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- The Red Room
They didn’t encourage connections in the Red Room. Alliances, yes. Partnerships of convenience, easily broken, definitely. Backs were always open for the stabbing. But connections were not encouraged. Friendship was not allowed.
It was a moot point, really. None of the girls knew what ‘friendship’ was supposed to look like anyway.
Natalya was the best. Everyone knew it. Hair red like blood, skin ghost-white from all the years she’d spent in this place, hidden from the sun. She was like something from a fairy-tale, one of the old ones that all ended bloody with a severe lesson learned.
No one approached Natalya.
The Winter Soldier trained her personally, with swift, brutal efficiency. The other girls whispered about her; vicious, cutting rumors, awed, fear-tainted stories, words fluttering in her wake like carrion birds.
There was one girl, very small, very young. Fresh meat. She hadn’t been assigned a name yet; they didn’t give you a name until you’d survived for more than six months, until you’d proved yourself a good investment.
She approached Natalya. She touched the bone-white skin of her arm, looked into ice-pale eyes and said softly, “Braid hair?”
Natalya blinked her cold snake-eyes at the little one (so small, so fragile, like a doll), “What?”
The little one blinked right back at her and lisped, “Braid hair?”
Natalya, cold Natalya, killer Natalya, vicious, deadly, twisted-fairy-tale Natalya…nodded, nonplussed. “Turn,” she said sharply, not knowing how to soften her words, not having learned gentleness here in this place that had none.
And the little one, sweet and stupid as a new-hatched bird, nodded back eagerly and turned.
Natalya combed slender, deadly fingers through tangled, dirty blonde hair…and braided it, humming a tune half-remembered from the smoky grey haze of her past.
Natalya never saw the little one again. She knew the girl didn’t survive, though. Even if her body was still alive, nothing survived the Red Room. Whoever inhabited those bones now, whoever wore that blonde hair, was a different person now. Hollowed out, burned out, reborn screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
II. Matt Pre-Adoption
Natasha wasn’t sure what to make of this child. He was persistent; she’d give him that. He dogged her steps like a determined terrier. He’d taken hold and wouldn’t let go.
What kind of aching loneliness bred a child who would track down a stranger, a liar, a woman with no name, and ask for – no, beg her friendship?
She watched Matt all the time during their outings. Sunny summer days when he’d race out of the orphanage, skidding to a stop at her side, vacant eyes bright behind his glasses, eager to do nothing more than walk at her side for an afternoon.
It was terrifying, being able to give a single person that much happiness. Natasha hated it; she hated the fear, restless and gnawing in her stomach, that she’d disappoint this small person with his fierce eyes and sharp mind. Matt was like a raw nerve, shivering with all the world poured into him but still eagerly demanding more.
They got gelato once. Natasha didn’t generally like sweet things; they always seemed a little overwhelming, a little too sticky and cloying after a life of only bitter, basic, bland food. Food as fuel, not fun. But Matt had stopped, head tilting towards the shop, and turned questioning hazel eyes on her and before she could think she’d found herself pushing the door open and putting her money on the counter.
They ate on the sidewalk, little cups of sweet, creamy gelato melting in their hands. And when Matt managed to track it all over his face Natasha reached over and absently, gently (impossible, almost, that she could be this gentle) scrubbed it off with a paper napkin. He’d stuck his tongue out at her and she’d paused, startled at her own gesture.
He caught the pause, or perhaps the microscopic hitch in her breath or maybe the tiny stagger in her heart and rolled his eyes. “It’s fine, Natasha.” And then, with a sly smirk, “Not like I would have spotted it anyway.”
She huffed a laugh, “That’s enough bad blind jokes out of you.”
He snorted, “Excuse you, I am a blind joke savant.”
That was enough to make her laugh again, “Did you swallow a dictionary when you were a child?”
“Oh, only a little one,” he said with a careful shrug.
She ruffled his hair, “Stick to gelato for now, Polygraph.”
“Yes ma’am. Do we have time for seconds?”
“Only if you don’t quote Oliver Twist at me.”
“But I’m a poor orphan lost on the street of a huge city! I can’t not quote Dickens!”
Natasha shook her head and laughed helplessly again.
Maybe there’d be time for more gelato later. She wasn’t quite ready to let this moment go.
III. SHIELD
“Agent Romanoff.”
“Director Fury,” Natasha kept her face blank, control perfect as she turned to face her superior officer.
“Did you and Agent Barton put twenty trainees in time out?” Nick’s face was twitching like it wasn’t sure what to do with itself.
