Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Natasha hit the punching bag again. She ignored the ache in her arm as the impact rang through it, instead ducking away and launching her foot into the punching bag. A satisfying boom continued to echo through the room with each hit as she kept moving, her hits fast and hard.

Boom. A kick to what would’ve been the chest of an attacker.

Boom. An uppercut, that would’ve been directed at a central nerve cluster. Enough force to interrupt brain signals and knock someone unconscious.

Boom. Boom. Right hook, left hook. Hard.

Boom. She spun around the bag, delivering a kick as she did, regrouping herself on the opposite side of the dummy.

She wiped sweat from her forehead. Keep hitting. Punch, punch, kick. Don’t think. Move, hit, don’t think. Natasha kept punching, the throbbing in her knuckles getting louder and louder until every hit sent a spike of pain up her arm. She kept punching.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Her knuckle made an alarming crack noise as she landed a punch against the bag of sand, accompanied by a burst of pain.

“Fuck!”

She hoped no one heard her admittedly very loud yell. She sat, finally, panting from more than an hour of straight physical exertion. Her arms hurt. Her legs hurt. The rest of her hurt. She’d been training for hours before she’d gotten wrapped up hitting that stupid punching bag, before she’d gotten distracted with the idea of drowning out her thoughts with that echoing boom.

Her feet drummed against the mats she sat on. She needed something to do. Something other than training and avoiding the people around her. Steve kept saying she should work on ‘assembling’ the Avengers or whatever. It all sounds great coming out of Captain America's mouth, but getting that team of total misfits to work together? It was hell.

Wanda Maximoff was broody and had no real experience in a fight, and was still processing the loss of her brother. Sam Wilson and Rhodey were easier - they had experience, real experience. But Wanda was difficult. At least she had the other (real) Avengers around her. But the new ones were sort of a mystery, and all together she did not appreciate having new people around.

Lucky for her, Rhodey and Sam had become fast friends, training together and becoming a good partnership. They’d spar or do flight drills together, and sometimes Rhodey would let Natasha borrow his suit and fly in it - it was exhilarating, but not really down her alley. She worked better quietly from the ground.

But overall, she had no clue what she was doing. It had been almost 3 weeks, and she’d hardly done anything with them. She’d talked to Rhodey and Sam, sure, shared where they came from and what they had been trained to do. The two of them were forthcoming, clear on how they’d been roped into the Avengers and why they were even qualified to be here.

Natasha hadn’t shared much. They didn’t need to know that her ledger ran red. Hell, they hardly had to know her. She felt next to no inclination to share her little sob story.

She had not asked Wanda anything about herself. In fact, she was entirely avoiding Wanda. Those tricks the witch had played in her head were not easily forgiven, not when they had unearthed so much she’d tried very, very hard to forget. And she did not enoy the thought that Wanda might have seen that. Might have seen the things she’d done in the Red Room (been forced to do, she corrected herself). But if Wanda had seen that, she might have seen the other things. Figured out the kill counts and crimes Natasha had committed. Learned that really, Natasha was no better than the so-called monsters the Avengers stood against.

She thought about Dreykov’s daughter. That had been by choice.

She really hoped Wanda hadn’t seen that in her head.

Natasha snapped out of thought when she heard a knock. She elegantly rose to her feet, taking a deep breath and shaking her arms out. The door opened a crack.

“Come in.”

The answer was accented, still coming from outside the door. “I heard a yell.”

“I did yell, yes.”

“Ok.”

Wanda did not open the door any further - her silence gave the impression that she didn’t know what to say. Natasha had never really talked to her one on one.

“Do you want to come in?”

“Ok.”

The door opened and Wanda walked in, dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie. She stared around at the room with wide eyes - Natasha doubted she’d ever done a lick of proper training in her life. Chances were she relied solely on the power she had at her fingertips.

“You know, you should probably do some proper training. It’s better to not rely solely on your power.”

Wanda hummed pensively, like she was thinking hard about it. As if it was such a massive decision. Natasha kept talking into the silence.

“You’d really just start with getting in better physical form. Exercise, muscle building, cardio. Everything’s easier when you have at least a little bit of strength.”

“Then I will do that. Where do you think I should start?”

Her accent made Natasha’s heart twinge. It reminded her of the accent she’d carried, the accent she’d lost - it reminded her of the Red Room. It reminded of herself when she was at the Red Room. How she’d fought to abandon that accent when she defected. She kept Wanda’s accent and her own separate in her mind. She would not let the sound of Wanda’s voice remind her of her past every time she talked, that would be totally unfair. It wasn’t even the same accent.

