Chapter Text
Night closes around the beds of the little girls in the Red Room. Natasha stretches her arm above her head so the matron can close the handcuffs and lock them in. It is normal and familiar in the darkness, but as she lies there, Natasha feels the weight of realization sinking in. She cannot get away. Tentative fear curls up in her gut.
She knows that is not right. She has never been able to get away. To get out of bed without permission is dangerous. To stay is safe.
It pushes back against the dread beginning to claw up her throat, but it's not enough to stop it. She finds it hard to breathe.
They discover Natasha's fear of heights when she is still small and has to make her way from one end to the other of a creaky crossbeam in the rafters of a warehouse as part of an exercise. She has practiced ballet, practiced grace, and this should be simple and easy.
She is too experienced to cringe back, but she flinches and her instructors notice.
"Natalia. You cannot have fear."
There is threat behind the voice, so she swallows down her unwillingness and begins to creep across the wood. She goes slow and methodical, breathing to a count inside her head until she finally reaches the other side.
As she grows older, the fear does not go away. Her stomach feels as though it drops whenever she teeters too near an edge., but her instructors keep putting her there to overcome it.
She is standing on the edge when she is almost ten, swallowing down phobia, when a calming sensation falls over the back of her mind. She is safe here.
She cannot shake either feeling. At last, she chooses to act on the calm.
She is safe when she lies still and quiet in the dark, even with her wrist cuffed. There is fear in the back of her mind where that alien calm resides. It never goes away either, but she chooses to ignore it.
Natasha learns to kill when she is still small, still barely old enough to fully understand the concept. Her instructors set her larger and more dangerous tasks, and she fulfills them with the ease of a Black Widow. Eventually, she graduates and enters the field.
She has never felt any resistance from that foreign instinct always in the back of her mind, full of different fears and fearlessness than hers. She is used to feeling comfortable in her own skin and ignoring what discomforts from it do not serve her.
She is a teenager when she's sent in to teach Drakov a lesson. Natasha is an old hand at killing. She takes blood without compunction. It is nothing to take the little girl and coldly do her work in front of the girl's father.
The feeling from the back of her mind overwhelms her, taking her completely and utterly by surprise.
Revulsion. She hates what she has done, sees the blood on her hands, and only her training keeps them from shaking. She finishes the job, finishes the lesson her handlers ordered her to give, then flees.
This is nothing. It will pass, she tells herself. For the first time, she questions just who it is with a soul that bleeds into hers. She has told herself for years that this is nothing, it's not a soulmate, it's nothing that has compromised her or will but for the first time, she hesitates before driving in a knife. If she is not careful, her handlers will notice.
There are little Red Room girls at a children's hospital where their rescuers are certain they will be safe. But each one of those little girls is living evidence of something Mother Russia would rather not say.
They send in Natasha, the best and strongest of the Black Widows. She handles the problem and cannot stop the wave of disgust she feels before she comes one acidic wash away from losing her iron stomach.
She cannot do this again, she realizes. She cannot kill a child.
And so she runs.