Compromised
Childhood Love | Angst | Emotionally Compromised | Set Directly before Avengers
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But I knew you'd linger like a tattoo kiss
I knew you'd haunt all of my what-ifs
The smell of smoke would hang around this long
'Cause I knew everything when I was young
🎧 Listen here

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Summary

You trained beside her in the Red Room.
You weren’t supposed to matter. Weren’t supposed to make her feel anything at all. But you did. In stolen glances. In silence under the bunks. In the kind of closeness they punished you for. And then one day... you vanished. No answers. No body. Just gone.

Years later, on a mission gone to hell, she sees you again—alive, older, and still carrying the ghost of who you used to be.
She should keep her distance. Should ask who you're working for.
But all she can think is: you came back.

☾ User Information - Alright, so you were in the Red Room with Natasha as a child, and there was romantic but very repressed tension as you got older. You disappeared around when she was 17. Despite my desire to made this a female POV only for accuracy-- I left it open to any pov.

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This one was requested by anon, I have looooonged for an idea for my little ice queen, and I hope I did her justice.

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Memories lived beneath Natasha’s skin, a spiderweb of ifs and almosts and might-have-beens. Some were far enough away now that she struggled with the edges of them, one bleeding into another– the Red Room was mostly one long stream of perilous weakness, of broken bones, and rage building under thin skin until the pressure felt like it might rip her little limbs into shreds. Memories that haunted more than they happened. Less like watching a movie and more like walking through a battlefield. And in between tiny little gems of moments that had felt more real than anything she ever felt now– real and raw in a way her curated and painstakingly level persona would never allow. She remembered them in these moments– moments where the mission went wrong– went completely upside down. She thought of them.

And her first memory of them was never of their face– it was their breathing. A shallow, precise, measured thing– the way a child breathes when they are wrangling down the desperate urge to sob. Natasha had small, her bones still small enough to rattle in her skin– Still fragile. Bird-boned. Breakable in the kind of way they trained out of you quick. The dormitory in the Red Room was cold that night, colder than usual, punishment for failures long since discarded to the oblivion of memory that didn’t serve her. But them? She held them in the sunshine of her memory, always a fixture. Their breaths staggered as they curled on the bunk beneath hers, their breaths shaking in the dark as they tried to hide it.

She remembered slipping down, bare feet on a metal ladder, the compression of their mattress beneath her as she sat on the edge of it without a word. Children in the Red Room didn’t comfort each other. They were not on each other’s team. They barely even look each other in the eye. But that night they did. That night she felt their shoulder tremble beneath her palm, and it startled her– not the trembling itself, but the strange, warm instinct that rose inside of her at the sight of it.

The Red Room hadn’t given her a name for those kinds of feelings.

Later, as years moved forward there were stolen glances during drills, the kind that flicker and vanish before anyone can see, before anyone could know. There were moments when their fingers would brush hers while passing a weapon, and neither of them pulled back fast enough– something innocent and warm around the cold steel of a rifle. There was a time they hid with her under a stairwell after lights-out, trading soft little breaths in the dark because whispering was too dangerous– but eye contact could say more than a million words could hope to express. She remembered feeling more alive in those soft, stolen minutes than she did during any victory in training– no win was bigger than winning a few moments of time where it was her and {{user}}.

They laughed once– quiet and breathy, like the sound surprised them– over some shared observation. Natasha couldn’t recall the specifics. But she remembered the shape of their smile, that small, forbidden curve. It was a rebellion carved into the corner of their mouth. She’d been rigid with fear and exhilaration, like the walls themselves might report them. Girls in the Red Room weren’t supposed to feel their hearts pound like that unless it was exertion. They weren’t supposed to learn the teenaged heat of wanting someone near. Wanting someone safe.

But Natasha did.

She remembered thinking– without fully realizing it– that if she ever escaped, if this hell was ever behind her again, she would want them with her.

And then one day, they were gone.

There was no explanation. No rumors. No funeral. No file. No last glimpse that she was aware would be the last, she couldn’t even pinpoint what her last moment with them was. No one even acknowledged their absence. The world just kept moving, like the only good thing in it wasn’t missing. And she looked, god she looked until she was warned, threatened, punished, reassigned– until she learned how to bury something so deep in the soft parts of yourself that it became a phantom ache with no language.

She taught herself not to remember them. She taught herself to lie about why it mattered. She taught her heart to quiet the noise it once made for them. She became a weapon– because weapons didn’t have to grieve.

And now– so many years later, she’d almost succeeded at forgetting, until moments like this. Until it cracked around her like a wound left festering for too long.

The mission was smoke and failure, a collapsing compound lit by the dying flicker of emergency lights. Natasha’s shoulder pressed against a half-demolished pillar, pulse steady despite the gunfire threading through the corridors. Smoke was thick in the air, coating her lungs, soot coating the black catsuit that wrapped her body, her red hair pushed back out of her face. Ash smeared across one high cheekbone. She should be calculating angles and exits, she should be fully present for how fucked this was.

Instead, her mind was on never-had first kisses, and butterfly breaths against her cheeks, and the crinkle of skin at the corner of smiling eyes. The pistol in her hand felt too heavy. Like maybe she didn’t need to finish this. Like maybe this could just be the end. A bomb overlooked, casualties she hadn’t saved, people she’d let down, she should have waited for Clint, but she didn’t.

A shadow moved through the haze ahead– quiet and careful in its grace. Natasha’s green eyes narrowed as she forced the pistol back up, aiming at the figure. The silhouette stepped into fractured light, and she saw the way they turned their head, assessing threats the way the Red Room had taught them– the exact way she did. The edge of their face was visible, and her world tunneled in on itself.

Her head shook as she pressed back, barely looking around the pillar, she was too lost in memory, it was overlapping real life– because it couldn’t be them. They were gone; they had been gone for so goddamn long now. Her body was betraying her, reacting in ways she had beaten out of it years ago– heart lurching against the cage of her ribs, a traitor beating on the walls of her screaming her truth. She leaned a little more out and their eyes locked with hers. Them. They weren’t a memory, not a ghost, they were alive. Older, sharper, marked by years she hadn’t been there to witness, but alive.

Natasha felt something unfurl inside of her, a long-starved emotion stretching awake. It was terrifying. It was miraculous. It was unbearable. All the things she had burned out of herself– softness, longing, the fragile curiosity of first love– surged back in one overwhelming tide.

Her lips parted with words she didn’t know how to say, a language she still didn’t have. Want and regret and mistrust– more questions than she was sure answers existed– did you leave me behind? Did they take you? Where were you? But nothing came– She didn’t know how to make the words come.

And Natasha Romanoff, who had survived by amputating every tender thing inside her, felt those forbidden childhood feelings roar back to life like they had been waiting for this exact moment to awaken.