“Start with basic exercises. Calisthenics. Pushups, at least until you can do a pullup. Squats. Situps. Do cardio as well. All of that is just to build a foundation for more targeted exercises, and later we can use that foundation to teach you how to fight.” Natasha spoke on autopilot - she was suddenly very tired but too stubborn to show that to Wanda. Her shoulders stayed straight and her voice stayed clear even as her thoughts pressed down heavily on her shoulders.

“That sounds good. Thank you, Natasha.”

“Don’t be so formal. Call me Nat.”

_ _ _

Natasha stood under the flow of the showerhead, feeling the drops hit her shoulders and batter them to numbness. She had talked to Wanda, really for the first time. And she hadn’t shown her resentment. It wasn’t hate. She did not hate Wanda Maximoff. But she resented her for bringing those memories she’d tried so hard to bury back to the surface. When she closed her eyes, there were memories. Memories she could not stand to relive.

The shooting range. Targets at the end.

The shooting range. A living, breathing body at the end.

Natasha opened her eyes, blinking away the water that hit them.

She could not quite bring herself to be friends with Wanda Maximoff. Not when long dead memories screamed through her mind like fresh wounds.

The surgery table. A scar just below her hips.

Natasha took a deep breath. Steadied herself, hand against the shower wall. She did not need to be thinking about this. She shouldn’t have to think about this. Fuck Wanda and her mind games. They were friends. She regretted being friendly. It gave the impression that she wanted to be friends.

Damn, Natasha needed more friends. She had Clint and Steve. She didn’t have Bruce anymore. She didn’t think about that either, putting that in her box of things to not think about.

She was busy putting the Red Room back in that box, but it was harder. It brought up too much of her past. If her mind overreached, it hit that part of her childhood that really was a childhood. Those three years. Ohio. Her mother she never got to mourn, partly because Natasha was a Black Widow and partly because Melania wasn’t really her mother anyway. Alexei, who she had long ago decided could go to hell for letting his daughters go to the Red Room. For letting six year old Yelena go to the Red Room. Yelena. Where was Yelena, she wondered? When the Red Room fell, where did she go? Was she still alive? Natasha wished she could bring herself to reach out, find her sister who wasn’t actually her sister. But that was too far back in the past. It was reaching too far into that box of things and if she brought too much out of the box they’d never go back in. She did not know what she’d do if that box couldn’t close anymore, if she had to sit and think about what she’d done. The things she’d done. Even this was too much - she needed to shut down, to do something other than stand and think until her legs went numb and her hands wrinkled.

She stuck her head out of the flow of the water and took a deep, calming breath. She was calm. She was strong. She was not strong enough.

Natasha cried for the first time she could remember. Tears streamed down her face as she sank to the shower floor, faces she’d tried so hard to forget flashing in her mind’s eye. Targets. Bullet holes in their foreheads as she walked away. Some truly innocent people. Dreykov’s daughter, walking to go meet her father in a rigged building. Her chest heaved. Gunshot. From her hand. Bodies dead on the floor, bodies she knew she would never be able to scrub from her mind because they were buried somewhere, bodies buried at graves that people visited to mourn. Someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone who could have lived a good life if not for her bullet in their brain.

Blood on her hands.

So, so much blood on her hands.

She couldn’t stop the hot tears that ran down her face as she huddled in the corner of the shower, shoulders shaking under the weight of her guilt. She had no clue how to stop thinking about this. For the first time in a long time, she was lost. She could not press it down or make it go away. Her hands were stained.

She thought of her sister again. Had she had to go through the same thing? Why hadn’t Natasha fought harder to keep that 6-year-old girl away from the hell that was the Red Room?

Under that thought ran a darker one. Was Yelena still alive? Had she died?

If she was dead, how? Dreykov? Someone else? Had she done what Natasha found she didn’t have the strength to do?

Natasha had thought about it. A balancing act. One less evil in the world.

There was only one time she’d lifted the gun to her head. And she couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t leave herself bleeding on the floor like she left so many others, because she was weak and couldn’t even do the one thing that might right the crimes she’d committed even a little bit. It wasn’t like killing herself would bring the people she’d killed back, anyway. In a way shooting herself was just as cowardly as not shooting herself because it was running away from the heavy guilt that weighed on her. Still, the temptation was there. It was always there, an easy escape she couldn’t quite bring herself to take.

