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mhalachaiIf you've been waiting for the chapter in which John and Natasha finally have it out - wait no longer.
At AO3
Summary: Natasha Romanoff tries to reconnect with her son. This is understandably easier said than done.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, John Sheppard. Guest appearance by Phil Coulson.
Warnings: Family secrets. Truly epic levels of swearing.
Notes: Beta thanks towebsandwhiskers, who is awesome. And uh-oh, someone just activated the Ancient chair in Antarctica and is off to Atlantis. Don't tell Mother. AKA the one in which we learn that John Sheppard has some lingering issues.
Follows Widow's Weeds, Widow's Flight, Widow's Son.
<< Part Four
July 12, 2004
The first sign that something was wrong came when Coulson interrupted her training routine.
Natasha had been with SHIELD for over two years and in that time, some things had been made perfectly clear: No one messed with Clint Barton's weaponry, Phil Coulson's afternoon coffee, or Natasha Romanoff's training routine. The first few times an agent had tried, Natasha was quick to put them on the floor.
And yet here Coulson was, standing at the edge of the mat.
"Tasha."
Here Coulson was, standing at the edge of the mat, interrupting her.
Natasha shifted her centre of balance, came out of the handstand, and executed a series of twisting back flips to land six inches from Coulson. "What's wrong?" she asked, barely winded.
Coulson held up a letter. "This came for me today."
Natasha took the envelope from his hand, noted that it was addressed to Coulson, and without asking removed the contents. Wrapped around another envelope was a piece of paper.
"What is this?" Natasha demanded.
"I got that ten minutes ago," Coulson told her, turning to leave.
"Why are you giving it to me now?" Natasha pressed, telling herself that John had written the letter to Coulson only days ago, he wasn't dead.
Coulson paused in the doorway. "Because contrary to popular opinion, I have no desire to be involved in your personal life. Major Sheppard deploys in two days from Colorado Springs." And with that, he vanished.
Hands steady, Natasha opened the second envelope.
That was it.
Natasha read the letter again, then a third time, incredulousness giving way to anger. What sort of project was worth dying for? Who wrote a letter like that when they were walking into the great abyss?
Natasha shoved the letter back into its envelope. This simply wouldn't do. John was still in the country, not even three states away.
The SHIELD airplane hangar was sparsely guarded at this time of day. Natasha had been holding onto a fake flight plane for months just in case. Escape plans fell into place as she moved; Natasha had a plane to steal.
With a bit of remote help from Clint hacking into credit card records, Natasha tracked John to a coffee shop in Colorado Springs.
John looked up when Natasha dropped into the chair across the table. "Coulson gave you the letter, didn't he?" John demanded.
Natasha threw the envelope on the table. "So that's it?" she asked. "You're just going to vanish into the great beyond and let me wait two years to hear if you die or not?"
John crossed his arms over his chest. "Better two years than thirty, wouldn't you say?" he retorted.
Natasha made herself hold her tongue. They were attracting attention from others in a coffee shop and she was not going to have this conversation in public. "Walk with me," she said, and stalked out of the coffee shop.
She was half-surprised when John followed.
Outside the coffee shop, Natasha turned right. John caught up to her in five long steps, and they headed along the boulevard in silence until they got to a small park. John veered toward a convenient bench and slumped down, favoring his right side. Natasha sat beside him. The only evidence of his Antarctic injuries were a few fading scars along his hairline and down his neck to his shoulder.
But she wasn't supposed to know about that. In the months since he'd woken from his coma, he hadn't mentioned his injuries, and Natasha kept silent.
She'd been watching him without his knowing for decades now; why should now be any different?
"I just..." John finally said, staring out into the distance. "I sent that letter because I wanted you to know in case I didn't come back. I know what it's like to not know. Anyway, wasn't sure if you were out of the country or not so yeah. I sent it to Coulson."
Natasha put her hand on his arm. "I would have liked to say goodbye to you," she said.
