The closest thing to a daughter

Season 2 Episode 33

Silence filled the shuttle for the first half hour and neither of the two men felt authorised to change this. It was up to Natasha when and if she would change this silence. In fact, after another quarter of an hour, she did: "I should have asked her," she mumbled to herself as her green eyes searched the vastness of the water below for something unknown. "Ask what?" asked Steve, who was sitting behind Clint and her and was now leaning further forward. "Whether I can adopt her," Natasha answered freely, surprising her two companions with this statement. Speechless, she took the floor again to explain her point, "Now that she's of age, it would have been easy to adopt her and then Ross wouldn't have been able to jump around with me as he pleased either." Snorting, she sank deeper into her seat. "Abigail Romanoff," she breathed, delighting in the sound of those two names combined. "It sounds too good to be true, but now I guess it will never be."

Clint beside her shifted to autopilot and reached for her hands. "Hey you're not usually this pessimistic we'll figure something out, I promise." A pained smile, was all she could manage for him. Something inside her felt strange, like an instinct that told her nothing would go right this time. "We promise not to give up until we get her back," Steve replied, putting a hand on her shoulder from behind. Touched by the words of her two best friends, she managed with difficulty to suppress rising tears. At her next blink of an eye, Natasha was no longer in the shuttle next to Clint and Steve but in the car next to the then seventeen year old Abigail. It was the time the two women were on their way home from the Park after Nat had bought her a pack of Oreos and how that night had changed their entire relationship. Now there were tears in her eyes at the thought of never seeing her again.