked over the room’s speakers.

”Impromptu team-building exercise with Maximoff and Vision. They’re here now with me,” she responded. Then more seriously. ”It’s priority.”

A pause, broaching uncomfortably long. Then: ”Not a problem. We’ll regroup tomorrow. Rogers out.” The coms closed with another down-tone.

Then before Natasha let her nervousness get the best of her, she ordered the AI to reschedule all her activities for the rest of the morning.

Taking a deep breath, the spy looked back and forth to both her guests. “I suppose no time like the present?”

Wanda held out her ringed right hand to Natasha, and she reached over to clasp it lightly. “When you are ready.”

The gem in the synthezoid’s forehead pulsed in time with Natasha's quickening heart-rate. She swallowed, looking out briefly again at the window for some tranquility before she plunged herself into this new frontier.

“I will see what you see,” the mindbender explained. “First, the witnessing. Then the three of us shall talk of what can be done to unmake it.”

“Let’s start,” Natasha agreed. “The sooner I can get back to being me, the better for everyone.”

“You’re in good hands,” the Vision spoke, just before the room where they were in peeled away to something else entire.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

The type of perception granted by Wanda and the Mind Stone was unlike anything Natasha had experienced before. Disorientating at first, as if she could suddenly feel color and taste sound.

A malice crawled over her like a snake. No. It was a hand that grasped her; not a calloused soldier’s hand, but still one of strength, palm pulsing with sorcerous power. The hand was connected to an arm, the arm was possessed by a man with shining and dark hair and pale skin. The fingers of the other hand reached for a place that seemed to be just above the center of her forehead.

Her possessor began to scratch at her, sloughing off reddish-brown flakes from her smooth skin, letting them fall and drift like snow onto the decking somehow below her.

“Such a crude use of you, I know,” came Loki’s fond voice -- or was it thoughts? -- as he tended to her. “But the mortal was foolish to get in the way of dealing with my dear brother.”

The part of Natasha still slightly separated from the experience realized that in this vision she was the Sceptre. Coulson’s heart-blood was caked to her metallic surface, a dim signature of life, while currents and swells of vast force swirled in the jewel that was somehow and somehow not within her own skull. Familiar, somehow, still...to be a weapon. Cognizant but not autonomous. She was to only be the instrument of a wielder's will; it was not the first time to feel this, to remember being an instrument. Played upon.

“I underestimated the woman agent, venomous siren of her sex!” She sensed a growing menace in Loki towards the red-haired spy that was and was not herself here, as if he wanted to needle sharp icicles into the most intimate and delicate places of her body, burning her with his cold and leaving her frozen and violated and likely dead from his attentions. The most disturbing part of this was that somehow Loki was, in the midst of his hatred, admiring her and lusting for a conquest of a worthy opponent. Natasha’s stomach may have revolted at the whole thing but Sceptre-part of her remained deep and untroubled and uncaring.

“She may have taken Barton from our service,” Loking continued, polishing her cruel, alien-forged hook with the edge of his sleeve, leaving her beautiful and gleaming and deadly again. “But I will make good on my promise should she interfere again. Something to work slowly...and intimately... the weakness in the spider’s underbelly that will unmake her, split her in twain, and lay waste to all true companionship she hoped to find in her new alliances. This I will do. This it shall be.”

She was set aside then by the Asgardian for a space, aware that Loki was speaking to the other controlled lifeforms in this flying vessel. Is the Tesseract in place? Yes, Sir. Stark’s Tower was occupied by Loki's conscripted forces and Selvig was close to finishing his calibrations of the device. It should be operational within an hour.

The cruel, anticipatory joy of imagining thousands upon thousands of Chitauri sleds and warriors and gargantuan wyrms descend upon one of the greatest cities of Midgard sang in Loki’s being, made him revel in his purpose divine. Merged as she was with the Sceptre, Natasha could sense it. So much so that she thought the mischief-maker would forget her and his oath for vengeance.

