Siberia
March 1990
Natasha stood in the antechamber.
She knew the stakes. She knew exactly what had brought them here. She was painfully aware that the twisted love she shared with her partner was the exact reason he was in this position.
"Widow," said the man nearest her, a soldier or a general, hard-faced and unyielding. He had aged much; the once-blond hair was now silver, and wrinkles lined his face. He had several secrets for every shadowy crease in his skin. They were the only people in the small room, and she knew the glass was one-way, and bulletproof. "Romanova. I know you've grown accustomed to working with your partner, but the steel fist of the Soviet Union is no longer necessary, and he's been compromised. You know how dangerous that is."
She ignored him.
The man standing in the chamber below them was her partner and her lover and her world. For him, she had stayed in this life. For him, she had left for the West and spent four years in deep cover in London so they could prove to their masters that neither of them was compromised.
How wrong she'd been. It had all been a trick.
Natasha remembered the message she'd gotten in her intel drop, a casual mention of operations to retrieve "the Winter Soldier" from Iran. She had done some quiet digging on her own when her suspicions were raised; normally, details of other missions would never have made it into her communications. Sure enough, the Winter Soldier (a ghost and a legend) was nowhere near the radical Islamist factions of the warring Middle East.
When the Winter Soldier was told Natasha was in the hands of Hezbollah, he was not so careful. And they'd caught him, and now here he was, Natasha's partner, about to go on ice.
She could try to kill all these men and women. She knew she'd even get through many if not most of them before they could take her down. But take her down they would. They'd made her, and they had the precautions in place to break her, too.
So she took the burning, roiling, blood-red fury and packed it back and back and back until no trace of it showed in her body, until it was nothing but a pressure at the bottom of her mind.
"Yes, sir," she said. The perfect soldier.
"Excellent."
Below them, her partner turned and looked up at the glass that he knew hid his love from his sight. He wanted to speak to her, to tell her in the words neither of them had ever uttered, preferring instead the gifts made each other of lives saved, wounds bandaged, hearts stilled, but he wouldn't make this any worse than it already was.
So he didn't fight the effect on his mind when the anonymous masked scientist began to speak.
" Longing."
"Rusted."
Natasha saw him flinch, one of the only times he had ever revealed his reactions like that to the people in this ancient bunker.
"Furnace."
"Daybreak."
With each word, she watched him draw farther away from the world, and from her.
"Seventeen."
"Benign."
He began to shake and shudder, eyes closed, fists clenching. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to grip his biceps - one metal, one flesh - hard enough to damage him and remind him who he was.
"Nine."
"Homecoming."
"One."
"Freight car."
With the final word, he stilled. His face emptied of any personality, and an imperceptible change in his posture transformed him into a different person.
"Soldier?"
The scientist sounded nervous.
"Ready to comply."
Audible relief washed the crew of scientists in the bunker.
Natasha looked at Malyen. "Do you wish me to watch, or may I go receive my next assignment?"
Malyen smiled. "Do stay, dear Natasha."
So it was a test, then. Well, she would not fail.
No trace of her agony nor of her fury showed in her body as her partner, the Winter Soldier, killed the three children held against the far wall of the chamber. Their deaths were not slow, and she knew it would horrify the tiny flame of humanity he had somehow managed to cling to all this time when (if) the neural programming ever faltered. Because it would horrify him, it horrified her as well, but she did not react.
And then, with both arms - silver and tan alike - painted from nails to elbows in blood, he walked out of the room and didn't look back.
Malyen watched her the whole time.
At last, she turned to the man who had been her handler for as long as she could remember. She was technically the elder, but while she looked to be in her late twenties or possibly early thirties, every one of his eighty-six years showed on his body, despite the care he took. He'd be forced into retirement in a few years, she knew, his usefulness to their organization outlived.
"Are you satisfied?"
Malyen nodded at last. "Indeed I am, my spider. It seems that you managed to avoid being compromised with your partner. Well done." He paused. "I know you are accustomed to working with him, Widow. You have been an effective pair."
