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Natasha is six years old and solemnly watching the other girls play. They sometimes involve her in their games, but they are wary of her, picking up on the wariness of the adults around them. All the children here are the children of high-ranking Party officials, but she is different. Any new child who makes the mistake of asking about her parents is silenced by the teachers, made to understand that this is not something that they may speak of.
(They whisper sometimes in the playground though. They say her father is Comrade Stalin himself, that this can be the only reason for such secrecy.)
A black limousine stops outside the playground, and two men in suits get out. All the children stop playing, and huddle together, waiting to see who they have come for.
When men in suits come to take children away, they sometimes do not come back. And if they do not come back, then they cannot be spoken of again, as if they never existed.
The men head straight for Natasha, ask her to come with them, and lead her back to the car. As they walk back the children start to play again, relieved that the men did not come for them. But the men in suits come for Natasha most often, and so she does not fear them. Sometimes they take her to the clinic, where men in white coats perform tests on her. The tests are sometimes painful and always boring, but she has been having them as long as she can remember, and simply accepts them.
Sometimes they take her to see her father. She hopes this is where they are going now.
They do not take the road to the clinic, but keep on driving. She smiles to herself, and hugs her ragdoll. She is going to see her papa.
Finally, after driving and endless concrete corridors and lifts, they open a door and her papa is there, beaming at her. He picks her up and hugs her, then twirls her around his head as she screams with delight. He hugs her again and asks, "So how is my beautiful daughter? Are you learning lots at school?"
"Yes papa. You have a new arm." She is already twisting round to roll up the sleeve of the mechanical arm holding her. Her father laughs, and holds her in the other arm so she can get a good look at it.
"See there, on the shoulder? They put a red star on it. Do you like it?"
She inspects the arm with complete seriousness, bending the joints and tapping on it, then nods. Her father smiles and sits down, putting her on his lap.
"You still haven't told me what you have been doing since I saw you last. Apart from growing, again."
She happily rambles about everything from arithmetic to food to who talks in their sleep in the dormitory. Her father is suitably interested, or amused, or pretend-angry. She doesn't ask what he does, knows that this is something they cannot talk about.
There is a knock at the door, and an officer in uniform sticks his head into the room. "You have ten minutes, comrade."
Suddenly all the levity is gone. Her father looks her in the eyes and says, "Natasha, I need you to listen to me. There are people who would hurt you because they hate me. So we need to keep you safe. We are going to make you go to sleep for a long time here, so you will be safe from them."
All she can think of is that this will be just another dormitory. She looks at her ragdoll. "Can I bring Sveta?"
Her father smiles. "Of course. Now, come and see where you will sleep."
It is nothing like the dormitory. It is full of wires and machines and men in white coats, and two boxes which look like refrigerators which have been tipped back to lie at an angle. She hesitates on the threshold of the room, so her father picks her up again. He shows her the first of the two boxes and says, "When they do not need me for work, they send me to sleep here. Efficiency for the state, little one. The door is shut, but there is a window so you can see out before you go to sleep."
The inside of the refrigerator-box is padded, and looks at least as comfortable as her bed. Her father takes her over to the other box. "This will be yours. See, they have made a ledge so you do not slip all the way down."
She is scared, and for all her father is being reassuring, she can tell that he is not happy with the situation either. But she realises that she is expected to be brave, so she just says "I won't be able to sleep, it's too loud." It is loud, a constant electrical hum overlain with whirrs and clicks.
"The box makes you go to sleep, even with the noise."
One of the men in the white coats says, "Time comrade."
She wants to run, wants to cry, but she will be brave. Her father hugs her so tight that it hurts and kisses her on her forehead before putting her into the box. He smooths the hair away from her face and says "You are the bravest person I have ever met, little one. Now close your eyes, and the machine will send you to sleep."
She nods, hugs her doll close and closes her eyes. Feels her father's hand leave her head, and then the horrible clang of the door of the box being shut. She wants to open her eyes, to try and get out, but her father has said she is brave and has told her to close her eyes. She feels woozy and strange, then the next she knows she is being awoken by the box being opened again.