But he did not.

Taken up again, she was stretched upon Loki’s lap, her unmoving body caressed lightly as he concentrated. “I cannot spare much for this working...not in the time for battle. But with you close to her and the Midrealm sun- and moon-tides to feed the making, the hourglassed-deceptress will succumb.”

Along the length of her Sceptre-haft, Loki began his work, golden crackles from his fingertips etching luminescent writing like a tattoo into her, overlapping sigils that came one over the other, glowing at first, and then fading to invisibility. Natasha thought to struggle, to fight, but in this reality she was a thing fashioned and harnessed and utilized and nothing else. Will was beyond a weapon such as this.

Though Natasha could not recognize the runes, the Vision, so very faintly tethered to her, provided something of a translation as Loki made his enchantment.

Madr. To target a Midgardian. In the geometry of the rune, there was two triangles touching their points as an hourglass, and Loki took his time tracing that part of the symbol thrice more, uttering, “I name and mark thee Black Widow. I name and mark thee Natasha Romanoff. I name and mark thee Natalia Romanova.”

Perthro, the mysterious, the unknown. The obscured and nigh-forgotten resurrected again to provide a catalyst for her needs of the heart. Agent Barton had told many secrets to Loki, yes. But there will still more that could be plumbed in the shadowy recesses of her scant lifetime.

Hagall. A disruption and chaos. “May all that was close seem distant, all that was true seem false, all that was cherished seem dross.”

Ur, the wild beast. Usually docile, but when provoked tramples all in its path. The master runesmith placed a twist. Layered on top of it was the sigil of Wunjo, a promise of joy. “Escape will seem your only option. Unbridled after so long, all you will desire to do is run and join the lumbering giant.”

The God of Mischief smiled at what he had done, certain that what he had wrought would have its effect in time when and if Romanoff or Rushman or whatever she called herself dared to take up this weapon of greater beings. The work would sink into her flesh like a disease, a virus…

Natasha felt a tug away from the observation, from the fascination of what Loki had imprinted. Thor was constantly telling the other Avengers that Asgardian magic was more technology than mystery. So this was code, in a way...DNA and biochemistry and neuropsychology…

She had to peel it from her bones before it went in further and infected her more. But here she was all metal and alloy and energy signatures. Not organic at all...

Bring her back.

I am trying. Her mind accepts the present as truth...the anchors of her core identity do not hold like most others. You know this.

Natalia. Red. The voice called in Russian, achingly so familiar and too distant all at once. She found herself with the strength of need to reach through the illusion of Loki and the Sceptre to find a long yearned-for ghost. He was in another room-place-chamber adjacent if she just could open the door, she was certain. So she reached.

When Natasha came out of the shared experience, it was with a sputtering gasp. As if she was half-drowned in it.

Wanda still had hold of her hand, with another on her back as she found herself bent over her own knees. She heaved several rasping coughs, righting herself from the dizziness. “I’m...

This was 2015. She was at the Avengers facility in upstate New York, in her suite of rooms. She was with Wanda Maximoff and the synthezoid. The Winter Soldier was still in the wind, despite Steve and Sam’s efforts.

“I’m here,” she finally breathed. “I’m alright.” A panicked part of her wanted to snatch at one of the sharp chips of china from her broken cup and try to dig out the runes that she sensed were still embedded into her palm from taking up the Sceptre to defuse the Chitauri portal back in New York, but she knew better than to give into the temptation. She couldn't dig anything out of her head, where the hex truly had rooted.

“I apologize Miss Romanoff,” the Vision began. “This was...untested.”

Wanda retreated back to her own chair, but a flash of red in her eyes bespoke of her own upset. Likely she had relived it all with Natasha.

“I think risk-taker is in my job description,” she quipped, finally straightening in her seat. “I’ll manage.” Natasha then rubbed the back of her neck. “So Loki left me a little farewell present. Great. Seeing that Thor is a galaxy or two away, any ideas?”