Chapter Text
Natasha doesn’t have any useful memories of her time at the Red Room, just nightmares.
That’s deliberate, of course. It’s something they did to her, which doesn’t make it better. Makes it worse, probably. But it’s always been like this. She knows her mind wasn’t always her own.
She can’t remember any of their faces. If she thinks about it — really thinks about it — it’s as if she never looked at them. She remembers them the way she imagines normal people remember everyone else in a train car: those people you’re not supposed to look at. But she knows she did.
She knows because she has so many crystalline perfect memories, like bits of broken china. The delicate design is still clean and flawless, but incomplete. Shards and fragments taken out of context, jumbled up, incoherent, half of them probably forgeries. Even an eidetic memory can tell lies.
For example, she remembers the Bolshoi very clearly, vividly remembers the boy who played Spartacus, dancing in his chains. He had the most beautiful blue eyes. She’s sure. She’s maybe 40% sure his eyes were blue. She remembers dancing too, her hands crossed at her back. Just another slave in the corps. She remembers the practice room, the barre. She remembers bitching about Moiseyev’s choreography with the other dancers, even though she’s 80% sure that she couldn’t have been in the Bolshoi, and 100% sure she wasn’t in the Bolshoi in 1958, at least twenty years before she was even born.
She remembers a cold room. Like a morgue, or maybe a laboratory. She remembers a body, frost-touched blue and laid out on a slab. She can’t remember the face, but she knows it. She knows it better than her own. She remembers a blurry handler standing behind her. Black Widow, the handler calls her, and laughter bounces off the walls. She doesn’t remember being married, but she can’t shake the bone-deep sense that the name is right, for some reason. It feels right.
She remembers the Ivanovich assassination pretty clearly, and that one she thinks is probably real. She remembers that they were trying to make it look like a mugging gone wrong. They hadn’t expected the girl to be there. Natasha can’t remember her partner’s face for that job, can’t even remember how tall he was, but she remembers hauling Ivanovich’s daughter away down the alley. The daughter wasn’t part of the mission, killing her would only have drawn more attention. Natasha remembers covering the girl’s eyes and ears so she couldn’t see, wouldn’t hear what they were about to do to her papa. The girl couldn’t have been more than eleven.
Natasha remembers being about eleven years old herself: wrists raw, trying not to shiver from the damp and the cold, studying Western propaganda with Madame B, whose face is an uncertain blur. She remembers a big stack of comics; Superman. Wonder Woman. Lady Liberty and the Howling Commandos. She remembers reading them with a kind of clinical detachment and noting that Lady Liberty had terrible form. That punch wouldn’t have knocked out a toddler and it certainly wouldn’t have knocked out Hitler. Punches as drawn by someone who’d never thrown a punch in their life. Westerners were so soft.
It isn’t until after she leaves the Red Room, after she spends a year in the cold trying to stumblingly become a person—
Truthfully? It isn’t until after she meets Clint Barton that she understands how softness can be weaponized without being insincere. She’s weaponized her own softness before, of course. Luring a mark in with a show of vulnerability, until you know exactly where to slip the knife.
That’s not the way Clint does it. He’s got one of those goofy, squashy faces and he broadcasts his feelings with it like he’s a damn traffic light. Which is why he’s the kind of spy who watches through a scope instead of getting in close.
But instead of taking Nat out from a distance with an arrow she’d have never seen coming or even thought to guard against, he does get in close, and makes a pitch instead of taking the shot. And because he’s soft, with a soft face and a soft Westerner’s heart, she knows it isn’t a trick. She knows she can trust him when he says “SHIELD can help you,” and it turns out that’s the most dangerous thing of all.
While she’s deprogramming in a secure SHIELD-run recovery facility, Clint visits her every Friday, and introduces her to the finer points of Western culture: Dog Cops, and really terrible coffee, and the intricacies of comic book collecting. He even brings her his hard-backed copy of the Nomad Saga, where Lady Liberty rebrands herself first as Miss Union Jack, then as Nomad when she uncovers corruption in MI-13, and finally as just Captain Margaret Elizabeth Carter, standing on the Cliffs of Dover and looking out across the Channel, ready to face the future without her mask.
