Chapter Text
The headline stared off the page at her, smug and slick and infuriating. Who is the real Black Widow? it asked. Inside the mind of a modern-day superspy. Natasha glared back, quieted the alarms jangling in her bones. She noted the author of the article, stored his name away for future reference.
The article started out bland enough: the same rundown of events that she’d given the media since day zero, naming her, Steve, and Sam as the main catalysts of the SHIELD leak, plus the inevitable comparisons to Snowden. Natasha skimmed down a bit further.
“June 1989: a baby girl was born in ————-, Russia, to Maria Sergeiyovna Romanova and Alian Mikhailovich Romanov…”
—“age ten — Red Room”—
—“believed responsible for the Easter Sunday fire at the K——— Hospital in Petrograd”—
—“Files state she is also responsible for the assassination of Anatoly C———-, a minor political member of the ——— Party”—
—“first came to SHIELD’s attention in 2006” — “shadowy associate Clinton Barton, better known to the public as Hawkeye” — etc, etc.
She turned the page, and discovered a two-page spread which featured a timeline: color-coded to indicate her allegiance, arrows pointing to photos of her various aliases and descriptions of what the captions suggest were “key moments” in her career.
She supposed that it was elegant. It was certainly thorough, and mostly accurate. In its own way, it was the most unnerving thing that Natasha had seen in years.
The final page of the article analyzed her actions with regards to SHIELD, her motivation for the leak, and whether this meant that she had turned her back on the United States in favor of her mother country, or whether she and Captain America had simply decided to take justice into her own hands.
When she finished, she picked up the phone to call Clint. Time magazine thinks I’m going to flee to Europe and go back to doing mercenary work, she had on the tip of her tongue, when she remembered.
She cleared his number and called Sam instead.
“It’s Nat. I’m going out,” she began without preamble. “What do you want me to get for dinner?”
“Uh…” Sam sounded startled. “I — I was gonna make some steaks while you’re both still patching yourselves up.”
“Steve heals six times faster than the average human being, and I’ve got ninety percent of my mobility back. Our iron levels are fine. Let me pick something up,” she said.
“You want to leave the house.”
Natasha’s eyes wandered back to the article, towards a photo of herself with long black hair and makeup that would make Morticia Addams proud. She’d been a secretary for the Polish Prime Minister then, until he died of a — a heart attack. She’d liked that disguise, and it had served her well, but every other person who read that article would be able to recognize the woman — the girl — in that picture as Natasha regardless of how well-hidden she had been at the time.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “I’m not on house arrest, am I?”
He laughed. “No, you’re not. How does Chinese food sound?”
~~*~~*~~
She didn’t have any of her old disguises anymore, but Natasha still made sure to change before she left the house. She applied a liberal amount of eyeshadow and lipstick, let her hair fall over the sides of her face, and changed into clothing — a sweatshirt from Steve’s closet, skinny jeans from her own — that would keep her looking more like a hungover grad student than an assassin.
“Sam Wilson,” she murmured to the girl behind the counter. She pitched her voice higher than usual; Natasha liked the sound over her own voice, didn’t like how distinctive it could be. “I called in twenty minutes ago?”
The girl looked up from her book, nodded, and gazed at her for two seconds longer than necessary before she turned around. “Wilson! Order 2617!” she yelled.
Natasha lowered her gaze, fiddling with a straw from the countertop dispenser while she waited. The wrinkle of paper bags: the calloused hands of an older man who set down two large paper bags in front of her. The shuffle of the man’s feet came to a halt.
“She’s pretty,” the man said in gruff Cantonese. “Like that woman from the television you like. The superhero.”
Natasha fidgeted and did her absolute best impression of an exhausted and monolingual American customer.
“Okay,” said the girl at the counter.
“You should ask her for her phone number,” he continued.
“Dad.” Natasha’s gaze flickered up to the girl, wide-eyed and frowning. “Just because I’m — that’s not polite — and Dad, I think she is.” She took a deep breath and said to Natasha, in English, “Sixty-four thirty-five.”
