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I'm going away for a week tomorrow, for New Years. So I'm putting this up now, and I apologise in advance for not responding to any comments -_-; Also, yes, I have a thing for mythopoeia. For that also, I apologise in advance.
Title: Fateforged, Remade
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Natasha, Clint, Fury, Phil, Bruce, Tony, Thor, Loki, Steve, mention of Mjolnir, Yinsen, Maria, Betty. Um. Everybody & Everybody?
Summary: "We are not warriors. We are weapons. We are Fateforged." The Fateforged are weapons made from the shells of dying men and women. Natasha Romanov was the first Fateforged of the new era. She was not the last, though.
Wordcount: 5382
Warnings/Notes: AU, alternate retelling of canon. Violence, betrayal, promises made and broken
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: Fateforged, Remade
Rating: R
Fandom: Avengers movieverse
Characters/Pairings: Natasha, Clint, Fury, Phil, Bruce, Tony, Thor, Loki, Steve, mention of Mjolnir, Yinsen, Maria, Betty. Um. Everybody & Everybody?
Summary: "We are not warriors. We are weapons. We are Fateforged." The Fateforged are weapons made from the shells of dying men and women. Natasha Romanov was the first Fateforged of the new era. She was not the last, though.
Wordcount: 5382
Warnings/Notes: AU, alternate retelling of canon. Violence, betrayal, promises made and broken
Disclaimer: Not mine
Fateforged, Remade
"We are not warriors. We are weapons. We are Fateforged."
They explained to her, once, what the programme was. When she was a child, newly bought. The Red Room told her of her purpose.
They told her that there were weapons, forged from the shells of once-people, from the bodies of dying men and women. They told her that those weapons were among the most powerful weapons in the world. They told her that her country had need of such weapons, that her people had desperate need of their protection. They told her that they had searched the land, searched all within their reach, for the shells that would make the most perfect weapons of all. They told her they were going to forge the best weapons in all the world, and those weapons would keep her people safe.
And then, while she stared at them, young and fragile, they killed her, the child she had been. And from her shell, from the failing body left behind, they forged a woman. A weapon. One of the best in the world. Fateforged from the blood of a proud, vicious, dying child.
Her name was Natasha. Birthday, Christmas, the girl who was reborn. Her name was Black Widow, the red-black weapon that killed in softness. She was Fateforged, she was a weapon, she was a knife in the hands of her masters. And in their hands, she did kill. Never ward, never shield. She killed, and only that.
She was Natasha. She was a weapon. But the hands that forged that weapon were not those meant to wield it. From the moment of her birth, from the moment her human heart had stilled and the steel-forged heart of the weapon beat to life, she had known that. Natasha Romanov was a weapon. But she was not their weapon.
They should have known better. She had been forged with the promise of protection, the chance to shield and defend that which she had loved. They had lied to her, while they broke her child's form around her, and made from it something new. They had lied, as they made from her a knife against their enemies. But Fateforged are weapons forged from the souls of dying ones. Fateforged are the living weapons.
And Fateforged, from the promise of those dying souls, may choose who has the right to wield them.
***
The man who hunted her down was not Fateforged. Not yet. He was a hunter, not a weapon. Not yet forged.
Yet, she said. Clint Barton was not a weapon when he found her, not a weapon when he brought her home, not a weapon when he offered her to SHIELD, to Fury, and to the defense of all she had loved. Clint had not been a weapon then.
But there was something in his heart that could be forged, when it came to it. She had looked into his eyes, into his heart as he stood over her, savage and silent and smiling with the faith of the shield, and she had seen the forging there, in some distant future.
Clint was not Fateforged. But he would be. She had seen how he would be. And she had followed him, had put her weapon in his hands to bring to another, as much for that as for his promise. She had sensed the weapon waiting in him. And for the faith in his eyes and the promise of a brighter service, she had sworn to guard him until that breaking, and hold him through the throes of remaking. She had watched a dozen weapons fall, broken by the hands that wielded them. Not him. Never him. That moment, staring into his heart along the line of the arrow, she had sworn that much.
Not love. Love was not for weapons, love was not for Fateforged. Love was the child she had been, and was no longer.
But Natasha had been forged in the promise of protection. And Fateforged may choose who wield them.
***
She had gone to Fury's hands for Clint, for that unspoken future. She had been wielded by many hands, her knife-blade made slippery by their blood in the end. She had not really cared the nature of the hands Clint sent her to. For his sake, she would have danced in any hand, and simply waited for the chance to slip within their grasp, and cut open what was not worthy.
But Fury was something different. She had known it the moment she walked into his presence. Fury was no more Fateforged than Clint. Not a weapon, nor ever meant to be. But not the spymaster, the assassin he pretended to be, either. Fury was something she had never seen before, something she had never been allowed to touch.
Fury was a Warrior. Fury was a wielder of weapons, the arm that holds the shield. Fury was ... the promise of protection.
She came to him as a weapon, stood before him as a knife, her blade made slippery by the blood of those who had forged her, those who had tried to wield her in broken faith. Natasha had stood before Fury as a Fateforged blade, and a weapon betrayed.
And Fury had offered her his hand, not to take her for his own, but as an extension of that first and broken promise. Fury had offered her a hand to wield her as she had been forged to be wielded. Fury offered her his arm to power her thrust, and cut open those who threatened all she had once loved, when she had been a child, when she had died on the promise of something more. Fury offered her the purpose of the knife, and the promise of the future.
She had become his weapon for Clint. She had remained his weapon for herself.
***
SHIELD were the defenders. They were the shield and the blade, the warrior and the protector. They were the first line of defense, the body spread between the world behind them and the threat before them.
A weapon, some thought. The Council, lurking in the shadows behind them, fearful hands wrapped around Fury, SHIELD's head, as though they could make a weapon of him, forge him to their purpose as Natasha had once been forged.
They failed. Could only fail. Natasha could have told them that they would. Fury was not Fateforged, not a weapon in waiting. They could kill him, maybe, but they could not remake him. His blood and his promise were his own, and no-one else's. Not their sword, but a warrior in his own right. They would never own him, never wield him as once Natasha had been wielded.
And while Fury stood inviolate, so did his weapons, his people, his shields. So did she. So did Clint, with his weapon lurking as yet unforged. So did Maria, the warrior who stood at Fury's side, a woman who might wield them well, should it come to her in turn. So did Phil, who was not a weapon as Natasha understood weapons, not a warrior, not a shield, yet not a civilian either. So did Phil, who Natasha understood not at all.
And so did dozens of others. So did technicians and spies and warriors and forgers, the body protective that stood above the world. The body born in the ashes of an old war, built by desperate men, to stand between that which they loved and the monsters that had once crept forth. Fury stood, and so did they, the Shield, the body protective.
Natasha's blade sang for the promise of it, the song of bloodstained steel in the hands that were born to wield it. Her teeth gleamed, a bright and loving promise, and Clint grinned back beside her, Fury above her, and all of SHIELD around her.
She was Fateforged. And she had found her promise.
***
But she was not the only Fateforged in the world. Natasha, the widowed blade, was not the only weapon forged from a dying shell. And the Red Room were not the only ones who would offer death on a broken promise.
The US military were the first to try, after she came to SHIELD. From the flawed memory of a weapon forged decades before, a weapon made from a living man and not a shell, they tried to forge a weapon more powerful than any ever seen. From the shell of a scientist, lied to and tricked, they tried to make something that no force yet living could hope to stop.
In Banner, they succeeded. At least as far as power went. Natasha had read the reports, a hollow ache in her gut, and she had seen what they had done. Forged a blood-soaked power, a berserker weapon, from the shattered shell of a scientist who had been trying, on the promise they had made him, to help people. To save them. They had made a weapon to destroy all the forged soul had loved.
And they had wondered, then, why that weapon had turned on them the moment it was made.
The weapon was flawed. She knew that, reported that, before ever she saw him. While Banner ran, and ran, and ran, shattering apart from himself, a weapon badly forged and shaking itself to pieces, split between its natures, seeking to be unmade. She had faced Fury, and she had told him. That Banner would never be theirs to wield. That Banner, unless he refound the promise in which he had been made, would never be anyone's to wield.
He was a broken weapon, running ahead of his own destruction. She had watched him run. And she had ... mourned. As a weapon mourns.
She had seen weapons broken in the wielding. He was the first she had seen broken in the forging. But then, in the Red Room ... those weapons were destroyed before anyone might see them at all.
***
Then there was Stark. And Stark was different again. Stark had been forged they knew not how, by a smith they had never seen, and he had guarded his maker's secret with all the dazzling, distracting power of the weapon he had been reforged to be. Stark was a weapon made by foreign means, and SHIELD had no idea what to make of him, what to fear from him, what to do about him.
So, in the end, they had sent her. Natasha, their first true Fateforged. They had sent her, while Stark was shaking apart in turn, a weapon fracturing under strains they could not see. A weapon to judge a weapon.
And to break it, soft and gentle, should the creeping cracks be too much for Stark to bear. Natasha was more than just an assassin's knife, now. But she did not forget, could not forget, what she had first been used for. And now, in these new hands, these hands she trusted, she was willing to be used again. For Stark, as much as for Fury.
He looked at her. Broken and drunk, the shattered shell of a man, feeling the breaking sowed inside him, knowing it was calling close. Stark had looked up at her, as she leaned over him, and he had known what she was.
"What would you do, if today was your last day?"
And she had felt something break within her. As she had with Clint, that first moment, sensing the breaking that was yet to be done to him. Natasha had felt something fall loose at Stark's words, a surge of that thing that wasn't love, the promise of protection that lived within her. For the weapons made, the weapons yet unmade, the weapons still betrayed.
"Do you know what you are?" she had asked him, asked the knowledge in his eyes, the thing that had recognised her. Did he know what he was, did he know how he was forged. Because Stark was more than a weapon, Stark was a weaponsmith, and if there was hope for him as there had not been for Banner, maybe it lay inside him still.
He had looked at her, that shining thing, the weapon in his heart that wasn't steel, as hers was, but something else. Something blue and shining and forged in blood.
"His name was Yinsen," he told her. "They took him, and they hurt him, and they made him remake me. So he did." The darkness in his smile, the smile of a weapon who has found means to slip within the hand that wields it, and cut them open. "We made me a weapon in his name," Stark whispered. "And he died for me, and made me in his blood, and I will not fail him."
He cried, cracked around the breaking, the flaws within his forging that shook him apart, and he didn't want to die. She saw it. Not because he feared death, but because the man who made him, the promise he was forged in, had asked him to live, and he could not.
She had gone to Fury. She had fled to the hand that wielded her, and she had asked for something she had never asked before. She had asked for help. A weapon for the sake of a weapon, the promise of protection she had been forged in.
Stark would not be theirs, she said. The hands that wielded him were a dead man's hands, and they could not reforge him. But she thought ... if they gave him the means, maybe he might reforge himself.
Fury had looked at her. The Warrior, the hands that wielded her, and she had seen something then in his one remaining eye. A grief she had never seen before, a knowledge she had never been let witness. The echoes of the war that had made the body protective, the war they had been born in. For a moment, Natasha saw the heart that wielded her, that wielded all of them.
And when Stark reforged himself with the tools Fury had yielded to him, when Stark remade himself for the protection of all he loved, she was not surprised.
***
She had not seen the alien weapon. She had been busy, holding Stark through the throes of remaking, her blade beside his as they slew the enemies he had remade himself to defeat. She hadn't seen the alien.
Clint had. Phil had. And they told her ... strange things.
The alien had been a Warrior, not a weapon. A Warrior struck down, a Warrior made weak, but a Warrior nonetheless. He had been a Warrior, and he had carried a living weapon. Not a weapon as she was a weapon, as Stark and Banner were weapons, but a hammer, a weapon forged not in flesh but in living metal. Mjolnir, who sang to Phil's senses as she did, a weapon who would be wielded by none save the Warrior she chose.
Phil had liked her, Natasha thought. She wasn't sure why. But Phil had liked Mjolnir.
But something had gone wrong. Some test, some challenge. Someone came to kill the Warrior Thor, as he stood weakened and unmade. As he stood to protect that which he loved, even without the strength to do so. Someone who succeeded, someone who shattered Thor before them, who had laid him down with a fatal blow.
And then, in something neither Phil nor Clint had understood, then the weapon came back for her warrior. Mjolnir had come, had flown into his hand, and she had ... forged, from the shell her Warrior had become. She had remade him in her promise as he lay dying, the promise of power and protection between them as he laid down his life, and she had remade him in her image, a Warrior made into a weapon, made by a weapon. His blood and hers, for the promise of protection.
Phil had told her. And his eyes had been on Clint, he had looked between Natasha, Fateforged, the widowed blade, and Clint, the weapon yet unmade. He had told her of Mjolnir and the choice she had made, a weapon forging weapons, and he had looked at Clint.
She had never understood Phil. He had always been something a little beyond her ken, something she had never been able to define. But in that moment, she had understood that Phil could see them, that he could understand them.
She hadn't realised what it meant. Not then. None of them, except perhaps Stark, could have known it then. But in that moment, Phil had revealed to her a little of what he was. Not a civilian. Not a warrior. And not a weapon.
Phil was, instead, the promise. Phil was what weapons were forged in.
***
She saw Banner's reforging, though. As she had not seen Thor's. She saw the battle, she saw the promise of protection he had been forged in, saw the promise remade, and the willing breaking of a weapon upon it.
Banner had come, still shattered inside himself, still seeking unmaking, to the hands of a woman. The woman who had forged him first, the scientist who had been promised the chance to protect alongside him, who had stood as he was remade, and been the first to fall to the weapon he had become. Banner had come back to her, fallen almost by accident into her hands for the promise of unmaking, and stayed at her side for the promise of protection.
They had come to New York. The weapon and the wielder, though neither of them had known it then, neither of them had understood it. Bruce Banner and Betty Ross.
Natasha watched as Banner embraced his nature for the first time. Natasha watched as, for the first time in five years, Banner didn't fight what he had been forged to become, did not shatter himself apart around it. Instead, on the promise of her protection, the woman he loved and the warrior that wielded him, he had remade himself deliberately into that thing, that most powerful of all weapons. He had reforged himself at the moment of his freedom, and for the first time there had not been fear him in him.
There had been, instead, the smile she knew from her own face, from Stark's. The smile of a weapon who has found means to turn inside false hands, and cut them open.
He ran again, afterwards. Ran from them, ran from her. The woman who had wielded him, his warrior and his promise of protection both. He ran, as Mjolnir had run, to protect the warrior who could not bear, or was not yet ready, to wield him.
But he would come back. Natasha had known. She had seen. This weapon which might be stronger than all of them, the weapon betrayed, the weapon reforged. Banner. He would come back.
The question, though ... was in whose hands, and for what aim.
***
In the end, for all her hopes, for all the promises of her protection, she failed Clint. When the breaking came due, when at last he was torn open, and reforged into the weapon that had waited so patiently inside him. In the end, Natasha had failed him.
It was Phil who called her. Phil who brought her home, the weapon who had been cast into the enemy at the wrong moment, leaving the body behind her to fall to someone else. It was Phil who knew to call her, to tell her Clint had been lost, had been compromised. It was Phil who understood the tearing inside her, knowing she had failed the man who saved her and brought her among all that she ... that she loved.
It was the alien who took him. Not Thor, but the brother. An alien, and a weapon in turn. A broken one, she thought. Loki. Someone had tried to forge him, tried to reforge him, over and over on the backs of lies and broken promises, and now there was nothing left. An empty weapon, a bundle of shards bound together and let loose with abandon, to fall and slay who they would.
It was Loki who forged Clint. Loki who made him, a shattered weapon to forge a shattered weapon, empty-eyed and in false hands, and there was nothing Natasha could do. She had failed him. She had let him fall. She had failed, and she could not undo that.
But she could avenge it. Yes, oh yes. She was a weapon, the first of all weapons, and she had watched the Fateforged of the world be made.
***
Except she had not, it turned out. She had not watched all the Fateforged be made. Fury showed her when he stood, the Warrior at the head of the body protective, and gathered the weapons of the world to stand against Loki.
Phil had gathered Stark, the twice-forged, wielded by a dead man's hands. Natasha hadn't really understood that, though Fury had told her there was a reason, Fury told her there was something between Phil and Stark that she had not yet seen.
She had gathered Banner, a weapon betrayed to gather a weapon betrayed. And that had been difficult, that had been terrible, for her knife was nothing to the berserker thing Banner had become, and a blade betrayed may fall where it wills. Bringing Banner to them had been one of the hardest things she had ever done, and not only for the shard of pain that slid through her at the memory of Clint, who had gathered her, and had not feared.
But when they arrived, when they had gathered, Fury had brought forward a weapon she had never known. Fateforged. The first Fateforged, the one made not from a dying shell, but a living man. The Fateforged of the breaking war, the sound to which they were all but echoes.
Fury had brought Steve Rogers, the first Fateforged, among them.
And he had shattered them, she thought. Not her, her only breaking hinged on the man now remade, in another's hands. But Banner, Stark. All over again, Rogers broke them. Whole and pure before them, a weapon made of living hands, wielded only by himself, he stood before a twice-forged man born in the blood of the fallen, and a weapon made in his image who feared he had only ever destroyed, not defended. Rogers stood before them, and they broke.
They broke, and in their breaking, so did SHIELD. Even her. Weapons without warriors to wield them, weapons breaking for the flaws within them. Clint, forged to a weapon against them, set among them in the midst of the breaking. Banner, betrayed all over again, falling upon her and away from her. Thor, weapon-warrior, who had come to find his brother and been broken for it. Stark, who had thrown himself against and beside Rogers, a desperate pre-emptive shattering. Rogers, who had come to a new world, and foundered himself upon it.