It’s not the first time that Natasha has felt like a fictional character. Not like Lady Liberty, but like a fictional character. Because to her at least, it’s blatantly transparent that Margaret Carter isn’t real, and the whole Nomad storyline is just a morality play with tits and spandex. Lady Liberty has about as much agency as the Black Widow did.
“Well when you put it like that,” Clint says, scratching his chin. “I guess I didn’t pick up the finer points when I was fifteen.”
When Natasha was fifteen, she went on her first assignment. She’s pretty sure she was fifteen. But she also remembers that the year was 1952, so that can’t be right.
In 2006, Natasha is released from SHIELD’s containment and rehabilitation facility. A woman who calls herself Maria Hill says: “There’s a place for you at SHIELD, if you want it.”
“As an assassin?” Natasha says, completely expressionless.
Maria doesn’t flinch. “As whatever you want to be.”
“What I want,” Natasha says, a little lazily, putting on a smirk that doesn’t belong to her. “Well, I’d want some answers before I committed to anything.”
“I’ll answer any questions I can.”
Natasha watches Maria with alley-cat wariness, and Maria meets every probing question, every delicately laid verbal trap with steadiness like bedrock. Maria with her hair pulled back so tight and her stance wide and her head cocked; she looks unshaken, unshakable.
At the end of their meeting, Natasha says, “I’ll think about it.”
After Maria leaves, Natasha locks herself in the bathroom of her temporary apartment, because it’s the only place she can really relax, and spends the usual ten minutes looking at herself in the mirror. She’s got this persistent fear that she’s going to forget her own face the way she’s forgotten the faces of everyone she worked with in the Red Room.
This is the thing about deprogramming. The Red Room took so much from her — memories, opinions, family — but for every single thing they took, they gave her something else: how to manipulate, to kill a man, to cover it all up. She may have left the Red Room of her own accord, but she still carried them around inside her. So much of her was programming, and now that it’s broken...
She stares into the mirror and thinks: Where else can you go? Nowhere. Who else would take you in? No one you trust. What else can you be used for? Nothing good.
She looks into her own eyes and thinks: what kind of a person are you?
There was the part of her that was Them, and had all kinds of things to say. And then, eventually, there was the part of her that was Her, which was much smaller, and only knew how to say no. No, I won’t do that anymore. No, I don’t have to do what you tell me. No, I am not yours.
What kind of a person is that?
Not much of a person. Natasha frowns. She’s not the sort to be kind to herself, to lie about something like that, but that’s not quite right.
Not much of a person, yet.
Unlike Clint’s comic book characters, she gets the chance to be real, if she wants to be. Unlike Captain Carter, she gets to choose what mask to wear, or not.
If Natasha were more of a person, she might develop a crush on Maria Hill, but she hasn’t decided what that would feel like to Natasha Romanoff, so instead she just likes Maria.
It’s for the best, probably. Maria is part of her intake team and in charge of familiarizing her with SHIELD’s protocols, so Natasha humiliates herself in front of Agent Hill about twenty times a day in those early weeks.
Natasha gets to be the recipient of several MariaTalks™, including such gems as:
1. The very emphatic speech detailing why elimination is not the fallback protocol for SHIELD when things go awry.
2. A much more patient explanation about how you can’t just bribe the admins to do your paperwork. Bribing is not just “against the rules” in theory, it’s against the rules in reality, and that policy is strictly enforced.
3. If you want to try out the experimental and potentially deadly weapons, you have to get permission and do so in a controlled environment.
4. No, you don’t need to swear undying loyalty to anyone, not even as a formality. You do need to sign a contract though, and you will have to start paying taxes.
4a. No, you cannot swear undying loyalty instead of signing a contract and paying taxes.5. You do get time off. Paid time off even.
5a. Taking time off is not actually optional, you’re not allowed to sleep at the office.
The coup de grace is the very embarrassing moment during her first official SHIELD facility tour where she cocks her head at the memorial in front of her, squints hard, and says: “Why do you have a comic book character on your Wall of Valor?”
Which is how she learns that Lady Liberty isn’t just a statue and a piece of propaganda. This is also how she learns that Agent Hill is, underneath her cool and collected exterior, a bubbling fangirl and passionate history nerd.
In 2008, while Natasha is laid up with a bullet hole in her abdomen, reading ghost stories, Tony Stark declares himself Iron Man.