John shrugged. "What's there to say? I got a better offer than flying scientists around the ice sheet, so what if it's dangerous?"
Thirty-four years old, and she could still tell when he was trying to bluster his way through a situation. "I meant when you were a child," she said softly.
John's jaw clenched, but he didn't speak.
"I'm sorry I didn't, but I couldn't."
"Or what, your KGB buddies would have killed me?" John snapped.
"Yes."
John shot to his feet. "I wouldn't have told anyone--"
"You were three years old."
"That's not the point--"
"You were three!" Natasha interrupted again. "I've been doing this much longer than you have, so don't tell me that you would have been safe if you'd known I was alive."
She hadn't meant for this to degenerate into an argument, but she supposed it was only a matter of time before this fragile peace between them fell apart.
John raked his hands through his hair. "You know what? Let's pretend that I understand that for an instant. So what the fuck was Oklahoma? And don't even fucking start about a vacation, I'm not Coulson."
Natasha took a deep breath. "I needed to get out of Europe for a while," she said evenly. "A project had ended badly and I needed to be where no one would think to look for me."
"Okay, sure," John said. "You hide out at the country fair, sure. Where I just happen to find you--"
"Is that what you think happened?" Natasha demanded. She could see a teenage boy thinking such things, but John was a man now, hadn't he worked this out? Didn't he understand? "You got a postcard from your pen pal about Oklahoma and the circus a month before you ran away, and you decided that was as good a place as any to go," Natasha said.
"How did you know that?" John asked. Natasha saw his expression change when he made the connection he'd missed for so many years. "You were my pen pal?" John demanded. He crossed his arms over his chest, backing away.
"John-"
"You were Janice from Seattle?" John asked, incredulous. "Jesus Christ, we wrote each other for three years!"
This time, Natasha was silent.
"I was fifteen! For three years, I told you everything, how could you do that to me?"
"I had to."
"No, you didn't!" John turned on his heel and walked across the grass. His anger was bleeding out white-hot in every movement and oh, how like his father he was in this moment. "Is this how you knew everything about me? By pretending to be other people I trusted?"
"What would you have had me do?" Natasha demanded.
"Oh, I don't know, how about not having my dead mother pretending to be my pen pal!" John rubbed his eyes angrily. "Jesus fuck, you're not normal!"
"I needed to make sure you were safe."
"You know, for someone who was supposed to be dead, you did a hell of a job of butting into my life at every step of the way."
"Has it ever occurred to you that I have enemies?" Natasha demanded. "Very dangerous people who would have no qualms about using you as leverage if they had found out about you?" She stood, growing angry herself, because she had no other choice. "Do you have any idea what those kind of people would do to a child?"
John put his hands on his hips, still angry, but focused and thinking now and that was what she needed from him right now.
"John, I had to keep you safe."
"Safe," John repeated. "How many of your people knew I even existed?"
Natasha took a step in John's direction; he didn't move away. She moved closer. "Not many," Natasha said. "A couple of people in charge of the department. My handler was another."
"Ah," John said. His voice changed away from pure anger to something else. "Mr. Leather Jacket? He came to see you just before you died, didn't he?"
Natasha ran her tongue over her lower lip, trying to think what she could possibly tell John. "He wasn't my handler," she said. "Just a..."
"Special friend?" John suggested. His mouth was set in a hard line.
"Yes," Natasha said.
"Whatever," John muttered. "So how many of these bad child-dismembering people are still out there?"
"Not many," Natasha said. "The number goes down every year."
"But there are some left," John finished for her. "Great. They still going to use me as leverage?"
Natasha thought about the people in her past, the living and the dead, and how her living enemies could still target John if things went wrong. "I can't say no."
John shook his head. "This is just awesome news," he snarked. "My life is turning into such a fucking special treat. Why did you even have me in the first place?"
Natasha froze. "What did you just say?"
"How did you think that whole undercover KGB thing was going to end, anyway?" John asked, and there was a ragged edge in his voice that tore at Natasha's heart. "They had birth control in the seventies, I hear that was a thing."
