Chapter Text
“Widow, it's behind us!” James shouted, even though he didn't need to. He was brash, even for an American, and he'd never quite broken the habit of speaking out loud when they were drifting.
Not like Yelena. Natasha couldn't remember if they'd ever said anything to each other when they were linked.
She rolled her eyes pointedly at James, knowing he could feel her reaction even if he couldn't see it. They turned as one, moving the jaeger as smoothly as something the size of a building could move.
“I told you not to call me that, Barnes,” she said, and they raised their arm to grab hold of the kaiju by the neck.
He laughed.
“Just admit it already, Widow.” he said, emphasizing the nickname. “I know you like it. I'm in your head, remember?”
As if she could forget.
“Hey, I heard that!” he said, but then the kaiju roared and the time for banter was over.
Every step the Vdova took, every little inch forward, the kaiju pushed them back twice that, and before long, they weren't fighting at sea, but at the docks.
Natasha cursed violently in her head, and James tried to soothe her (she could feel the warm caress of his hands on her back as clearly as if he were actually touching her) but it was no good because they couldn't maneuver, they couldn't move their hands and the kaiju was going to . . .
The screech of metal tearing exploded in the air, and she screamed as it echoed through her head and James'. The wound (not a wound, Natalia, you're inside a robot) felt like her own skull had been torn open, like there was a gaping hole exposing her brain.
Claws reached in, rending metal (flesh), and she was panicking too much to do anything more than flail.
not again not again not again not again
James screamed once, and it was different this time because he was being pulled up and out and tossed. For a moment, it felt like she was flying.
Then blackness.
***
Natasha woke up two weeks later in the infirmary, not knowing how she got there.
The nurse who was checking her vitals, gave her a pitying look before she hurried from the room.
“James?” she asked the director when he arrived seemingly instantly at her bedside.
Udinov said nothing, which was really all she needed to know.
***
She began to develop a theory when she was confined to her bed in the med bay. Very few people came to visit her – James had been her only friend and her parents lived far away – so she had plenty of time to think.
Natasha decided that Chernaya Vdova was cursed. It was the only thing that made any sense.
She'd grown up with her first partner, raised inside the training facility affectionately dubbed the Red Room after the color of its walls. Like all the other pilots she knew, she'd been taken from her parents when she was ten, and put into the program alongside dozens of other girls from Russia and the ex-Soviet nations.
Day after day, year after year, she'd trained, forcing herself to be better, faster, stronger than all the other girls. She was small for her age, but she never gave up, would never, could never, and when the time came, there was only one other girl who even held a candle to the infamous Natalia Romanova.
On good days, Natasha would admit that Yelena Belova was the blonde version of herself – calm, athletic, and lethal. They despised each other with a passion only rivaled by their mutual hatred of the building sized monsters that came from the sea, and they channeled that anger into teamwork like no other.
They were a deadly team.
Six kaiju dead, all told, by the time a seventh rose up out of the deep. She and Yelena were cocky, with good reason, and they were sure that this seventh would fall like all the others.
Yelena Belova did not come back that day.
Natasha had expected that to be the end of it. Her drift partner was dead, the Vdova was half-slag, and she was far too headstrong to find someone else who was even close to compatible. She wanted to get back out there, of course, she did, but what was the chance of that?
The Red Room scraped her back together the same way they put her jaeger to rights, piece by piece, bolt by bolt. Natasha didn't expect much to come from the trials, didn't expect to find anyone, but the director was willing to try anything by this point because Natasha was too good and the Vdova was too important to the war effort.
The Room was so desperate they went to the Americans.
James Barnes was something of a revelation. Tall and strong and beautiful, Natasha had never felt anything quite like it, and when she first laid eyes on the man, she knew he was her match. When they drifted together, it was nothing like it had been with Yelena, but then how could it be? She and Yelena hadn't been so much “drift compatible” as they were “drift reconcilable”.
She hadn't loved Yelena.
It didn't matter how good they were together, though, because James was dead, and in the middle of the night when his screams in her head were loudest, it felt like she'd lost half her mind with him.
Maybe she had.
**It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland