The closest thing to a daughter

Season 1 Episode 21

The next day at noon, Abigail was tired on her way home from school back to the Tower. Natasha had offered her to stay home for the day, but she didn't want to give the girl, whose name was Sadie, the feeling that she had won so easily against her. Just as she was thinking about her, that very girl called her name and made her stop. "Hey Abigail!" She turned around and when she saw her in front of her, her heart started to slam significantly faster. In her mind's eye, the events of the past day played out. Especially her emotional outburst along with her powers scared her a lot. "Where do you think you're going?" screamed Sadie, coming closer and closer to her. Nervously, the latter stepped further and further back and stammered, "I um - home." With a mocking laugh, the girl pulled at her backpack and pushed her back to the ground. "Don't tell me you call the Avengers home. Like they'd want you when they could have me. Romanoff may be like a mother to you but she'll never want you as a daughter." That had hit her. Especially because Sadie was the first person who had said it. In her life she had never felt the feeling of a real family and even if she sometimes didn't want it to be, the Avengers alone had become her first family in the few days. All the more she thought about whether Sadie was not right with her words. Natasha didn't know everything about her past by far, but even with the knowledge she already had, Nat would never want her as some kind of foster daughter. "We weren't done with you yet!" the brown haired girl yelled as Abigail tried to push her off of her. A few surrounding girls joined in and they all began to stomp on her. To avoid another burst of her powers, she curled up as small as she could and protected her head. Knowing that any counterattack would activate her powers, she let it all wash over her. When Sadie caught her hip, she groaned in pain, "Please - stop..."

"You deserve this...I'll see you tomorrow Abigail." When everyone had left Abigail coughed to get more air back into her lungs before trying to pick herself up, which took a few tries. "That sucked," she cursed under her breath. Even without her powers, she would have easily managed to knock out all of her attackers. But she just couldn't afford another outburst. But why were Sadie and her clique suddenly no longer afraid of her, when last time they would have preferred to flee in fear? It took her quite a while to drag herself to the tower and when she finally succeeded, a worried Natasha was already waiting for her. "Hey Abigail ... are you okay?" The trained agent, of course, instantly noticed that her gait was not quite as round as usual. She winced at an accidental touch to her ribs but still tried to let on as little as possible. "Yeah, I'm fine, I'm just - tired." Nat didn't really believe her, Abigail had already fooled them enough for that but she suspected another reason behind her 'excuse'. "Really? Because you look very shaken up. Do you want to talk about what happened last night?"

"NO Nat I'm fine, okay!" she snapped at the perplexed Avenger and ran up to her room as best her ribs could manage. For Natasha, there was no explainable reason for her sudden freak out. After all, she had no way of knowing that Sadie's words had more effect on her than they should have. Steve, who had been watching the whole conversation from an armchair, looked over at Nat and took the floor, "Well, that didn't exactly go smoothly," he tried to exchange her worried look with a smile but all he got was a 'are you serious look?" from her side. "I have to get her to talk to me," she replied seriously as Tony entered the room with a coffee in his hand. "I'm sure it won't be easy..." said Tony with his usual know-it-all tone, which this time he was probably more than right about.