They had broken, one and all. The Fateforged of the world, the most powerful weapons ever made. The weapons she had been promised, all those many years ago by men who had betrayed her, would save the world. In one moment, one splintering as Loki threw himself among them, they shattered.
But there was something they had not understood. Those men who had taken her as a child. Loki, who had broken and broken and broken again, and never been reforged. There was something none of them understood.
The Fateforged were made to be broken. Because the Fateforged, one and all, had been born in breaking. Even Rogers, in his way. They were born in breaking, and reborn, and they could be so again.
The Fateforged were made from the broken. The Fateforged could be made again.
***
She held Clint through the throes of remaking. The promise of protection, the thing she had thought was not love, but was, she knew now, was and had always been. As he had brought her home, the weapon betrayed, and placed her in safe hands, so did she bring him through in turn. As Phil had whispered to her, that once, having watched a weapon remake a warrior in her own image. Natasha held Clint through the breaking, and the remaking, and as Mjolnir before her, she forged him now anew.
"Have you ever ...?" he asked, shuddering around the breaking. She smiled at him, love and mourning as only weapons know.
"You know I have," she whispered, resting beside him. The breaking they all knew, the betrayal of a broken promise. And then ... the promise made anew. The promise of protection in which they all were made. "Clint. You know I have."
She had promised him, all those years ago, for the faith in his eyes and the promise of a brighter service. She had gone to foreign hands for him, for the promise waiting inside him, and she had made her promises inside herself. Those promises were broken, betrayed the moment she had let him fall.
But promises, like weapons, could be remade. And there were times the weapon, once reforged, was the most powerful weapon in the world.
***
She didn't understand, not until later, what had passed between Phil and Fury as he lay dying, between Fury and Stark and Rogers, later while she had reforged Clint and made a promise anew. She didn't understand the blood in which promises were made, the wild grief of a warrior losing that which he had loved, the blood-forged determination that used blood and death and a dead man's promises to reforge two broken weapons. She didn't understand, not until much later, how Fury had reforged Stark for the third time, and Rogers for the first, in Phil's blood and hope and promise of protection.
She didn't understand Banner, either. How Stark, as Mjolnir and Natasha before him, as Mjolnir and Natasha again around him, had reforged Banner from the new breaking, a weapon to forge a weapon, or at least the promises on which a weapon is made.
She saw none of it, understood none of it, not then. There hadn't been time, when the shattered weapon that was Loki moved to break the world from beneath them, and destroy all that they loved, as already he had destroyed them. And the world was not a weapon, the world was not a forged thing, the world could not be remade. The world, like Phil, would die for a broken promise, and it would never be remade.
So they had fought. All of them, every last one. Twice forged, at least that, all of them. They had stood, the Fateforged of the world, the weapons Natasha had been promised would keep her people safe, all that she had loved.
And it was odd, she thought. Strange and savage and precious, that in the right hands, from the right mouths, even promises broken so many years ago could be remade, and find justification.
They were six, at the finish. Six weapons (seven), cast from a Warrior's hands, from dead men's hands, wielded by themselves and for themselves, by each other and for those they had loved, by those who trusted them and for those who had once destroyed them. Wielded for a world by which they had been broken, and for a promise of protection once betrayed. Six weapons reforged, to stand against one who had only ever been broken.
And they had won. They had fought for promises made in blood, promises made true by the deaths of those who made them, and they had won. Nothing Loki had, nothing that had been promised to him by those who had broken him by their lies, could stand against what they were. They were Fateforged, and he had nothing left.
And he knew it. She saw, in his eyes as he lay before them, in his heart as it spread shattered beneath them, that he knew it. That Loki, forged and broken on lies, knew how badly he was betrayed, and all that he had lost because of it.
He reforged himself in that moment. She saw it. Stark saw it. Banner, a little. They three, the weapons first betrayed. They saw the moment he remade himself, and knew the darkness of the weapon thus made. But there was nothing, in that moment, that they could do.
They were not who had betrayed him. And there was no promise they could make that would matter, to so shattered a thing.
***
So the world was not remade but kept, at least for the moment, unbroken. So they had stood, Fateforged for those they loved, and so they had won.
She stood next to Fury, some days later. A weapon beside her warrior, the hands she had freely chosen to wield her. The hands Clint would choose too, she thought. The hands Clint, in many ways, had chosen years ago, before he ever knew he was destined to be a weapon. The arm that born the shield, the hand they trusted to send them where they needed to go.
The others didn't. Not yet. Not, perhaps, ever.
Stark was broken and remade too many times, held still in the ghosts of Yinsen's hands, and Phil's behind them. Stark was a weapon made of himself, to serve the promises already broken. He would suffer no living hand to wield him. He had leapt on Fury's word only because he did not, just yet, want to turn in Fury's hand and cut it. But he would, if forced. Oh, he would.
Banner, of course, was never theirs. Never would be. There had been two hands in all the world Banner trusted to wield the weapon he had been made to be. One was a scientist, not a warrior, and Banner would never force her to wield him against her will. The other ... the other was as much a weapon as he, and Banner didn't yet know what to do with that.
Rogers, then, was something that couldn't be wielded. Rogers had been made from a living man, as much warrior as weapon. He wielded himself, for the sake of what promises he saw fit. He was not made to be held at all.
And Thor ... well. Thor had never been for them to wield either. Nor Mjolnir. Though he had fought beside them on a shared promise, for the sake of those he loved that were in some ways theirs, Thor, like Rogers, was as much warrior as weapon, and was the promise of protection for more worlds than theirs besides.
So. Her alone, and Clint, to be Fury's weapons in truth. The reforged knife, and the restrung bow. For the shield, for the warrior, for the body protective. For the ghosts of the breaking war, and the promises that were made in its ashes. For the lies told to broken children, and the truth reforged from their remains.
"Does it worry you?" she asked her Warrior. Fury, who stood behind them and cast them forth. "That you can't wield them? That they're not your weapons?"
Fury turned to her. The warrior in the ashes of all he had loved, rebuilding it slowly around himself. Fury, who had seen things she didn't understand, the echoes of the breaking war, the echoes of long-made promises. He turned to her, proud and vicious and rueful, and grinned a gleaming grin.
