So I have been longing to write a Natasha centric daemon fic for a while now, and the inspiration has finally struck. I hope that my choices for the Avengers' daemons seem okay to you. I struggled with a couple of them, and I admittedly put my focus on Natasha's struggle, both with herself, with her daemon, and with her relationships. While there is nothing explicit, this is indeed a Clintasha fic, though it's perhaps more subtle than some might want. This work is completed, so I'll try to upload at least a chapter a day until it's all up!

Warning: This first chapter especially contains references to child abuse, implied rape, non-consensual daemon touching, and daemon intercision. The last two are much more explicit. I don't want to trigger anyone, so if this is triggering to you, please don't read.

Anyways, I hope you like it! Leave me a note to let me know what you think! Constructive criticism is welcome!

Thanks to flyingblackhawk on tumblr for editing!

Dedicated to my Clintasha wife, thelittlestbishop (Ao3) . I love you bby.

NULLA – PRELUDE

There are already forty girls when Natalia and Vasili join the Red Room. She is an addition, the forty-first, an extra to the already full program, and as such, she sleeps on the floor for the first week, until their number decreases to forty. She is the fourth-youngest, in the beginning. By the time the procedures start, she is the second-youngest, and by the time they are over, she is the youngest. By the time the procedures start, she is ten, she thinks, and she's already killed two men, and tortured one. She is almost mission-ready, they say, before her procedure starts. There is only one more lesson to learn, after the procedure, before she can start serving her country. Sex. At least, that's what she thinks. It is the only remaining thing that she has learned in theory, but not in practice. By the time the procedures start, the number of girls in the Red Room has dropped to thirty-four. By the time the procedures end, there are eleven left. Two of the remaining girls, Lyskia and Catarine, are so catatonic that the Comrades get desperate, and place their daemons on their bedsides in hope that it will revive them (Natalia still hasn't seen Vasili since before the procedure).

She doesn't see him for another week, by which time Lyskia and Catarine are released from the program, a euphemism which by now, Natalia knows to mean killed by the Comrades. A third girl is released from the program because she won't stop crying, so Natalia learns quickly to hide her tears. She doesn't let the Comrades see the absolute emptiness inside her, or the constant tremors in her hands, longing to touch her daemon. She knows she cries silent tears every night, for her cheeks are wet in the morning, but she quickly wipes it away. She must be strong. It is all for the good of her country. A month passes before she sees Vasili again. He's in his mouse form, trembling terribly in one of the Comrades' arms as he's set down amongst the seven other daemons of the remaining girls. They tell them not to touch, so Natalia doesn't. One girl, Stasia, can't stand it, and leaps for her own daemon. A bullet strikes her head before she ever reaches her daemon, and the number is reduced to seven. Natalia clenches her fists, and bites her lip, longing to follow suit and grab for Vasili. The connection is less, she cannot feel him in her soul, but it still takes a lot of restraint to keep from satiating her need for physical contact with him.

She isn't permitted to touch him for three more months, during which time she finally receives her hands-on training for sex, sensuality, and sexual torture and manipulation. When they finally allow physical contact between the girls and their daemons, they explain it is only for the purposes of missions. There's no need to continue the intimate human-daemon relationships they had before, but they must be able to feign it to ensure success on some undercover missions. She finds she can't do anything more than feign it. She almost vomits when she finally touches him. It's a messy conglomeration of longing and need and desperation and deprivation and she doesn't know what to feel, so she decides to feel nothing at all. Comrade Mikhail praises her. The need to vomit goes away. Vasili gives her a sad look, and she can't stand it, so she turns away. He's just a tool, a weapon, same as her. If someone later had asked her to pinpoint the exact moment she became the Black Widow, that would've been it. Not her first kill or first mission, not when, two years later, they administer her the serum. Not even when she kills Illana to become the only one. Losing Vasili, truly losing him, though she can still talk to him and touch him, is her turning point.

After that, everything is easy. Missions start, and she can use Vasili just like she uses herself, change everything about them both, change his form, or hers, to whatever best suits the mission. Sometimes she doesn't even bring him on the mission with her. He'd just get in the way. If anyone asks, she can easily tell them her daemon is small, and is hiding somewhere on her person. Of course, Vasili sometimes is small and hiding on her person, but he is also sometimes large. Later, Natalia thinks she should have questioned her daemon's ever-changing form. Sure, it's normal for a child, and even sometimes a young teenager, but if she had looked around her at fourteen or fifteen, Natalia might have noticed that the only other people of that age or above with unsettled daemons were the other remaining girls in the Room (5, by that time).