"You sever your best operatives with this move," she said.
"He is compromised."
"I would not wish to work with a compromised partner. I merely inquire if I will be assigned another, or return to solo work."
Malyen paused. "You will be alone, for now. But there may be another partner at some point. Perhaps this Winter Soldier may even be returned to me."
Her expression did not change. "I would prefer otherwise."
"Congratulations, Widow," Malyen said after another minute of silence.
She did not acknowledge the praise. Before her soldier, she wouldn't have cared about it. Now, she did care: she hated this man, and hated that he approved of her actions.
But he would not know, not until it was too late.
"Come. Your next assignment will be to infiltrate…"
Siberia
October 1995
The bunker was gone.
Natasha stood next to her stolen helicopter and stared in disbelief. The bunker had vanished as if it had never been there. The tundra was smooth, white, and unmarked.
Her memory had never failed her but she scrabbled through her pockets until her gloved hands found her GPS, one of the newest models and one that wasn't even available on the public market, hoping desperately this was the first time in the seventy-two years since the Red Room took her, changed her, that she was remembering wrong.
Natasha's heart sank. The coordinates were correct.
She bolted back into the helicopter and, with shaking hands, activated the rotors. It snarled to life and lifted off the ground, engine whining without its warm-up, but she didn't care.
The spy's hands flew over the weapons console, aiming two bunker-busters she'd loaded up as a last resort at the ground where she knew the bunker door had been five and a half months ago. Five months in deep cover, and this happened.
Natasha was no stranger to explosions. She pulled ear protection over her head and pressed the button. The missiles screamed from the helicopter to the ground two hundred feet below. She closed her eyes against the resulting fireball.
When she touched down next to the crater and flew out of the helicopter, diving down into its bottom with the grace that wouldn't leave her limbs even when she was desperate and grieving and furious , she found nothing but scorched earth and flakes of stone. What she did not find was the upper level of the bunker, which should have been there but wasn't.
Wait .
Natasha scrabbled with her hands until she uncovered the sheet metal. Her heart sank when she realized it was a lone piece of scrap, not a clue that might lead toward a way into the bunker if they'd only removed the top levels, but at least she could see the logo on it.
The KGB, or what was left of it.
Natasha's eyes narrowed. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a feral snarl.
She carried the piece of scrap with her back up to the helicopter and made sure it was secure in the back before she lifted off and aimed it back toward Naiba. She'd catch a flight from the Russian port city to Moscow for her next check-in. Malyen would be there, as her handler, and she would make the rotten fossil of a man regret having taken her Soldier, and then she would paint Russia in the blood of the entire rotten organization.
But that would take funds. Momentum. Assistance, possibly, and information: all things she didn't have, and that would take years to obtain. She'd play it smart. Play the long game.
The only thing Natasha Romanova was sure of was that she would never do another thing for the KGB again.
Except destroy it.
Am I not merciful ?
Budapest
July 2001
The city was sweltering. Clint rubbed his hands compulsively along his pants to get rid of the sweat, knowing it would be back in less than a minute but unable to help himself.
Though he would never admit it out loud, he knew some of the sweat was from nerves, not the heat. Why did Fury send me of all people? A green agent with a track record of deviating from the operational plan. He knew everyone else at SHIELD had collectively shit their pants when the assignment was made known to the higher-ups, but Fury hadn't backed down, and the aging Director Jones didn't question the Head of Operations. Fury had chosen Clint Barton, so Clint Barton it would be.
Clint couldn't help wondering how big a mistake that had been.
He scaled the construction equipment with ease, his compound bow hidden in his toolbox and the quiver concealed as a roll of plastic sheeting on his back. He wore a bright orange vest and a yellow hard hat and carefully disguised the trained command over his body that SHIELD had given him. His target was deadly and impossibly skilled; he'd been warned that the slightest discrepancy in her environment would send her running and the last ten years of trying to track her would be down the drain.
Translation: Don't fuck up, Clint.