It took two tries for Natasha to speak. "Come over here," she ordered. She hadn't used that voice on John in more than thirty years ago. "Now."
Resultantly, as he had as a child, John dragged his feet over to the bench. Natasha waited until he sat down, resting his elbows on his knees, before she sat next to him.
Had that really been what he'd thought, all these years?
"Don't you ever question why I had you," she told him, still angry, at herself, at her life, at the choices she'd been forced to make.
"You shouldn't have," John said to the ground.
"You're right, I shouldn't have," she said. His shoulders tensed up. "But I did and I wanted you, so stop it."
Slowly, slowly, the tension eased out of his frame.
She'd never meant to have this conversation in her lifetime, but there was no way out of it now. Might as well try some actual honesty, she supposed John deserved that much from her. "You were... getting pregnant was an accident. I'd seen what happened with other agents and I didn't mean for it to happen, but it did."
"Funny, dad always treated me like more of a disaster than an accident."
Silently, Natasha found herself cursing Patrick Sheppard. "Hush, lapushka, your father loves you."
"He's got a funny way of showing it."
"He had a hard time as a child," Natasha said, not sure why she was defending her former husband.
"Yeah, I hear that Grandfather Sheppard was a real child-abusing sonofabitch," John muttered.
Around them, the sun was dipping behind the Colorado mountains, setting the sky on fire in pinks and reds. Natasha put her hand on John's shoulder, wondering if he would ever truly understand what Natasha had tried to do over the years, in keeping him safe, away from her.
"Patrick wanted to do the best by you," Natasha said. "I don't think he knew how to do that, sometimes."
"Yeah," John said. "I always figured he screwed up so much with me that when Dave came along there weren't many mistakes left for him to make."
"I'm sorry," Natasha said, knowing it wasn't enough, would never be enough for make up for thirty years.
John shrugged and sat back, resting his shoulder against Natasha's arm. "Doesn't matter anymore."
"Doesn't it?" Natasha asked quietly, brushing the hair over John's ear. The scars on his cheek from his crash in Antarctica were healing neatly, just a fading memory.
"Can't change any of it."
Natasha leaned against John's arm, watching the sun sink below the horizon. "There are some things I wouldn't change," she said. "Not any of my time with you."
John sighed. "Why the fuck is my life so weird?"
"How do you mean?"
"Like, you're some super spy ninja ballerina chick from Russia who's been killing people for decades, and I'm about to embark on some super secret wacky mission for the US Military."
"That's not weird, it's..." Natasha thought for a moment. "It's just the way our lives are."
John glanced at her, eyebrows raised.
"What we do isn't very different, you and I. We have our orders and we obey them."
John sighed. "I don't know if you've been following along at home, but I'm not all that great at obeying orders."
Natasha thought back across the many decades of her life, and all the choices she had made. "Neither am I," she conceded.
John smiled at the distance. "Guess I come by that honestly then."
When did you grow up, Natasha wondered, trying to reconcile this man with the teenager she'd known in Oklahoma, and the young child in Connecticut. So much the same, yet made so very different by the circumstances.
"So you didn't ask me about my posting," John observed after a few minutes.
"I know better," Natasha replied. "If you'd have been able to tell me about it, you would have done so in the letter. I suppose you won't be able to write."
"Nope."
Natasha ruthlessly pressed her emotions out of her voice. "I'll miss you."
In the twilight, she felt John slide his hand down to grasp hers briefly. "Yeah, me too."
"Thanks for giving me chance to say goodbye."
John bent down and kissed the top of her head. "Thanks for coming out here to say it, mom."
It was the second time in thirty-two years that her son had called her mom.
end part five
At AO3
Summary: Natasha Romanoff tries to reconnect with her son. This is understandably easier said than done.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Natasha Romanoff, John Sheppard. Guest appearance by Phil Coulson.
