emmylou | natasha romanoff

two.

2012
SHIELD Headquarters
Three Months After the Attack

"You wanted to speak with me?"

Natasha Romanoff stood in the doorway of Nicholas "Nick" Fury's office. She stood there, posture straight with hands tucked behind her back, like a soldier reporting for duty. Her boss and director of SHIELD, Nick Fury looked away from the box he was searching through and up at the red-headed agent.

"Yes," he says, "Agent Romanoff, come in please and close the door behind you." 

Natasha obeys, closing the door behind her as she approaches Nick's desk.

"Agent Hill was going through the archives of SHIELD when she found this," Fury says as he pulls out a set of old tapes. Natasha looks at the tapes and sees the name Allen written on them but nothing else. She racks her brain for any mission that she'd gone on involving a subject named Allen. There were a few, but none that would have been associated with SHIELD.

"Am I supposed to be familiar with the subject?" Natasha asks.

"You tell me," Fury states. He takes one of the tapes and he heads over to the corner of his office where a TV with a built in VCR. He turns the TV on and shoves the VCR into it. Natasha stares at the TV screen watching the static.

The word play crosses the screen and Natasha continues to look on as the screen shifts to what looks like an interrogation room. There's a young girl sitting in the chair and Natasha continues to look on curiously.

"Hi there," a woman with dark hair says as she extends her hand to the girl, "My name is Valentina, what's yours?"

"Kennedy."

"Will you tell me your full name please?"

"Kennedy Emily Louise Allen."

Natasha's eyes widen slightly as she stares at the screen. There she was. Her neighbor. Her best friend. Her humanity. Little Kennedy whose legs dangled as she sat in a chair far too large for her and was smarter than anyone Natasha had ever met, even now as she worked with the smartest brains in the world.

The first person she had ever loved.

"Emmylou," Natasha said softly. Fury turned to look at her but said nothing.

"Do you know why you're here, Kennedy?" Valentina's voice asked on the tape.

"My mom said that this is about Natasha?"

Fury pauses the tape and looks over at Natasha. The agent was unable to tear her eyes away from the screen as she stared at the small girl.

"Kennedy Allen is a surgical doctor in Springfield, Ohio," Fury states.

Natasha finally tears her eyes away from the screen and looks over at her boss, the man who gave her the chance to start over, "Why are you telling me this?"

Fury sighs as he ejects the tape and puts it back into the box, "These tapes combined are four hours of footage of SHIELD agents questioning a nine-year-old girl about her friendship with you. She said that you saved her. I can't help but feel that she did the same for you."

Natasha was not one to get emotional, in fact the only two people she felt comfortable being vulnerable with were Nick and her SHIELD partner, Clint Barton. And while she'd share something here and there, talking about Kennedy felt like exposing who she had been. The young, naïve, and innocent childhood that she almost had.

"She did save me," Natasha answers, her voice quiet as she stares off into space, "I told Kennedy the truth. I told her that I was trained by an organization called the Red Room and that one day I would have to leave."