Chrysalis

She makes her first kill at thirteen.

It's a small job, really, and Natasha is deployed as an experiment, to see if the Red Room has finished crafting their best specimen. They've stuck needles in her skull for years, making careful notes about her progress in crimson ledgers, and now they want the profit.

They've peeled back her skin and torn at her limbs and glued her back together again with ice and curses and alcohol fumes while they stripped her of anything that could be called a soul. She can recite her cover stories backwards while hurling knives into leather imitation men, and when she tries to stab her handler's heart an officer grabs her chin and calls her perfect. They tie up her hair with ribbons and give her a party dress and then send her to the home of a man who likes these things.

When she's in his lap Natasha cuffs him to the chair, puts a plastic explosive down his pants, sets the timer, and leaves. Her handler praises her sense of style and locks her in her room.

At sixteen she shoots her handler between the eyes and is assigned a new one whose name Natasha never bothers to learn before she tips him over a balcony and runs for something like freedom. She's been passed around and turned upside down and inside out so often she doesn't know who she is anymore, but she knows who she wants to be.

So Natasha learns to forge her own path, to take cash when it is offered and lives when the other side offers her more, she steals secrets and sabotages planes and fucks men old enough to be her grandfather. The showy moves of her younger years give way to a subtler technique; knives and guns with silencers and a wicked chokehold.

She digs the trackers from her wrists one freezing morning in Ekaterinburg. The Red Room can still find her any time they like, but it's the gesture that counts and as long as she still takes orders from them on the odd occasion they'll let her live a bit longer.

It's the Red Room who orders her to eliminate Ivan Drakov, a wealthy up and coming politician who just won't do as he's told. His family is old money and she finds him at the site of the hospital that's about to open with his funds. Natasha watches him for days, getting to know his routine, waiting for the time when he'll be alone.

It's an utterly mindless job that should be an insult to her skills, until his daughter visits him with her stepmother and everything changes. Drakov's daughter is four years old and her eyes are completely dead in a way that no four year old's should be. Drakov keeps her in his office and Natasha hand tightens on her gun.

When she dreams she's eight years old again, bent on hands and knees, trying not to vomit from the stuff they've pumped into the room while she screams her loyalty again and again because she saw what happened to the last girl who failed the test, and the men with their red ledgers wear gas masks and nod at each other while they take notes, she shows promise, this girl, such promise…

She wakes up with bite marks on her knuckles and Drakov will die tonight.

Natasha is an efficient killer and does not play with her prey, but in a tribute to her explosive youth she pours petrol on desks and unused hospital beds, and watches from a safe distance as the building burns down.

Drakov's daughter sits at her feet, looking at the falling ash with a childish interest. Seeing her father killed has done nothing to her and she reminds Natasha a little too much of herself, so she delivers the girl to a foster home that the Red Room prefers to recruit from. A new training subject will keep them off her back for a while.

Sometimes she thinks about what that girl will become (her name is Svetlana, she whispered it into Natasha's ear, and elephants are her favourite animal), and Natasha avoids mirrors for a week because this is no time to develop a conscience.

One month later Natasha's in an abandoned train station in Siberia, three Mafia henchmen dead and another to go. The man rushes her, blind with fear, and she's crouching to avoid the blow when an arrow hits him in the chest. She whirls around, stunned, and meets her equal.

She knows of Hawkeye from his reputation, but he surprises her nonetheless. He's less than five feet away from her and his bow is pointed at her throat, because she's a close range kill, no sniper arrows here. His eyes are like iron and a man who can manage to sneak up on her deserves to be her executioner, but that doesn't mean she can't take him with her.

The blood from her last mark is still wet on her face and she tastes it on her lips as she smiles. "You're good."

He smirks and the dart hits her in the neck because he's faster than his reputation. Her senses cloud almost immediately but she still lands a kick in his stomach. He's going to slit her throat anyway so it seems a fair trade.

But she comes too with her throat still intact and her body chilled on a hard tile floor. Her crusty lashes open and in the dim light she sees Hawkeye sitting casually against the wall, one leg bent and the other straight, with an arm resting on his knee in lazy arrogance.

Her limbs are like lead and of course her hands and feet are bound. She tries to launch herself forward anyway but only succeeds in bumping her head on the floor.

Hawkeye watches her with an amused expression, unmoving. "So, as long as you're just lying there," he starts, as if they were continuing an interrupted conversation, "I have a deal for you. You take it or you die. So you might as well consider it."

She does.