In 2010, Natalie Rushman is hired as Tony Stark’s newest PA. It’s her least favorite job for SHIELD so far, including the one where she took a bullet to the gut. Iron Man might be a hero, but Tony Stark is a brat, constitutionally incapable of realizing that he is not, in fact, the center of the universe. If only they could get Pepper Potts to put on the suit instead.
It’s not like it’s surprising that Stark has issues. Before taking the assignment, Natasha had read up on all the relevant Starks, and Captain Carter’s name had come up again, this time in the context of a theoretical romantic tie between her and Stark the elder. Howard famously never stopped looking for her body after she went down in the Valkyrie. He helped make SHIELD what it is, and it doesn’t take a genius to look at that ridiculous acronym and Lady Liberty’s ridiculous so-called “weapon” and draw a line between the two.
And then, in the seventies, they revived the Lady Liberty comics and introduced a new character: Reynard Clark, the lovable inventor who builds Captain Carter’s weapons and steals her heart. The comic revival did well enough to get a really terrible movie adaptation, and sparked a swirl of hindsight speculation and a flurry of tabloid attention on Howard and Maria Stark.
Articles were written, along with a couple of trashy exposés with dubious sourcing. But the hypothesized divorce never materialized, and anyway, Natasha is more focused on how that story had clearly affected young Tony’s psyche, since he’d “transferred from” (Natasha reads “gotten kicked out of”) the first of what turned out to be a string of private schools six months later.
It’s useful intel, and she makes sure to wear retro red lipstick to throw him off his game.
It works. It doesn’t stop Stark from being a completely insufferable pain in the ass, but it works.
In 2011, SHIELD finds the wreckage of the Valkyrie. Natasha isn’t very interested, except for the effect it has on Maria. Maria geeks out about it in a gently repressed way, like she’s trying very hard not to vibrate at a frequency that will shatter glass.
Natasha, by this point, feels about Maria the way she imagines normal people feel about their siblings. Fond. A little embarrassed. Tolerant of their weirdnesses. And it is undeniably funny to watch Maria flip effortlessly back and forth between that calm, confident exterior she projects and the squealing, hands-flapping fangirl.
Normally Natasha would be doing the dead-eyed lizard stare she uses on junior operatives who get all gushy about Iron Man and the Avengers Initiative. But it’s Maria. She’s the one who convinced Natasha to join the Avengers Initiative in the first place. When Maria talks about superheroes, it’s with the warmth and sincerity of a true believer. Coming from someone else, it’s just corny, but Maria’s a natural born skeptic, like Fury. When they believe, that means something.
“It’s just— it’s a piece of history, Nat!” Maria says, clenching her fists and shaking them in front of her. “A piece of history!”
“A piece of history that you have a deeply weird history ladycrush on,” Natasha says, smug and smirking.
Maria goes red to the tips of her ears, which Natasha has never seen before. She throws back her head and laughs, thumping her palm on the table between them and Maria buries her nose in her beer glass and changes the topic.
It isn’t until several months later that Natasha learns that they didn’t just find the Valkyrie. They didn’t just find Carter’s body. They found Carter herself, still alive.
In Natasha's defense, she has about twelve other things on her mind when she finally actually meets the real Lady Liberty. At least three of the things are Loki, of course. One is definitely Fury, who is acting even shiftier than usual. Another is Bruce, because one does not simply let The Hulk slip your mind.
Six of the things are Clint, or Clint-adjacent. Clint, who’s out there somewhere, who’s been brainwashed by a Norse god. So that’s at least six things on her mind right there.
(And one is lunch, because she hasn't eaten since they left Mumbai and she's starving.)
The point is that she has a lot on her mind. She was bound to miss something. So she doesn't notice right away.
The quinjet has already touched down when Natasha steps out onto the deck of the helicarrier. The jet's back hatch is opening, and Hill comes out into the sunlight.
Hill straightens up as she steps off the ramp, and looks back over her shoulder, waiting for someone to follow her. She’s standing even taller than usual, like she's got someone to impress.
Boy howdy does she ever.
The Captain’s hair is in perfect rolls and her lips are just as red as the propaganda posters promised. But the posters definitely did not fully capture the experience of being in the presence of a 6’2” woman who can absolutely bench press a Harley.
Natasha wants to pick a fight.
