Sneak peak - a glimpse of the Natasha!backstory fic I've lately been concocting. Warnings: mention of children in threatening situations. Hope you enjoy and happy Halloween!

The records were almost impossible to dig up, lost among all the thousands of dead peasants in the messy records of the Soviet Union. Natasha had tried to find the charred foundation of the apartment complex but she had been unable to locate it, lost among regrowth and rebirth, a small family of five long forgotten by these children of the new age, never known by the wizened, wrinkled elders who had tasted the thick, rich redness of borscht in a chipped bowls night after night, been acquainted with hard work in the fields, toiling at the dry ground with hoes and rakes, and could recall the mystery of all the people and so little food and shelter.

Death had been so common; the Romanovas had been lost among the multitudes, their identities swept away with the curl of ink upon a page, forgotten even by their surviving daughter.

The names were all there waiting for her when she did eventually find them and for a moment they seemed to spell welcoming smiles after a long time away from home. She hadn’t thought to bring anything to lay by the grave. She wondered who had paid for the stone, perhaps the government. Another relative? A grandparent, aunt or uncle. Natasha had no way of knowing if there had been any other family.

The stone was rough and crumbling, a mass grave with all their names listed, one under the other. No epitaph, just dates, ’55, ’62, ’82, ’84, ’87, and for all of them the last date the same: 1988, January 16th. Natasha tried to remember it, blinding heat and sharp cold of the harsh Russian winter, wind howling in her ears, mixing with the screams of her dying family but – nothing. There was nothing. Abram, Darya, Feodor, Nataliya, Katya.

Mother, father, abstract ideas that, for all Natasha knew, might never have existed at all. She wondered if this was, in fact, the right grave. How could she know if the Red Room did not scrub out her identity so fully that they had stolen this dead little girl’s name and given it to Natasha, that there really was the dust of a four-year-old child beneath that hard ground, that this was just yet another dead end?

It was strange. She could not by now recall whether or not she had cried, that night when the Red Room had snatched her from the biting wind, watching her life dissolve into ashes that floated away on the harsh wind like snowflakes.

Natasha whirled around at a sound behind her, hand flying to the holster hidden by her coat. Her hand relaxed when she saw him standing silently behind her, arms over his chest, wool hat pulled over his ears. He was staring at the grave, not at her. By then he had yet to tell her about his own brother.

“What are you doing here?" she asked.

Barton’s eyes traveled up from the tombstone to meet hers, steely gray in the cold but there was a ghost of a smile on his lips. “You don’t have to do everything alone, you know, Romanoff.”

Oh, that's lovely. And dark. And ... promising!!!! Thank you!