Her father is stood by the box, but he is wearing different clothes. She is too confused to take it on board at the time, but will later remember how tired and sad he looks.
"Was I asleep?"
"You were asleep for eight years, little one."
It's too much for her to take in. She sits up and starts to climb out of the box, and her father picks her up and lifts her to the floor.
"Come on. We're going to the park."
She beams at this. She never gets to go to the park with her father, always meets him in underground rooms in concrete bunkers. Her excitement is such that she skips all the way out of the bunker, talking nineteen to the dozen about nothing. They sit in the back of another black limousine, which takes them to a deserted playground. There are men in suits dotted about the area, no-one else to be seen.
When she is older she always remembers that morning in the park. It becomes crystallised to perfection, an idealised moment in time of true happiness. If she is hurting, alone, cold, thinking maybe this is the time she will die, that is the memory that she searches for. She remembers whooping with delight as she was pushed higher and higher on the swings, laughing at her father hanging upside down from the climbing frame, demanding that he push the roundabout round faster.
It is when she is older that she realises how hard he must have fought to give her that memory. The Red Room do not do things which are unnecessary or inefficient, and there was nothing necessary about that morning.
All too soon the men in suits come into the playground, say that it is time to leave. The smile leaves her father's face in an instant.
In the car he explains. "You remember I told you that there were people who want to hurt you? Well, our comrades have decided that the best way to protect you is to train you. Train you to be like me. To be an agent of the state, to do the things that the police and the army cannot." He takes her hand in his and looks into her eyes. "You will hurt, Natasha. They will push you until you break, so they know how hard you can be pushed in the field. You will think that you cannot go on, but you can. I will not be there, but remember always that I love you. And I believe you can do this."
The words make no sense to her at the time, but only a few weeks later she understands. She has got stuck in a small window she is supposed to be slipping through for this training exercise, and a man twice her size with scars across his face is screaming at her as she cries.
She cries less and less. She starts to take pride in what she can do. When she starts she is nearly ten years younger than any of the other people she comes across on training exercises. By the end of the first year she can outclass all of them in anything that doesn't require her to be bigger or stronger. The men in white coats still test her, but this time they give her injections and put her in machines as well. She realises that some of the things she learns and some of the things she can do come from the injections and machines, but learns that she has to hone that knowledge and ability herself.
She is sent on her first real mission at the end of that first year. She is with a diplomat, posing as his niece, because their intelligence suggests that someone as small as her will more easily evade the embassy's security. That part is easy. But it seems that she has forgotten how to be a child, as all the adults at the embassy comment on how serious and reserved she is. A junior attaché takes pity on the 'miserable slip of a girl' and makes it his mission to make her laugh, and when his third terrible joke falls flat, she actually does laugh, and thinks she last laughed when she last saw her father.
It is a few weeks after that when she sees her father again. He smiles and hugs her tight, then steps back and says, "Show me what you've learned. Take me down."
(It is only a very long time afterwards that she realises the ridiculousness of a grown man asking a seven year old to take them down. At the time, though she had no expectation that she would succeed, it seemed reasonable.)
She tries, with complete seriousness. He flips her over with his left hand and pins her to the floor. "You're good. But you can be better. Let me show you."
He takes her through the moves she has been taught, shows her how to improve them. Instead of the screams and shouts that her instructors give her, he praises her, corrects her gently. When another operative appears to tell them him that he has to leave, he hugs her and says, "I love you. And I was right to believe in you."
The next year is much the same, though there are more real missions among the training and treatment. She gets to see her father some time after each mission, and realises that this is so he can see she is still alive. As she learns more she realises that seeing her is a reward for him, and a chain to bind him. Perhaps they are a chain for each other, the power of life and death over the other serving to keep both father and daughter loyal and compliant.