The urge arrives in her gut as a series of angry, red, Russian expletives and a sound like sirens. Natasha is used to this kind of thing — you get used to that kind of thing, when your mind wasn’t always your own. And as a consequence, Natasha is not now, nor has she ever been, the kind of person who gives in to her impulses.
Assessment, demands the nameless, faceless Red Room trainer that still lives in Natasha's head, even after all this time.
The Captain — Lady Liberty herself — looks like she’s about to go on vacation to Southern California, circa 1948. She’s got those wide-legged, high waisted pants with the sailor-style double row of buttons at the front, and a loose white blouse tucked into them. She’s wearing dark glasses with a thick red rim that matches her lipstick. All that’s missing is a wide brimmed hat to top her victory rolls.
This is a choice, Natasha surmises as she crosses the tarmac. The cold and calculating half of her brain is sure of this much: Captain Carter may be a product of the 40s, but she’s not an idiot. She knows how to fit in. She doesn’t have to dress like she’s just stepped out of the past, she’s choosing to do that.
What Natasha doesn’t know yet is why. What is she trying to say? Is she trying to set herself apart because she wants people to remember who she is? Then why not the uniform? Nothing says “Don’t Forget I’m A Superhero” like the iconic red-white-and-blue, after all.
“Agent Romanoff,” Maria says, and the Captain turns, mahogany curls sliding over her shoulders. “Meet Captain Margaret Carter.”
“So?” Maria asks in an undertone, in a quiet moment while the Captain and Fury are talking on the other side of the bridge. “What do you think of her?”
Natasha doesn’t need to ask which her. She glances over and lets her eyes rake over Carter again. “I didn’t know she was British,” she says at last. The accent had been the only real surprise; Lady Liberty never spoke in the propaganda films.
“And?” Maria prompts, going a little handler-y.
“Do you want my assessment of her potential as an agent or a hero or something else?” Natasha says, because she doesn’t have to give the assessment if she doesn’t want to, and sometimes it’s fun to push back. She quirks an eyebrow. “I think your girlfriend is very nice, but—”
“Nat,” Maria says. “Come on.”
“Ugh, fine.” She cocks her head in Carter’s direction and contemplates their earlier conversation. Ma’am, Carter had said. A firm handshake, calloused hands. And later: Only word I care about, she’d said to Bruce, dutifully, like a line from a script she’d memorized. The clothes, her attentiveness to Fury, her reactions all scroll before Natasha’s memory like a briefing. Assessment. “I think she’ll do what we need her to do.”
“Huh,” Maria says, like she hadn’t thought of it that way. “What do we need her to do, though?”
Natasha is still staring at the Captain. She’s a little… stuck on the waistband of those trousers. There’s something about the way she wears them. It’s niggling at her. “Assemble the Avengers,” she says, a little vaguely. “What else is there?” she adds. A little black humor, because if they need to assemble the Avengers everything else that can possibly go wrong already has. Natasha shrugs one shoulder. “We know she’s got the tactical know-how. She’s a proven leader, but she understands the chain of command, so you don’t have to worry about her going off the rails. Stark will be the sticking point. If she can get him to follow her lead, we’re golden.”
“Hm,” Maria says.
Even with twelve other things on her mind, Natasha notices a tone there. She gives Maria a sidelong look. “Why? What do you think of her?”
Maria shakes her head slowly. “I think…” She narrows her eyes. “I think I’m worried about her.”
Natasha startles. “Really? Why?”
Maria gives her a look. “Well. Actually, if anyone will get it, it’s you.”
Which makes no sense to Natasha, but—
“We got a hit!” one of the techs calls. “A 67% match. Wait. Cross match, 79%.”
“Location?” Maria says, coming around to look at the screen. Natasha joins her, and sure enough there he is, looking more like a dapper but understated fashion model than a Norse God.
“Stuttgart,” the tech says.
“Captain.”
That’s Fury’s voice. Natasha follows his gaze back to the Captain, looking over her shoulder with her hands on her hips. Her jaw is set. She looks ready to take on the world.
“You’re up.”
Carter sighs, nods, and lets her hands drop from her waist. A stray thought crosses Natasha’s mind. She wears those clothes the same way I dream in Russian. But she can’t quite pin down what that means.
Much later, it will finally occur to Natasha that there is another reason to dress like someone from your own past: when you’re stranded in the future, the familiar is hard to come by. Even when you’re looking in a mirror.