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Escaping The Red Room is impossible, she’s known this from before she can remember. This innate knowledge that Natasha has doesn’t stop others from trying. But as far as she is concerned they’re foolish. She is content in The Red Room.
She has known life without purpose or home so becoming a weapon for a country that she has been taught to be devoted to isn’t objectionable to her. You cannot sully what has never been clean, so the missions they send her on that bloody her hands don’t leave her sleepless. She knows her duty and she fulfills it to the best of her ability. That ability is brutal and quick with very little room for mistakes. Her trainers praise her efficiency and she hears rumors of whispers that she is the first agent they’re willing to say has completed Black Widow training. The pride of this has her chin tipping up and a smirk on her lips because she might be a weapon for her country, but she is the best weapon the world has seen.
Then there is James. They introduce him as an asset on loan from a mysterious ally and they wish him to be her trainer. Her final trainer before she graduates. His eyes are haunted and there is a feral quality about him when they first meet. She wonders what they’ve taken from him to make him so brutal. So efficient.
He is more than that, though, and the longer he stays with them the more she can see the person under the asset. The more she sees of him the more she wants him until finally she takes what she wants and it becomes clear that James wants her just as much. It isn’t long before Natasha knows his body like she knows her own. Their love is fast and hard and born of a kind of desperation that Natasha didn’t know she could feel. Sex until James is a function of necessity. A way to lure targets into a false sense of security. No one looks for the pinch of poison when a woman is giving them the gaze Natasha has perfected. She is good, even if it’s not her favorite method. But her body is a tool and it makes sense to use it in every way possible.
But sex with James ruins her.
Only she wishes that it was just physical because what really ruins her is the way he looks at her when there’s no one to see them. The way his hand settles at the base of her spine and the way he says her name. What truly ruins Natasha are the nights she gazes at him and for the first time in her life she wonders about what her life could have been if she had not been chosen for The Red Room. If James wasn’t the asset. If they had a chance at a life that could be considered normal. There’s a strange kind of almost nostalgia in the idea and for the first time in her life, Natasha regrets who she is. Who they both are.
They are found out. They both knew it would happen, even if they never discussed it. Loving on borrowed time means that she shouldn’t be surprised when it runs out. But the sound of his screams as she is torn from his mind stills her heart and the empty expression he gives her on their last meeting causes something to break inside her. Her own punishment isn’t nearly as severe. She spins it to her superiors as a seduction. Trying to gain secrets from a rival organization. The story is swallowed easily. She has never shown signs of defiance before? So why wouldn’t they believe her story now?
She asks one of the technicians responsible for her health if The Red Room would ever use the machine they used on James for her or any of their own assets. He isn’t important enough for her to worry about him suspecting, and there’s the added insurance of that perfected look and a flash of her skin. He’s willing to reassure her that nothing so barbaric would be used on an agent of her caliber. The sweaty hand that rests over her own in what is meant to be a reassuring gesture as he waxing on about sledgehammers and diamonds turns her stomach, she wants James’ hands.
That is the moment she knows that she is going to leave The Red Room. They took James and because of that she would never forgive them. The thrumming knowledge that it is impossible to escape them thrums through her but she is the first Black Widow or the closest any agent has come to being one. Nothing is impossible. Nothing. She will find him again and even if he has forgotten her and she’ll die trying she owes it to the life she’d never thought to dream of before meeting him to try.
So she does.
Really it is far easier than she’d expected. A group of dissatisfied agents that she nudges in the wrong or right direction begin to plan an escape. She doesn’t spend much time on their plan, doesn’t need to once she sees how predictable it is. She smirks to herself because she already knows that this is going to work.
The night they make their escape she makes her own, and for a long while shadows them. But eventually, she breaks away. The group goes deep into western controlled Europe and Natasha stays behind. Biding her time in a country that still feels like home. Within a week she knows they are going to be caught and killed. Or caught and sent for reconditioning. She doesn’t know which she would wish for herself. Doesn’t care because she is free. Even if freedom isn’t always pleasant.