"They don't have to be mine," Fury told her, his hand light and sure upon her. "They just have to love what I love, and be willing to protect it. And you know what?"
She tilted her head, shining with the strength of all her promises, and grinned into his grin. "What, sir?" she asked, but she knew, and had known, from the moment they stood reforged, six strong, and fought in defense of all she had ever loved. She grinned into his grin, into his faith, and she understood.
"I think they will," Fury whispered, his hands light on his weapons and a promise of protection in his heart. "When we need them to. Because we need them to. I think ... that they will."
And Natasha, the blade betrayed, the blade reforged, did not disagree.
She believed it too.
"We are not warriors. We are weapons. We are Fateforged."
They explained to her, once, what the programme was. When she was a child, newly bought. The Red Room told her of her purpose.
They told her that there were weapons, forged from the shells of once-people, from the bodies of dying men and women. They told her that those weapons were among the most powerful weapons in the world. They told her that her country had need of such weapons, that her people had desperate need of their protection. They told her that they had searched the land, searched all within their reach, for the shells that would make the most perfect weapons of all. They told her they were going to forge the best weapons in all the world, and those weapons would keep her people safe.
And then, while she stared at them, young and fragile, they killed her, the child she had been. And from her shell, from the failing body left behind, they forged a woman. A weapon. One of the best in the world. Fateforged from the blood of a proud, vicious, dying child.
Her name was Natasha. Birthday, Christmas, the girl who was reborn. Her name was Black Widow, the red-black weapon that killed in softness. She was Fateforged, she was a weapon, she was a knife in the hands of her masters. And in their hands, she did kill. Never ward, never shield. She killed, and only that.
She was Natasha. She was a weapon. But the hands that forged that weapon were not those meant to wield it. From the moment of her birth, from the moment her human heart had stilled and the steel-forged heart of the weapon beat to life, she had known that. Natasha Romanov was a weapon. But she was not their weapon.
They should have known better. She had been forged with the promise of protection, the chance to shield and defend that which she had loved. They had lied to her, while they broke her child's form around her, and made from it something new. They had lied, as they made from her a knife against their enemies. But Fateforged are weapons forged from the souls of dying ones. Fateforged are the living weapons.
And Fateforged, from the promise of those dying souls, may choose who has the right to wield them.
***
The man who hunted her down was not Fateforged. Not yet. He was a hunter, not a weapon. Not yet forged.
Yet, she said. Clint Barton was not a weapon when he found her, not a weapon when he brought her home, not a weapon when he offered her to SHIELD, to Fury, and to the defense of all she had loved. Clint had not been a weapon then.
But there was something in his heart that could be forged, when it came to it. She had looked into his eyes, into his heart as he stood over her, savage and silent and smiling with the faith of the shield, and she had seen the forging there, in some distant future.
Clint was not Fateforged. But he would be. She had seen how he would be. And she had followed him, had put her weapon in his hands to bring to another, as much for that as for his promise. She had sensed the weapon waiting in him. And for the faith in his eyes and the promise of a brighter service, she had sworn to guard him until that breaking, and hold him through the throes of remaking. She had watched a dozen weapons fall, broken by the hands that wielded them. Not him. Never him. That moment, staring into his heart along the line of the arrow, she had sworn that much.
Not love. Love was not for weapons, love was not for Fateforged. Love was the child she had been, and was no longer.
But Natasha had been forged in the promise of protection. And Fateforged may choose who wield them.
***
She had gone to Fury's hands for Clint, for that unspoken future. She had been wielded by many hands, her knife-blade made slippery by their blood in the end. She had not really cared the nature of the hands Clint sent her to. For his sake, she would have danced in any hand, and simply waited for the chance to slip within their grasp, and cut open what was not worthy.
But Fury was something different. She had known it the moment she walked into his presence. Fury was no more Fateforged than Clint. Not a weapon, nor ever meant to be. But not the spymaster, the assassin he pretended to be, either. Fury was something she had never seen before, something she had never been allowed to touch.
Fury was a Warrior. Fury was a wielder of weapons, the arm that holds the shield. Fury was ... the promise of protection.
She came to him as a weapon, stood before him as a knife, her blade made slippery by the blood of those who had forged her, those who had tried to wield her in broken faith. Natasha had stood before Fury as a Fateforged blade, and a weapon betrayed.
And Fury had offered her his hand, not to take her for his own, but as an extension of that first and broken promise. Fury had offered her a hand to wield her as she had been forged to be wielded. Fury offered her his arm to power her thrust, and cut open those who threatened all she had once loved, when she had been a child, when she had died on the promise of something more. Fury offered her the purpose of the knife, and the promise of the future.
She had become his weapon for Clint. She had remained his weapon for herself.
***
SHIELD were the defenders. They were the shield and the blade, the warrior and the protector. They were the first line of defense, the body spread between the world behind them and the threat before them.
A weapon, some thought. The Council, lurking in the shadows behind them, fearful hands wrapped around Fury, SHIELD's head, as though they could make a weapon of him, forge him to their purpose as Natasha had once been forged.
They failed. Could only fail. Natasha could have told them that they would. Fury was not Fateforged, not a weapon in waiting. They could kill him, maybe, but they could not remake him. His blood and his promise were his own, and no-one else's. Not their sword, but a warrior in his own right. They would never own him, never wield him as once Natasha had been wielded.
And while Fury stood inviolate, so did his weapons, his people, his shields. So did she. So did Clint, with his weapon lurking as yet unforged. So did Maria, the warrior who stood at Fury's side, a woman who might wield them well, should it come to her in turn. So did Phil, who was not a weapon as Natasha understood weapons, not a warrior, not a shield, yet not a civilian either. So did Phil, who Natasha understood not at all.
And so did dozens of others. So did technicians and spies and warriors and forgers, the body protective that stood above the world. The body born in the ashes of an old war, built by desperate men, to stand between that which they loved and the monsters that had once crept forth. Fury stood, and so did they, the Shield, the body protective.