Warnings: Family secrets. Truly epic levels of swearing.
Notes: Beta thanks to
websandwhiskers, who is awesome. And uh-oh, someone just activated the Ancient chair in Antarctica and is off to Atlantis. Don't tell Mother. AKA the one in which we learn that John Sheppard has some lingering issues.Follows Widow's Weeds, Widow's Flight, Widow's Son.
<< Part Four
July 12, 2004
The first sign that something was wrong came when Coulson interrupted her training routine.
Natasha had been with SHIELD for over two years and in that time, some things had been made perfectly clear: No one messed with Clint Barton's weaponry, Phil Coulson's afternoon coffee, or Natasha Romanoff's training routine. The first few times an agent had tried, Natasha was quick to put them on the floor.
And yet here Coulson was, standing at the edge of the mat.
"Tasha."
Here Coulson was, standing at the edge of the mat, interrupting her.
Natasha shifted her centre of balance, came out of the handstand, and executed a series of twisting back flips to land six inches from Coulson. "What's wrong?" she asked, barely winded.
Coulson held up a letter. "This came for me today."
Natasha took the envelope from his hand, noted that it was addressed to Coulson, and without asking removed the contents. Wrapped around another envelope was a piece of paper.
July 10, 2004
Agent Coulson,
I am being deployed, and I am not certain if I will return. If you are notified of my death, or you do not hear from me within two years, please give the enclosed to Agent Romanoff.
Maj. John Sheppard, USAF
"What is this?" Natasha demanded.
"I got that ten minutes ago," Coulson told her, turning to leave.
"Why are you giving it to me now?" Natasha pressed, telling herself that John had written the letter to Coulson only days ago, he wasn't dead.
Coulson paused in the doorway. "Because contrary to popular opinion, I have no desire to be involved in your personal life. Major Sheppard deploys in two days from Colorado Springs." And with that, he vanished.
Hands steady, Natasha opened the second envelope.
Natasha,
If you are reading this, I'm either dead or missing in action. I suppose everyone in our line of work has to write a letter like this in the end. I want you to know that this posting is for the greater good, and I hope that I have made a positive contribution to the success of the project.
Please know that I am glad we could re-connect after all these years.
Regards,
John
That was it.
Natasha read the letter again, then a third time, incredulousness giving way to anger. What sort of project was worth dying for? Who wrote a letter like that when they were walking into the great abyss?
Natasha shoved the letter back into its envelope. This simply wouldn't do. John was still in the country, not even three states away.
The SHIELD airplane hangar was sparsely guarded at this time of day. Natasha had been holding onto a fake flight plane for months just in case. Escape plans fell into place as she moved; Natasha had a plane to steal.
With a bit of remote help from Clint hacking into credit card records, Natasha tracked John to a coffee shop in Colorado Springs.
John looked up when Natasha dropped into the chair across the table. "Coulson gave you the letter, didn't he?" John demanded.
Natasha threw the envelope on the table. "So that's it?" she asked. "You're just going to vanish into the great beyond and let me wait two years to hear if you die or not?"
John crossed his arms over his chest. "Better two years than thirty, wouldn't you say?" he retorted.
Natasha made herself hold her tongue. They were attracting attention from others in a coffee shop and she was not going to have this conversation in public. "Walk with me," she said, and stalked out of the coffee shop.
She was half-surprised when John followed.
Outside the coffee shop, Natasha turned right. John caught up to her in five long steps, and they headed along the boulevard in silence until they got to a small park. John veered toward a convenient bench and slumped down, favoring his right side. Natasha sat beside him. The only evidence of his Antarctic injuries were a few fading scars along his hairline and down his neck to his shoulder.
But she wasn't supposed to know about that. In the months since he'd woken from his coma, he hadn't mentioned his injuries, and Natasha kept silent.
She'd been watching him without his knowing for decades now; why should now be any different?