“I’m just trying to be supportive,” the father said, while Natasha pulled cash out of the pocket of her jeans and disguised her unease by lounging against the counter while the girl counted out change. Another customer walked in, and Natasha held her breath. In accented but steady English, the father said to Natasha, “My daughter is a lesbian now. She’s a fan of yours.”
Natasha fluttered her eyes open wide, shoulders drawn together and elbows pressed against her side. “What do you mean?”
“Five sixty-five here’s your change have a nice night,” the girl at the counter said, thrusting the money into Natasha’s hands. She stared at the air over Natasha’s shoulder, flushed. “I’m sorry.”
Natasha took pity on her. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “You want to talk about frustrating parents, my father-figure didn’t even tell me he’d faked his own death,” she told the girl in Cantonese, grinning. “At least yours has realistic expectations.” The girl laughed, startled, and Natasha straightened. “Good night,” she said in English, and bolted.
The apartment had already been lit up from the inside when she got back. “Who’s there?” she called as she opened the door.
“Just me.” Steve’s voice came floating over from the couch.
Natasha frowned and deposited the paper bags on the floor. As a general rule, he never gave her a straight answer to the question: it was always “your fiance” or “who’s got two thumbs and grew up during the Depression?” or “Captain Steve Rogers, sir”. She climbed over the back of the couch to perch on the arm opposite him. “How’d it go?”
Steve shrugged, blank-faced. He looked like he could use a hug, but to do that Natasha would have to climb half into his lap and she didn’t know how he would react to that. Instead, she slid her hand down into his palm and laced her fingers through his.
“It could’ve been worse,” he said, looking down at their hands like he’s memorizing their arrangement. “A lot worse. Stark likes pretending he’s a dick enough that it’s easy to forget he isn’t.”
“Stark is still a dick,” Natasha corrected him. “He just doesn’t blow up innocent people for money anymore.”
Steve smiled. “At any rate, he’s paranoid enough that most of his stuff wasn’t on the SHIELD database we uploaded, and he’s cynical enough that he wasn’t too bothered by what we’d done once he found out why we’d done it.”
Natasha slid down onto the couch, so that she could wedge herself between his shins and the comfortably worn back cushions. “That doesn’t sound so bad. What went wrong?”
Steve sighed. “Dr. Banner. SHIELD had a lot of his work in their files. All that work is now up for anyone who can search the internet.” He gazed off at the blank television screen, worry creasing his forehead.
Natasha suppressed her first instinct to get up immediately and add that information to her ever-growing list of classified information whose release she needed to track, because Steve was still holding her hand in a way that suggested he needed the physical contact. “Everything that SHIELD knew about the experiments with gamma radiation that turned him into the Hulk — turned part of him into the Hulk,” he pushed on, “that’s out there too.”
It didn’t take long for Natasha to grasp the implications: renewed interest in the super serum, or even deliberate attempts by other organizations and crazed individuals to replicate the Hulk debacle. She shut her eyes, running through scenarios, kicking herself for not having thought about it earlier. HYDRA’s active projects within SHIELD were more than enough to warrant total exposure, and given the nature of the situation there hadn’t been time for a more nuanced solution, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have momentary regrets. The key word was momentary.
She opened her eyes and squeezed Steve’s hand. “So life is going to be interesting for a while,” she said. She didn’t let her smile reach her eyes so that Steve would know she wasn’t treating this too lightly — just enough to put him at ease.
Steve huffed, eyebrows up. “And here I was, worrying that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself after … all this.”
Which was an excellent segue into Natasha asking him what he intended to do now, and she opened her mouth to do exactly that —
“So who’s this?” With his free hand, Steve gestured up and down to indicate Natasha’s outfit and makeup. “I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”
“Sammy Wilson,” she said, thinking rapidly as her voice climbed higher and lost its confidence. “Grad student. Biochemistry at Princeton, third year. I’ve got juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and slight anemia. Hauling up two bags of greasy food wasn’t so bad, I guess, but on a bad day, it’s worth the extra couple bucks to have someone deliver everything so I’ll have energy to actually eat it, you know?”
Steve looked torn between concern and amusement. Natasha grinned. “Got you.”
He just smiled, and she felt compelled to add, “She’s no good for anything important, though. The cashier at the Chinese place saw through it.”