The brown-haired man found his position, most of the way up the tower, and settled into the shack. He plunked his case down, pulled out a sandwich and an iPhone, and did his best to imitate a lazy worker taking his lunch while he waited for his shift to start.
At noon exactly, he put the phone aside and began rummaging around in the toolbox.
The first shot he fired from his perch was a lightweight arrow, designed to disintegrate on impact, leaving nothing but the directional mike behind. Fury had personally ordered that the young agent be given access to the tech. It was new, and he'd almost been shot down (ha), but in the end the Head of Ops had overridden everyone else.
Clint guessed it'd be nice to have that kind of pull.
He screwed an earpiece into his ear and pretended to mess with the unrolled plastic sheeting (his quiver lay on the platform, invisible to anyone below) while he listened to the meeting. Thankfully, it was in English.
"Widow."
Clint twitched. They'd been right. The Black Widow really was here. He'd been half convinced it was a screw-up from Intelligence that said she'd be taking a client here this afternoon.
"Mr Darcy. Quite an interesting alias, by the by. Wouldn't have pegged you for an Austen fan."
The voice was female. Smooth, confident, laced with a threat and a promise. Clint started to understand why everyone was so freaking terrified of this woman when they didn't have pictures, prints, or anything to say who she really was. Scuttlebutt said the Black Widow was a myth.
He almost wished they hadn't had to upgrade his clearance for this, because it would make awesome gossip points in the cafeteria.
He, Clint Barton, was about to kill the Black Widow.
It wasn't his first life taken. Nor would it be the last. But Clint had seen the files, done his paperwork, and he knew exactly how dangerous this woman was.
He gave in to his curiosity and bellied over to the edge, watching her through the window of the building, several stories below his viewpoint.
The young agent's eyebrows shot upward when he focused on the woman.
She was… damn.
He'd been born with accuracy enhancement and brilliant eyesight, which had made him a neighborhood menace to cats and birds once his uncle got him a slingshot for his seventh birthday. There had been times when Clint kind of hated the ability because it had also resulted in some bullying, but on days like this? No. He would not be complaining about being able to see easily into that room, because this woman was scary awesome and he could tell the arrogant paunchy Spanish prick in there was about to get his ass either verbally or physically handed to him. Clint didn't want to miss a second of it.
He hoped he'd get the intel SHIELD wanted out of this interaction before he started to root for her.
The prick shrugged. "Well, I'm hardly a Bingley."
Clint didn't get the reference.
The woman smirked. "Somehow I think you're more of a Collins."
"Hey, that's not-"
The Black Widow leaned back against the wall. The lithe viciousness in her movement halted the man's words in his tracks. Clint strongly suspected the dude was both terrified and turned on, and trying not to show either.
"So," he said at last. "I have a contract for you."
"I'm not cheap."
The prick leered at her. "I can afford it."
Clint imagined sending an arrow through the client's neck.
"What's the job?"
The client gave a name, someone Clint didn't recognize but memorized anyway, just to be safe.
"I don't kill just anyone, you know."
"How do you feel about a woman named Emilia Jones?"
Clint's grip on his bow tightened to the breaking point. That name…
This man was about to send the Black Widow against the director of SHIELD.
"Never heard of her," the Widow said, sounding bored.
The archer grabbed a length of high-tensile cable from the toolbox and fastened one end to the platform with a magnetic clamp. The other was hooked to an arrow and he aimed the bow carefully at the window below.
"She's the director of an organization called SHIELD," the client began.
Clint saw the woman's head snap up. "You're going after SHIELD?"
"Is that a problem?"
"Yes."
An arrow shattered the window and found its place in the client's upper thigh.
The Widow moved, but Clint was already firing his second arrow and hooking his suit to the cable and leaping from the platform. He shot silently through the air, slammed feetfirst through the remains of the window, rolled, and came up with an arrow aimed at the Widow's throat.
He didn't fire. She didn't move.
After a long moment, during which the client gasped and squealed on the floor, the Widow raised an eyebrow. "I thought SHIELD would send someone older."
"I thought you'd be older," he replied.
She smirked. "I look younger than I am."
