Chapter Text
Coming back from Vormir was the hardest thing Nat had ever done. She replayed the fight with Clint over and over-finding it hard to believe that she had lost and he succeeded in sacrificing himself before she could. From the day they met in Budapest, as she sat calmly in his hotel room announcing her intention to let him kill her, she had won everything. Or maybe not. She really was ready to die that day. Never in all her calculations did she consider turning herself in, defecting. What for? It wasn’t that she had any particular belief in or affection for the United States of America, let alone SHIELD. If she gave any thought to the organization, she saw it as the counterpart to HYDRA and the Red Room. They had different objectives, but they achieved them exactly the same way. Through treachery and violence. Clint had been sent there to kill her, not to talk to her.
Somehow, something he said or how he said it made coming back with him an option to consider. If nothing else, his presence in Budapest demonstrated that her cover had been blown. If SHIELD could find her there, then what use was she to the Red Room? If he wasn’t going to kill her, then they surely would at the next opportunity. And based on her experience with the organization and her own role in ending the careers of those perceived if not disloyal, then incompetent enough to get caught would be a very different experience than an arrow to the heart. An “arrow!” Something else that had thrown her off balance in that conversation with Clint.
Somehow, even though it was she who surprised him in his hotel room, she ended up leaving with him and was back in what she now knew was heli-carrier, beginning what turned out to be a very long process of deprogramming and proving herself. Along the way she did appreciate that SHIELD was different. Certainly, everyone there really was an adult and a volunteer. They were all able, after signing a bone-chilling set of non-disclosure documents, to leave any time and pursue other career opportunities.
Yes, SHIELD valued her for the same skill set that made her a Black Widow. She didn’t kid herself about how long they would be interested in her if she lost her looks, her shape, or her attractiveness to men and women. Sure, she could fight effectively with her electric batons and hold her own in hand-to-hand combat, but that didn’t distinguish her from hundreds of people, hundreds of men, who were bigger, stronger, and faster. The other female Avengers either weren’t primarily human or, in Maria’s case, essentially administrators.
And yes, the loyalty she had given SHIELD, the World Council, and the USA were thrown back in her face the minute something went wrong, and they needed someone to blame. It was easier to keep the public calm by letting them think the Avengers were attracting alien danger-not combatting it.
The two years she had spent on her own after the Sokovia Accords and before being lured back into the fight when Thanos emerged were the happiest in her life. She reconnected with Yelena, Melena & and even Alexi. She shut down the Red Room and began the process of freeing the remaining widows. And finally had time to be alone with Wanda.
After breaking her out of the Raft, the two of them left the world and its problems (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) behind. Now that she wasn’t training Wanda but just being with her, she was able to let herself feel the attraction that had begun on a freighter in Africa the second she felt Wanda’s magic enter her brain. The memories Wanda unlocked sent Natasha into shock, but that’s because they really happened. Not because Wanda was creating them from her fears as she had with Tony, Steve, Thor, and the Hulk.
Standing hidden in the trees of Tony and Pepper’s lakeside estate, she couldn’t join the mourners-not the ones that were there for Tony, certainly not the ones there for Clint, and in particular not Wanda who was there for Vision. Wanda had woken up on the field in Wakanda with no sense of time having passed but an absolute memory of first killing Vision herself and then watching him be killed by Thanos. Why Wanda had been with Vision in Scotland when the attack began-and, not in the cabin the two had been sharing was something she had been thinking about every day for the past five years. And now that she was here, alive, looking at who was still to her the most beautiful woman in the world, Natasha needed to decide what she was going to do about getting her back.
To be continued