𝐁𝐔𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐅𝐋𝐈𝐄𝐒 | 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘢 𝘙𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘧𝘧 [✓]

Ch.2 Ask Me Later

Word count: 1.07k

Eliza's POV:

She freezes, her whole body stops moving, and I bet her heart stops it's beating. I haven't a clue what was on those files, but I now guess it is something dangerous to Nat.

"What for?"

"They fit in with the projected assignment Fury has me on. It's the second to last piece to the puzzle." I reply casually. Its not as if she has a right to blow up at me. I just got here.

"Fuck you, Fury." She snaps hastily under her breath. She pauses to take an exasperated breath in, before letting it our again slowly. "What can you do, exactly?"

"Play nice, Romanoff."

"You're a buzz kill, Steve. Get gone, let the grown ups talk." She snarls, a smirk settling on her lips. God she looks beautiful. Her red hair is loose from training and her skin still glistens with moisture.

"You do know that I'm about fifty years older than you, right?"

"The big kids are talking, Rogers. Bugger off." She turns back back me, but not before the two share a smile and he leaves the room. I can't lie, the jealousy boils from deep within. "So, what do you do?"

"I specialise in robotics, analysing rare artefacts, deciphering codes, breaking boundaries."

"Any magical ties?"

"Nope." I say popping the 'p'. My to my surprise, she scoffs, playing on my feelings and contrasted reality.

"So you're telling me that Fury brought in a rip off Tony Stark?"

I bite my tongue to prevent an outburst.

What the fuck? One second she's blushing till dawn and the next she's breathing down my throat like she's some kind of war torn wolf - of which I wouldn't be surprised if she was.

I nod instead. "Ask me that again later."

"The file is in the top left box in the conference room, left wall, top shelf. What you find in there goes no further that your eyes." She warns, and somehow it resonates in my ears. Ask my brother and his first reaction it to always tell people that I say no for a living. To be fair though, it's not like he's wrong. I've never fit it with circumstance, although I never tried. I was content in being different. Hesitantly, I turn away, and she does too. It's not long before she's put me to the back of her mind, back to beating up a punching bag. Huffing, I drown out her groans and leave the gym in a hurry.

I head towards the conference room, where Natasha had said the file would be. I grapple for the top shelf, having to tip-toe for it. I slip my fingers in between the gap for the handle and slide the box from the wooden shelf. It comes away with ease. I take off the lid, biting my bottom lip in reluctant anticipation. I can now see why Nat tensed when I asked. These files contain her life, her work, her past. It's terrifying. Missions she's completed, for and against S.H.E.I.L.D; the lives and names she has created: Natalie Rushman, Natasha Romanoff, Natalia Shostakova.

I handle all the papers with care, taking each one in both hands. I stroke the writing, her name and her only know first picture. The censored birthday, but known birth place of Stalingrad. The next two boxes tackle her past, her deeply emotional conflict against S.H.E.I.L.D, her dwellings in being the notorious Black Widow without compunction or remorse. The one and only fully fledged daughter of Dreykov and Madame B and the Red Room. Her false created world of lies and hatred, that she based the good guys off of. The files contained so much truth that I was afraid to move on. But there was one file that I needed, one that meant more than Natasha, more than anyone could have imagined. It was how my parents died. How someone had been involved in their deaths.

Mission report, 21 August 2010.

I freeze at the first names on the list. 'Black Widow and The Winter Soldier -'

Natasha and who? That would be Bucky? Surely it wasn't Bucky - he was set free a year before. And Nat? What had Nat got to do with the ordeal? I freeze again, noticing my most fatal mistake. Natasha wasn't as innocent as I had originally thought. The woman was a master spy, hacker, assassin, for fuck's sake.

I read on.

'The pair, supposedly controlled or blackmailed by Hydra, commit murder on the Parkers, scientists who created the first world saving antidote for those influenced by - '

The words are scrubbed, smudged in to unseeable things. I can't see much more than that, but all I know is that Natasha killed my parents. Natasha and Bucky killed my parents, left me and Peter orphans to a deadly world. If he hadn't been bitten by a radioactive spider, (that and Aunt May) I think we would have ended up somewhere fatal, working a job for criminals. I don't know what to think, my mind has gone blank. For a moment, I let out the breath I don't know I'm holding in, allowing it to flow out slowly. I have have get to grips with the fact that the woman I so badly want to love murdered my parents, that my first friend assisted her. That the good and brave Natasha Romanoff and the loyal and calm Bucky Barnes destroyed my hope and happiness. I blink back tears in hopes that my sorrow will die back too. It doesn't - not to my surprise.

But something doesn't seem right. It doesn't feel right because strangely, I know Nat. I've known Bucky. They wouldn't do this, would they? And infulenced by Hydra? Nothing made sense. Maybe at the moment, I was supposed to hate Nat, hate them both, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to. As sad as I was, I couldn't blame them for their actions. If they were under Hydra's control, who knows what my parents had been working on. If they were so desperate to get rid of the substance that they had to kill, how would my family's legacy end up?

I suspected that this was no accident, no coincidence. My parents had died for something that Hydra despised, feared.

If Hydra was the ones behind the deaths of Joshua and Mary Parker, then it wasn't Nat and Bucky I should blame.