Natasha's story

As long as Shuri is busy doing the check-ups and is reading things off of the computer, honestly how long can that take, Natasha sits in the chair next to my bed. The Wanda chair as I like to call it. She keeps quiet but it's not uncomfortable. When Shuri is finally finished and leaves the room, it stays silent a little while longer, until I finally gather all of my courage. "Nat, I'm sor-" "Don't." She interrupts my sentence and looks me straight in the eyes. "There is nothing for you to apologize for Lidiya. You tried your best but the nightmares were too real. It happens, and I'm sure it will happen again." I take a couple of seconds to let her words sink in. "You know Lidiya, almost everybody assumes that when you're finally freed from a terrible situation, when you finally get the chance to lead a good life, all of the bad just disappears. That the past is in the past and the only way for you is forward. That it doesn't matter how hard it might get, it will never be as bad as it was before. They think that you can just move on and start living your new life. I know that that's not how it works." I listen to the silence between us. It's filled with some kind of tension, but not in a bad way. It's like understanding hangs between us, heavily loaded. "Don't go expecting yourself to be all better just because you're gone from that place moy drug (my friend). You'll have fall backs, you'll have dark moments, maybe even moments that you see no difference between being in that cell and being here. But you'll get through it, with our help if you want it. We'll make the bad moments smaller and step by step you will see the light of your life once more. But even then it won't be all sunshine and rainbows. Your past is part of you, and no matter how hard you try to forget it, to fight it, to fix it… It will always be there." There is no blame in her voice, no negativity, just facts. The way Natasha Romanoff always is. "What did you try to do?" I ask her, and this causes her to grand me a soft smile. "Fix it. For years I tried to do good, not because of wanting to do the right thing but because I was trying to wipe away the red from my ledger. I thought that if I could do more good deeds than bad ones, I could make up for it. I could make the red disappear. It took an alien invasion in New York city to make me realize that that's not how it works. For the first time in my life I wanted to do the good thing because it felt like the right thing to do. I wanted to protect these people, not because I wanted to even out the deaths I had caused but because I genuinely cared about saving their lives. Of course it didn't just fix everything, and when I discovered that by working for SHIELD I had actually been working for Hydra for years it send me back in the darkness. For years I had been thinking that I was making up for every horrible deed I had committed in my past, and then it turned out that I had actually been causing pain and death in favor of the bad guys once more. I had been nothing but a puppet." I know that this is a story that Natasha doesn't just tell someone, if she has even told anyone about it.

