Months earlier, she’d sat on the edge of her bed, staring at a cheap pregnancy test clutched between her gloved fingers. The neon pink plus symbol burned her eyes like a brand. It wasn’t possible. She was careful. She was trained. She didn’t even remember the guy — his face, his name, just a haze of loneliness and vodka. The kind of mistake someone like her couldn’t afford to make.
Her body had gone cold.
She didn’t want a baby. She wasn’t built for that. She wasn’t soft. She was a weapon.
She didn’t tell anyone. Not Tony. Not Steve. Not even Clint, not at first. She went on missions, hard ones. She volunteered for the roughest assignments, fought hand-to-hand until her knuckles split open and her ribs ached. She climbed, dropped, dove, bled—like if she just pushed hard enough, her body would break the way it was supposed to.
But it didn’t.
And then one night, after a mission in Vienna, she was lying in a motel bathtub, cold water around her hips, exhausted, too tired to even think—and she felt it.
The smallest flutter. A movement. Like the brush of a bird’s wing beneath her skin.
The baby had kicked.
Her hand flew to her stomach. Her throat clenched.
And just like that—her heart shattered into pieces she didn’t even know she had.
She changed everything after that.
Tony didn’t ask questions when she requested an apartment in the city—just raised a brow, made a sarcastic comment about "settling down," and handed her the keys.
She painted the nursery herself. Pale yellow walls. White crib. Little stuffed animals she didn’t know the names of. She read books, watched videos, quietly asked Laura for help, and tucked baby onesies into drawers like they were landmines.
For the first time in her life, she planned for the future.
When the time came, it was Laura who drove her to the hospital while Clint sat white-knuckled in the passenger seat, barking at New York drivers. No one else knew. She didn’t want the others to see her like that—vulnerable. Soft.
But the moment you were placed in her arms, wrapped in cotton and crying, your fingers curling instinctively toward the warmth of her chest, it didn’t matter anymore.
You were hers. You were real. And somehow, impossibly, you had forgiven her before she had ever asked.
Now, you were asleep on her chest, your tiny breath fogging the fabric of her hospital gown, and Natasha Romanoff—the Black Widow, the assassin, the ex-Red Room killer—sat still, afraid to even blink in case she woke you.
She whispered words you couldn’t hear yet.
“I’m sorry for almost giving up. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what you’d mean to me.”
You shifted, sighed, and pressed your cheek tighter to her skin.
She kissed your forehead. You smelled like milk and baby powder and something impossibly warm. Like home.
You were everything she never thought she could have.