"If I interrogate this prick, are you going to kill me?" Clint asked.
"No."
"Are you going to run?"
"No."
Slowly, he lowered his bow. The Widow didn't move.
Clint stepped backward until the client was between them, keeping his eyes on the redhead the whole time. He didn't look away from her even as he knelt and gripped the arrow sticking out of the client's leg.
"Why did you want to kill Emilia Jones?" he asked.
"I'm not telling you anything," the man gasped.
Clint twisted the arrow, pushed it in farther. The man screamed.
"Pansy," the archer muttered. He wondered if he'd imagined the twitch of the Widow's lips.
"What's your name?" the Widow said suddenly.
Clint grinned at her. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
"Mary Allen."
He snorted. "And I'm Michael Jackson. Nice to meet you, Mary. Okay, come on, you bastard, answer the question." He jerked the arrow again and produced another scream.
"No," the man gasped after the shriek petered out.
The Widow was by his side so quickly Clint realized she probably would've dodged if he'd shot at her from the point-blank range of thirty seconds ago. No wonder she hadn't looked nervous; she'd never really been in danger.
"Watch and learn, kid," she said, and a tiny oyster-shucking knife appeared between her fingers. She laid it against the client's cheek and smiled at him. "Now," she purred, "you're going to answer this man's question. Or I carve your face off."
It took three minutes for the sobbing man on the floor to yield the information he wanted.
"I presume you're not taking him back to SHIELD," the Widow said at last, looking down at the bloody, wounded mess on the floor.
Clint looked, too. This wasn't his first rodeo. He'd had to use torture before. But the coldness and apathy of the Widow was something entirely knew, and terrifying. "My orders were to find out who he wanted to send an assassin after, then kill him." He left off the fact that the Widow was supposed to be dead now, too.
She raised an eyebrow at him. "If you leave him here, it'll raise a scene."
Clint heaved a sigh. "Well, it's an old building, lots of outdated electrical wiring… Really, this whole place is a fire hazard."
"And me?"
Clint walked to the window, pulled the directional mike off the outside wall, and turned it off. He didn't need a recording of this bit.
"I was ordered to kill you too," he said.
"But you didn't."
"I could have."
"I'm impressed," the Widow said slowly. "I knew SHIELD was coming today, but I had no idea you were up there. You had the drop on me."
Clint bowed, trying to hide how proud that made him.
"Why didn't you take the shot?"
The young agent looked at his target.
It wasn't the first time he'd deviated on a mission. There was a reason most of the SHIELD higher-ups didn't like him. The problem was Clint's intuition. His gut had never steered him wrong in his life, and he wouldn't apologize for following his instincts. They were usually right. And right now, he was certain that this woman didn't need to die.
"You're not my enemy."
"You sound sure."
"That's because I am."
"So you're just going to let me walk away?"
"I guess that's up to you, isn't it?"
She nodded slowly, eyes never leaving his face.
And spoke abruptly. "I want to come in."
Clint blinked. That was… unexpected. "Ah… why?"
She shrugged gracefully. "I'd rather work for the good guys than continue doing this."
She could be lying, but…
"We'll have to fight our way out. There's a huge task force coming in for you. Fury sent me in to take you out before they got here."
"Who sent them?"
"Can we table that conversation? We have less than two minutes."
"Deal," she said, and faster than he could react, she had two pistols in her hands. He realized he'd never really had the drop on her. It was an uncomfortable feeling. "You've got an exit plan?"
He grinned. "Car in a garage three miles south."
She stared. "That's it?"
"I wasn't supposed to be down here," he snapped. "I guess we'll have to wing it."
"Fine," the red-haired woman said irritably. "Lead the way, rookie."
Clint squinted at her. "You gonna shoot me in the back?"
"If I wanted you dead, you would be already. Quit wasting time."
She could just be using him as backup until she was free of this mess - but no, she'd spared him and wanted to come with him before she knew about the task force. So she was probably telling the truth. Mostly.
Clint nodded once and left the room, the Black Widow behind him. He made little noise. She made none.