Marvel: PS - Chapter 4 - New Home (Patreon)

(Word Count: 2,549)

My eyes were red and puffy now, but at least I had ice cream. I licked my triple chocolate and fudge as I walked up to our new house. It was a two story house that had a thin driveway leading off the side of the house all the way to the back. It had a small front yard that had a half brick wall and half metal fence surrounding it. For in the city, this was a pretty large house.

Natasha unlocks the door and we head in. The interiors looked like they haven't been lived in, just the pure basics of furniture. Makes sense, since this is just a cover home. Did she even have this house before she adopted me? Or was this bought just so I could have somewhere to lay low?

"So, Natasha, what now? Do I get to go through some super secret spy training regime? Learn how to disarm people and shoot guns? Learn several different languages?" I asked, excitedly. She had told me her real name on the way here: Natalia Romanova, and she explained that her "English name" was Natasha Romanoff, which she preferred.

"Now, we need to get you registered for the elementary school nearby," Natasha said with a deadpanned me. "I'm not going to train you to become a child soldier. At most I will only be helping you learn kickboxing for self defense."

"What! Oh come on! But I have super powers! I need someone super cool like you to help me master them!"

"No means no, Amelia. I don't want you to go through the same thing I did. I would be a very irresponsible adult if I made you go through all of that. I want you to enjoy your childhood and be happy." Natasha said.

"But if you think about it, I have powers that can be potentially deadly. If I'm not trained properly I could accidentally hurt someone or myself! So, really, it would be irresponsible of you not to train me." I reasoned.

Natasha looked conflicted, obviously scared of inflicting the same childhood she had onto me. "Look," I interject her thoughts. "I'm not asking to join your super spy team. So I won't be a child soldier like you fear. I just want to be able to use my abilities to their fullest. And I doubt you would be abusive towards me as we train so our situation will be completely different than what you've likely had to go through."

Slowly Natasha agreed. "All right, you win. Just… if you feel like it's too much, please tell me and we can take it slower okay?"

"All right!" I cheered.

"You're still going to school though!"

"Oh, come on!" I whined with a mouth full of ice cream.

"Like I said, I want you to have as normal of a childhood as you can in your situation. So I'm enrolling you to the nearby elementary school." Natasha said firmly.

"Fine," I muttered, resigning myself to school. I had thought that I could get out of it when SHIELD sent Natasha, but I guess not.

Ugh! This is gonna suck!

"So what's your job here?" I asked.

"Right now, I'm in place setting up a cover. I'm working for random companies as a legal consultant so when I need to infiltrate a company for real, I have a believable backstory." Natasha explained.

"Wow, I guess covers take a while to set up. What company do you think you'll be infiltrating?"

"I would have said Stark Industries, with all their weapons showing up in the middle east, but they're in California, so someone else must have got the job. Here though, I'm not sure. I haven't been here long enough to get the lay of the land."

Black Widow not getting the lay of the land within the week? Not buying it. She probably doesn't want me to know too much to involve myself. Here in New York? There were tons of shady companies. Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, is bound to be a major player. Is she investigating him? No, that can't be right, or SHIELD would have taken him down before Daredevil did.

"So, how's this gonna work? What's our days gonna be like?"

"Well, we’ve got a couple of weeks before school starts, so we're mostly free until then. Once school starts, I'll be dropping you off and picking you up at school. I've moved most of my consultant work home so I can take care of you better, aside from the occasional meetings. After your school work is done then we can get some training in for the evenings. As for… my spy stuff, we'll have to go test your powers here in a day or two. But other than that, just live like normal I guess. Ah, some time this week, we'll go shopping to get this house filled in, what do you think? You want to help me decorate the house?"

"Yes! We're gonna make this house so cozy!" I said excitedly. “There's going to be so many 'live laugh love' signs and scented candles everywhere!”

I kindly decided to ignore the look of horror on Natasha’s face.