His posture stiffened, and he let go of her hand to push himself upright. “Did anything happen?”
“Well, her father tried to set me up with her, but nothing bad happened.” Natasha swung herself off the couch.
“I can’t tell if that’s sweet or scary,” Steve said.
She shrugged. “The girl noticed who I was and ignored it; I think the father was just being a dad. I hope Sam isn’t too attached to that place. And speaking of Sam…” Natasha glanced at the wall clock. “I’m going to shower and get clean before he gets home. You’ll watch out?”
“Course. Anyone wants to get into the bathroom, they’ve got to get past me, first,” Steve assured her.
Natasha and Clint had a routine that they followed after a mission together: one would shower and clean themselves up while the other sat in the bathroom and worked on writing up the mission report. Then they would switch. She didn’t remember talking much during those times, aside from the occasional “What time was it when you took down the guard posted on the northeast face of the offices?” or “Is the past tense of lead spelled l-e-a-d or l-e-d?” It had been enough for Natasha just to know that someone was there, standing guard and ready to protect her. It was enough knowing that Clint would leave all of his weapons with her and trust her to do the same.
Showering at Sam’s apartment, even with Steve there, wasn’t quite the same. Steve was — well. They didn’t have the same history.
Still, some parts of the process are familiar. Removing her clothing and makeup (and sometimes her wig, and knives, and guns, and fake fingerprints) was a soothing, meditative ritual: stripping away the artifice until she was just herself, just the base components of Natalia Romanova waiting for an external force off of which to springboard a new variation. She scrubbed away every trace of Sammy Wilson under the hot water and dried herself with one of Sam’s gym towels. (She had only gone back to her apartment once after they left SHIELD, to collect her laptop, straightening iron, and the most useful array of clothing and weapons that she owned. Towels were not on her list of priorities.) She pulled on sweatpants and a cheerleading t-shirt from Agent Hill (because gifts without strings attached were rare in her life and they were a priority) and paused.
She could hear music playing outside the bathroom. Loud, awful music.
Natasha slid through the door and padded around the corner silently, holding her breath. Her stealth was rewarded by the sight of Captain America with his back to her, singing along as he arranged a dozen containers of Chinese food around three place settings on Sam’s small kitchen table.
“Now that I want you, now I can touch you, next to me …”
“Who told you that was good music?” Natasha asked, and promptly jumped out of the way and into a fighting stance as Steve did an about face, hands curled into fists and already halfway up.
He relaxed when he saw her, hands falling at his sides. “Sorry — habit. Stark’s AI, believe it or not.”
Natasha raised her eyebrows. “JARVIS?”
“I asked him for music last time I was at the Tower. Figured it doesn’t get much more unbiased than a robot.” Steve popped the lid off a box of kung pow, examined it with polite interest, and set it in front of Sam’s place setting. “It’s been a wild ride.”
“I’ll bet.”
They lapsed into companionable silence, surrounded by wailing guitars and wailing vocals from the living room speakers. Natasha let herself go still and blank, which pleased her until she noticed Steve looking at her with something like concern. She shook herself and smiled to reassure him. Steve tipped his head back, expression wry, and she thought he might be about to say something important, but then they both heard the click of a key in the front door.
Steve’s attention snapped towards it at once. His shoulders relaxed when Sam entered the room, mouth curved into a soft smile. Natasha dismissed the stab of jealousy in her ribs as soon as she recognized what it is. Children were possessive. Natasha was not.
Once they had arranged themselves around the table for dinner, Steve didn’t talk much. It wasn’t unusual, but Natasha thought it was suspicious anyway. He didn’t look as tortured or withdrawn as he did when he started losing himself in the past again, so she didn’t mention it to Sam. As far as Natasha could tell, he wasn’t ashamed, or disappointed in himself for whatever obscure reasons his brain could come up with, and he definitely wasn’t angry. Therefore, Natasha concluded, he would talk when he was ready to talk, which meant that she could safely devote most of her attention to Sam, asking him about his day and discussing the members of his group in a way that lets him get it off his chest without violating any confidentiality agreements.