It is only when she is nine that she finds out who her father really is. Of course, she knew he was a high-ranked operative. But she didn't know he was the Winter Soldier himself. She is sure that the operative who mentioned this thought she already knew, so she is careful not to seem surprised. It makes a lot of things about her childhood make more sense.
When she is ten they start putting her on ice between missions. If both she and her father are awake they meet. Otherwise she wipes the frost away from the glass on his closed box, and wishes him goodnight before she is put on ice herself. Once when she does this she catches the most junior of the men in white coats smiling at her, and gives him a questioning look. "You and he do exactly the same thing. You even tell each other goodnight in the same way."
She keeps a logbook in the room with the boxes, so she knows how old she is. It feels like something she should know. Soon after she is eleven she picks the book up to record how many days she has been awake and finds "Happy Birthday, love papa" written in the margin of the book.
Her father still teaches her when they meet, and she knows that this is his way of protecting her. The only thing she thinks he needs protecting from is knowledge about what they make her do. She is told about sex when she is twelve (though she knew most of it from conversations overheard in the commissary. People who don't know her age think she is an adult chosen to be an agent because she looks like a child, so feel no need to censor their conversations.) The doctor, a tired-looking woman, then looks at her sadly and produces a needle. "Contraceptive injection. I know you are not menstruating yet, but you may conceive immediately before you first do. I hope it is not necessary." She has never been in real danger of being raped, but that is due to good training and good luck. She has sex for the first time when she is fourteen, as part of a mission, a high-ranking official with a taste for young girls being the weakest link in the organisation. It is not the most unpleasant thing she has had to do, though she wonders how any woman finds it enjoyable. (The first time she enjoys sex it is also on a mission, some years later. Before that she has some perfunctory relationships, having sex because it is expected of her. Her target thinks of himself as a modern-day Casanova, and prides himself on his ability to bring any woman to orgasm. He has few redeeming personal qualities beyond that, but she is still happy the mission does not involve killing him.)
When she is fifteen they send her on a mission with her father. It is a test, of course, to see how they work together. It is the 1980s, and they are both fitted with satellite trackers, which sit neatly in their chests above their hearts. Naturally the trackers are booby-trapped. They are to hunt down a group of rogue agents in the Siberian wilderness.
They are dropped a few days trek from where the rogue agents are thought to be, the better to take them unawares. It is the longest she has spent in her father's company in her life. They are naturally both quiet and cautious, but she is comfortable with him. When they stop to rest the first night he taps his chest where the tracker sits and says "They may well be listening, but there are some things I need to tell you."
She hasn't seen him this serious since the morning he told her she was going to be trained as an agent. Some of that old fear wells up inside her.
"Firstly, about myself. I do not know who I am. This isn't a cover; I really don't know anything before 1945. One of the doctors once told me that they knew I'd been experimented on by Hydra, but I don't think they know much beyond that either. I don't know how I got to be part of the Red Room. I don't have a name." He took a deep breath. "Secondly, I'm not your father. I'm your mother."
She had never asked about her mother. It had been one of the things that she had sensed were not to be spoken of. She had just assumed that her mother was dead. But wilderness missions are not the place for false modesty, and she knows very well that her father is male.
"But-"
"Yes, yes, I'm a man. I'm told it was part of those Hydra experiments.“ He stares into space. “They’d talked about taking you away before you were born, but when I heard that I went half crazy, and took down about fifteen people trying to get out. While nine months pregnant, remember that. They must have decided that you were a good motivator for me. I remember holding you for the first time, still half-knocked out from the caesarean and thinking you were the most beautiful thing in the whole world. They let me keep you for three months, then sent you to live with the apparatchiks' children. I remember making a sling out of a shirt, because I knew they'd send you away eventually, and I didn't want to put you down while I still had you." He looks at her. "I wouldn't have chosen this life for you. But never, ever doubt that you are loved, Natasha."
She crosses the distance between them, and hugs him fiercely. "I love you too, papa." But there was still a question. "But if you're my mother, who is my father?"