MPS

The next day, I woke up in my new bedroom. It was completely empty except my bed, which only had one pillow and a throw blanket, and my single suitcase that survived the crash. Once I’m ready for the day, I go downstairs to find Natasha sitting on the one couch with some takeout. Panda Express.

“Hey, good morning! I ordered some takeout for breakfast, because we don’t have any other food in the house. We definitely need to get some groceries today.” Natasha smiled at her.

“Good morning. That’s okay, I like Panda Express.” I go and sit next to her and start eating. 

“Hey, Natasha?” I asked, breaking the awkward silence.

She perked up. “Yeah?”

“Do you… do you know what happened to my parents' stuff?”

“If I remember right, the moving company placed everything into the house you were going to move into. It should still be there, the bank hasn’t seized the house back yet. Would you like to go gather your things there?”

I nodded. “Yes, please. I don’t want everything to disappear. I was thinking of collecting some of the photo albums they had, some things to remember them by.”

“Of course we can, Amelia.”

The drive to the house I was supposed to have moved into was really short. Only a couple of blocks really. The only reason we even took the car was to haul stuff back.

I look at it, not knowing how to feel about it. A mixture of loss of an unrealized future and unfamiliarity. The house to the left was the Parkers.

I go and try to open the door. It was locked. "Do you have the keys?" I asked.

"Yep, I have them right here," Natasha said and, with a grace that said she's done this a thousand times before, she whipped out a set of picks and had the door unlocked before I could even fully register what she was doing. 

"Can you teach me that?" I asked. I mean, I know I can teleport, but it would be a waste to use it just to get past a door and who knows what situation will pop up when picking a lock will be needed. Plus, it's just a cool skill to have.

"Sure. It's really easy," Natasha said.

We both enter and we see some stacks of boxes, a set of mattresses leaning against a wall, a variety of furniture, including my two bookshelves.

Natasha whistled. “That’s a lot of stuff. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for? I can help look.”

“All the boxes with books in them are mine, and those two bookshelves. If we can, can we move them all to our house?”

“You know, when you said you knew how to read, I wasn’t really expecting this. Give me a sec, I’ll call a friend of mine and he’ll bring his truck,” Natasha said. She pulled out her phone and called someone on speed dial. 

Meanwhile, I started looking through the boxes. All of mine were labeled “Amelia” so I ignored them. I knew I was going to be taking all of those anyway. So I opened up some of the boxes for my parents' items. Mainly, I wanted to find my mom’s jewelry box and their clothing. I wanted to use my dad’s jackets/hoodies and my mom’s sweaters for comfort. Then there were their own Gameboys, which had their pokemon games we played together on. I definitely took those.

“Hey, Clint,” Natasha said. My ears perked up at a familiar name. “You’re free right? I need you to come to 22 Ingram Street in Queens with your truck…. You know the girl, Amelia, right? We’re moving some of her things… oh, shut up. … no, it's not like that… I doubt that. Just get here soon, okay? We need your truck.” And she hung up with a somewhat sad sigh. Then she turned back towards me with a smile on her face. "My friend Clint is coming with his truck! Well be able to haul everything you want over."

The sad sigh and fake smile made me look her over more closely. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"... alright, if you say so. Anyway, all of my things are already labeled with my name on the boxes. Those two bookshelves are mine, and I wanted to find my mom's jewelry box, photo albums, and my parents jackets and sweaters. Other than that, there's nothing else I can think of. The rest of the stuff can be sold off or something."

Together they set aside all the boxes they would bring back with them. About 30 minutes in, a truck pulled up. Clint Barton came up to greet them. "Hey, Nat!" He crouched down to eye level with me and ruffled my hair. "And you must be the pretty girl Nat's been telling me about!"

"I'm Amelia. Are you a super spy too?"

"Er…" he looked at Natasha, who shrugged.

"The kid's smart. She figured some government agent would come pick her up when she revealed her powers and at that point, I figured there was no need to keep lying to her.

"Well then, kid, yeah you could say I'm a super spy." He ignored Natasha's snicker.

