---

February 26, 1972
The edge of Earth’s upper atmosphere

“Crossing the Karman Line* now.”


“Heh, hardly feels like we’re even moving.” Hawkeye looked over at Spider-Man, who sat at the controls as the small saucer-shaped craft they were in achieved escape velocity with the uttermost ease. “Bet the NASA boys would just love to get a hold of this baby.”

“But would that really be a good thing?” the Black Knight, who was seated at his left, asked. “This is a highly advanced piece of alien hardware, Clint. The product of millions of years of technological innovation, and—”

“NASA doesn’t necessarily need it,” cut in Spider-Man. He glanced back proudly at their blue and white homeworld below. “With good old fashion human know-how we’ve reached space, landed on the moon and are set to reach Mars in a few years.”

Dane Whitman nodded. “And don’t you think handing them a Skrull starship would take away everything that achievement says about mankind?”

“I guess it’d be a bit of a cheat,” Hawkeye admitted.

“Nonsense,” Quicksilver interjected. Though he and Wanda had only recently been extracted from the Super-Skrull’s clutches, he was already as quick to argue as ever. “It is an historical fact that when cultures spread outward they adopt new technologies that they discover. We would be fools not to do the same and take everything we can from those so-called ‘higher species’ who think they can discount humanity.”

Clint mulled that over before he said, “Anyway, all I was sayin’ was that John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil an’ those guys would be green with envy when they find out we’re tooling around in a flying saucer.”

“They’re not the green ones we need to worry about,” the Scarlet Witch said pointedly.

Clint turned around to look at Wanda Maximoff. While she appeared to be making herself comfortable as she could on the alien ship, her fleet-footed sibling had an irritated scowl on his face worse than his normal one; Clint knew Pietro really disliked being cooped up inside any kind of vehicle. Hercules did not look like he was enjoying it much here either, but his discomfort came more from how the ship was designed to accommodate an alien species whose default form averaged a much smaller size than a humans’ did, and Hercules was himself much larger than the average human.

“My sister is correct,” said Quicksilver. “The Skrulls are not to be underestimated. Do you think this plan will work, Peter?”

Spider-Man replied confidently, “Millions of years ahead of us the Skrulls might be, but my money will always be on what Reed Richards can dream up, and what he has is a real doozy. The sensor virus we’re infecting the Skrull Armada with will make them think we’re an even bigger armada – one coming right at them!”

Pietro looked unimpressed. He climbed out of his seat in disgust. “And pray tell, what happens when the thousands of Skrull ships open fire on us with their thousands of weapons?”

The Black Knight smiled beneath his dark helm. “If the virus works as it’s supposed to, they’re targeting computers will be so thrown off they won’t be able to hit us.”

“And then we’ll be upon them!” Hercules cried boisterously, slamming a fist into his other mighty hand.

Restless, Quicksilver stood up and started making his way to the back of the ship.

“You gotta go to the bathroom?” Hawkeye cracked.

“I need to run some laps,” growled Quicksilver in reply, activating the controls that opened the rear door into another compartment. As the door slid to the side he discovered a dark clad figure standing behind it.

“An intruder!” shouted Hercules, whirling.

“Red alert, everybody! The ship’s been breached!” Hawkeye was jumping up and around, unslinging a gun when Quicksilver did the most unexpected thing. He turned and suddenly laughed out loudly. The laugh was a bit cold, a bit nasty and, as usual on the rare occasion he did laugh, it was at someone’s expense.

By the look in Pietro’s eyes Clint saw the mockery was directed squarely at him. “What the--?!” Then he saw the ‘intruder’ as she stepped forward into the light.

“Hello everyone,” said the Black Widow, an amused smile spread across her face.

Clint lowered his gun with a heavy sigh. “Natasha, what are you doing here?!”

Exchanging smiles with Wanda and Hercules, she slowly turned to meet her husband’s troubled gaze. “You didn’t really think I was going to sit this one out, did you?”

