A/N: Written for the Single Ladies (lady-centric one-shot) challenge at The Beta Branch. Trigger warnings for mentions of child abuse and general violence.

Chrysalis

There was a grandmother, sometimes, when she strained her memory in the darkness after lights out. Natasha did not know how she knew the old woman was grandmother; it simply felt right. There were other things, too, not mother and father like some of the other girls, but a little house with a yellow door and playing in the garden. The memories were cool and distant, like the distant towers of the city on a foggy day.

(She did not remember the fire, though there had to be a fire because Ivan Petrovich said there was. She remembered his strong arms carrying her to the Room. She was nearly too big to carry now, after a year. But she was nearly five.)

Little girls like her were breathing all around her as they slept. Natasha should sleep too. Once there had been a girl who cried all night for fear of the dark. Natasha never even learned her name; she had been gone before morning. Her friend Sveta, a whole half-year older, whispered she had seen it before, and that it could happen to any of them.

But there was not much time for these thoughts. In the morning, like every morning, there would be many hours of lessons. Languages mostly. She liked the funny letters and the way they sprang from her tongue. She was not like Anya, who mixed up her English with French or worse, Russian, and received a slap with a ruler from Missus Smith or Madame Larousse.

Afternoons were spent at ballet, to make them graceful; or gymnastics, to make them strong. Natasha liked the way her toes wiggled through the pink slippers almost as much as she liked bobbing and twirling gracefully in time with the other girls. Anyone not in time was punished with the ruler, or worse, no supper. Natasha didn't mind. She was good at both, not like Anya who fell off the balance beam nearly every day. Nobody, especially Natasha, was surprised when Anya disappeared one night and was never seen again.

Natalia (there were no baby names allowed now) was ten years old, and every part of her body ached. It was not from combat training, although they had just started knife techniques and their new combat master was a brutal old man who pushed young bodies to their limits. The acting mistress had them playing at different roles for hours, all to tell a different story. Sometimes it seemed her entire life was about telling stories.

It was more difficult than it had been before, when they merely had to memorize lines and say them convincingly. Now, every time the acting mistress snapped her fingers, they had to be a new person. First they had a minute to prepare, then thirty seconds, then ten. It was challenging and exhausting work, reshaping their bodies and their voices accordingly. If their work was deemed too shoddy they were beaten with one of the sticks used for combat training. Natalia was rarely beaten, but many of the other girls were not so lucky. Some of them would be reassigned before the month was out. She lived in constant terror of being reassigned, though she was careful never to let it show. She would be beaten for showing fear.

There were other lessons, too. Sometimes they practiced deception, telling false stories with wide innocent eyes. If they were found out, they were beaten. Other times they were to collect information by picking locks and borrowing papers, or slipping nimble fingers into unwary pockets to retrieve all manner of objects that were not what they seemed. Natalia was good at this, too, even though there was a tiny part of her that prickled it was wrong. She did not understand why it felt wrong. The old lesson was lost somewhere deep inside her memory, like the grandmother that she could barely recall.

Her very first assignment came soon after her tenth birthday, and sadly for her new skills it did not involve knives. Natalia was to join two agents and be part of a false family to entrap a business man who had grown too close to the West. It meant her first visit to the Red Room, where active agents were prepared for their missions.

She remembered being excited, but nothing else until she woke up screaming in a strange bed with strange memories of a tenth birthday party that had never happened. There had been cake and cheerful girls in pretty dresses, a visit to the Bolshoi, a mother with bright red hair and a father with a kind smile. Even the memories she knew were her own were not safe. There was a ballet class with Svetlana and all the others in a warm, brightly lit room with a shining bar instead of the dim, dull room she was used to. They were alien and frightening, with a brittle quality that quickly appeared if she lingered on any of them for long. Yet they were there, in her head, a part of her now.

Natalia fought them at first, because she was afraid and it was in her nature to fight. The agent assigned to be her mother glared from under her red wig, slapped her, and called her a fool. The agent assigned to be her father was more understanding, more coldly logical. She responded to that logic. She was given these memories as tools to make her stories more believable. Why not enjoy it while she could?

So Natalia did as she was told, and found that he was right. She secretly reveled in the luxury of her temporary bedroom (her own room!). She made herself fit in at her temporary school, even though the first day she was weak and ate herself sick on the rich food in the cafeteria. She was kind to their target's daughter, a girl about her own age, even though she was a horrible spoiled brat who bullied the other girls and tried to bully Natalia, too. Natalia gritted her teeth instead of slitting the awful girl's throat and filled her ears with lies about her rich, pro-Western parents, and all her luxurious American toys.

She was not surprised when one night her "father" put on his black gloves and shot the businessman over his plate in their dining room. Natalia and her false family disappeared into the night while the man bled into the tablecloth. She was sorry to go, if only because she would miss the rich food.

Natalia wasn't sure when the other girls had gone from friends to competitors. She felt their jealous eyes whenever Ivan Petrovich paraded her before visiting military men in olive drab hats and fat politicians in their Italian suits. Even Svetlana had grown distant. She had always had a soft heart. There was little that was soft about Natalia now.

Years seem to have flown by, filled with lectures and assignments and training and training and endless, constant training. It was a running joke that one of the girls had washed out to become an Olympic champion. Training in computers, in firearms, in all the technical arts of espionage. There were other lessons, too, she picked up over the years. How to kill. How to dress (or undress) to kill. How to prey on the weak-willed, or manipulate the strong to her own advantage.

The worst by far had been interrogation and interrogation resistance. After four months of that hell, five of the ten remaining girls in Natalia's class remained. One of them died. The other four were reassigned. At least that was what Ivan Petrovich told them. Natalia had her suspicions about that. There were no illusions about what they did in the Red Room now. Imperfection was unacceptable; a mistake could mean death, or worse, reassignment. The stakes were too high.

Natalia did not make mistakes. She was eighteen now, and close to receiving her first solo assignment. She was ready. Constant physical training kept the teenage gawk out of her limbs. Her accents were perfect; her command of language better than native speakers. She could lie and cajole and bully with the best of them. She did not fight the false memories any longer. If she tried, she could still see the brittleness that marked them from her own real memories. But she no longer tried. It was easier, even helpful, not to resist.

There had been other assignments to test her skills, of course. Collect information from that man, break into that building and steal a document. Infiltrate a secret group and turn one of its members into a Red Room asset. Dispose of a particularly problematic political crusader or a rival spy. She particularly liked the anonymity of the long rifle with a long scope for that work, where she could vanish into the night and rain down death from above.

Her solo mission would not be that simple. Disposal from a distance was one thing, but sometimes a closer, more personal message needed to be sent. This was one of the specialties of the Red Room, and Natalia would not be qualified as a full agent until she had completed one of these missions. While she would be expected to complete the objective on her own, she would never actually be alone. They were all assigned a partner. The role of partner was twofold: to be a supervisor who could report their behavior on mission, and to be a protector of the considerable investment in their training should something go wrong.

Natalia had never met the man assigned to be her partner. He was important, very important, if the ridiculous way Ivan Petrovich fluttered around him was any indication. She stood her ground. His hard blue eyes lingered on her for longer than was strictly professional for a partner and she felt a sudden flush of pride. Like most of the male operatives she had interacted with, he was tall and handsome enough to make her stomach twist pleasurably. The real surprise was that he was American.

They called him the Winter Soldier. She knew him as James.

She was a weapon, lean and fine and hard. Her body was a lethal instrument; she knew hundred ways to kill a man with her bare hands, a thousand or more with a weapon. Anything could be a weapon if she tried. She was only limited by her imagination and ingenuity.

Even at her most vulnerable she was not without weapons. Some of her best work was done at gun point, at knife point, tied to a chair. They thought her weak because she was a woman, thought her stupid because she was beautiful. They never suspected her femininity was a weapon too, wielded with consummate skill, that her red lips spun lies and her soft body was a deception. She delighted in showing them their error. Natalia was never without a weapon now, and she reveled in the power it gave her.

She was twenty and she commanded respect wherever she walked. When she stalked through the corridors at headquarters everyone demurred to her: men in white coats who ran the experimental section, old men in olive drab hats, men who brokered power and had the money to pay for the Red Room's services. Even ordinary people on the outside, people who did not know her reputation, simply got out of her way.

Except for James.

Just the thought of him made her heart beat a little faster and she refused to be ashamed. Two years' work with the Winter Soldier had honed her already considerable skills to a scalpel's edge. That was what she was, a scalpel, a surgical instrument that could cause minor harm or utter devastation depending on how she was wielded. He was a predator, relentless, pursuing his objectives with an animalistic fury that both terrified and captivated her. He pushed her to the limits of her daring and she moderated his recklessness. Together, they were all but invincible.

Which was, of course, why it had to end.

Their relationship had never been strictly professional. They tried at first, despite a mutual attraction that had been obvious from the start, but it did not last long. Perhaps sex was just the logical progression for two people living and breathing and working in closest quarters, steeped in tension and adrenaline. Natalia had learned long ago to take whatever pleasure she could when she could get it. She knew James was the same. That was how life was in their line of work.

