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By the time Natasha Romanoff learns how to want something, she has already spent most of her life being told what wanting looks like. The Red Room taught her hunger as a function, a lever to pull, a weakness to excise or weaponize depending on who held the knife. Desire was a script. Fear was a stimulus-response. Pleasure was a reward, carefully rationed and meticulously conditioned. She learned to mimic them all so well that even she could not always tell where the imitation ended and something real began. That ambiguity follows her into S.H.I.E.L.D. like a shadow that never quite detaches from her feet, and in the beginning, it almost feels like freedom.
It takes three years for her to understand that it is not.
Trust, she discovers, is not given in S.H.I.E.L.D.; it is accumulated like a currency, slow and quiet, built from a thousand small confirmations that she is exactly what she presents herself to be. Efficient. Precise. Loyal. She lets them see the scars they expect to see and hides the ones that matter. She completes missions with clinical exactness, debriefs with a calm that reads as professionalism instead of absence, and never once contradicts the narrative they are already inclined to believe: that she is a weapon learning how to be a person. That she is, in some sense, rehabilitated. Natasha does not correct them. Natasha never corrects anyone unless it serves a purpose.
The first time she kills someone who does not strictly need to die, it is almost disappointingly simple.
The target is a low-level asset, someone flagged for extraction after a botched operation in Prague. The mission parameters are clear: retrieve, contain, return. He is jittery when she finds him, pacing the narrow apartment with the restless energy of a man who has already imagined every possible way this ends badly. When he sees her, there is a visible drop in his shoulders, relief flooding his posture in a way that would be almost touching if it did not bore her so profoundly. He trusts her immediately. Of course he does. She is S.H.I.E.L.D., and S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to mean safety.
“You’re here to take me back?” he asks, voice tight but hopeful.
“Yes,” she says, because that is the expected answer, and because, in that moment, she has not yet decided.
It is not an impulsive act. Natasha does not do impulsive. She observes him, catalogues the micro-expressions, the way his eyes flick to the door, the window, her hands. He is calculating his chances even as he smiles. He is not entirely trustworthy. He might talk under pressure. He might break. These are valid considerations, reasonable justifications. She could make a case for termination. She could write the report in a way that aligns perfectly with protocol, and no one would question it.
That is what she tells herself while she watches him breathe.
But the truth, the thing that sits just beneath the clean lines of logic, is quieter and far more dangerous. It is curiosity. It is a question she has never quite been able to answer: what does it feel like when the choice is hers and hers alone? Not assigned, not ordered, not justified by a handler’s voice in her ear, but chosen. The Red Room never allowed for that. S.H.I.E.L.D. pretends to, but always within constraints, within systems that define what is necessary and what is not.
This would be outside of that.
He is still talking, filling the silence with details she does not need, explaining things she already knows. Natasha steps closer, her expression softening into something reassuring, something human. He relaxes further. He should not. He really should not.
When she kills him, it is efficient. Quick. Controlled. There is no spectacle to it, no excess. The moment passes almost before it has fully registered, and then there is only stillness. She stands there for a long second, listening to the quiet settle around her, and waits for something—guilt, perhaps, or exhilaration, or even the faintest flicker of regret.
What she feels instead is… clarity.
It is not pleasure, not exactly. It is not the crude satisfaction she has seen in others, the kind that comes from dominance or cruelty. It is something cleaner, sharper. A sense of alignment, as if a piece of her has clicked into place in a way that it never has before. There is no noise in her head. No conflicting directives. No ghost of a handler whispering approval or disapproval. Just the undeniable fact that she chose, and the world adjusted accordingly.
Natasha cleans the scene with the same care she applies to every mission, constructs a narrative that will withstand scrutiny, and files her report with the necessary alterations. The asset resisted. The situation escalated. Lethal force was unavoidable. It is all perfectly plausible. It is all entirely believable.
No one questions it.
That is the moment she understands how easy this is going to be.
Over the next year, she is meticulous. She does not rush. She does not indulge. She selects carefully, always within the margins of plausibility, always with enough ambiguity to justify her actions. A target who might compromise a mission. An asset who shows signs of instability. A suspect who moves just a fraction too quickly. Each death is explainable. Each report is airtight. She builds a pattern that is, by design, invisible.
And then there are the others.
The extracurricular activities, as she comes to think of them, though the term feels almost flippant for something that has begun to take on a weight of its own. These are not tied to missions. These are not sanctioned in any conceivable way. They are chosen for entirely different reasons, reasons she does not immediately interrogate because she does not yet have the language for them.