"How did you get out of the darkness?" I ask, and a sad smile crosses her lips. "Steve and Clint helped me, I owe them a lot. They showed me that we can still make our own decisions, we can still decide who we are and what we fight for. It's something that means a lot to me. The world isn't just black and white and neither are our actions, we don't control our past but we do control what we do with the future." Both of us stay quiet after she says this, and I take some time taking in the things she has been telling me. "I know you send Wanda a message about me not doing well." She raises one of her eyebrows at me. "So I did, though I'd say not doing well is an understatement." She doesn't ask me how I know this, it doesn't matter to her. "I feel guilty Natasha. I care about Wanda and I want her to be a part of every day of my life, but I know how worried I made her when she was away. She could barely concentrate, if something bad had happened because she wasn't there with her mind it would have been on me. If she got hurt because she was distracted, it would have been my fault. And even though nothing bad happened, she has spend every moment in sadness and distress. How can I let her close to me when this creates so many opportunities for me to hurt her without it being my intention?" Natasha takes a moment to think about my words, silence filling the room. "You know, the first mission that Fury send me on after joining SHIELD was with Clint. Clint had been send to eliminate me after I had gotten on SHIELD's radar in a bad way, but he made a different call. To get into SHIELD I had to eliminate the director of the Red Room, but that's a story for another time. It was to prove to them that they could trust me and that I wouldn't just run back to my old masters the moment the opportunity presented itself. Still, Fury didn't trust me one bit. He appointed Barton as my supervisor, told him that since he had to save the drowning kitten he should be the one to get her all cleaned up." Hearing this surprises me, there was no way anybody would ever think of saying something like that to her now. Natasha sees my shocked look and this makes her chuckle. "Fury and I have always had a special kind of bond, and even though I wanted to shoot a bullet straight through his head when he said that I didn't. I knew that doing that would not be the best start in my attempt to make amends." I laugh and Natasha joins me before she continues. "But yeah, the first mission with Barton. I've always been used to working on my own, it's how I was trained in the Red Room. Counting on someone else to have your back is a death sentence, they drilled that into our minds. So when Clint and I were cornered by the so called bad guys, I didn't think about his wellbeing for one second. I saw a guy pointing a riffle at me from a distance, and the only way to eliminate the threat was to shoot him… through Clint. Honestly I didn't even realize I was doing it, all I knew what that I was finishing the job given to us. When I was finished with those guys and had managed to retrieve the USB stick that we were send out to get, I looked around and could see Clint lying in a puddle of blood, caused by my gun. Thank god I shot him through his side and I didn't hit any vital organs, but immediately I realized that I had fucked up. The two of us were supposed to watch each other's back and instead of doing that I basically shot his. I knew this would be my end at SHIELD, I knew that Fury would see this as prove that his distrust towards me was justified and he would have me locked up who knows where. My instinct told me to run as far away as possible, but part of me told me that I couldn't just leave him behind… Not after he stuck his neck out for me like that. So I dragged him to our plane, bandaged him up as good as possible with the limited supplies we had with us and began the flight towards the SHIELD headquarters. This is when Clint gave me other coordinates, and even though I asked him where he wanted us to go he refused to answer my question. At that point I decided to trust him, the flight would also be much shorter, which was a good thing seeing his wounds. When we arrived I landed the plane on a grass field next to a farm house. I can't even begin to explain how confused I was, but I helped him get up and basically dragged him to the house. This is the moment when a woman came out of the house and basically ran towards us, the fact that she was clearly very pregnant not helping her. It turned out that Clint had brought me to his house, the house that Fury was keeping completely off the charts to give them a chance of some kind of a peaceful life between missions, and had brought me to his highly pregnant wife Laura. And instead of hating me for shooting her husband, she gave me a blanket 'for the shock'. After she was finished stitching him up, Clint came to talk to me. I expected to hear a lot of things, but none of the things he would tell me. He told me that even though I decided to leave my past behind, I couldn't just change from one day to the next. That my past was a part of me and always would be, but when it came to the important decision, I decided to stay with him instead of running away. He told me to always keep moving forward and to fight for our future, no matter how hard the past might be. But to also cut myself some slack, and to realize that I couldn't just change what the past had done to me." Natasha is obviously finished with her story and it's a lot to take in. "In the end I guess that I got what I deserved, because during one of my SHIELD missions the Winter Soldier shot his target straight through me." "Guess it's a Russian spy thing, right?" I joke and she agrees with an amused expression on her face. But she's right, just like Clint had been right when he had talked to her. I can't just cut Wanda out of my life in a useless attempt to prevent my past from hurting her. "Thanks Nat." I whisper, my voice thick with emotions. She gets up from the chair, walks towards me and ruffles my hair. "Always here for you when you need me Ivanov, whether it's love advice, ass kicking or a wakeup call. You know where to find me." With one last smile she leaves me alone with my thoughts.

After some time, honestly I have no idea how much time has passed, I can feel Wanda enter the room before I can even hear or see her. "Hi malysh (baby)! Look what I found in the kitchen, these strawberries are perfectly ripe! You should try them." She sits down on the bed and offers me one of the strawberries she was talking about, and curiously I bite in it, my lips softly brushing against her fingers. The taste is amazing and I'm convinced about the fact that this is my new favorite food of all time. Wanda smiles when she sees my eyes lights up. "Good, right? I thought you would like them, they are personally some of my favorite frui-." I interrupt her before she can finish her sentence. "Ya tebya lyublyu (I love you) Wanda." The words leave my lips before I even realize it but I know it's the truth. Wanda falls silent when she hears this, and for a moment I can feel fear get a grip on my heart, but that's when the biggest smile I have ever seen appears on her face. "I love you too Lidiya."