What they had wasn't purely lust, but it wasn't love either. They were both too…damaged for that. It would have been neater if it had been one or the other, though. Reality was so much messier. They used each other (the thrill of his metal fingertips tracing across the sensitive bare skin of her stomach), they helped each other (the security of James' distant eye watching over her through the telescopic scope of his long rifle), they even appreciated each other (the pleased little growl that came over her earpiece when she made a particularly good move). But it wasn't love.

She knew something was wrong when he summoned her at headquarters and there were two men in military uniform flanking the door. The Winter Soldier, not James, was waiting for her inside.

He had never been one to mince words. "I've been reassigned," he said tonelessly.

Something in her chest seemed to snap. Reassignment was a punishment; what had he done? What had they done? She had known, they had both always known, that there would be a time when their partnership was ended, but now? They had completed every assignment flawlessly; they had done the impossible time and time again.

"What?" she gasped. She hated herself for the hitch of pain in her voice.

His words were flat and emotionless for the benefit of the men outside the door, but his burly shoulders hunched together miserably. "It's over."

He could convey so much with two words and a small gesture. It wasn't his decision. It was an order from someone on high, very high to be ordering the Winter Soldier around. She knew there was no use fighting it; orders were orders. But for one moment, Natalia Romanova forgot herself. She was a young woman of twenty and what was left of her heart was being ripped apart by forces she could not control and could never resist.

"James," she whispered. He flinched at the sound of his name and glanced warningly at the door. She knew the risk; her heart was pounding somewhere in her throat but she had to say it. Her nerve nearly failed. If he was being reassigned, she might never see him again. She might not ever get another opportunity. He had to know. "James, I lo-"

He turned on her before she could finish the word. James had always been faster. His gloved metal fingers gripped her arm so tightly she gasped with pain. His lips curled back into a snarl. "Love is for children!"

Natalia recoiled at the venom in his voice and he released her arm with a contemptuous little shake. But something in her face must have touched him because his dead eyes flashed with anguish and impotent anger. Suddenly, she understood. Resistance had never been an option for either of them.

James squared his shoulders and vanished again behind the Winter Soldier's mask. When he spoke there was just the right amount of frigid disdain in his voice. "Goodbye, Natalia."

He brushed coldly past her into the hall where his minders were waiting. She watched him go without protest, without making the passionate scene she desperately wanted to make. She gave him a few moments to disappear before she followed. Ivan Petrovich would be waiting for her, no doubt with another assignment. Tears prickled at her eyes but she was too proud and too smart to let them fall. She was even too proud to rub the fast-forming bruises on her upper arm.

Ivan Petrovich was waiting for her. He was beaming. Natalia wanted to hit him, but she bit her cheek until the feeling went away. He clapped her on her bruised arm, too excited to acknowledge her grief. "Natalia, my dear," he exclaimed. "They've named you Black Widow."

Natalia's eyes fell to the floor. So the Red Room gave and the Red Room took away. Black Widow was the codename reserved for the top female asset in the program. They had openly acknowledged her as the best. She had been dreaming of this moment for years, hadn't she?

Her silence would alarm her handler, so she swallowed her feelings down deep and looked up coolly. "Do they have an assignment for me?"

She was twenty-one and she commanded respect wherever she walked. Even her peers, not just the men, acknowledged her now. She was the Black Widow.

Her hands were bound. Her feet were bound. She strained at the chains on principle even though knew that her bonds were unbreakable; her captor knew what he was doing. Even if she dislocated joints, scraped away layers of skin, there was no escape. The famous Natalia Romanova, the Black Widow, was captured and humiliated.

The archer smirked and she snarled at him behind the tape sealing her mouth. She should be honored, she supposed. She knew his work. He was the top assassin working in the West; one of the best in the world. They must be desperate indeed to send Clint Barton, the infamous Hawkeye, after her.

Barton grabbed the only chair in the dank concrete room and dragged it around so he could straddle it cowboy-style. Her eyes crinkled with distaste; how typically American. He leaned casually on the back of the chair, taking a bite from an apple as he did so. She had to look up at him from her vantage point on the sweating floor. Natalia hated him for that indignity and rattled her chains to show her displeasure. He laughed around a mouthful of apple.

"You're younger than I thought," Hawkeye observed. He took another bite of his apple. "Can't be more than, what, twenty-four? Twenty-five? You sure as hell made a name for yourself early, Black Widow. Or should I call you Natalia?"