Being Sam’s friend was a new experience for Natasha. He held the distinction of being the first acquaintance who didn’t meet her while she was acting under orders, acting as any particular version of herself. Sam knew her first as Steve’s friend Natasha, then a rogue agent trying to displace a corrupt regime of her own free will.
To be honest, Natasha wasn’t sure what to do with that. She figured that if she stuck to being Steve’s friend, she was probably in safe territory with Sam, but then he’d come out with something blindingly sincere like, “Thanks for getting food, hiding out in the bedroom doesn’t look good on you,” and Natasha wasn’t sure what to do with herself. So she deflected.
“I once spent fifty-two hours in a storage unit the size of your refrigerator,” she informed him. “Me and some water and ammo. Your apartment will never be as bad as that.”
“But that was on assignment, right?” Sam jabbed a forkful of limp broccoli in her direction. “It’s different when you’ve got orders.”
“I’ve got a mission. I’m keeping track of what people are doing with all their shiny new SHIELD intel,” she said sharply.
Sam gave her a look that said he knew what she was doing, and Natasha relaxed back into her chair, dropped her shoulders, loosened the muscles in her jaw. “We burned over a dozen deep-cover agents, and at least twenty more who were undercover in a lesser capacity, including someone I knew well. If he’s alive and safe enough to contact me, he would. So far, nothing.”
“Friend?”
“He got me out of Russia. We work well together.”
Sam nodded like he got it, as though a ten-second exchange was enough for him to comprehend the thorny knot of events and deaths and scars that defined Natasha’s relationship with Clint.
She let it be. She didn’t want to explain, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone right now for Sam to think he understood.
“You know Stark’s rebuilding his tower?”
Natasha and Sam both redirected their attention to Steve. “Yeah, of course. They started as soon as they could clear the debris,” said Natasha.
“You seen it recently?” Steve asked.
“I’ve had other things on my mind besides Tony Stark’s enormous phallic monument to himself.”
Sam snorted behind a curled hand, and Steve’s mouth twitched in a small smile before he refocused himself.
“Seems it’s not a monument to himself anymore. He’s calling it the Avengers Tower. Says he wants me to move in with him.”
Natasha blinked. She’d taken much larger surprises in stride, but she usually had her guard up when they happened. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“All of us. The, uh, ‘Avengers’.” Natasha could hear the air quotes around the word.
“He knows that initiative was part of SHIELD, right? I mean, it was mostly me and Fury, but he’s got to know how that would look.”
Sam leaned forwards on his elbows. “The Avengers. That’s you two, the Hulk, Thor the god of thunder, and the guy with the exploding arrows, right? Just so I got this straight.”
“That’s us,” said Steve.
“That’d be a hell of an apartment to live in,” Sam mused.
Steve spread his hands. “Like Natasha said: the world’s going to get a lot more interesting. He thinks it’d be better to have everyone together in one of the safest buildings in America, just in case. Especially since we’re all public now, like it or not. I told him there had better be room for you, considering we’d have gotten our asses kicked without you,” he added. Sam gave him an informal salute.
“You agree with him?” asked Natasha.
“I told him I’d consider it.”
“And have you considered it?”
“I’ve got business I need to take care of before I do anything else.” Steve folded his arms across his chest and met her gaze with little of his usual mildness. “What do you think?”
Natasha tipped her head to the side. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what ‘business’ he means, and Natasha was a genius by most definitions of the word. “It’s smart. If it stops being safe to hide, then take that visibility and make it into a weapon. It’s also stupid, calling it the Avengers Tower before he’s consulted everyone. We’d all need to be there, or else the public image of the whole team is destabilized.”
“So you’d be in?” said Steve.
She looked between him and Sam. “Like you said, business to take care of first.”
~~*~~*~~
“And you?” asked Nick. “You coming?” I could use you, she heard.
Attention trained on him, Steve and Sam only on the fringes of her awareness, Natasha didn’t move her head to give any indication yes or no. She pressed her lips together and poured all of the respect and fondness and stubbornness that she knew into the slightest crinkle of her eyes, the slope of her shoulders. Her voice, when she spoke, was as dry as ever. “I blew all of my covers,” she answered, and he gave her a short nod. She knew that Nick Fury would understand what it meant for her. She almost thought that Steve might, too.
