#sestryverse

3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

Ooooh this is a hard one for a reasonably long fic so I’m going to cheat and choose two:

It—it’d never gone anywhere, that’s the thing. Natasha’s heart had thumped every time she’d had a personal conversation with Maria Hill exactly the way it’s doing now, but they’d never done anything about it: had always been on the cusp of something, maybe, and then the timing had been wrong or Hydra had taken the entire fucking agency down or killer robots had attacked both them and Sokovia. And then Maria had died, and Natasha had died, and now here they both are in an entirely different world where Maria Hill still smells like fucking vanilla-amber set on fire with a match.

“Fuck,” Natasha whispers to herself, shaky, and tries to remember what the goddamn hell she was doing.

Oh babe. Who hasn’t been there with an eternal crush???

“Well,” Steve says. Leans in so he can nudge his shoulder against hers, and it's enough that she turns to look at him, his blue eyes and open expression. It's startling seeing how young he is; he doesn't age, exactly, but she remembers the exhaustion in his eyes. Keeps expecting to see him with a beard. “I know it's not the same thing, but how about a friend?”

God, she can still remember what she'd told him then, years and years in her past and still nearly eight in the future, and it's not the answer she'd give him now; she's had ten years with him at her side, and almost eight with her sisters, with Bucky, with Nick Fury giving her a place in the world.

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, Steve, I'd like that,” and then, realizing: “we weren't dating, Christ, it wasn't like that.” Lying, just a little; it wasn't like that but there were times after the Decimation when it was, when all they had was each other. But that one's too complicated to get into without explaining the end of the world, and it's not something she'd want now, so— friends. It's nice. Feels familiar.

NATASHA. STEVE. HOW ABOUT A FRIEND. How about Natasha changed and seeing that change in herself, the clearest contrast of who she was and who she is, and Steve able to put his finger right on what’s going on for her when not a single other person has figured out her whole deal. Don’t mind me I’m just screaming about it.

5: What part was hardest to write?

The ending! Satisfying and solid endings are always like pulling teeth for me - even if I know how a fic will end, the way I did with this one, getting the wording right is an exercise in patience and feeling like a hack who doesn’t know how words are even supposed to fit together.

11: What do you like best about this fic?

Okay so part of what I love about this fic is getting to write a kinder world for Natasha, with a bunch of OCs I fucking adore, that nevertheless doesn’t pull away from acknowledging what she’s lost. And then in trying to answer the first question I remembered the passage I love the best, which feels like it speaks to some of that bittersweet feeling of the fic and also just lets me chew on the Natasha-Steve friendship a bit more:

"I only pretend to know everything," she says once to Steve, stretched out on his couch and on her second glass of wine while Bucky cooks them dinner, and Steve just rolls his eyes, disbelieving. “No,” she insists, “it's true. It's a ripple, the, what do you call it, butterfly effect. Every decision I made took me further away from what I remember. At this point all I know is the big stuff and the small stuff.”

“What's the big stuff?” Steve asks, curious now, and Natasha shrugs one shoulder.

“Hydra. Where to find you in the ice. Demi-gods throwing down in New Mexico. You know. Things that are too big to change just from my own actions.”

“And the small stuff?” Steve says. Tops up her wine. Natasha takes a sip, considers her answer.

“You learned how to steal a car in Nazi Germany,” she says eventually. “You broke two of your fingers catching the shield, first week you got it, and they healed crooked, still ache when it rains. Your body healed too fast, and you wouldn't let anyone re-break them and set them right—you should really go to medical and get them to fix that, by the way. Your favorite place to eat in DC is this Thai restaurant with really good tom kha gai.”

“I like mango bubble tea,” Steve remembers, and Natasha nods.

“Yeah,” she says, “you like mango bubble tea.”

“He used to wear newspapers in his shoes,” Bucky adds, from the kitchen doorway, and laughter bubbles out of Steve.

“I don't even know what tom kha gai is,” he says after a beat, going serious again. Natasha shrugs again.

“So we'll go eat there,” she says, “you can try it out. Shit, I think that place might not open until 2012, that's a bummer.”

“But what if I'm different,” Steve says. “What if—shit, I don't know. You said I liked mango, and I do, but what if it's not my favorite here. What if I liked strawberry, or milk tea. Or, what is it, the one Vasilia gets.”

“Winter melon and lychee,” Natasha says. “I don't know, Steve. Go try them all, figure it out for yourself. Decide you're gonna drink strawberry instead of mango. I only know what I know.”