The key, she knows, to staying away from The Red Room is to stay away from legitimate sources of income. To travel slowly. She knows the organization that has James is in the west but moving undetected proves to be slow and tedious. If you take out her normal channels or information and avoid similar ones you’re left with very little that is acceptable for a woman to do. Rocking the proverbial boat in this situation could end with her back in The Red Room, and this taste of freedom is enough to not want to go back.
Having sex for money is easy and while not pleasant Natasha finds that it tolerable. None of the men who touch her are James, but it’s no worse than targets that have touched her before. Unlike other women, she does have ways of handling situations that might have ended in her being harmed. Although it calls too much attention to herself so she tries to avoid using violence whenever possible.
She tells herself the first time that she misses her monthly cycle that it is natural for how stressed her body has been. The second cycle she tells herself that it is her malnourishment after a lifetime of a carefully controlled diet. But by the third she ends up in a small clinic, hands over her abdomen. They tell her she’s pregnant and she sits in the waiting room for a long time processing the fact that her body is made for more than being a weapon. For James or The Red Room, she’d never questioned that. But there’s a life inside her and weapons do not create life, they end it.
She tries in vain to stay objective about the pregnancy, although her reaction to the quiet question about abortion is a shocked gaze. She owes it to the life she could have had to, at least, try to have this baby. At first, her routine changes very little, she handles the illnesses but as it becomes more obvious that she is pregnant and that the situation is real she is less willing to take clients. She falls into her old ways and takes a few jobs that might alert The Red Room to her presence. When they don’t show up she continues on, wondering if by some miracle they’ve forgotten her. She’ll later wonder if it’s the lack of food or the hormones that made her so recklessly hopeful.
As her belly grows the detachment is more difficult. “The baby” begins to be referred to softly to herself as names she might use to call them when they’re born. Finding James takes a back seat and Natasha tells herself that he can wait until her child is old enough to handle being alone for a short time. It isn’t giving up on him, but suddenly the small life growing inside her is more important than anything she’s ever known. Some nights she sits alone and tells herself over and over that she is more than a weapon as her hands stroke the skin of her stomach. She is so much more than they made her.
But in the light of day, she is objective. This baby might or might not be worth keeping. She might find an orphanage to take them once they’re born so that The Red Room won’t find them. She keeps the soft thoughts as far from her mind as she can as she makes her way through the countries, hoping that if she makes her way to a Western country she can seek asylum. It’s her only real hope of staying away at this point and she knows it.
She is in a small town not worthy of a name when she feels the first stabbing pain. It’s early, she doesn’t know how early but she knows that it is too soon for the pains she’s feeling. Her panicked expression must have given her away to a passing woman, and even in this strange country, there is a strange tendency that Natasha can’t understand for women to reach out to each other. Heavily accented Russian tells her that this stranger knows a place that will help her. The village midwife opens her door and takes one look at Natasha before making soft “tsch”ing noises under her breath.
The following hours make her torture training feel life a walk. And she talks more than she’ll feel comfortable with later. But the midwife and her daughter talk her through it all, their accents thick around the Russian words but their tones kind. She is breathless and exhausted when they hand her the baby, a girl swaddled in a blanket that is stained but soft. The midwife tells her, in the gentlest way possible that they don’t know how long she’ll survive.
Natasha’s finger traces down the small, splotchy cheek. Taking in the squashed face and shock of red hair. Babies, she thinks, are not very pretty when they’re first born. She’s been expecting her baby to be louder, and that thought is a painful one. But she is perfect. Rose. Rose is perfect. Natasha cradles the child closer, murmuring about how wrong she’d been. There had never been a moment when she didn’t love her. She could never have left this baby behind for strangers to love. How she’s loved and wanted.
The midwife’s daughter can’t be more than 14 but she stays next to Natasha the whole time. Not taking Rose away once her breathing has stopped and Natasha’s tears have begun again. Begging the young girl, the universe, and god for just a little more time. But of course, she doesn’t get any more time.
They bury her that evening. The midwife, the midwife’s daughter, and Natasha all stand in a small clearing and Natasha is numb. Too taken with grief to care about her own health as she promises herself that she is more than The Red Room made her. No weapon can be a weapon and know love the way she does.
