The Soldier and his Widow

11

T'Challa looked at the amount of women in the room -- and Bucky -- who all had the tendency to roast his royal behind, and walked straight past.

Okoye stood up suddenly. "What about her?" she asked, swiping an image from her bracelet to full view for everyone to see. The Wakandan women crowded around Bucky and Natasha.

"Her name is Anastasia, and she's Russian, for starters," Okoye said, "she's already six years old."

"Widow, look."

Natasha read off the hologram what Bucky pointed at.

"Her mother was a Red Room escapee."

"There's no way that thing is still operational. It should've been dead for the last twenty years."

"Anastasia wasn't her first child, though," Shuri said, also reading through the information, "she had another, died in a failed assassination of the father, an assassin himself that once worked against the KGB. Some unlisted programme."

"Are her parents still alive?" Ramonda asked.

"Body of the father discovered in a lake weeks before her birth," Nakia said, "mother died weeks after. It's just the little girl."

"What do you think?" Bucky asked Natasha, who seemed captivated by the photo of a young girl with brown curls and light eyes.

"I can fix a meeting," Shuri said, "we will be able to get you there and back without the rest of the world laying eyes on you."

Natasha gave Shuri a nod before turning back to the photo in front of her. Right at the top was the child's full name.

Anastasia Nikitichna Volkova.

~~|1993|~~

"Widow, what are you doing?"

Natalia looked up at the Winter Soldier that stood behind her. "There was a time in my life when I thought I had no place in the world. Joining the Winter Soldiers, despite losing the others to the serum, it makes me question that."

The Winter Soldier squinted at the bright snow around them. "And you couldn't do that inside the facility?"

Natalia laughed. "No one said you had to join me."

"Karpov sent me to make sure you didn't jump off the building or something."

Natalia peered over her knees at the drop. "I'd probably survive that without the serum running in my veins. But he shouldn't worry. I'm not going to end in suicide. Perhaps I'll go down in battle, fighting until the end. I'd accept my death if it meant something."

"Something like what?" he asked, sitting down beside her.

"I don't know. The world is changing, Soldier. The people we fight for could become the people we fight against. I don't know. When I die, I want it to be on my own terms. I want to die knowing that whatever I've done in my life, it's led up to the moment where I can be free, satisfied with my end. I don't want to die a simple or meaningless death."

"Does death by old age not form part of that list?"

"Old age isn't something a KGB Hydra agent can think about. Our line of work is dangerous and can be fatal. I'd be surprised if I even made it to sixty."

"According to the calender, I'm seventy-six."

"And I'm thirty. But we're both twenty-eight. Time is relative."

"What else are you questioning?" he asked instead.

Natalia thought for a moment. "If the Red Room was wrong about the girls having a place in the world, what else were they wrong about?"