She kissed Steve goodbye because they would see each other soon but the man seriously lacked closure in his life, and she didn’t say goodbye to Sam because they would talk soon and he had fewer issues than Steve, and she slipped a phone number into Fury’s pocket when she hugged him, and then she left.
She estimated that she had five or six minutes more before Steve and Sam made their way back via their more roundabout route.
Natasha had nothing to gain by pretending to Fury that she wasn’t staying with Sam, or that she won’t remain in contact while he and Steve went off chasing ghosts. She supposed that it just made her feel better about everything. Secrets were safe and comforting in moderation, and it was nice to have just this one for now.
In the five minutes before they got home, Natasha took out a loan from the Bank of Steve Rogers that he kept stashed in a mattress, in a shoe box on the top shelf of the hall closet, and in a rolled-up sock in the drawer of Sam’s dresser that he claimed as his own. She left a note and a necklace as collateral. It wasn’t a lot, just enough to get her from here to the West Coast if she was careful. Steve didn’t believe in banks, and thus had well over a million dollars in Army back pay squirreled away; Natasha, on the other hand, had most of her money in bank accounts that were linked to SHIELD. He would understand, even if he might not quite understand why she couldn’t just ask him for the money.
She made the bed next, and changed Sam’s laptop background to a photo that she got a tourist to take of the three of them at a restaurant in the West End. She took the leftover takeout from the fridge and stuck it in her duffel bag.
Then she packed the few things she still owned onto the back of her motorcycle, and Natasha headed west.
~~*~~*~~
All right, so she didn’t go directly west. She drove for three hours before she got caught by commuter traffic, which is how she ended up pulling off the highway into the parking lot of the Relax Inn. She signed in as Evelyn Wright, and set up a temporary base there: securing the room and setting it up with the bed wedged in the closet. She didn’t seriously believe that she needed to make the motel sniper-proof, but she did know that she would sleep easier with windows made impossible to open without setting off the fire alarm. It was unlikely that anyone would look for her here, in a crappy motel with weekly rates and suspicious-looking stains on the rug in her room.
The first thing she did after turning on the fan in the bathroom to get rid of the lingering stink of disinfectant was get out her laptop to see if Clint had gotten back to her yet. She posted messages on every ecoterrorist forum (decided upon beforehand, on the grounds that it had absolutely nothing to do with either of them) that she had been able to find, all containing certain turns of phrase that would look innocuous to the untrained eye, but would alert a Hawkeye to her presence.
Still nothing. She posted on a couple more threads, then amused herself by sending badly acted pornography to people who were Wrong On The Internet. When she got bored of that, she finally turned to her other, trickier, mission. She sat down on the bed inside the musty closet and pulled an accordion folder out of her duffle bag, the one with the Time article clipped inside. The pockets were all half-full with papers: all the initial media coverage about the event, reactions, and some printouts, highlighted and annotated in her favorite handwriting. Everything was a bit of a mess because while she was theoretically capable of sorting files, of arranging and presenting her data in a logical way, there are much, much better uses of her specific skill set. She had Coulson’s number; she thought he would pick up if he knew it was her. But Coulson, as much as she would like to pretend otherwise, couldn’t be trusted. The SHIELD data dump cleared him of involvement in HYDRA, but the events in New York two years prior had rattled her confidence in him.
So Natasha sat down to sort the pile of information she’d gathered, ready to build the bigger picture, only to realize how many places there were to begin. She had made a list — copied it off the internet, because crowdsourcing was a wonderful dangerous thing — and collected names. She spread the papers out on the bed and across her computer screen, and wished for one of SHIELD’s setups, with a wreath of touch screens around a central console so she could tap away and move files around virtually, instead of having to push paper like some kind of peasant.
There were sixteen different women, all with her face: interpreter, diplomat, two different secretaries, ballerina, daughter of a Swedish army general, high-class escort, illegitimate granddaughter of Irina Alexandrovna, and a professional dominatrix, among others. She’d been dozens of people, but these ones were her: she had put time and effort into creating them and maintaining their lives.