"How many martial arts do you know?"

"Quite a few, though my specialty lies in my marksmanship. I mainly use archery, because I can customize the arrowheads, but I'm just as good with any gun."

"Cool." I didn't know what else to say, so I just went back to searching through everything.

With Clint here, we moved all my boxes and everything I wanted to take into the back of his truck. By "we" I mean Clint and Natasha. My weak child body, even if I've practiced some kickboxing, couldn't lift any of the large boxes. The entire truck bed was packed full, and some boxes were loaded into the cab as well.

"Thanks, Natasha, Clint," I said. Now I have something to remember them by. 

"No problem, Amy." Clint said. He had started calling me that through the time we've been packing.

"I'm glad you've found so many things you could keep as mementos, Amy," Natasha said. The nickname kinda stuck on. I never had anyone call me nicknames before, I do like my name, Amelia, but the familiarity of Amy was nice.

The next hour was spent unloading everything up to my room. I got to watch two super spies struggle to get my dresser and bookshelves up the stairs. It was a surreal experience. When they were done, I started unboxing everything, getting my books and knick knacks onto the shelves and clothes into the dresser a bit at a time.

M:PS

Meanwhile, Clint and Natasha went back downstairs.

"Hey, Clint, would you mind watching her for a bit? I need to report back to Fury for a bit," Natasha asked.

"Yeah, no problem. You go take care of everything, we'll be fine," Clint said, waving her off.

"Amelia, I'm heading out for a bit!" Natasha called up the stairs.

"Okay! Drive safe!" Amelia called back from her room.

"Hey," Clint said, stopping her as she turned to leave. "Don't worry, you'll grow on her. Give it some time and she'll open up to you."

Natasha gave a sad smile back. "Thanks, but I'm not exactly mother material, Clint."

"That's not true, you know. My kids love their aunt Nat. You'll do great."

"Your kids aren't depending on me to provide for them, physically or emotionally." Natasha gave a deep sigh. "I gotta go. Don't spoil her rotten while I'm away!"

Clint shook his head sadly as he watched her leave. Natasha will have to learn to open up to the girl as well. He went back inside.

"Hey, Amy! You want to go get some ice cream?"

"YEEEEE—"

M:PS

"In addition to the barriers and teleporting that we've seen, Amelia told me that she can also Heal. She said her healing is to such a degree that she can even regenerate lost limbs." Natasha reported.

Fury's eyebrows shot up. His thoughts wandered briefly to his blinded eye. Could she?

"She had expressed some willingness to use this healing ability to help SHIELD agents. Though there are some limitations, she said she can use it only up to 10 times a day, with a 1 hour cooldown between healing.” Natasha briefly wondered if she should report that she believes Amelia was hiding some more abilities she could do. Amelia was very careful during their conversation in the car. Natasha was observant enough to tell that she hadn't revealed everything. In the end she chose not to. She'd rather get the girl to open up before she brings this to Fury’s attention.

"Even so, if that's true, then it would be invaluable help." Fury could already see just how useful she would be. Even if it's only 10 people a day, that could potentially be 10 lives that would have otherwise been lost. Or 10 retired agents that were missing limbs could be healed. And who's to say she won't get stronger? They must take very good care of the girl. “From now on, your priority will be taking care of Amelia for the foreseeable future. You’ll only be receiving state-side missions until she’s able to take care of herself.”

Natasha felt uncomfortable. She never expected that her job would end up placing a daughter on her lap. Her, of all people, with her red ledger, was now expected to be a mother to this girl? “Sir, don’t you think someone else might be better suited to this role? I’m not exactly mother material. Maybe Sharon Carter would be better?”

“Maybe if she could only teleport I would consider someone else. But with her healing abilities, she’s too important. I need my best agent on this to protect her. Just ensure that she’s raised right. You’ll do fine,” Fury stated, “Bring her in tomorrow to take some tests.”

Natasha forced down all of her doubts. “Yes, Sir.”