She desperately hoped Yelena had not killed herself. She wished she could tell Yelena that she shouldn’t. She wished she was strong enough to reach out to Yelena, but she was far too afraid of what she might find.

A grave.

Or worse, nothing. No trace of the former Widow. As if she had never existed. Natasha couldn’t bear the idea of Yelena living on in only her own memory, so she went without answers and hoped desperately against the worst.

She looked up at the tiles on the wall. It had been too long spent here, crying, pitying herself. Natasha was almost disgusted with herself, but she couldn’t quite muster the feeling. She was emotionally spent.

She half crawled out the shower, drying herself off, brushing her teeth, padding into her room and getting dressed in her pajamas. She threw herself into her bed, pulling the comforter over her head and letting the darkness fold around her like a hug.

To her surprise, she fell asleep easily.

She was back in the Red Room. A man stood on the floor in front of her, almost twice her size. She was 13, not particularly tall, and he must have easily weighed two hundred pounds.

He barreled towards her, arms outstretched, grabbing her and throwing her to the ground.

Her back gave a nasty crack as she hit the floor. She looked up to see a fist coming towards her face, cracking against her temple. She was too distracted by her fear to really notice the pain, adrenaline pumping through her.

He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. She settled into a more comfortable stance, ignoring the pounding pain that beat along her spine and that stabbing agony in her head.

He grabbed her by the hair and flung her against the wall. Her leg landed wrong against the floor, a resounding crack and sharp pain hitting it as it broke. It seemed misaligned to the rest of her, crooked. It took all she had not to scream. She suspected he would only hit her again if she screamed.

The man walked towards her, his foot smashing into her stomach.

She wheezed, retching as it hit her, fighting to get her lungs working again. He stopped, looking towards someone on the other side of a window. She hardly noticed, the pain so severe her vision was spotting. She struggled for breath as the man’s foot came down once more, hard, into her face.

The dream changed.

She was strapped to an operating table, thick cloth restraints holding her down. She fought her instincts, didn’t struggle - she knew that struggling would only bring punishment later.

A cloth was put into her mouth, something to bite on to. Muffle the screams, she assumed. It tasted fruity and like chemicals. She found herself losing control of her limbs, everything going floppy. A light sedative. Not heavy enough that she wouldn’t feel everything, see everything.

The surgical knife was near her now. Sharp and lethal and she found herself praying. She was not religious but if something, anything could save her from this she would reach out.

The scalpel was raised just above where her hips started, tracing a pre-drawn line. She had never wanted to be drugged so badly.

The surgery started.

Natasha shot up and out of bed, hands reaching to the scars on her stomach as if checking that she was still intact. Still safe. She was panting like a wounded animal, heartbeat loud in her ears as the panic slowly dissolved.

She was a trained assassin and spy. She did not get nightmares. Her mind had no right to do this to her, besiege her in her sleep.

Wanda had no right to do this to her. The two of them needed to have a talk, Natasha decided. After all, the two of them hadn’t had a proper conversation yet and the best place to start was with what Wanda had done to her.

Chapter Text

Wanda sat on her bed, hollow. The wave was washing over her again, and again, and again.

She missed being understood, even a little bit. Having her other half. She could not stop remembering the feeling of his death, the way it had torn out of her like someone had shot her through the stomach as they shot him.

She could not remember exactly how the bridge of his nose looked. Like her mental picture of him had started to fade in the month he’d been dead. It felt like he was dying again, but this time slowly and painfully as her image of him slipped from her mind.

It had been a month. How had it been a month? She wasn’t sure time moved anymore. Everything had been so slow. The days had nothing to separate them, really. They marched by so, so unbearably slow but the days piled up until time swept her away.

The worst part was that she would think something and expect him to be there, until she looked for him and all she found was this big, wide hole deep inside of her and that little sense of normalcy fell into it. Her anchor had disappeared and she was so utterly alone. So, so alone. No one to voice her thoughts to. No one to ask about her day. Just days that were too long that shifted into too long nights that shifted into weeks that passed in the blink of an eye.

Gunshots replayed in her head as a knock on the door came. Every goddamn noise in this facility sounded like the bullets that had killed Pietro.

“Come in.” She had no clue who was on the other side of that door. She was mildly surprised when Natasha Romanoff walked through the door.

“Can I help you?” She heard her accent drag over the words and just barely caught the narrowing of Natasha’s eyes. “Is there a reason you’re in my room?”