(As Tatiana Georgievna, she spent a good deal of time in the company of her mark’s mother Yelena, who was convinced until her dying day that Tatiana was madly in love with her son and just as devastated by his death. Natasha used to send her letters every Christmas and Easter, postmarked from a convent in Belarus, in order to keep Tatiana’s life in order; occasionally, she visited the confused nuns who received Yelena’s responses. You cannot know what it is to lose a child until it happens; it is unbearable, Yelena wrote, only a few months after Natasha had poisoned her son. If you truly feel that this is the path that the Lord has chosen for you, then at least I thank Him that you will never have opportunity know that pain. Natasha had thanked the nuns and burned everything she received.)
Looking down at the elegant drape of the dress last worn by her younger self, she recalled the letters for the first time in several years. She scowled.
Losing her covers was not the same thing as losing actual people who actually existed independent of her, but it still kind of hurt.
~~*~~*~~
The problem, of course, was what to do with the information once she had it all laid out. She considered the problem over a bucket of strawberries and a slushie purchased from the farmer’s stand a few miles down the road. Halfway through her makeshift dinner, something sparked in her brain, another bright idea. Natasha Romanova had a very short list of people she trusted absolutely, beginning (in alphabetical order) with Clint and ending with Sam and Steve. But she had a slightly longer list of people she trusted to be basically decent human beings, even if she wouldn’t be comfortable enough to bring down the government with them. Most of these people were with SHIELD, but there were still one or two she could call.
For her part. Ms. Potts didn’t sound horribly surprised when she picked up the phone. “Hello, Natalie. Are you calling for me or Tony?”
Natasha leaned against the windowsill and slipped on the curvy posture and sly smile that she used as Natalie, regardless of the fact that Pepper Potts couldn’t see her. “Either one. And I’m fine, thanks for asking. I have a favor to ask of you. Do you think you could help me?”
There was the slightest pause at the other end of the phone line before Ms. Potts said, “That depends on what you need.”
Natasha eyed the collage of articles and headshots tacked up onto the wall. “I think I’m having a midlife crisis.”
“No, I’m forty-five. I get to have a midlife crisis. There’s still time for you to switch careers.”
“Life expectancy of the girls in my program was fifty — most of us either died or had to be terminated before we hit retirement age,” Natasha pointed out.
Pepper hesitated only for a moment before she took it in stride. Natasha appreciated that about Pepper. “Okay, so you’re having a rough time. Are you looking for a job offer, because I have to say, given your history at Stark Industries, I don’t think we’re necessarily the best”—
“Something completely unrelated to SHIELD or SI,” Natasha interrupted her. “Which is the problem. I need time off because my boss’s boss was a Nazi and tried to kill several million people. Unfortunately, things have been … difficult lately.”
“You mean the aliens, or the Nazis, or maybe the fire-breathing nutjobs building biomechanical weapons?” Pepper asked. “We could have used you with those, by the way.”
“I was busy,” Natasha said.
“Aren’t we all.”
“If something comes up while I’m away, will there be anyone else around to handle it?”
“Listen, I won’t promise you that Iron Man can make it — that issue is complicated — but if something happens, we’ve still got Dr. Banner. Thor’s back in New Mexico. We’re interviewing Maria Hill but you and I both know that if she wants a job with Stark Industries, then she’s got one; and if she has a job with us, then she’ll know if any giant tomatoes come down from space to enslave us all.”
“I don’t think space tomatoes understand the concept of enslavement, but I’ve been wrong before,” Natasha mused.
“And if we do need someone to pull a crack team together?” Pepper asked.
“I’m keeping this phone. You can reach me here if it’s an emergency.”
Pepper paused on the other end of the line — taking notes, perhaps. “Thanks for calling, instead of just vanishing into the ether like some people when they’re having issues.”
Natasha smiled, some of the tension unknotting in her chest. “I owe you.”
“I’ll remember that,” Pepper warned her. “So, midlife crisis?” she added, shutting the door on the subject.
“Yep. I’ve already got the motorcycle. If I start dating any twenty-year-old swimsuit models, send one of your smart missiles to find me,” she said, and was rewarded with a long-suffering groan of agreement.