“I believe we described it as ‘gave them time to reassess their priorities and reflect on areas that needed improvement’.” She gave him the bland, blank look that made most people uncomfortable. It just seemed to make Nick irritated.
“You put twenty trainees in a corner to think about what they’d done.”
“Agent Coulson approved of our tactics.”
Nick made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl, “Of fucking course he did. Okay, Romanoff, the tricks that work on your middle-schooler are not appropriate for use on the recruits.”
Natasha snorted, “I highly doubt the tactics I use on my middle-schooler are going to meet with your approval either.”
Nick actually did growl this time, “What.”
“I have a highly intelligent, easily bored son with enhanced senses, sir. Making him clean the bathroom is punishment enough, generally.”
“That.”
“What, sir?” she tipped her head to the side, treating him to a near-invisible smirk.
“Make the recruits clean the bathrooms; at least they’ll be doing something useful and learning the value of hard work. In time-out they’re just wasting oxygen.”
The smirk widened, “Of course, sir.”
IV. Undercover at Stark Industries
“Natalie!” an obviously tipsy and far-too-enthusiastic Tony (in the Iron Man suit – Natasha was more and more certain by the day that this whole damn assignment was Fury’s idea of a joke) greeted her with arms flung wide.
She pressed her lips together and parked the car on the side of the rode, getting out and approaching Tony, who had staggered to his feet to meet her.
“Mr. Stark.”
“Ms. Rushman,” he said with exaggerated gravity and upon closer inspection she saw there was blood tracked down the side of his face, revealed by the helmet’s open faceplate.
“Mr. Stark, were you – ” she winced internally at the absurdity of the coming statement, “ – flying under the influence?”
He shook his head, “No, no, no. Okay. No. But maybe? Hey, Natalie, how much ‘under the influence’ does a concussion count as? Because I may have had like, a little, itty-bitty, baby concussion from that fight, you know, at the racetrack? But I thought I was fine and decided a nice little flight would clear my head, and then this telephone pole came out of nowhere and hit me. And I’m lost.”
Natasha looked around. Yes, still open wasteland.
“You’re several miles outside the furthest reaches of the city. There aren’t even suburbs out here.”
“Huh. Yeah. Lost. So I called you, because Pep...” he seemed to lose his train of thought for a few moments before rallying, “Pep, she worries. Worries a lot. So I figured, who better to come assist me back to civilization than my assistant?” He grinned at her, wide and guileless, like a child.
She blinked. A deep, expressive blink. “You called me because you were lost and you wanted me to come pick you up?”
“Yes!” He sounded positively delighted that she’d puzzled it out.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Get in the car.”
He nodded good-naturedly (she would need to check his skull for cracks and make sure he didn’t need a hospital once they’d gotten back to the house) and clambered into the car, Iron Man suit and all.
“I should get a backpack leash for you,” she muttered under her breath, “Like a toddler.”
“Ooh, if you do that, I want one with a monkey on it.”
“Like a goddamned toddler.”
V. A few months before the Battle of New York
Another life, another girl asking Natasha to braid her hair.
“I mean, it’s prom,” Kate rocked uneasily on her feet, “I wasn’t even going to go, but a bunch of my friends were and I didn’t want to be that loser on Monday, you know? When everyone’s talking about prom and what happened at prom and who was at prom, I have to be that guy who doesn’t know what they’re talking about because I didn’t go…I didn’t want that?”
“Don’t cave to peer pressure!” Clint hollered from the living room and Natasha and Kate rolled their eyes in sync.
“You don’t know what we’re talking about, bird-brain!” Kate hollered back.
“Peer pressure! Bad! Remember that!” he yelled back.
Kate rolled her eyes one more time for good measure before turning her attention back to Natasha. “So. Yeah. It looks like I’m going to prom, I guess?”
“Yes,” Natasha said dryly, a small smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
Kate spotted it and grinned back crookedly, “So, could you do my hair?”
“I can do makeup too,” Natasha offered; voice dry, but heart stuttering uncertainly. She was momentarily glad Matt wasn’t around, run off his feet as he was with finals and graduation swiftly approaching. Natasha may act unruffled by every bit of insanity their patchwork family had to offer, but she still caught herself in moments like this feeling like she was reaching for something that didn’t belong to her. Like she was trespassing somehow by doing these things that a real mother, a real person should be doing.
But Kate grinned wide, “Sweet, we can do the whole 80s make-over montage thing!”
“Aw, come on!” Clint griped from the living room, “I do better makeup than Nat! Sorry, babe, it’s true.”