The Widow cleared her throat, a threatening look dancing across her face.

“There is, actually. You and I need to have a little chat.”

“Alright.”

Natasha stepped a little closer, posture dangerous. Wanda wondered vaguely if Natasha meant her harm, her powers flickering across the back of her mind.

“Wanda, what did you see in my head?”

Wanda ‘s eyes widened in surprise. “You mean, uh, when we fought?”

“Yes, when we fought. I know you looked.”

Visions of the inside of a classy looking building came into Wanda’s memories. Something about Natasha shooting a bound man. She did not remember that much else - at the time, she had been distracted pursuing the other Avengers and had mostly declined to watch the scenes she had evoked.

“I did not look at much.” Wanda answered honestly. “I planted the seed and moved on. I am sorry about that.”

Natasha took another step forward, getting uncomfortably close to Wanda.

“Don’t lie.”

Her voice was low, gravelly. It very nearly betrayed the anger she was feeling, but Natasha was too well trained to show her emotions plainly.

“I’m not.”

A flicker of red caught at Wanda’s fingers, begging to be used. She ignored it and kept talking.

“I did see a short little bit. Nothing I committed to memory. A house of some kind. A shooting range, I think? And maybe a few other things. I’m not sure.”

Natasha actually flinched back a little bit when Wanda mentioned the shooting range. Hurt colored her expression for a second before she brought herself back together. It took all Wanda had not to peel back her mind and look inside, figure out what these memories meant to her and why she didn’t want Wanda to see them. But mostly, Wanda felt sorry that she’d dug them up. Natasha’s reaction gave the idea that they were pretty awful memories. Even if they had been enemies at the time, she still carried a little weight of guilt in the pit of her stomach.

“Forget you saw anything.” The Widow said, her grace returned. “Those memories are not for you.”

“Then I am sorry to have seen them.”

Natasha faltered for a second before pressing on.

“Is there any way you could,” she paused, “remove them? Or bury them?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never tried.” Wanda frowned.

“Well, they were buried very deep before you helped them resurface.” Natasha said pointedly. “But I will not have you digging around in my head again. Ever.”

An unfriendly aura seemed to roll off of Natasha in waves, filling the room with hostile tension as she stared the other woman down. Wanda was aware of how close they stood, and the fact that Natasha likely had about 20 concealed weapons on her person, even under sweatpants and a hoodie.

“I would not dig in your head. We are not enemies any more.”

“We may not be enemies, but we are by no means friends, Wanda.”

“Can’t we be?”

“Maybe if you fix my head.”

Wanda stifled a sigh. She had no clue how she’d even attempt going about something like that - her powers were unfortunately a big unknown, for the most part. She had never been anywhere near the limits of them, or how much reach she had into other people’s minds. Afterall, she had been starved for practice.

“Natasha-”

“Call me Nat.” A dangerous smile flashed across Natasha’s face as she said it.

“Nat, I don’t think I can ‘fix your head’. I would have to dig a lot, I think. And mess things up more.”

“I don’t care.”

“I would have to look.”

A pause.

“I don’t care. Just never mention it.”

“I might mess up. Unearth more.”

“Wanda, I don’t think you understand. I cannot carry on like this. I have two options - this is one. I’m sure you can figure out the other one.”

Realization dawned on Wanda as the other woman spoke. She really couldn’t live with these thoughts circling her head. Live without them or don’t live, those were the options presented. She sighed for real this time, sorrow for the person standing in front of her filling her. Life was not fair. Good people like Pietro died and innocent children like Natasha were abused.

“Ok. I don’t know how well it will work, but I can try.”

Natasha relaxed a little, stepping back before she sat down on the bed.

Wanda moved to sit next to her, preparing herself to enter Natasha’s mind. Preparing herself for what she might find in there.

Red tendrils crept towards Natasha’s temple. Wanda was plunged into her mind headfirst.

The first impression was that of control, everything reined in and perfectly tuned. Planned out movements and calculations and neatly organized thoughts. Information lined up in rows. Almost every movement Natasha had made in the past few minutes had been entirely intentional and thought out.

Almost.

Those little reactions, slip-ups, flinches - those were all tied to a string that led beneath the surface. Below what Natasha showed. Wanda grabbed onto that string, following it deeper into this mind.

Into a roiling mass of red and blood and death and guilt. An enormous amount of guilt. An insurmountable amount of guilt.

