emmylou | natasha romanoff

thirty-seven.

2016
Somewhere in Budapest

"Kennedy?"

Meredith Allen gently forced open the bedroom gently. Kennedy rolls over in her bed and rubs at her eyes as the light from the hallway floods her room. She looks toward her window and notices the blue and red lights outside and sits up, suddenly feeling more awake than she had initially.

"Are the police outside?" Kennedy asks.

Meredith nods her head, "They're talking to your father."

"Dad?" Kennedy asks, "Why?"

Meredith sighs as she takes a seat on Kennedy's bed. She looks as though she's searching for the right words to say and the tone to pair it with. Kennedy stares at her mother and as the silence stretches out further and further, she looks outside to see that there weren't just cop cars, but news vans as well.

Kennedy wasn't stupid. She was able to piece together the puzzle that was lying before her and decided to save her mother the trouble of telling her.

"They're gone. Aren't they?" Kennedy asks and her mother's head quickly snaps over at her.

"Who sweetheart?" her mother asks.

"Natasha. Yelena. Melina. Alexei," Kennedy answers, "They left. The police and news people are here. They must have figured out who they are."

Meredith looks at her daughter, shocked at what she was hearing, "Kennedy, baby, do you know something?"

"No," Kennedy answers as she recalls her promise to Natasha. She couldn't tell anyone. Not even her own mother.

"Kennedy," her mother says firmly, "You can talk to me, okay? I know that Natasha was your friend, but it seems like her family did something bad."

"I don't know anything," Kennedy states, "Honestly."

"Then how did you know that they were gone?" Meredith asks.

"An astute observation," Kennedy replies. Meredith stares at her daughter. Here she was nine years old using the word astute. She wasn't even sure that her husband knew what that word meant.

"Kennedy, they're going to have questions and if you know something, you have to tell the truth," her mother tells her.

"You want to know the truth mom? The truth is that I knew Natasha was going to leave because she told me she was going to leave. She told me that she wasn't who I thought she was," Kennedy says, "Their family? Fake. Whatever the news is saying that they did, they probably did it. But my friendship with Natasha? That was real. And if they ask me anything, I will lie."

Meredith stares at her daughter, so loyal to a fault that she would lie to the police.

"I'm going to ask you one thing of you then. If you're going to lie, be good at it."

"I will," she tells her.

Her father knocks on the door as he steps inside the room, "Everything okay?"

He looks over at Meredith specifically, wanting his wife to weigh in on the status of their daughter.

"I'm fine daddy," Kennedy says, "Do they want to talk to us?"

"They do," her father states, "All of us."

"We don't know anything," Meredith says.

Frank shrugs, "We're the only people that would know something. They were our neighbors, our friends. Hell, how did we not notice anything?"