"I just..." John finally said, staring out into the distance. "I sent that letter because I wanted you to know in case I didn't come back. I know what it's like to not know. Anyway, wasn't sure if you were out of the country or not so yeah. I sent it to Coulson."
Natasha put her hand on his arm. "I would have liked to say goodbye to you," she said.
John shrugged. "What's there to say? I got a better offer than flying scientists around the ice sheet, so what if it's dangerous?"
Thirty-four years old, and she could still tell when he was trying to bluster his way through a situation. "I meant when you were a child," she said softly.
John's jaw clenched, but he didn't speak.
"I'm sorry I didn't, but I couldn't."
"Or what, your KGB buddies would have killed me?" John snapped.
"Yes."
John shot to his feet. "I wouldn't have told anyone--"
"You were three years old."
"That's not the point--"
"You were three!" Natasha interrupted again. "I've been doing this much longer than you have, so don't tell me that you would have been safe if you'd known I was alive."
She hadn't meant for this to degenerate into an argument, but she supposed it was only a matter of time before this fragile peace between them fell apart.
John raked his hands through his hair. "You know what? Let's pretend that I understand that for an instant. So what the fuck was Oklahoma? And don't even fucking start about a vacation, I'm not Coulson."
Natasha took a deep breath. "I needed to get out of Europe for a while," she said evenly. "A project had ended badly and I needed to be where no one would think to look for me."
"Okay, sure," John said. "You hide out at the country fair, sure. Where I just happen to find you--"
"Is that what you think happened?" Natasha demanded. She could see a teenage boy thinking such things, but John was a man now, hadn't he worked this out? Didn't he understand? "You got a postcard from your pen pal about Oklahoma and the circus a month before you ran away, and you decided that was as good a place as any to go," Natasha said.
"How did you know that?" John asked. Natasha saw his expression change when he made the connection he'd missed for so many years. "You were my pen pal?" John demanded. He crossed his arms over his chest, backing away.
"John-"
"You were Janice from Seattle?" John asked, incredulous. "Jesus Christ, we wrote each other for three years!"
This time, Natasha was silent.
"I was fifteen! For three years, I told you everything, how could you do that to me?"
"I had to."
"No, you didn't!" John turned on his heel and walked across the grass. His anger was bleeding out white-hot in every movement and oh, how like his father he was in this moment. "Is this how you knew everything about me? By pretending to be other people I trusted?"
"What would you have had me do?" Natasha demanded.
"Oh, I don't know, how about not having my dead mother pretending to be my pen pal!" John rubbed his eyes angrily. "Jesus fuck, you're not normal!"
"I needed to make sure you were safe."
"You know, for someone who was supposed to be dead, you did a hell of a job of butting into my life at every step of the way."
"Has it ever occurred to you that I have enemies?" Natasha demanded. "Very dangerous people who would have no qualms about using you as leverage if they had found out about you?" She stood, growing angry herself, because she had no other choice. "Do you have any idea what those kind of people would do to a child?"
John put his hands on his hips, still angry, but focused and thinking now and that was what she needed from him right now.
"John, I had to keep you safe."
"Safe," John repeated. "How many of your people knew I even existed?"
Natasha took a step in John's direction; he didn't move away. She moved closer. "Not many," Natasha said. "A couple of people in charge of the department. My handler was another."
"Ah," John said. His voice changed away from pure anger to something else. "Mr. Leather Jacket? He came to see you just before you died, didn't he?"
Natasha ran her tongue over her lower lip, trying to think what she could possibly tell John. "He wasn't my handler," she said. "Just a..."
"Special friend?" John suggested. His mouth was set in a hard line.
"Yes," Natasha said.
"Whatever," John muttered. "So how many of these bad child-dismembering people are still out there?"
"Not many," Natasha said. "The number goes down every year."
"But there are some left," John finished for her. "Great. They still going to use me as leverage?"
Natasha thought about the people in her past, the living and the dead, and how her living enemies could still target John if things went wrong. "I can't say no."
