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“Well, it’s not like I’m a real woman,” she says into her phone. Normally, she’s very good at stringing along her therapist with things that almost sound like confessions. Unfortunately, when she says this one, it maybe, kind-of, strikes her as true.
“Can you tell me more about that?” her therapist says. Fucking therapy. It was worth agreeing to it, just to watch Stark eat his hat. (She chose the therapist that sounded, from his website, like the easiest to kill, if necessary.) Luckily, for the sake of opsec, he can only hear her, not see her, and she trusts Stark’s stuff to keep the line clean - she has to, otherwise she’d be dead. Not that she’s worried that her face’ll do something without her permission - lucky because she can keep flicking through her presets on her photostatic veil, watching herself in the mirror as her skin morphs. An older woman with a long nose, one she still needs to find a wig for; another woman, stocky face and neck - an arena fighter, maybe.
“Well, you see, when someone scoops out all your lady bits…” she says, playing with the flex of the cauliflower ear.
There’s a silence that could just as well mean ‘that’s reductive’ or ‘tell me more’.
“I’ve only ever been a little girl with blood on her hands,” she lies. The next preset is a man, soft in the chin with a little bit of light stubble. She can wear him with hair in a low pony and heavily padded with baggy clothes - good if she needs to carry explosives on her. But now she's not in baggy clothes, she's in a tank top and leggings, and they leave no part of her body to the imagination. The contrast is jarring.
It really would be helpful, if there was a veil to change her body, too. She can imagine it now: more waist, less hips, less ass, smaller chest. Something generic, practical. Dr Selwyn was working on prototypes that would do that, she’s pretty sure - she wonders, vaguely, what happened to him. That’s the problem, with being a fugitive.
*
When she was a kid, Natalia was nothing. She was a lump of clay, a little doughy baby, ready to be moulded to Draykov’s whims; she knows this now.
But the hands she felt were the hands of her Madame. She pinched, and pruned, and cropped them until they were perfect; and then cut and shrank them even more. She told them what an honor it was to be in her school; what an honor it was to be a girl. Because girls are perfect. Free of the vices of men; preternaturally pretty. Girls hold imaginable power in their little bosoms. And to dance was the epitome of that - soft and unassuming and delicate; precise and vigorous and moving.
When the Madame first took them all to see Don Quixote at the Bolshoi, she found herself, despite all her training, wildly and uncomfortably jealous of the male dancers - their long strides, their tall jumps, their tours en l’air - how they were allowed to show bulk in their shoulders, how no delicate skirts hid the uncompromising athleticism of their lithe bodies. And a kid can only dream about what she knows: so that was little Natalia’s dream. Not freedom, privacy, the ability to relax; she dreamed of being a ballarino, her strong muscles chiselled by bright stage lights.
But men are just as good as women at shooting, Madame said; throwing, strangulation, hand-to-hand, better. So she trained, and trained, and soon she forgot all about her stupid little dream.
When she was a kid, she was a lump of clay. And then she was fired, in a thousand degrees of heat, into something solid and unchanging. Something water-tight. Something hollow. Something new.
*
What Natasha was really good at was honeypotting - at striking men at their weakest point (the cock). She was attractive; could smile wide, talk high; and it wasn’t as if she had any feelings about romance in the first place, to get tangled up in things. KGB or SHIELD, it didn’t matter: she was there to use her body all the same. Fury sent her to assess Stark’s capabilities with a wardrobe full of tight pencil skirts. And she almost blew her cover, pinning Happy Hogan to the mat with just her legs. She should have been better, she knows, at tamping down her rage (blame her being an American, now; blame its indulgent hedonism of emotions) - but she did it with perverse joy anyway, knowing Fury would get mad. But, she told Fury, she was just going along with Stark’s whims! Is that not what he told her to do? To be sexy, and competent, but most of all to play along, to be a good little girl for the man in the mansion?
It was only when she became an Avenger, that she was told she couldn’t do those kinds of missions any more - far too famous. Her face was spread across magazines, across billboards; crowds with cameras would blind her with flashes and then ask her questions about her figure and her diet and her workout routine. Stark even suggested that they do a shirtless Avengers calendar (for charity, guys, come on). And she would have done it - but the idea got shot down pretty quick.
*
Either way: how she presents herself is supposed to be soft, in enough ways to slip under the radar. Long hair. Enough weight on her bones to hide the muscles beneath. Clothes that show the curve of her hips and waist and chest.
Except that, underneath, she’s not soft, and never has been. Underneath, she’s all sharp edges. It’s all a lie she’s comfortable telling - the kind of lie she hardly needs to tell, because people see her that way anyway, always will. There is no “I’m a woman,” because there is no “are you a woman?”, because they see her and they read her and they think they know her. It’s really the easiest lie she’s ever told, laughably easy.
So how the fuck can she justify looking at herself in the mirror, and thinking about ditching it all?
*
The problem is that she knows her body belongs to her, if nothing else does - not her name, not her role, not her standing. She’s the one who’s honed it to perfection - she can do whatever she likes with it.
She’s thinking about how it would feel to have no more long hair to hide behind. To feel the bare wind on her face.
But she can compromise with herself. She’s a master negotiator. What she ends up with, in her mind, is this: long enough on top to braid or put into a ponytail; her sides shorn down to the scalp. If she needs to hide behind her hair, she can, if she takes it down.
So she imagines this, and stares at her face in the mirror one last time. And then partitions her hair, all precision, with the end of a stiletto blade.
*
In Tokyo, she braids what’s left of her hair up into a bun, so it doesn’t go wild and curly in the pouring rain. On the jet, when she takes her hood down, a ghost of an almost-smile passes across Clint’s face. “I like it,” he says, his fingers reaching up to barely trace along the short spiky hairs above her ear. “Hey, look. We match now.”