Gunshots. Targets. Targets in a row as the faces of the many people Natasha had killed played on loop. Wanda was taken aback by it all, the sheer amount and the sensation that there were more that went unrecognized. A young girl’s father, dead with a bullet hole in his forehead. A smoking gun in the Widow’s hand as she walked away. Poison slipped into the drink of a diplomat, covered up with fake smiles and small talk. Countries falling apart, wars caused by this network of Widows that Natasha had been a part of.

A ledger that ran red with more blood than her mind could deal with. Wanda understood why the Widow was so desperate to keep this carnage ‘in its box’, suppressed, unnoticed - and why she didn’t tell anyone. She assumed that everyone around her would think her a monster if they knew what she’d done. Done a million times.

She viewed herself as a dirty, no-good devil surrounded by Saints. Surrounded by the goddamn Avengers. This was her best shot at balancing the cosmic scales, making up for the blood on her hands.

And, god, Wanda found even more, traumas layered under traumas. The first man Natasha had ever killed. She realized she’d seen this in Nat’s mind before, a man with a sack over his head sitting at the end of a shooting range. Nat’s hand did not shake as the scream cut off.

A family dinner. A young, almost innocent Nat sat with a younger sister and a mother and father. The memory transformed into a panicked flight, a bullet in the mother’s stomach, her sister taken away to go where Nat had gone. That hellhole. Wanda felt the other woman’s rage towards it, this ‘Red Room’. The sick panic that surrounded the idea of her sister, whether she made it out, if she was alive or dead.

How could Wanda tuck that away neatly? How had Natasha ever fitted this much into ‘a box’?
But Wanda figured she was too deep in, that she had to try. She owed it to Nat to try, after she’d looked at all of this.

She summoned her physic energy, bundling the worst of it into that. The kills, the red ledger, shots on a shooting range that plunged into flesh, as much of the guilt as she could possibly fit.
Wanda took it, balled it up into her scarlet magic, and pushed it deep. It would come up again, sure, but hopefully not as much as it did now. She kept pushing, that ball of terror and horror and awfulness burying itself as deep in Natasha’s psyche as it could go. She could only wish that it would not be unearthed for a long time. Would not reappear in Natasha’s nightmares for at least a little while.

Wanda found herself wishing she could erase it entirely, but she reckoned that would come with far too many knock on effects, memory loss, who knows. It wasn’t like there was a guidebook for these things.

She carefully drew herself up, back into the carefully crafted sphere that was the outside of Nat’s mind. She was tempted to look around, figure out what Nat thought of her and the other Avengers, to dig out her insights on the people around her and look at them. But she stopped herself, out of respect for the Widow and also partly out of fear.

With a deep breath she shot herself back into her own body and found herself staring into a very anxious pair of green eyes. She stared back a little, alarmed by the proximity and the intensity of feeling captured within those eyes.

Natasha spoke first, her voice low and angry sounding.

“What did you see?”

Wanda did not lie. Could not lie.

“A lot. I do not think you are a monster.”

Natasha stiffened, drawing farther away.
“It doesn’t feel like it’s right there anymore. Waiting to ambush me everytime I look inside my head.” She shot a sideways glance at Wanda. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I am sorry I had to look. If you need anything else, I am happy to help.”

“I can help myself. Don’t think you know me just because you’ve seen.. That part of me.”

She faltered as she spoke, something Wanda had never heard from the normally very well conducted Widow. It was unsettling, seeing someone so strong be weak like this. Wanda figured it was the most vulnerable Natasha had ever been in all her years of life.

“I… Can we be friends? And will you accept my apology for messing with your head in the first place?” Wanda cringed and hurriedly added, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Natasha appeared pensive, that defensive shield still in place as she slowly stood.

“Not quite friends. But you did me a favor, so allies.”

“Thank you.”

Wanda stood. Took one last look at the damaged and broken woman, hidden by that calm, self-assured mask. She had no clue how Natasha held herself together so well, not even after she’d seen so much of her. It was admirable and Wanda was jealous of it.

She did not feel half as strong. But it had been almost nice to have been wrapped up in someone else's issues for a little while, to have left hers behind. Made her understand why these Avengers felt the compulsive need to help others as they did. They were all making up for something, or avoiding something. Wanda suspected Natasha knew that. Natasha seemed to know everything. She really did wish she’d had a chance to dig further through those neatly organized, filed stacks of information. They were practically labeled.

“Good night, Wanda.”

“Good night, Nat. I am sorry for having had to do that.”