Natasha's blade sang for the promise of it, the song of bloodstained steel in the hands that were born to wield it. Her teeth gleamed, a bright and loving promise, and Clint grinned back beside her, Fury above her, and all of SHIELD around her.
She was Fateforged. And she had found her promise.
***
But she was not the only Fateforged in the world. Natasha, the widowed blade, was not the only weapon forged from a dying shell. And the Red Room were not the only ones who would offer death on a broken promise.
The US military were the first to try, after she came to SHIELD. From the flawed memory of a weapon forged decades before, a weapon made from a living man and not a shell, they tried to forge a weapon more powerful than any ever seen. From the shell of a scientist, lied to and tricked, they tried to make something that no force yet living could hope to stop.
In Banner, they succeeded. At least as far as power went. Natasha had read the reports, a hollow ache in her gut, and she had seen what they had done. Forged a blood-soaked power, a berserker weapon, from the shattered shell of a scientist who had been trying, on the promise they had made him, to help people. To save them. They had made a weapon to destroy all the forged soul had loved.
And they had wondered, then, why that weapon had turned on them the moment it was made.
The weapon was flawed. She knew that, reported that, before ever she saw him. While Banner ran, and ran, and ran, shattering apart from himself, a weapon badly forged and shaking itself to pieces, split between its natures, seeking to be unmade. She had faced Fury, and she had told him. That Banner would never be theirs to wield. That Banner, unless he refound the promise in which he had been made, would never be anyone's to wield.
He was a broken weapon, running ahead of his own destruction. She had watched him run. And she had ... mourned. As a weapon mourns.
She had seen weapons broken in the wielding. He was the first she had seen broken in the forging. But then, in the Red Room ... those weapons were destroyed before anyone might see them at all.
***
Then there was Stark. And Stark was different again. Stark had been forged they knew not how, by a smith they had never seen, and he had guarded his maker's secret with all the dazzling, distracting power of the weapon he had been reforged to be. Stark was a weapon made by foreign means, and SHIELD had no idea what to make of him, what to fear from him, what to do about him.
So, in the end, they had sent her. Natasha, their first true Fateforged. They had sent her, while Stark was shaking apart in turn, a weapon fracturing under strains they could not see. A weapon to judge a weapon.
And to break it, soft and gentle, should the creeping cracks be too much for Stark to bear. Natasha was more than just an assassin's knife, now. But she did not forget, could not forget, what she had first been used for. And now, in these new hands, these hands she trusted, she was willing to be used again. For Stark, as much as for Fury.
He looked at her. Broken and drunk, the shattered shell of a man, feeling the breaking sowed inside him, knowing it was calling close. Stark had looked up at her, as she leaned over him, and he had known what she was.
"What would you do, if today was your last day?"
And she had felt something break within her. As she had with Clint, that first moment, sensing the breaking that was yet to be done to him. Natasha had felt something fall loose at Stark's words, a surge of that thing that wasn't love, the promise of protection that lived within her. For the weapons made, the weapons yet unmade, the weapons still betrayed.
"Do you know what you are?" she had asked him, asked the knowledge in his eyes, the thing that had recognised her. Did he know what he was, did he know how he was forged. Because Stark was more than a weapon, Stark was a weaponsmith, and if there was hope for him as there had not been for Banner, maybe it lay inside him still.
He had looked at her, that shining thing, the weapon in his heart that wasn't steel, as hers was, but something else. Something blue and shining and forged in blood.
"His name was Yinsen," he told her. "They took him, and they hurt him, and they made him remake me. So he did." The darkness in his smile, the smile of a weapon who has found means to slip within the hand that wields it, and cut them open. "We made me a weapon in his name," Stark whispered. "And he died for me, and made me in his blood, and I will not fail him."
He cried, cracked around the breaking, the flaws within his forging that shook him apart, and he didn't want to die. She saw it. Not because he feared death, but because the man who made him, the promise he was forged in, had asked him to live, and he could not.
She had gone to Fury. She had fled to the hand that wielded her, and she had asked for something she had never asked before. She had asked for help. A weapon for the sake of a weapon, the promise of protection she had been forged in.
Stark would not be theirs, she said. The hands that wielded him were a dead man's hands, and they could not reforge him. But she thought ... if they gave him the means, maybe he might reforge himself.
Fury had looked at her. The Warrior, the hands that wielded her, and she had seen something then in his one remaining eye. A grief she had never seen before, a knowledge she had never been let witness. The echoes of the war that had made the body protective, the war they had been born in. For a moment, Natasha saw the heart that wielded her, that wielded all of them.
And when Stark reforged himself with the tools Fury had yielded to him, when Stark remade himself for the protection of all he loved, she was not surprised.
***
She had not seen the alien weapon. She had been busy, holding Stark through the throes of remaking, her blade beside his as they slew the enemies he had remade himself to defeat. She hadn't seen the alien.
Clint had. Phil had. And they told her ... strange things.
The alien had been a Warrior, not a weapon. A Warrior struck down, a Warrior made weak, but a Warrior nonetheless. He had been a Warrior, and he had carried a living weapon. Not a weapon as she was a weapon, as Stark and Banner were weapons, but a hammer, a weapon forged not in flesh but in living metal. Mjolnir, who sang to Phil's senses as she did, a weapon who would be wielded by none save the Warrior she chose.
Phil had liked her, Natasha thought. She wasn't sure why. But Phil had liked Mjolnir.
But something had gone wrong. Some test, some challenge. Someone came to kill the Warrior Thor, as he stood weakened and unmade. As he stood to protect that which he loved, even without the strength to do so. Someone who succeeded, someone who shattered Thor before them, who had laid him down with a fatal blow.
And then, in something neither Phil nor Clint had understood, then the weapon came back for her warrior. Mjolnir had come, had flown into his hand, and she had ... forged, from the shell her Warrior had become. She had remade him in her promise as he lay dying, the promise of power and protection between them as he laid down his life, and she had remade him in her image, a Warrior made into a weapon, made by a weapon. His blood and hers, for the promise of protection.