“Come on, Clint, I want mommy-daughter bonding time!” Kate yelled back, seemingly without thinking, freezing momentarily when she realized what words had left her mouth. She peered up at Natasha out of the corner of her eye, face caught in a wince. “Um? Is this going to be one of those things we never speak of again? Because I can do that.”
Natasha was…nonplussed. “Mommy-daughter bonding time?”
“Oh geez, it does not sound any better coming out of your mouth either, does it?”
Natasha blinked and offered a tentative smile, lips shaking like the legs of something newborn, standing for the first time, “I think it sounds fine.”
Kate grinned, “Sweet! Let’s 80s-movie-montage this thing!”
“Sounds good, Kate.”
I. A few months after the Battle of New York
“Excuse me, sir; how did you get up here?”
Matt blinked turned in the general direction of the woman whose heels echoed like gunshots and authority and whose voice hid blades. This must be Pepper Potts. “Well, considering how out-of-ADA-compliance this building is, ma’am, I’d say it was a combination of the directions I was given, superpowers, and sheer dumb luck.” And look, he wasn’t even lying.
Look. Ha.
He was about 75% sure this was Ms. Potts; only a handful of people had access to this particular set of floors in Avengers Tower, and less than half of them were women. Of the women she could be, she didn’t smell like a lab, ruling out Dr. Foster or her assistant, and she wasn’t Natasha, Kate, or Maria Hill.
She seemed unimpressed with his attempt at humor. “We will see what we can do about the ADA issues. Now, what are you doing here?”
“I don’t understand why you’re so determined to protect them, Ms. Potts,” (a sharp intake of breath, he was right) “They’re literally a team of superheroes. What kind of threat do I pose to them?” He kept his tone as mild-mannered as possible as he spoke, using his own apparent passivity as a weapon.
She clenched her teeth, he could hear the enamel creak, “I will only ask you this one more time; what are you doing here? And to answer your question, there are more threats than physical ones.”
“I’m here to see Agent Romanoff.”
That got her hackles up; Natasha must have a lot of ‘admirers’ harassing her.
“I’m afraid she doesn’t meet with members of the public.”
“I think she’ll make an exception here.”
“There are no exceptions,” Ms. Potts’ professional veneer was perfect, her polish pristine.
Matt was about to come back with another retort when Clint rounded the corner, munching on a donut and slurping coffee. “Hey, kid, quit winding up Pepper. Nat raised you better than that.”
Matt grimaced, “Do you have to eat like that? It’s very loud.”
“Do you have to be a dick to Pepper? No, but you’re doing it because you’re pissy about the no-Braille-or-buttons-on-the-elevators thing. Cut it out, Matt, you’re better than that.” Clint’s words were harsh, but his tone was generous, the words strung out with humor and restrained laughter.
Matt huffed a sigh, “You’re right, Clint.”
“Of course I am,” Clint shrugged, “Your mom’ll be down in a minute, she’s finishing up some training stuff.”
“Okay, Clint.”
Clint made a vague affirmative gesture before wandering off again.
“Your mom?” Pepper’s tone was neutral, balanced on an edge.
“My mom,” Matt confirmed wryly, “I apologize, we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Matt Murdock, Natasha’s my mom; I’m here to see her.”
“Pepper Potts,” she introduced herself, voice bemused, “And I do apologize for the elevators.”
He shrugged, “It’s annoying, but not unexpected.”
Pepper gave an irritated hum, as if it personality bothered her that Matt considered non ADA-compliance ‘annoying but not unexpected’. “Well, Mr. Murdock, I will file the paperwork to get the elevators fixed.”
“Thank you,” Matt made sure to smile at her. He was fairly certain she returned it before walking away. He settled in to wait.
He didn’t have to wait long, Natasha melted out of the shadows as soon as the click of Ms. Pott’s shoes began to fade from a normal ear.
“You shouldn’t bait Pepper.”
“I know. I do feel bad about that.”
“A bit.”
“A bit,” Matt allowed himself a sharp-edged smile, knowing it would make his mother laugh.
It did, “Read to go, Polygraph?”
“Yes. Gelato first?”
“Of course.”
He held his arm out to her and she tucked it into the crook of hers, squeezing his hand gently as she settled it in the crook of her elbow.
He reached up with his free hand and squeezed her fingers lightly. “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”
“Thank you, Polygraph.”
“I’ll pay for gelato.”
“I’d expect you too, you’re not a poor orphan lost on the streets anymore.”
“I’ll have to find another Dickens novel to quote,” Matt said mock-mournfully.
“Somehow I think you’ll figure it out.”
And they walked out, into the sun.