So many foreign worlds, so relatively fucked / So ready for us, so ready for us
/ The creature fear
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SUMMARY
Born under a name no-one can remember, not even herself, Annika Van Kirk was one of many little girls trafficked into the Red Room to be trained as a Black Widow. A piece of property more than anything else, throughout her childhood Annika's ownership changed hands, from the Red Room in Russia to the Jorōgumo's Lair in Osaka, Japan: the brakes being pulled, finally, after she arrived in the US under care of the Web, a nation-wide organisation known in the criminal underworld as the one-stop-shop for high-end human labour. Here, Annika was handpicked not to be a weapon, as she had expected — as she had been made for — but to be a daughter.
Amelia Van Kirk, head of logistics for the Web, had always wanted children.
Years later, Natasha Romanoff, the most notorious Black Widow of all, reveals that the intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. has been corrupted by Hydra from the inside-out and inadvertently exposes the Web, who have had clandestine dealings — contracts, rather — with Hydra for years. The general public might not understand what this means for the world but Annika does. And so does the now-defunct director, Nick Fury.
He calls her to action, and with her, the famous Captain America, a.k.a. Steve Rogers, who is recuperating after the shitshow that was the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and their fleet of helicarriers). Steve is tasked with supervising Annika as she carries out one of the last covert missions S.H.I.E.L.D. — at least, what S.H.I.E.L.D. should be — will ever authorise: quietly neutralise key figures in Hydra's hierarchy, one head at a time, before they disappear into obscurity forever. The brief is simple enough: get on the road, start driving, stop, kill, and get going again before anyone catches on.
Annika, of course, has her own agenda. But that's for her to know, and for Steve to never find out.
The Web, the Widows: it's one and the same. Steve and Fury might not comprehend how deep it goes — how dirty Annika and her fellow spiders' hands truly are — but Annika does. She's lived this, she's died this, over and over and over again. Such is the way of the Widow. It's in Annika's muscles, blood, organs, and bones —
— and it always will be, no matter how hard she tries to pretend otherwise.
What else are weapons good for?
Steve Rogers knows. And the way is long, the road is rough, but he'll tell Annika as many times as she needs to hear it. As many times as it takes for her to believe that she's more than what she was made for.
As many times as it takes for him to believe it, too.