“We did, didn't we,” Steve says. Takes a breath. “Tried them all out just to see.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees. Suddenly tired, full of the memory of the time after the second mission they'd run together. A sunny afternoon, the two of them at a loose end, and Steve still hadn't figured out where he fit in SHIELD, who he was in this new world. But Natasha had dragged him out—stay on him, Fury had briefed her, figure him out—and maybe she'd needed a friend just as much as he had. Come on, Rogers, she'd said, let's go make ourselves sick on sugar, and they'd ordered one of everything, sat in the park with the sun in their faces and traded off drinks until they'd settled on a favorite. She can still picture the sunburn Steve had got, the way it faded over the evening from pink into a collection of freckles across the bridge of his nose before disappearing; she'd been fascinated, trying not to show it. “Yeah, Steve, we did.”

Yeah, Olivia definitely stopped speaking Russian about the same time she stopped being Olga, and that was a very deliberate choice. The younger ones have mostly forgotten - Marta and Kseniya were so young when they left they don’t remember much if anything, and Irina and Lyudmila will swear in Russian and chat up the babushkas when they go to Brighton Beach in the summer, but not much else.

Hello! Oh boy this is a real test of my memory and also tough for a fic series where the through line can be summed up as “fake ID, it's the only way to get through life when you're a weird child prodigy.” While I was writing I kept a broad reminder/age list/timeline but deleted it once I was done so this is constructed from re-reading and counting on my fingers a bunch, lmao

(Note - I wrote it all before Black Widow came out, so nothing matches the canon established by that film except for I think it’s fun to believe that Yelena is still played by Florence Pugh)

The series begins in 1999, where the sestry are (about) these ages:

Vasilia - 17-18

Natasha - 16-17

Yelena - 15

Evgenia - 14

Svetlana - 14

Olivia (Olga) - 13

Lyudmila - 11

Irina - 10

Marta - 5-6

Kseniya - 4

None of them have birthdates recognised/acknowledged by the Red Room so they’re also guessing to a certain extent. Olivia and the other older sisters have been through the test assigned at 13, but Lyudmila doesn’t know about it so that’s one measuring point.

In 2000, a year after escaping, the girls create new identities and fake papers. For Vasilia through to Svetlana, their fake papers age them up by a few years - mostly because being older will make it easier to get what they want in their new life.

Around then:

Natasha runs Clint’s intake assessment

Yelena joins SHIELD

Vasilia goes to college, and Svetlana and Evgenia go to Tisch

The younger girls enter school at roughly their correct age grade

Natasha and Bucky clear his programming and burn down the bank vault

Yelena re-meets Monica (in the summer of 2000) and moves to DC before the end of the year.

2001: 9/11 (a notable event for both Natasha and Yelena)

2002: Yelena starts dating Monica, who is 19 but has been at MIT since the start of the series (per author authority, that’s because she’s a baby genius who started college at 16). Yelena is 23 on paper but about 17-18 in reality.

2005: Steve is found and defrosted. At that point the girls are 11-24. Natasha is about 26 according to her fake papers. Bucky says she is “barely 20” but she’s more like 22-23. Let’s say that’s because of Bucky rounding down when he talks about his little sister and not because of my mistake 😅 Natasha notes here that Steve is out of the ice “six years earlier” than her (canon) memory.

2008: Sharon is assigned as protection for Yelena, and Tony comes back from Afghanistan (matching Iron Man canon).

Between 2005/2008 Natasha also goes to Siberia and realises Vasilia would have been one of the other super-soldiers created with the stolen serum.

2009-2010: It really starts to pop off:

Yelena goes undercover as Pepper’s PA (taking Natasha’s canon role)

Yelena completes the Bahrain mission (about a year later than Agents of SHIELD canon, due to referenced canon changes of a treaty Yelena negotiated with the Inhumans.) During that mission Yelena meets Lady Death, who mentions that Natasha has met “her sister” the Oracle. (Natasha doesn’t meet the Oracle until 2011 but the past/present/future are basically all the same thing for the three Fates and it certainly isn’t my timeline mistake)

Tony saves Riley from getting killed by an RPG

Natasha recruits Sam to her Avengers team

Marta and Kseniya are still in high school

Sveta joins the New York City Ballet and Evgenia moves in with Sebastian

2011:

The general canon events from Thor happen off-screen - Natasha references it and knows Sif, Heimdall and Jane, indicating she was involved in some way (probably through leading the Avengers response)

Evgenia gets married, and in late 2011 she has the twins

Natasha gives Sif back the Tesseract and visits the Oracle

Marta and Kseniya are likely just about to finish high school

Natasha’s fic finishes!

2012-2013ish: Another big couple of years.

Tony joins the Avengers.

Yelena is attacked by Dezhnyov (thank you Goose)

Yelena is given the SWORD mission

All the kids are out of school by then - Vasilia mentions Marta’s “school play” but this is more likely to be a college theater club.

this meme going off in the sestry group chat right now

Maria, when Natasha leaves on mission: get some sausage, Natasha