Phil had told her. And his eyes had been on Clint, he had looked between Natasha, Fateforged, the widowed blade, and Clint, the weapon yet unmade. He had told her of Mjolnir and the choice she had made, a weapon forging weapons, and he had looked at Clint.
She had never understood Phil. He had always been something a little beyond her ken, something she had never been able to define. But in that moment, she had understood that Phil could see them, that he could understand them.
She hadn't realised what it meant. Not then. None of them, except perhaps Stark, could have known it then. But in that moment, Phil had revealed to her a little of what he was. Not a civilian. Not a warrior. And not a weapon.
Phil was, instead, the promise. Phil was what weapons were forged in.
***
She saw Banner's reforging, though. As she had not seen Thor's. She saw the battle, she saw the promise of protection he had been forged in, saw the promise remade, and the willing breaking of a weapon upon it.
Banner had come, still shattered inside himself, still seeking unmaking, to the hands of a woman. The woman who had forged him first, the scientist who had been promised the chance to protect alongside him, who had stood as he was remade, and been the first to fall to the weapon he had become. Banner had come back to her, fallen almost by accident into her hands for the promise of unmaking, and stayed at her side for the promise of protection.
They had come to New York. The weapon and the wielder, though neither of them had known it then, neither of them had understood it. Bruce Banner and Betty Ross.
Natasha watched as Banner embraced his nature for the first time. Natasha watched as, for the first time in five years, Banner didn't fight what he had been forged to become, did not shatter himself apart around it. Instead, on the promise of her protection, the woman he loved and the warrior that wielded him, he had remade himself deliberately into that thing, that most powerful of all weapons. He had reforged himself at the moment of his freedom, and for the first time there had not been fear him in him.
There had been, instead, the smile she knew from her own face, from Stark's. The smile of a weapon who has found means to turn inside false hands, and cut them open.
He ran again, afterwards. Ran from them, ran from her. The woman who had wielded him, his warrior and his promise of protection both. He ran, as Mjolnir had run, to protect the warrior who could not bear, or was not yet ready, to wield him.
But he would come back. Natasha had known. She had seen. This weapon which might be stronger than all of them, the weapon betrayed, the weapon reforged. Banner. He would come back.
The question, though ... was in whose hands, and for what aim.
***
In the end, for all her hopes, for all the promises of her protection, she failed Clint. When the breaking came due, when at last he was torn open, and reforged into the weapon that had waited so patiently inside him. In the end, Natasha had failed him.
It was Phil who called her. Phil who brought her home, the weapon who had been cast into the enemy at the wrong moment, leaving the body behind her to fall to someone else. It was Phil who knew to call her, to tell her Clint had been lost, had been compromised. It was Phil who understood the tearing inside her, knowing she had failed the man who saved her and brought her among all that she ... that she loved.
It was the alien who took him. Not Thor, but the brother. An alien, and a weapon in turn. A broken one, she thought. Loki. Someone had tried to forge him, tried to reforge him, over and over on the backs of lies and broken promises, and now there was nothing left. An empty weapon, a bundle of shards bound together and let loose with abandon, to fall and slay who they would.
It was Loki who forged Clint. Loki who made him, a shattered weapon to forge a shattered weapon, empty-eyed and in false hands, and there was nothing Natasha could do. She had failed him. She had let him fall. She had failed, and she could not undo that.
But she could avenge it. Yes, oh yes. She was a weapon, the first of all weapons, and she had watched the Fateforged of the world be made.
***
Except she had not, it turned out. She had not watched all the Fateforged be made. Fury showed her when he stood, the Warrior at the head of the body protective, and gathered the weapons of the world to stand against Loki.
Phil had gathered Stark, the twice-forged, wielded by a dead man's hands. Natasha hadn't really understood that, though Fury had told her there was a reason, Fury told her there was something between Phil and Stark that she had not yet seen.
She had gathered Banner, a weapon betrayed to gather a weapon betrayed. And that had been difficult, that had been terrible, for her knife was nothing to the berserker thing Banner had become, and a blade betrayed may fall where it wills. Bringing Banner to them had been one of the hardest things she had ever done, and not only for the shard of pain that slid through her at the memory of Clint, who had gathered her, and had not feared.
But when they arrived, when they had gathered, Fury had brought forward a weapon she had never known. Fateforged. The first Fateforged, the one made not from a dying shell, but a living man. The Fateforged of the breaking war, the sound to which they were all but echoes.
Fury had brought Steve Rogers, the first Fateforged, among them.
And he had shattered them, she thought. Not her, her only breaking hinged on the man now remade, in another's hands. But Banner, Stark. All over again, Rogers broke them. Whole and pure before them, a weapon made of living hands, wielded only by himself, he stood before a twice-forged man born in the blood of the fallen, and a weapon made in his image who feared he had only ever destroyed, not defended. Rogers stood before them, and they broke.
They broke, and in their breaking, so did SHIELD. Even her. Weapons without warriors to wield them, weapons breaking for the flaws within them. Clint, forged to a weapon against them, set among them in the midst of the breaking. Banner, betrayed all over again, falling upon her and away from her. Thor, weapon-warrior, who had come to find his brother and been broken for it. Stark, who had thrown himself against and beside Rogers, a desperate pre-emptive shattering. Rogers, who had come to a new world, and foundered himself upon it.
They had broken, one and all. The Fateforged of the world, the most powerful weapons ever made. The weapons she had been promised, all those many years ago by men who had betrayed her, would save the world. In one moment, one splintering as Loki threw himself among them, they shattered.
But there was something they had not understood. Those men who had taken her as a child. Loki, who had broken and broken and broken again, and never been reforged. There was something none of them understood.
The Fateforged were made to be broken. Because the Fateforged, one and all, had been born in breaking. Even Rogers, in his way. They were born in breaking, and reborn, and they could be so again.
The Fateforged were made from the broken. The Fateforged could be made again.
