Name: Swan Lake Ballet Suite

Summary: Rights after the Battle of Sokovia, Natasha can't sleep and can't help but think of the memories brought by the Scarlet Witch.

Rating: General Audience

Notes: AU of AoU. In this story, everything that happens in the movie happens, except for all the Brutasha. So, yeap. SPOILERS.

She knew she should be sleeping. After a 48-plus hours battle, every single bone and muscle in her body hurt. Even blinking was painful. But for some reason, she couldn't keep her eyelids shut, or her brain silent.

Tony had given her her own apartment in Avengers Tower, like he'd done for all the Avengers, but at first, just like Clint, she'd preferred the solitude of her own apartment. It wasn't as fancy as the space Tony had designed for her, with modern, stylistic furniture and Kandinsky paintings (real Kandinskys, she may add). Instead, her place was small, with a wooden bed (made by Clint), a small kitchen and tall, white, bare walls. Of course, there were some (many) hidden compartments here and there. Once a spy, always a spy.

But unlike Clint and his farm, her apartment wasn't really a home, and she found she'd been spending less and less time there, instead spending it in the Tower, taking out Hydra cells all over the world with the Cap and Falcon, and the occasional Avenger. Sure, she's intended on finding a new cover after the fall of SHIELD, leaving Rogers to his own personal quest, even thought she knew he'd benefit of her skills. But once the dust cleared, she'd realized that finding a new cover was harder than one may think, and to be honest, this was all she knew how to do.

With a tired sigh, Natasha sat on her super King sized bed (about 5 people could be sleeping in that bed), covered in the most expensive bedding set (1500 thread count, solid Egyptian cotton), stood up and walked out of her room.

The lights on the hall were eerily dimmed. A chill run through her spine and she involuntarily rubbed her exposed arms. Nat rolled her aching shoulder as she looked down one end of the hallway, and then the other, and started walking away into the silence of the night, only tarnished by the cries of the girl in the room across from hers.

She made a quick stop by Tony's bar and picked a fresh new bottle of Stolichnaya Elit Vodka that was sitting in the freezer and found her way to the training room a few levels below Tony's and Bruce's lab.

The vodka burned her throat on its way down, but it was a good kind of burn. The kind that reminded her of home.

"Friday," she called as she used to call for Jarvis.

"Yes, Agent Romanoff," the female voice answered soothingly.

"Play some Tchaikovsky, please." Natasha took another sip from her bottle as she stared at her reflection on the wall-to-wall mirror on one end of the training room.

She was bruised all over her arms and part of her torso. She knew it would be worse if it weren't for the collision-resistant cloths Tony'd created for their suits. On the bright side, she wasn't bleeding.

Natasha straightened her spine, pushed shoulders back and stuck her stomach in. She shook her head. No matter how much they'd tried, she wasn't built like a ballet dancer, but boy, could she dance.

The explosive finale of the "1812 Overture" gave her the necessary thrill to stretch her muscles and by the time the "Swan Lake Ballet" suite began, her body was in elegant motion, the steps coming back to her through muscle memory.

She remembered the first time she'd hear this symphony. She was far too young to understand what the ending of this story was really about, but she dreamed of someday being as free as Odette ascending into the Heavens. Natasha closed her eyes, avoiding her reflection. She knew now that the only way to freedom was death. They'd made sure she never wished for anything like that, like Odette's love for Siegfried. Love is for children, they'd said.

Her legs burned with exhaustion but she couldn't stop now; she wanted to, but there was a twisted sort of comfort in dancing, like she could pretend that had been her life once. She could pretend she'd once been a young ballerina with dreams of dancing for the Bolshoi Ballet Company. She could pretend she'd had parents and friends, and she'd felt what love felt like. She could pretend her indoctrination story had all been true.

I'm one of 28 young ballerinas with the Bolshoi—I'm one of 28 Black Widow agents with the Red Room… The training is hard. But the glory of Soviet culture… of Soviet Supremacy… And the warmth of my parents… Makes up for… Makes up for…

She missed the next step as the dramatic finale of the suite built up, so her eyes opened by instinct, her body stopping ungracefully in mid-step, her lungs demanding air and this time she couldn't take her eyes from her reflection.

Those dark, dead eyes of the Black Widow.

"Wow," the voice ripped through her self-loathing as "Violin Concerto in D major op.35" began playing.