John shook his head. "This is just awesome news," he snarked. "My life is turning into such a fucking special treat. Why did you even have me in the first place?"
Natasha froze. "What did you just say?"
"How did you think that whole undercover KGB thing was going to end, anyway?" John asked, and there was a ragged edge in his voice that tore at Natasha's heart. "They had birth control in the seventies, I hear that was a thing."
It took two tries for Natasha to speak. "Come over here," she ordered. She hadn't used that voice on John in more than thirty years ago. "Now."
Resultantly, as he had as a child, John dragged his feet over to the bench. Natasha waited until he sat down, resting his elbows on his knees, before she sat next to him.
Had that really been what he'd thought, all these years?
"Don't you ever question why I had you," she told him, still angry, at herself, at her life, at the choices she'd been forced to make.
"You shouldn't have," John said to the ground.
"You're right, I shouldn't have," she said. His shoulders tensed up. "But I did and I wanted you, so stop it."
Slowly, slowly, the tension eased out of his frame.
She'd never meant to have this conversation in her lifetime, but there was no way out of it now. Might as well try some actual honesty, she supposed John deserved that much from her. "You were... getting pregnant was an accident. I'd seen what happened with other agents and I didn't mean for it to happen, but it did."
"Funny, dad always treated me like more of a disaster than an accident."
Silently, Natasha found herself cursing Patrick Sheppard. "Hush, lapushka, your father loves you."
"He's got a funny way of showing it."
"He had a hard time as a child," Natasha said, not sure why she was defending her former husband.
"Yeah, I hear that Grandfather Sheppard was a real child-abusing sonofabitch," John muttered.
Around them, the sun was dipping behind the Colorado mountains, setting the sky on fire in pinks and reds. Natasha put her hand on John's shoulder, wondering if he would ever truly understand what Natasha had tried to do over the years, in keeping him safe, away from her.
"Patrick wanted to do the best by you," Natasha said. "I don't think he knew how to do that, sometimes."
"Yeah," John said. "I always figured he screwed up so much with me that when Dave came along there weren't many mistakes left for him to make."
"I'm sorry," Natasha said, knowing it wasn't enough, would never be enough for make up for thirty years.
John shrugged and sat back, resting his shoulder against Natasha's arm. "Doesn't matter anymore."
"Doesn't it?" Natasha asked quietly, brushing the hair over John's ear. The scars on his cheek from his crash in Antarctica were healing neatly, just a fading memory.
"Can't change any of it."
Natasha leaned against John's arm, watching the sun sink below the horizon. "There are some things I wouldn't change," she said. "Not any of my time with you."
John sighed. "Why the fuck is my life so weird?"
"How do you mean?"
"Like, you're some super spy ninja ballerina chick from Russia who's been killing people for decades, and I'm about to embark on some super secret wacky mission for the US Military."
"That's not weird, it's..." Natasha thought for a moment. "It's just the way our lives are."
John glanced at her, eyebrows raised.
"What we do isn't very different, you and I. We have our orders and we obey them."
John sighed. "I don't know if you've been following along at home, but I'm not all that great at obeying orders."
Natasha thought back across the many decades of her life, and all the choices she had made. "Neither am I," she conceded.
John smiled at the distance. "Guess I come by that honestly then."
When did you grow up, Natasha wondered, trying to reconcile this man with the teenager she'd known in Oklahoma, and the young child in Connecticut. So much the same, yet made so very different by the circumstances.
"So you didn't ask me about my posting," John observed after a few minutes.
"I know better," Natasha replied. "If you'd have been able to tell me about it, you would have done so in the letter. I suppose you won't be able to write."
"Nope."
Natasha ruthlessly pressed her emotions out of her voice. "I'll miss you."
In the twilight, she felt John slide his hand down to grasp hers briefly. "Yeah, me too."
"Thanks for giving me chance to say goodbye."
John bent down and kissed the top of her head. "Thanks for coming out here to say it, mom."
It was the second time in thirty-two years that her son had called her mom.
end part five