“Yeah, actually I did,” fumed Clint. “I really thought if there was anywhere you’d want to be right now that it would be with the baby! How could you just go off and leave Yelena like this?!”

“Oh come on, Clint. I could say the same thing about you rushing off into danger; if something happened to you she’d never get the chance to know her father.”

“Well if something happened to the two of us she’d be robbed of both her parents!”

“You don’t get a say which one of us risks their life, Clint Barton!”

“Well, it shouldn’t be her mother! C’mon, Natasha, I mean, you’re in pretty good shape again this soon after giving birth, but you’re nowhere near up to top form and you know it!”

“You think being in top form makes you any less superfluous when Hercules is in the room?” she said, waving her hand at Hercules.

Everyone was following the debate and looked at Hercules. “It’s true,” Hercules said with a shrug.

“You think your skills and experience are any more valuable than mine? Do you think I’m less capable as an Avenger than you?” Natasha added, still fuming over Clint’s insistence on shielding her.

He shook his head. It was the same argument they had been having for weeks. He’d never feel any different about it and he didn’t feel too apologetic either.

“Sorry to butt in guys,” Peter interjected as a large Skrull vessel came to fill up the front window as they closed in on the ship. “It’s just that we’re getting close to docking range.”

“Oh crap,” Clint exclaimed, having not been paying attention. “Think they’re gonna let us in?”

“I don’t think they’ll have a choice,” said Natasha as she saw Hercules eagerly rise out of his seat.

“I will see to manufacturing a suitable entrance for us,” the Lion of Olympus told them with a grin as he headed toward the airlock.

Dane nodded at the idea. “I can probably cut through their hull with my sword, but Herc can make a door a lot faster.”

“Speed is essential,” Pietro agreed.

“I’ll position the boarding tube while you guys get ready to move,” said Peter. “When we’re in, Wanda and Dane, you go left and Clint and I will go right. Pietro, you can take the point.”

“And what about little ol’ me?” asked Natasha.

“We need someone to watch the ship,” Peter told her. “I was going to have Dane be the one to do that, but now that you’re here I can use him in our boarding party; with his Ebony Blade, the Skrulls won’t have a chance of sealing us in anywhere.”

“Okay,” Natasha said resignedly, seeing how it made sense. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

Clint smiled at this. “Don’t worry, hon, we won’t be too long.”

As if to punctuate his statement the deck shook as outside Hercules violently ripped open a large gaping hole in the side of the Skrull’s ship.

“I think we can squeeze into that,” commented Wanda with a laugh.

“Watch yourselves,” said Natasha, donning a headset that each of the other Avengers wore to keep in radio contact. “You know how tricky the Skrulls can be.”

As the boarding tube was inserted and they hurried through to take full advantage of the element of surprise, she started to watch the bank of monitors in front of her at the navigation station. She could see the Skrull armada had not yet broken formation. With luck, Earth’s heroes would be able to sabotage a bunch of ships before the armada discovered their sensors were being tricked. After that, well, even with all these months to prepare they were still playing the rest of this by ear.

One camera feed in the lower right hand corner caught her eye. She had observed the other Avengers manipulating the monitors enough to know that they were somehow so motion-sensitive that she only had to point at an image on the screen to highlight it. Then she motioned with her hands outstretched and widening them to expand that image over a larger portion of the main monitor. Now she could count three ships, at the far ‘right flank’ of the armada that were trying to sneak around where their sensors told them an opposing armada was sitting.

“Anyone who can hear me,” Natasha said on the secure channel to the Avengers’ headsets, “I see three ships trying to move around our armada. They’re nowhere near our position.”

There was a long pause and then, when she did hear Peter respond, he sounded distracted by combat. “Widow, do you think they’re just…maneuvering around the armada?”