***
She held Clint through the throes of remaking. The promise of protection, the thing she had thought was not love, but was, she knew now, was and had always been. As he had brought her home, the weapon betrayed, and placed her in safe hands, so did she bring him through in turn. As Phil had whispered to her, that once, having watched a weapon remake a warrior in her own image. Natasha held Clint through the breaking, and the remaking, and as Mjolnir before her, she forged him now anew.
"Have you ever ...?" he asked, shuddering around the breaking. She smiled at him, love and mourning as only weapons know.
"You know I have," she whispered, resting beside him. The breaking they all knew, the betrayal of a broken promise. And then ... the promise made anew. The promise of protection in which they all were made. "Clint. You know I have."
She had promised him, all those years ago, for the faith in his eyes and the promise of a brighter service. She had gone to foreign hands for him, for the promise waiting inside him, and she had made her promises inside herself. Those promises were broken, betrayed the moment she had let him fall.
But promises, like weapons, could be remade. And there were times the weapon, once reforged, was the most powerful weapon in the world.
***
She didn't understand, not until later, what had passed between Phil and Fury as he lay dying, between Fury and Stark and Rogers, later while she had reforged Clint and made a promise anew. She didn't understand the blood in which promises were made, the wild grief of a warrior losing that which he had loved, the blood-forged determination that used blood and death and a dead man's promises to reforge two broken weapons. She didn't understand, not until much later, how Fury had reforged Stark for the third time, and Rogers for the first, in Phil's blood and hope and promise of protection.
She didn't understand Banner, either. How Stark, as Mjolnir and Natasha before him, as Mjolnir and Natasha again around him, had reforged Banner from the new breaking, a weapon to forge a weapon, or at least the promises on which a weapon is made.
She saw none of it, understood none of it, not then. There hadn't been time, when the shattered weapon that was Loki moved to break the world from beneath them, and destroy all that they loved, as already he had destroyed them. And the world was not a weapon, the world was not a forged thing, the world could not be remade. The world, like Phil, would die for a broken promise, and it would never be remade.
So they had fought. All of them, every last one. Twice forged, at least that, all of them. They had stood, the Fateforged of the world, the weapons Natasha had been promised would keep her people safe, all that she had loved.
And it was odd, she thought. Strange and savage and precious, that in the right hands, from the right mouths, even promises broken so many years ago could be remade, and find justification.
They were six, at the finish. Six weapons (seven), cast from a Warrior's hands, from dead men's hands, wielded by themselves and for themselves, by each other and for those they had loved, by those who trusted them and for those who had once destroyed them. Wielded for a world by which they had been broken, and for a promise of protection once betrayed. Six weapons reforged, to stand against one who had only ever been broken.
And they had won. They had fought for promises made in blood, promises made true by the deaths of those who made them, and they had won. Nothing Loki had, nothing that had been promised to him by those who had broken him by their lies, could stand against what they were. They were Fateforged, and he had nothing left.
And he knew it. She saw, in his eyes as he lay before them, in his heart as it spread shattered beneath them, that he knew it. That Loki, forged and broken on lies, knew how badly he was betrayed, and all that he had lost because of it.
He reforged himself in that moment. She saw it. Stark saw it. Banner, a little. They three, the weapons first betrayed. They saw the moment he remade himself, and knew the darkness of the weapon thus made. But there was nothing, in that moment, that they could do.
They were not who had betrayed him. And there was no promise they could make that would matter, to so shattered a thing.
***
So the world was not remade but kept, at least for the moment, unbroken. So they had stood, Fateforged for those they loved, and so they had won.
She stood next to Fury, some days later. A weapon beside her warrior, the hands she had freely chosen to wield her. The hands Clint would choose too, she thought. The hands Clint, in many ways, had chosen years ago, before he ever knew he was destined to be a weapon. The arm that born the shield, the hand they trusted to send them where they needed to go.
The others didn't. Not yet. Not, perhaps, ever.
Stark was broken and remade too many times, held still in the ghosts of Yinsen's hands, and Phil's behind them. Stark was a weapon made of himself, to serve the promises already broken. He would suffer no living hand to wield him. He had leapt on Fury's word only because he did not, just yet, want to turn in Fury's hand and cut it. But he would, if forced. Oh, he would.
Banner, of course, was never theirs. Never would be. There had been two hands in all the world Banner trusted to wield the weapon he had been made to be. One was a scientist, not a warrior, and Banner would never force her to wield him against her will. The other ... the other was as much a weapon as he, and Banner didn't yet know what to do with that.
Rogers, then, was something that couldn't be wielded. Rogers had been made from a living man, as much warrior as weapon. He wielded himself, for the sake of what promises he saw fit. He was not made to be held at all.
And Thor ... well. Thor had never been for them to wield either. Nor Mjolnir. Though he had fought beside them on a shared promise, for the sake of those he loved that were in some ways theirs, Thor, like Rogers, was as much warrior as weapon, and was the promise of protection for more worlds than theirs besides.
So. Her alone, and Clint, to be Fury's weapons in truth. The reforged knife, and the restrung bow. For the shield, for the warrior, for the body protective. For the ghosts of the breaking war, and the promises that were made in its ashes. For the lies told to broken children, and the truth reforged from their remains.
"Does it worry you?" she asked her Warrior. Fury, who stood behind them and cast them forth. "That you can't wield them? That they're not your weapons?"
Fury turned to her. The warrior in the ashes of all he had loved, rebuilding it slowly around himself. Fury, who had seen things she didn't understand, the echoes of the breaking war, the echoes of long-made promises. He turned to her, proud and vicious and rueful, and grinned a gleaming grin.
"They don't have to be mine," Fury told her, his hand light and sure upon her. "They just have to love what I love, and be willing to protect it. And you know what?"
She tilted her head, shining with the strength of all her promises, and grinned into his grin. "What, sir?" she asked, but she knew, and had known, from the moment they stood reforged, six strong, and fought in defense of all she had ever loved. She grinned into his grin, into his faith, and she understood.
"I think they will," Fury whispered, his hands light on his weapons and a promise of protection in his heart. "When we need them to. Because we need them to. I think ... that they will."
And Natasha, the blade betrayed, the blade reforged, did not disagree.
She believed it too.
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