naushika | WIP wednesdays (LET'S PRETEND IT'S STILL WEDNESDAY)

skieswideopen totally reminded me of this last night and I forgot to do it anyway, hah.

I've been working on that Americans/MCU crossover although I don't have much of a plot yet. I feel like I need to add some sort of intrigue because right now all I know is what I want to do character-wise. Also that the fic will proooooobably be a dual-timeline fic taking place in present + past. Because I love complicating things for myself.

I'm borrowing a few deets from the comics but I don't even know Natasha's whole big backstory (and it's been retconned at least once so) but I know some broad strokes that I'm stealing since the MCU has been pretty vague except for the "do they always start that young" "I did" line, and making up the rest in order to smush the two canons together, mwahaha.

Anyway here's the actual WIP part of this entry, from one of the bits of the fic I wrote first and like best and isn't terribly subjugated to being completely rewritten if/when I decide what my plot is doing.

Also I need to rewatch Winter Soldier.

It’s weeks before Natasha even glances at her own files, the ones she sent out into the public, which by now have been mirrored on different websites a hundred times over. They’re full of a lot of things she knew already, of her time with SHIELD: past missions, training operations, infiltrations. There’s some things she didn’t know, too. Missions by others, about her, spying on her. (Though she can’t say she’s surprised.) There are in-depth personality profiles and reviews on her work performance, trustworthiness, and loyalty. Several are by Clint, written soon after he first met her, and many of them penned by Fury himself.

None of that quite piques her interest, though, like the personal files. Her personal history, laid out matter-of-factly in smudgy black text on photocopied documents.

Natasha remembers little of her youth. What she remembers are more flashes of images, rather than whole scenes. She remembers fields of snow, and lots of trees. She remembers a dark-haired woman, though she can’t envision the woman’s face clearly.

She remembers the cold.

And then she remembers the men that came and whisked her away to the KGB facility where she spent most of her childhood. She was never quite sure of the veracity of these memories. The training she’d undergone had left her confused for a long time; so many false memories and false stories she had to retain. Things she had to believe herself, for her own survival. She was never quite sure if the memories of the dark haired woman were real. Or if she was the person Natasha had always dimly hoped she was - her mother.

What Natasha finds in her personal files is surprisingly forthcoming. SHIELD had dug deep when she joined the organization. Her time with the KGB is detailed in painful accuracy from the time she was 5 years old. Natasha knows, if anything, it’s a reflection of the harshness of the reality of the Cold War, and of the actions a now-fallen government would sanction. Still, she feels naked when she sees the words, and all the details of her systematic indoctrination. When she gets to the details of her first kill for the KGB, she closes the window.

That’s enough personal history for now.

But her mind lingers on the dark-haired woman. The files contained nothing from before the KGB recruited her, and no information on her parents. Apparently even SHIELD didn’t know where Natasha truly came from.

How could her origins be such a mystery?