She looked over her shoulder to find Steve Rogers, on a pair of dark gray sweatpants and a blue shirt a couple of sizes too small for him. She mentally sighed. Will someone ever tell him he's getting shirts too small for his Captain America body?

"Friday," she said out loud, tearing herself from the mirror and the ballet and her thoughts. "That's enough."

The music stopped.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, probably trying not to wake anyone up, failing to realize no one could hear him there.

"Don't be," she replied in a normal voice. She was hiding, and she didn't want Steve to find her.

"I thought everyone else was sleeping," he told her, although he was really asking her why wasn't she too.

Natasha took the bottle of vodka off the floor and took a big gulp. Clearing her throat, "I couldn't sleep," she explained.

He just nodded, and she could see he understood. "Can I?" he added as he nodded towards the bottle in her hand.

She shrugged and walked to the door, where he stood lazily against the doorframe, with his hands inside his pajama pants' pockets. She couldn't help smiling at him as took the vodka off her hands, though she tried to hide it. She motioned him to walk with her outside the training room as he took a sip of her bottle, which was already half way down.

"It should be illegal to waste such good vodka on someone who can't feel its effects," she joked, looking at him over her shoulder as he walked after her. He laughed.

"I sort of wish Thor had left some of his millennial Asgardian liquor, after these last couple of days."

She simply smiled.

They reached the balcony and Natasha sat on the floor, against the glass door, looking out at the New York skyline. She reached for the bottle and took a swing at the vodka. He sat next to her, his forearms resting against his bended knees.

"Where else are you going to get a view like this?" Steve suddenly asked in a quiet voice, with a silly smirk on his face, remembering her words from just a few hours ago.

She simply smiled.

They sat in silence for a long while, sharing the bottle of vodka, as each of them got lost in their own thoughts. It was Steve's smooth, tired voice that broke the silence. "What did you see when Wanda attacked us?"

Natasha remained silent, her eyes closed and her shoulders tensing so slightly he shouldn't have noticed it.

"I saw Peggy," he said a few minutes later. The steadiness in his voice surprised her and she felt him move next to her. He'd grabbed the bottle sitting between them.

She opened her eyes and looked at him from the corner of her eye. He was opening up in the hopes she would too. He was using her own tactics. She knew better than that. Never reveal your secrets, never let anyone inside your head or they'll use it against you, they will punish you, they—

She took a breath and stood. She walked slowly to the edge of the balcony and looked down at the city that never sleeps.

So what if she said the words? So what if she let someone else know her thoughts? Know she is a human being with feelings, after all? But could she do it? Not even Clint knew that much about her, and Fury knew whatever was on paper; the rest remained inside her mind, locked in a safe box.

"What happened when you saw her?" She was making time, waiting for a distraction to avoid doing this.

"She was just there," he told quietly, inspecting the bottle in his hands. "Just as I remember her. And we were dancing and she kept telling me the war was over."

Natasha turned around and took in the sight in front of her. Not that of the night skyline, but of Captain America, the first Avenger. A very soft, warm light shifted through the glass doors from inside, and it shone on top of him. He looked sad, yes. There was a frown standing on top of his eyes, which were shut. But he looked warm and open and she could tell exactly who he was, and who he used to be before he was tore away from his family.

"But it's never over, is it?" he finished, locking his now opened eyes with hers.

She shrugged, crossings her arms, and slowly walked back to Steve and sat again on the floor next to him.

Natasha wasn't the type of person to hesitate; whether if it was originally part of her personality, or a trait welt into her by training and torture, she wasn't entirely sure, but once she made up her mind, she went through with it from beginning to end.

She put her hand on the bottle and took a big swing of it, finishing the bottle.

"I had this…" she said out loud, very confident in herself. She knew she had his attention even if his eyes remained of the skyline. And just like that, despite her so-called training, the confidence that was her trademark feature began leaking off her, and it took her a second to continue. Crossing her arms against her chest, her said: "dream. The kind that seams normal at the time, but when you wake…" she couldn't finish the sentence. If she finished the sentence she would be admitting what she'd realized on their way to Clint's farm.

"What did you dream?" Steve asked quietly.

It took her a moment, but she knew that no matter how long she put this off, how much she may try running away from it, they would all eventually understand who she really is. She turned her head to look him in the eyes, and with resignation, she answered. "That I was an Avenger. That I was anything more than the assassin they made me."

Steve's face scrunched up in a look she recognized as concern. "Natasha, what are you talking about?"

"It's not a secret. We can stop pretending it's not true, the entire world knows now, thanks to me," she said realizing that she would still be dreaming if it weren't for the data she'd released to the public right in Pierce's office. "The Avengers have a man in a super suit, stopping civil wars in impoverished countries; a man who becomes the most powerful beast this world has ever seen; a super soldier that survived frozen in the arctic for 70 years. Jesus, we even have a god!" She stopped hoping he would understand her point, but he didn't. She could see he didn't. "I was trained since I was 6 years old to become a coldhearted, calculating assassin. I'm not…" she stopped, looking for the right words; she'd never explained this out loud, to anyone before. "I'm not entirely human. Do you understand?"

She tore her eyes away from his when she realized he did understand. After some time in the battlefield, after the things he'd seen, the thing's he'd done. Even if the world believes you've won, you always leave your humanity in the battlefield.

Natasha tried to hold back the tears, but a couple rogue ones got away. "It's never over," she answered the question he's asked before, rhetorically, whipping the tears off her face.

It was a few moments before she spoke again.

"I look at Clint and Laura and… I just—". She couldn't continue. She didn't know how to explain this.

"Is that…" Steve asked, filling the gap. "Is that something you would like? That kind of life?"

Natasha took a breath and clicked her tongue, frustrated at her inability to express herself. "I think I want that, but I'm not sure if I really want it or if I want to want it to prove I'm not too far gone, that I'm still alive, and besides…" She laughed bitterly, "I couldn't even if I wanted to."

"Why?"

Her arms tensed up as she held herself, and with a small shrug, she replied: "In the Red Room, where I was trained… where I was raised, uhm… they have a graduation ceremony." She swallowed, trying to steady her breathing, the way she'd been trained. "They sterilize you." She tried to pretend it didn't hurt her, but it did. It shouldn't, but it did. "It's pretty efficient," she explained. She didn't explain what it was they'd done, because it wasn't exactly a medical procedure, getting the sterilization wasn't the graduation. It was surviving it, without anesthesia and without blurting her secrets to the enemy.

"One last thing to worry about," she said, looking away from him for a moment. "The one thing that might matter more than a mission… Makes everything easier." She was trying to convince herself it wasn't a big deal and that the mission was what mattered, but she… didn't even know what the mission was anymore, even before SHIELD turned out to be the enemy, and it angered her. "Even killing," she finished.

After a couple of minutes, she looked back at Steve, her hands nervously playing with the bottle. "Do you still think there are no monsters in the team?"

She saw him hesitate and suddenly, she saw her anger and frustration reflected on his face.

"Natasha, you care," he said slowly, taking the bottle from her hands. "Some of us… we may not get the home most of the people get, but we… we care. And as long as we care, I don't think there's nothing wrong with us." She looked him shyly in the eyes. "Some of us answer to a higher calling." He saw her roll her eyes. Unfortunately for her, he was still a man of God, but that didn't mean everything was about 'Him.' "I don't mean God, I mean an even higher power than that. We were meant to be here from the start. This is where we were headed from the moment we were born. We were meant to save the world, Nat."

She looked him straight in the eyes, letting sink in what he'd said, but she couldn't hold it in anymore. She snorted in his face and said: "You're so cheesy, Rogers."

He laughed along side with her. "It may be cheesy, but think about it. What are the odds of you, a Russian spy trained since childhood; me, a super soldier made in a lab 70 years ago; Stark, a genius millionaire; Thor, a god, for Christ sake! Banner and Barton. What are the odds of all of us converging into this one spot in time and space to protect the world from the things it's never seen before? " He looked down at the bottle in his hand as he ripped the label off the glass with the other. "And if a life like Clint's," he then continued, with his eyes on hers, now. "With a significant other and kids, if that's what you want, there are many other ways to get it."

She didn't want him to make her feel better, but he did, with his word, and his soft eyes, and his shy, good-guy smile. She didn't know if she was even able to ever feel something as deep as love, but she wanted to think she could, not to prove she was human, but because she was able to feel it.

"Are we ever gonna talk about the wife, the kids and the farm you and Clint have been keeping from us?" he questioned, breaking the sad, serious atmosphere they'd created in the balcony, by themselves.

She simply smiled.

Fin.-