She settled for glowering murderously at him, seething at herself for being stupid enough to allow herself to be put in this position. She was going to escape. She was going to be free of her bonds and she was going to rip him into tiny pieces. She was going to humiliate him as she had been humiliated. She was going to stab him with every one of those damnable arrows twice. And then she was going to hang him by that accursed bowstring in the middle of Wenceslas Square, so SHIELD and the world could see what she had done. All she had to do was bide her time, wait for him to remove her gag, and then she could go to work.

Unfortunately, he showed no intention of playing along. He seemed to like the sound of his own voice, she thought sourly.

"I'm gonna be honest with you, Romanova," Hawkeye started casually, "I was expecting more. "I been hunting you for over a year and watching you for a lot longer than that. I know what you can do. You made it damned hard, but not near as hard as I was expecting."

She rolled her eyes at the attempted insult. He was going to have to try a lot harder if he wanted to get to her. Was this really SHIELD's best?

His eyes narrowed at her seeming unconcern. "You don't get it, do you?" he observed. He straightened up and drew his sidearm in one smooth motion, his apple safely clasped in the opposite hand. She froze as he drew a bead somewhere between her eyes. "My orders were to shoot you on sight. Notice that I haven't."

Natalia swallowed, but she did not flinch. She had faced far more intimidating men than Clint Barton. She wasn't surprised he had been ordered to kill her, but she was surprised that he was apparently disobeying orders to speak with her. She sensed there was something more to him than she had initially thought. She must find it out. Given how badly she had already botched this mission, she needed to return to the Red Room with something. If she could gain valuable information from Hawkeye, they might not punish her failure and the discovery of the safe house too severely.

"We don't got a lot of time before my people get here, so let me just spell it out," he told her. "I think you wanted to get caught."

Her eyes widened in surprise. Want to get caught? Allowing herself to be captured intentionally was a legitimate intelligence gathering strategy she had used with great success in the past. But not on this mission. And by the way Barton was smirking at her shock, he knew it. Her insides suddenly went cold.

"I think you wanted to get caught," Barton repeated quietly. "I think you want out."

She let out a muffled cry, at this, the mother of all blasphemies. Agents had been killed for less. She had killed agents for less. Of course not, of course she didn't want out-

Hawkeye cocked his blond head slightly, still smirking, but there was something, some strange understanding behind the humor in his eyes. "Three years ago, I'd never have caught you. I'd never even have gotten close." There wasn't any ego in his words, strangely. It was just a cold statement of fact. "But something changed. You got sloppy, Natalia. 'Bout a year, year and a half ago, that sound right?"

Natalia's insides drew into tense knots. She turned her face away from him as best she could, but she could still feel Barton's pale eyes boring into her. His words were casual but she could hear the cold, hard analysis under it. He knew just as much about her work as she did, she realized with a shudder. He knew far too much. She had severely underestimated this American.

"I think it was this one," Barton continued, tossing a sheaf of papers to the floor beside her. A photograph of a balding, middle-aged man was on top. "Sergei Mikhailovich Pavlov. Ring any bells?"

As usual, she did not open the manila envelope from Ivan Petrovich until she was in the air. It was sealed in black; whoever she was supposed to kill was a traitor of the highest order. She slit the seal with a sharp knife. A photograph slipped into her hands and suddenly everything became clear.

"Took me forever to find out what your interest would be in this guy," Barton said conversationally. "Pretty small time crook by your standards, just little bit of laundering for the mob. What kind of trouble could this guy have been into for the Red Room to put out a hit on him, and his wife and kid?"

It had not been Sergei Mikhailovich she had been sent to kill that icy shock stabbed into her. Her eyes widened and she sat very, very still. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought he would be able to hear it from across the room. He knew.

Barton tossed another photograph onto the pile. "I did some digging. Turns out his wife, Galina Pavlova, wasn't really Galina Pavolva. She was ex-Red Room; used to go by Svetlana Belova. Ring any bells now?"

Her former friend Sveltana stared up at her from the photograph, smiling as she had never smiled at the Red Room. She had gone missing years ago, presumed dead on a mission in India. But somehow she had survived to betray them all. That was Natalia's mission. There was no betraying the Red Room.

"Thought as much. There isn't really ex-Red Room, is there?" Barton observed quietly. She had almost forgotten he was there. "So you go make the hit to send a message."

Svetlana's house was small and tasteful, with a rich lawn green from summer rain and a swing in the tree outside. She had admired it from outside. It reminded her of another house, long ago relegated to the mists of memory. Sergei Mikhailovich had been in the yard. She shot him on sight. The child Yelena screamed.

"I think she was something to you, Natalia, at some time," Barton continued. She wanted to block her ears from his voice, but her hands were bound and she was helpless against his words. "They've used you on traitors before and you didn't have a problem with it. I heard about what you did to Draykov, and his daughter."

Svetlana did not scream. She did not fight. Her brown eyes filled with tears when she saw who the Red Room had sent to kill her. She was resigned, somehow, as if she had always known this would happen. Natalia hesitated. Her orders were clear; she was to dispose of the traitor Svetlana Belova in a manner befitting her foul crime and to bring her daughter for training in the path her mother had forsaken.

"What was she to you, Natalia?" he asked softly. She looked at the floor, but he didn't stop. "Is it possible Yelena's still alive?"

Natalia looked at the plea in the eyes of her former friend, around the warm little house, and she felt a prickle of doubt. For the first time in her life she found herself questioning her orders. They had been friends for many years; did that truly mean nothing? Perhaps she owed Svetlana the last respect of a simple death. Wasn't taking the daughter revenge enough?

Hawkeye's voice pulled her out of her memory. "That's what changed, wasn't it? Something about her changed it all for you. Maybe not consciously, but it did. Because after you killed her, Natalia, you got sloppy. You got sloppy, and now here we are."

She couldn't answer, wouldn't answer. But she did not need to; Barton knew everything and for the first time in years, Natalia was truly terrified. She looked up at him and she knew he could see the fear, the doubt in her eyes.

Barton got up and crouched beside her. His right hand rested on the butt of his sidearm. His left hand reached for the tape on her mouth. Natalia instinctively flinched. "I'm going to take this off now," he said quietly. The tape pulled painfully against her skin, but he didn't seem to take any pleasure in her discomfort. "My orders are to kill you," he added. "But I'm offering you a way out, Natalia. If you want it."

She gaped at him, torn, warring with herself. He was right. Svetlana had changed everything for her. She had questioned her orders once, it had been almost impossible not to do it again. She had refused to even acknowledge the thoughts because they were so dangerous, so blasphemous. But now she was, and she could not seem to stop. Barton watched her silently, his expression unreadable.

Natalia swallowed. Her heart was racing, all her instincts were screaming at her to stop, to tell him to go to hell, to run as fast and as far as she could. The idea of leaving the Red Room for Barton's unknown was more terrifying than any punishment her handlers might throw at her. But there was something else, a prickle of warmth, of something good, that came from the deepest depths of her fractured memory, where the sense of her grandmother and the image Svetlana's smile still lived. It wormed upward through screaming layers of doubt and iron conditioning and long-held fear and somehow it felt right.

She cleared her throat and said: "How?"

The file said Natalia Alianovna Romanova. It was hard to believe this was actually her birth name. She wondered how SHIELD had managed to find it. She had stopped looking long ago.

For someone who had adopted and shed so many names, so many identities, it seemed strange somehow that she assigned so much importance to this decision. Yet somehow it was different. She was starting over here in the West. It made sense she would need a new name. Barton summed it up with his usual…earthy eloquence: "You only got one shot, so get it right."

She chose Natasha as her given name. She had not used Natasha regularly since she was a child, and there was something pure about the diminutive that appealed to her. Something hopeful, something clean, like the pale unsullied pink of new ballet slippers fresh from tissue paper. A fresh name for a fresh start.

She discarded Alianovna. She never knew her father, so why should his name be a part of her new life? She was never afforded the respect of a patronym at the Red Room. The point in her life at which knowing her father's name would have been important or interesting had long since passed.

Her surname, however, gave her pause. She had been Romanova for her whole life, the one constant through years of turbulence. They called her Romanova at the Red Room. It had been the one piece of her identity that they never tried to destroy or dislodge. Her enemies had learned to fear that name. Yet Romanova had been whispered in dark corners, with fear, with dread. Did she want that dark cloud hanging over her new life?

Natasha frowned. Barton glanced up at her, and suddenly inspired by the American, she wrote out Romanoff. The Americanization normally would have made her cringe, but somehow it felt right. She wasn't Russian anymore, not in that sense. It was a break she had to make.

Natasha Romanoff. It was a little odd writing her name in latin letters, but that would soon pass. She took a deep breath and said aloud: "Natasha Romanoff."

"Well, Natasha Romanoff," Barton said with a grin. He took the papers from her and tapped them into a neat stack. "Welcome to SHIELD."

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