The Devil's Own

Part 1: Natasha Romanova

You went back in to once again do battle with the night and the red numbers on your clock.

* * *

Your name was Natasha Romanova, Natasha Romanoff to the english speakers, and you'd defected from your home country of Russia seven years ago. Shield had sent an agent named Clint Barton to kill you after you'd dispatched several of their top agents trying to infiltrate the infamous Black Widow Program and it's training facility, the Красная комната (Krasnaya Komnata) the Red Room.

You'd been born on November 22, 1982 to a schoolteacher mother and a railroad worker father. By the age of five your intellect had gained you some notoriety in your neighborhood and in your school in Moscow. Your parents had died in a car accident that same year, whether it had been arranged by the government or not you would never know, and you'd been taken in by the Black Widow Program, raised fully and completely to be a spy. Twenty one years later, Clint had been ready to kill you; he'd come close, but he had been your unlikely savior that cold day in late March. He'd held out one last chance at humanity, dangled it in front of you, and you'd reached with weary hands and a wearier heart to grasp it. You'd never thanked him; he'd never needed thanks, never expected it. He knew it was there, as unspoken as it would remain. He'd become your best friend. His children were your God children now, his wife like a little sister, and Shield had made excellent use of such an asset as yourself. It had taken you a very long time to undo the majority of the manipulation and brainwashing that had happened in the Red Room; you knew that you could never truly be rid of it. The days of espionage, the lies, the deceit, they weren't over. They would never be over. Those traits were as much a part of you as your dark eyes and red hair, as your stealth and wit, your soft touch and steely gaze. But since the day you'd left, you'd found more of yourself than you had ever hoped that you could. More of the rest of yourself. THe Program and the Red Room had not been rife with opportunities to develop a sense of self beyond the Black Widow. In the years since that fateful day when Clint had chosen mercy, you had become an entire person. The journey of self discovery that you'd began on the snowy streets of Eastern Europe over a decade ago, some of it spurred by the Winter Soldier and with him by your side, had come full circle. The quiet moments in your life had changed from a disciplined stillness to a kind of strained peace. The time spent with your teammates, who you now considered friends, had gone from a chore to a necessity that you looked forward to. You'd been all over the world, dismantling the last remnants of the scattered KGB and the broken down Black Widow Program, even forming alliances with the newer Russian government, and later battling Hydra cells splintered everywhere. You'd forged a strange but ultimately solid and true friendship with Captain America. When Steve had come out of the ice three years ago, you'd been a founding member of the Avengers. When Shield had fallen to Hydra a little while ago, you'd helped him pull through and do what was right; you'd found yourself an unwitting pillar of virtue. And then his best friend had risen from the ashes like a dark phoenix, nearly killing both of you in the process, and ripping open the protective layer that had rested over your heart for so long.

Your shoulder still ached sometimes from that last bullet you'd caught, courtesy of the Winter Soldier. You'd have liked it to have been the only time he'd shot you, but it wasn't. There was that time in Odessa, too. Your former lover had nearly ended your life twice since Hydra had ended whatever meaning the two of you had ever hoped to share. And he'd done it with cold, steely eyes that had looked at you as though you could have been anyone; as though they had never gazed upon you before, let alone held you in their light for countless hours on and off the battlefield.

You shook your head to clear it and looked down into your coffee cup. You hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. Just as you'd known would happen, you'd tossed and turned, and when sleep had laced it's tentative fingers through your consciousness, you'd dreamed of long ago days and safe houses; tents on icy mornings and underground nightclubs and targets; alleys and guns and marks; and finally skin and scars and lips and fingertips grasping in the dark of nights that had long since come to pass. Events that you needed to forget. Events that you had forgotten, until Bucky had decided to show up again.