The midwife tries to get her to stay, promises that they don’t see Russian officials more than every other year. She would be safe, they would hide her. But Natasha shakes her head and as soon as she is able leaves. Her original goal is still an option. The only person she wants to touch her is waiting somewhere in the west, the only person she trusts needs her to help him wake up as much as she needs him to help her hold the pieces of her heart and mind together.
She makes it to a city that is just a little too large and is just this side of not careful enough. Beginners mistakes cost her her freedom, and she is dragged back to The Red Room without enough energy to kick or scream. She knows what is waiting for her.
Reconditioning or death.
There’s an absent kind of thought that occurs to her as she waits in a medical ward to be debriefed. She doesn’t care which anymore.
It turns out that she is too expensive a commodity to be terminated. Too much time and money have been sunk into her so she is to be “reset”. A new technique for reconditioning that takes less time and is more effective.
She is numb as a vaguely familiar technician takes her in for reconditioning. A sweaty palm making her feel like she might vomit as a voice reassures her that this is nothing like what she’s seen before. They’ve perfected it. With the last thought that is her own, she looks up at him and tells him she isn’t just a weapon.
James and Rose and the last year and a half of her life are gone by the time he smiles at her and tells her that of course she isn’t just a weapon.
She is the best weapon.
She doesn’t particularly object to being sterilized at the time. After all, it makes sense for her work, and a lack of a monthly cycle would only make her more efficient. They call it her graduation ceremony and she accepts this. It makes sense. One last surgery and she’ll be the first successful Black Widow agent. A title she carries with pride as she takes her first mission.
For a very long time, Natasha is the weapon they made her. No other male agent awakes the same feelings James did, not that she would know to compare lovers to him. The small form she buried in the forest isn’t even a ghost to her now. She has no reason to think she has ever been anything more than something made for war.
The only exception is when she is laying in a ditch, a bullet hole through her abdomen and gazing at the back of the Winter Soldier that something like a memory makes itself known. She pushes it deep as she’s taken in for a debriefing, doesn’t mention it even though they question her about this man more than they have about any other. She assumes it is because he is a ghost to the system and moves on.
Then there is a blond man, the first agent the west has sent against her that she finds impressive. His smile is cocky and easy and his quips stir something she doesn’t recognize in her gut. But she is resolved to kill him because that is her duty. Anyone this good cannot be allowed to live. But the universe is a funny place and he slips out of her fingers.
Her next mission takes her to a hospital. It is simple. Pose as a friend of a woman and terminate her and her new baby. If the targets had been any less important it would not have been Natasha that was assigned the job. A child agent could have pulled it off. A woman still incapacitated from giving birth and a newborn? They stood no chance. And yet Natasha’s finger grazes along the small cheek of the stranger’s baby. The eyes are wrong. The hair is wrong. The baby is all wrong but some instinct knows that she is not made for this. She flees. No warning for the mother just a blind panic and the desperate need to be anywhere but there because the memories that are flooding back into her have no place with what she understands of reality.
Within hours, the entire hospital has been blown up and Natasha is sick with the knowledge that they sent someone much sloppier than her to finish the job. She finds Hawkeye a day later, he’s been trailing her. She doesn’t blink at any of his questions and only hesitates on one. How did a girl so young get so good?
She doesn’t know how to tell him that she’s looked this age for longer than he’s been alive so she lets it go. Gives him a look that causes him to laugh much to her confusion. She’d been expecting him to cower.
It turns out selling her soul to Nick Fury is the easiest thing she’s ever done. The debriefing process is painful, the process of her mind bringing back repressed memories is more painful.
It is months before she stands in what is now called Belarus and explains to Nick Fury what her price is. She’ll be his weapon but at a cost. His hand is heavy on her shoulder but he promises that her genetics will be wiped from the KGB so thoroughly that they’ll forget they ever had access to them. She is cold, numb through to the core but the promise gives her a chilly kind of satisfaction.
She touches the old rock pile that marks where Rose rests and tells herself no one will ever make her forget again. That she’ll make this world a place where in another life she would have wanted to raise her baby.