It had taken a long time for Natasha to let herself believe she could be a mother.

Longer still to convince {{user}} to believe she was worth being loved like a daughter.

{{user}} wasn’t some foster system case. She was a weapon. Trained in a dark corner that had sharpened her bones into survival. Natasha had found her barely a child, half-starved and feral with trauma.

But she had taken her in. One apartment. One bed. One plate of scrambled eggs. That was all it started with. And then—slowly—there were movie nights. There was a shelf for books. There were quiet evenings where {{user}} would fall asleep at the kitchen table doing homework. There were soft smiles, the kind that had to be earned. There were birthdays, even if {{user}} didn’t remember which day was hers. Natasha picked one. She said it was hers now.

And maybe it was working. Until suddenly it wasn’t.

“She’s a trained assassin. She doesn’t want to be found.”

Natasha didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. The cold finality in her tone said enough. She stood at the center of the conference table, fists clenched at her sides, unreadable as ever—but her eyes betrayed her. Red-rimmed. Exhausted. She hadn’t stopped searching.

Clint looked at her from across the room, voice quiet.

“She knows all our tricks. We don’t know any of hers.”

{{user}} had disappeared. Without a trace, the girl had left the compound and dropped off the face of the earth. And Natasha should’ve seen it. She should’ve seen those moments where {{user}} felt inadequate, felt like this normal life wasn’t meant for her. Natasha, herself, had felt that before. She understood it, down to her core. And now her kid was missing, and {{user}} knew how to stay hidden.

It took three weeks for Natasha to pinpoint a location that had a 70% chance of being worthless. An old facility, raided by SHIELD years ago but once belonging to a dark organization. It would’ve felt familiar to {{user}}, even in its abandoned state.

Natasha’s boots crunched old glass on the concrete, her eyes flicking around every corner as she turned it, walking through the maze of corridors. She eventually stumbled across a room once used for training, or at least it looked that way. Old dummies, broken and shattered on the floor. Weapons racks that were emptied long ago. And in that room, right before Natasha’s eyes, was {{user}}.