"I don't know. The first I remember, in 1945, I must have been about three months pregnant."
She smiles. "When I was in school, they talked behind my back and said my father was Comrade Stalin."
Her father grins. "For all I know, he is. Unfortunately, given that it was Hydra experiments, it may be more likely that your father was a Nazi. Sorry."
She shrugs. The past really didn't matter that much to her. That her father was her mother was strange, but her papa was still her papa. Some unknown sperm donor didn't figure in her life.
"One more thing. All the tests you had when you were little? The Red Room felt you had 'great genetic potential'. They wanted to get me pregnant again, by some Heroes of the Soviet Union for the best result. But apparently I'm too scarred or something. But you should know that they will almost certainly want to do the same to you at some point. I'd guess they'd wait a few more years though."
She nods. She had suspected something like that herself.
"What about you getting some female Heroes of the Soviet Union pregnant?"
"May well have happened. They wouldn't tell me if it had. I just have to trust to hope that if you have any half-siblings they are doing well."
"Anything else?"
"No. And I think that is enough for anyone, don't you?"
The mission goes smoothly. They are an excellent team, all the time her father has spent honing her abilities translating into an ability to work together almost as a single unit. The rogue agents don't know what hit them. It takes a few minutes to take them all out, and it feels almost a let-down after the five days hiking it took to get to them.
They are not sent out together again. They both have the trackers removed a few months later, as the doctors find they are leaking heavy metals into their bloodstream. They go back to the low-tech method of using one to keep the other loyal.
She sees more and more of the world, learns more and more, and becomes more and more practiced at what she does. She is a cleaner in London when a defector is stabbed in a random street attack. She is a ballerina in Prague when the ballet-loving arms dealer has some of his most interesting new technology stolen. She is a tourist with the lost passport when enough incriminating material to last the Red Room for several years is lost from the US embassy in Beijing. She is an art historian in Paris when an obstructive member of NATO's high command has a 'heart attack'. She is an English teacher in Jerusalem when a bomb takes out a Mossad agent who was getting a little too close to some of their activities.
She meets her father whenever they are allowed.
They are sat on rickety metal chairs deep in a bunker. Her father is nursing a cup of tea. "I think I'm getting old. The world seems to be changing faster and faster. I need to catch up on more even when I've been out for the same amount of time."
"In that case, papa, I'm getting old too. Or neither of us is old, and it's the world."
"I prefer that one. You're barely twenty, you can't be old."
"But I was born in 1945, so technically I'm 53."
Her father winces theatrically. "That means I must be at least in my seventies, and I don't want to think about that."
A new century, and her life rolls on as it did before.
Budapest happens. When she makes the decision to defect, she is thinking of her father, knowing that she is putting his life in danger. But she also knows that it is the right thing to do, and she can almost hear his voice telling her to do it.
She spends a long time being debriefed by SHIELD. She tells them everything (everything that will not get someone she owes a debt to killed, everything that doesn't include her father being her mother). They ask her a lot about her father. They knew the Winter Soldier was her father before she defected, but not much more. She tells them what she knows. She sees that they don't believe her and think she is protecting him. Eventually they release her, give her work to do.
She spends some time waiting for assassin to be sent to kill her. Eventually she realises that this is probably the new deal with her father: you keep working for us, and we don't hunt down your daughter. She considers trying to find him, but realises that she probably can't. If he wants to defect, it's his choice.
She finds out that SHIELD had not briefed Clint about who her father was when she mentions it casually one morning when they are in bed together. She feels the goosebumps on Clint's skin as he makes some strangled disbelieving noises.
"Oh god, he's going to kill me. Dad with a shotgun's bad enough, dad who's the world's most feared assassin is something else."
"Clint, he knows what I do for a living. I don't think he'll have any illusions about you deflowering me."
"Yeah, but he thinks I'm treating you bad and I don't get a warning, I get a slit throat."
"He hasn't murdered any of my previous boyfriends."
