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So that it might be finished, so that I might feel less alone, I could only hope there would be many, many spectators on the day of my execution and that they would greet me with cries of hatred.
-Albert Camus L’Etranger
The second time they meet, he is in prison, and she is a young woman.
It is night, and she has been paid good money to kill a man already in jail. She asks no questions, and tells no lies.
Gently, silently, she slips from shadow to shadow, fearing the light. Her auburn hair is tied up in a net at the back of her head, as she steals to the cell, the one he shares with…
“Hello, little bird.”
She starts. Only one man has called her that, and it was many years ago.
What she took for a sleeping figure on the mattress above her target shifts, and forms into the man she knows as Ivan. He stares at her, taking in her older, not quite fully grown form - the curves of the woman she will become linger in the air, like half-heard harmonies. Her eyes are so much colder than they were long ago.
“I have a job to do,” she tells him, and her hands tremble.
“I know,” he rumbles, amused at her tension, “Look.”
She turns, and finds that her target - a man with hands no cleaner than her own - hangs from the ceiling.
“It is a terrible thing,” says Ivan, raising an eyebrow quizzically at her, “to be hunted and trapped at once.”
She is shaking, but with rage or fear she cannot tell.
“You shouldn’t have done this, Ivan!” she hisses, “It won’t help you!”
“Da. But it will help you, Natalia. And,” he shifts so that he is sitting up, facing her. One large, callused hand reaches out and touches her chin, briefly, “I am so fond of pale, red birds.”
“I…” Natalia wets her lips, but it is an odd, youthful gesture on her face. It is not seductive; it is a gesture of concern, and of calculation, “I need to go.”
“I understand. Fly away home, little bird,” sighs Ivan, smiling.
She will later deny having fled, even if the only person she needs deny it to is herself.
But she will start sending letters again. Letters drenched in adolescent dreams and desires, letters he responds to gently, delicately, far more so than he did when she was younger, and she treasures each of his replies as if they are struck in gold.
-
The third time they meet is after Budapest.
Her hair is longer now, but still russet red, and she knows how to find Ivan.
She gently knocks on the door, and the door opens with an almost outraged thud, but the curses die on Ivan’s mouth when he sees her.
“Ah.” he says, because Ivan’s memory is impeccable, even with years gaping like a vast gulf between them, “Little bird. What do you want?”
“To talk. That’s all.”
“Talk is cheap. Vodka?”
“No, thank you.”
“No vodka for the Black Widow?”
Her eyes narrow as the sobriquet passes his lips.
“You’re drunk,” she snaps.
“Da. Very. What will you do of it, my little spider-bird?”
“I’m joining SHIELD.”
He raises an eyebrow at her, amused.
“SHIELD is the product of a madman and a march hare, little spider-bird. You should keep far away from it.”
“You don’t understand. I...owe somebody.”
Ivan’s hand stills on the bottle of vodka, and he looks at her, and for a fraction of an instant, she sees the longing.
“Natalia,” he begins.
“Nyet,” she says, “My name isn’t Natalia. It’s Natasha now, Ivan. You know that. If you know enough to know about Black Widow, you know enough to call me Natasha.”
“Of course,” he says, “But you are still little Natalia to me.”
“I thought I was your little spider-bird?” she responds sarcastically.
His eyes narrow, and for a moment - just a moment - his hand stretches out, and she remembers the touch of his hand in the prison, and the fire she felt as a child for him, even when all other emotions had been cut away.
She seizes his hand in her bare ones, and looks into his eyes. Both of their hands are dripping in red, she knows, and she knows the outcome of this conversation before it begins, but she needs to say it anyway.
“Please come with me,” she whispers.
“Who will look after my father?” he asks softly.
“Damn your father, let him rot, I want you to come with me. We’re Russian, we can afford the cruelty.”
Somewhere, in her pleading, she has fallen to her knees, still clasping his hand. He brushes a long, red strand of hair out of her eyes, and says softly to her.
“Little bird, I am staying here.”
Then he kisses her fingers, and gently shows her the door.
-
The fourth time they meet, it is in Monaco. She has gone to secure the race track, and spotted a familiar tattoo in the crowd.
She is rushing after him, through throngs of people in unbearable heat, and suddenly she is five, rushing through the streets of Russia, bleeding where no child ought to bleed - but now she is a teenager, running through the prison, rushing from shadow to shadow, fearing the light and what it might show -
“Little bird!” he is older, far older than she remembered, his hair is streaked with white now, but he is embracing her suddenly, and her arms go around his neck.
“What are you doing here?” she hisses in his ear.
“My father is dead.”
Her heart skips a beat.
“Wha...what?”
“I will join your army, but first, I have a contract to complete.”
She is dizzy in his arms, his lips are brushing her ear, and that is the reason she doesn’t question, doesn’t ask, doesn’t doubt.
When he walks onto the racetrack, burning away the stolen uniform, she will curse that her heart is flesh and blood, and weep tears for all the might-have-beens and girlish dreams that die.
-
When Ivan last sees her, it is as she is on her way to kill him. She is defeating the soldiers, and the feed is vicious and bloody and graceful and she is exactly as beautiful as he knew she always would be.
It makes him all the sadder that he cannot stay.
Before he goes, he does one last act, his penitence, his redemption: he takes the letters she sent him, two tiny bundles: one when she was a child, one when she was a child thinking she was a woman. The latter is perfumed; he smiles at the thought, charmed.
Then, using a lighter, he burns both tiny bundles of heartache and dreams, and leaves.
-
When he dies, wrapped in armor and revenge that wasn’t his, Coulson notes the paleness of her face. The tension in her muscles. He says nothing. But she suspects Coulson behind the cage that appears in her tiny Manhattan apartment a week later.
This was in his will for you.
It’s his cockatoo.
A little bird, for his little bird.
-
When they first meet, she is five, and has just been caught in crossfire between grumpy soldiers and resistant civilians, and is bleeding from her stomach.
Her only mission was to give a message to a particular person, but now she can’t remember the details, and she is running, and the red is staining her dress something awful, when warm hands, burning hands, boiling hands, lift her up, and that is all she remembers before the world goes black.
She stirs, wakes, shifts, feels the stitches beneath the cotton of her dress, and startles.
At the door is a tall, broad man. He is not unhandsome. He smiles wearily at her, but something in his eyes is friendly, and calm, and that is why Natalia does not flinch when he settles at the bed beside her, and slowly brushes the sweat-soaked strands of hair from her forehead.
“Hello, little bird,” he says softly, “I am Ivan. What is your name?”
“Natalia,” she murmurs, and the lie comes as easily as dancing now.
He smiles.
“Ah,” he says gently, “I see that I have a lyre bird.”
She tenses, and her blue eyes blaze.
“It is the greatest of cruelties,” he continues, as if she is not glaring at him with all the force a child can muster, “that lyre birds were given no song of their own - only the songs others give them. Da?”
She shivers.
Later, she will hear of his imprisonment, and send letters, drawings, tiny scraps of hope that keep him going, even when the night is black and all else around him is lost. What he will cannot know - will never know - is that his replies fill her, in her darkest days, with just as much hope as hers did for him.