The first of these happens six months after Prague, in a city that barely registers beyond its utility. The man is not important. He is not connected to anything. He is, in many ways, irrelevant. Natasha notices him because he watches her for too long, because there is something in his gaze that reminds her of something she cannot quite place. Not fear. Not desire. Something closer to possession, to the quiet assumption that he understands her, that he can categorize her, define her.
She has always hated that.
It would be easy to walk away. It would be easier still to ignore him entirely. But that question is back, insistent now, no longer a fleeting curiosity but something with shape and substance. What does it feel like when there is no justification at all? When the act exists purely because she wants it to?
The word still feels foreign.
Want.
It implies a self she has never fully acknowledged, a set of preferences and inclinations that exist outside of programming and conditioning. Natasha has spent years dismantling the idea that she has a core beyond what was built into her. And yet, here it is, persistent and undeniable, threading through her thoughts with a quiet insistence that she cannot dismiss.
She follows him that night.
Again, it is not messy. It is not chaotic. Natasha does not lose control. She never loses control. But there is something different in the way she moves, in the way she anticipates his reactions, in the way she times everything to the precise second where his awareness shifts from vague unease to sudden, sharp realization.
That moment—that exact moment—is where she finds it.
Not in the act itself, but in the transition. In the instant where the world changes for him, where the assumptions he has been carrying collapse under the weight of a truth he did not expect. It is a kind of intimacy, she realizes, a connection that exists only because she has chosen to create it. He sees her, truly sees her, for less than a second, and then he is gone.
Natasha stands in the aftermath and understands, with a clarity that is almost frightening, that this is not something that will fade.
It is something that will grow.
By the start of her fourth year at S.H.I.E.L.D., she is no longer asking herself whether she will continue. The question has shifted into something more complex, more nuanced. How far can she go before someone notices? How much can she take without disrupting the balance she has so carefully constructed?
She is still trusted. More than trusted, now. Relied upon. There are agents who defer to her judgment without hesitation, supervisors who sign off on her reports without a second thought. She has become, in every measurable way, exactly what they wanted her to be.
Which makes what she is even easier to hide.
Maria Hill is the only variable Natasha does not account for immediately.
That, in itself, is unusual. Natasha accounts for everything. She maps out interactions before they happen, predicts responses, calculates outcomes with a precision that borders on instinct. Maria, however, does not fit neatly into any of the categories Natasha is used to navigating. She is not easily impressed, not easily manipulated, and, most importantly, not easily dismissed.
Their first real conversation is brief, almost inconsequential on the surface. A post-mission debrief, a discrepancy in a report, a question asked in a tone that is too neutral to be casual. Maria does not accuse. She does not even imply. She simply asks Natasha to clarify a detail that most people would have overlooked entirely.
Natasha answers, of course. She provides exactly what is needed, nothing more, nothing less. The explanation is solid. It holds up under scrutiny. Maria accepts it with a small nod and moves on.
But she does not forget.
Natasha notices that.
She notices the way Maria’s attention lingers just a fraction longer than it should, the way her questions, when they come, are always precise, always deliberate. There is no overt suspicion, no indication that Maria has pieced anything together. But there is an awareness there, a quiet vigilance that Natasha recognizes immediately because it mirrors her own.
It is the first time in years that she feels something close to being seen.
It should be a problem. It should be a risk that needs to be managed, neutralized, eliminated if necessary. Natasha has done it before. She knows how to remove obstacles. She knows how to make people disappear without leaving a trace.
But Maria is not an obstacle.
Maria is… interesting.
The realization is subtle, almost imperceptible at first, but it grows the more they interact, the more Natasha observes the patterns in Maria’s behavior, the way she navigates the same systems with a different kind of precision. Maria does not trust easily, but when she does, it is with a depth that Natasha finds… compelling.
Dangerous.
There are moments, brief and fleeting, where Natasha considers what it would mean to let Maria see her, not in the way her victims do, not in that final, fleeting instant, but fully. To reveal the thing that has been growing inside her, the thing that wants without permission, without justification.
She does not act on that.
Not yet.
Instead, she continues as she always has, balancing the two sides of herself with a skill that has been honed over years of practice. The agent and the thing that wants. The weapon and the choice. The mask and the absence beneath it.
But the balance is shifting.
It is subtle, at first. A hesitation where there was none. A question left unasked. A look held a second too long. Maria is getting closer, not to the truth, but to something adjacent to it, something that Natasha cannot quite define but can no longer ignore.
And for the first time since Prague, Natasha feels something that might be considered uncertainty.
Not about what she is.
But about what she might become if someone like Maria Hill keeps looking at her like that, as if there is something there worth understanding.
As if the thing that wants is not the only thing she is.
Natasha does not know if that makes Maria a threat.
Or something far more dangerous.
Something she might want to keep.