"That's... actually slightly reassuring."
She accepts being put forward for the Avengers Initiative with resignation. She finds it far too flashy for how she prefers to operate, but she's prepared to deal with that. In New York she finds she likes the team, and can work with all of them.
The next mission isn't with the Avengers. The next mission makes her feel sick to her stomach. She's glad that Fury is briefing her alone, before the others.
The Winter Soldier has been activated. The Winter Soldier is hunting down Captain America. The Winter Soldier has to be stopped.
She gives the briefing to Steve and Clint. She goes into a lot of detail, mainly for Steve's benefit (she skips over any of the details about her birth. They don't need to know.)
"Do you have any pictures of the guy? It's nice to be able to recognise the guy who's out to kill me."
"No. He's never been photographed to our knowledge-"
Fury comes into the room and interrupts her. "That may have changed. As of ten minutes ago, we got a picture via the intelligence services in the Netherlands. They think it's him."
The picture comes up on screen, a crowded marketplace with one man circled in red.
Natasha nods. "That's him."
"Cap? You look like you've seen a ghost." Clint is looking at Steve, who is pale and almost visibly shaking.
"Can- can that computer cross-reference pictures?"
"We can do facial matching, yes."
"Do it. With Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes of the Howling Commandos."
It only takes a moment, and there's a photo of a smiling man in a US army uniform next to the marketplace picture. They're undoubtedly the same person, even before the computer flashes up '100% match'. Steve tells them the story.
"Steve, he doesn't remember. He won't remember you. It won't stop him killing you."
"I don't think I could kill him. If it came to that."
Fury stares him down. "You have your orders, Captain. We want him alive, but if we have to choose, we want you alive more."
"Sir."
Natasha realises that if it comes to it, either she or Clint will have to kill her father to save Steve. That was part of the choices that she made when she defected, and now she is going to have to live with it.
It doesn't come to that. Now her father is strapped down in four point restraints in a SHIELD facility. He smiles at her when she and Steve walk into the room.
He speaks to her in Russian. "Natasha. It's good to see you looking so well."
She replies in Russian, "I'm glad I didn't have to kill you." Then she switches to English, because Steve has to understand. "Do you remember anything before 1945?"
Her father shakes his head.
"Not even after meeting him?" She gestures towards Steve.
Her father replies in English. "No. I take it I should."
She expects Steve to reply, but when she looks at him he looks like he couldn't speak if his life depended on it.
"You were friends. He thought you were dead."
"Oh." Her father looks at Steve. "Sorry."
Steve mumbles an apology back, and then leaves.
She brings a chair over to sit by her father. He beckons with his head. She takes a moment to calculate that this probably isn't a ruse, then leans in. He speaks very softly, in Russian. They both know that in here it will still be picked up by surveillance, but it means they will only be overheard by people who are deliberately listening in.
"His reaction. Not just friends, I think."
She looks at him, genuinely shocked.
He chuckles. "Oh, I know, no-one's parents ever had sex. But stop thinking of him as a friend for a moment, and think of him as a target. Read him."
She does. She replays everything from that first briefing onwards. Her father is right, of course.
"So are you-?"
"Gay is the nice American term, isn't it? Yes. But not stupid. I think that 'celibate' would be a better description in all the time you've known me. Far too risky otherwise. Now, are you going to put two and two together, or do I have to do it for you?"
She pauses. "He might be my- oh."
Her father grins. "Better than a Nazi. Or Stalin, for that matter."
"I think I need to check some things."
She goes straight to the doctors. "I need you to tell me who my parents are, because I'm pretty sure that you have genetic samples from both of them now."
The doctor initially refuses, then contacts Fury, then tells her what she already knows. Her father (or mother) is the Winter Soldier (or James Barnes, or Bucky, or whatever he might be called). And her other father is Steve Rogers.
Then she looks for Steve. She has no intention of telling him any of this. He has enough to deal with.
She finds him in an empty meeting room. He dries his eyes hurriedly when she comes in. She sits next to him. "Papa still doesn't remember anything. But he's good at reading people. You were more than just friends, weren't you?"
Steve nods without meeting her eyes. She pats his hand, thinks perhaps she should hug him, but that would be too strange. "They still think they can get his memories back."
Steve nods again. She can see that he's in no fit state to really take any of this in. She stands up to leave, when he suddenly says, "Natasha. Bucky- was- was he a good father?"
She smiles. "In the circumstances, the best."
It is three days later, and she and Steve have been summoned by the doctors and scientists. They think they have recovered her father's memories. As soon as she opens the door, she knows they have been successful. Last time they walked in together her father's attention was entirely on her; now he flicks between her and Steve, and she can see that he recognises him. They still have him in the four point restraints, obviously not taking any chances.
One of the doctors says, "We need to know that this really has been successful. I need you to tell Captain Rogers some things that only the two of you know. He can then confirm whether you have remembered."
Her father grins. "Well, it ain’t as simple as that is it?" And it's strange, because the flow of his speech has changed; not the accent, but how he speaks. "It's things only the two of us know that he'd be happy for all of you to know."
"Bucky-"
"Relax Steve, your honor and dignity are safe with me. If you want them to be."
"Bucky!"
There's something about the exchange which speaks of familiarity; they may not have had that conversation before, but the rhythm of it, her papa pushing and Steve protesting, she thinks must have happened a lot. Her father rolls his eyes and rattles off four insignificant childhood events, each of which Steve confirms.
"Do you trust me enough to let me up now?"
There is a consultation with Fury. The restraints come off. Her father stands up and scoops both her and Steve into a crushing hug. When he finally lets go he is looking serious. "I remember everything. And that means - I'm not quite the man either of you know. Does that make sense?"
"Something like a man being the sum of his memories?"
"Yeah, something like that."
Her father looks at her. "Does he know?"
"No."
"Right. Steve, sit down."
Steve looks confused, but perches on the edge of the nearest table anyway.
"You know Natasha's my daughter right? Course you do. And you know that she's was frozen for a long time, like me, yeah? Ok, that's the easy part. You know when you picked me out of that Hydra base, we knew they'd done stuff to me, but not what they'd done? One of the things they did was, uh, that I could get pregnant. I'm not Natasha's father. I'm her mother. I- I was pregnant when I fell of that train. Steve, Natasha's your daughter too."
She could see the moments it took for Steve to process this.
"Jesus. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry-"
"Like you dropped me off that train deliberately. You've nothing to apologise for."
Steve looks at her, wide-eyed. "Um. I don't know what I'm supposed to say."
She almost surprises herself with how harsh the next words she says are. "Don't try and be a father to me. I have a father. I don't need another one. Our being related doesn't change anything."
Steve looks taken aback.
Her father is holding Steve's hand (and she's never going to think of Steve as her father, even though he is). "I think Natasha knows how you operate Steve. You want to make amends, right?" Steve nods. "Not that you've done anything wrong. But you think you have. And you want to make up for what you're thinking right now is some sort of bullshit about child endangerment and abandonment."
Steve smiles at that. "Something like that."
"It's too late. We can't go back and change what's done. And I think she's turned out ok, don't you?"
"Yeah. Better than ok."
"And you two work well together, maybe even friends, right? Don't go ruining that with some guilty half-assed parenting."
"I get the message. Don't get in the way of your half-assed parenting."
Steve grins, and her father slaps his arm. She wonders if Steve realises that he's probably the only person (apart from her) who could have gotten away with saying that without having their neck broken.
"Don't tell anyone." She looks at Steve with all seriousness. "I know that SHIELD know, but it'll be down as confidential. I don't want the team to know. I don't want them to treat me differently."
"Sure."
"Oh, and papa? You need to meet my boyfriend. Well, properly meet him. He was the guy with the bow and arrow whose leg you broke in three places."
"I don't know whether to apologise, or be proud that I've already put the fear of god into him."