“No,” Natasha answered. “I don’t like the speed they’re going. I’m worried they’re making an end run around the armada to get to Earth faster.” Natasha checked the readouts on the console in front of her, all of which were frustratingly displaying only in non-Earth languages. She tried pointing to the ships on the monitor screen and more data started displaying around the ships. She could make out little of that, except for some of the data that looked suspiciously like bar graphs. “I’m thinking those ships are powered up for something bad…”

“Wait for us!” Clint’s voice shouted. “We’ll fall back and regroup at the ship.”

“There’s no time for that,” Natasha said as she looked over the ship controls. She had seen Dane and Peter at the controls of the ship on the way here. Could she figure out how they did it in time? Some of the controls were still mechanical in nature, levers and buttons, but others seemed to be more instances of motion-sensitive technology, with pads that reacted to having a hand over them while the closeness of the hand had a further effect. Natasha put her hands on two navigational pads and turned her hands hard to the left. The monitor displays all shifted as if the ship had just broken away from the larger warship to which it was docked and veered away from it. She allowed herself a smile. The mechanical controls might not be intuitive, but these ‘manual’ controls were and she could at least use them to pursue the three break-away vessels.

“Widow, what have you done?” Pietro’s voice shouted. “I was almost aboard! You almost dumped me in space!”

“Sorry, Quicksilver,” Natasha said, “but I can’t come back for you now even if I knew how. Knight, can you hear me? How do I engage the hyperspace engines?” There was a pause where Natasha only heard static and fighting over the ship’s speakers. “Those ships are moving faster,” she pressured. “I’ve got to overtake them now!”

“…the last lever on the far right hand side,” Dane’s voice said reluctantly. “The one with three buttons to the left of it; press all three buttons from top to bottom and then slide the lever forward.”

“Dane!” Clint’s voice shouted. “Dane, stop! Natasha, don’t do this! You can’t take on three warships with our one ship.”

“I don’t have any choice,” Natasha said grimly as she watched the three ships disappear off the visual monitors in a flash of light. “They just went into hyperspace. They’ve got to be heading to Earth.” Natasha pressed her hands hard on the navigation pads and pushed them all the way to the top of the pads. The ship seemed to respond by going faster. “My only hope is to line up behind them, jump into hyperspace, and jump them from behind when they come out.”

“Widow, you’re going to be cut off from communication with us as soon as you jump,” Peter’s voice said.

“You’ll be all alone out there!” Clint’s voice added hastily, still trying to dissuade her.

“I won’t be alone,” Natasha said as she continued to maneuver the ship into line with the direction the warships had been before jumping. “I’ll have a whole mess of Skrulls with me and four billion humans…including our daughter. Good bye, Clint. I love you…” she said, holding back tears and making sure her voice did not crack in her final words to the man who loved her so much he had made her love him back.

“Gawdamit, let go of me!” Clint’s voice said. “I’ve got to stop her! For the love of God, don’t do this, Natasha! Don’t—” Then his voice was cut off when the ship jumped into hyperspace and Natasha was suddenly very alone in a silent alien spacecraft.

Natasha was not idle. She figured out how to bring up images from long range scanners on the main screen and could see Earth. The only other line of defense around Earth, she knew, was on the opposite side of the planet trying to fend off the Kree armada, so there was no one there to stop the Skrull ships on this side. And then the Skrull ships appeared, as if superimposed over the image of Planet Earth, but Natasha knew that meant they had come out of hyperdrive already. She kept pointing at the ships, hoping to get sensor readings on them to appear on the screen even if she could not understand all of them.

“Widow, do you read, over?” Peter’s voice suddenly appeared over the ship’s speakers.

“Spider-Man…?” Natasha asked hesitantly, unsure how Peter could contact her at this range and well aware of the Skrulls’ gift for mimicry.

“I’ve patched into the ships’ communications so we don’t have to rely on the headsets,” Peter said. “We’ve commandeered this ship already and are about to attack the rest of the fleet with it. What’s happening at your end?”

“It’s as bad as I thought,” Natasha said as sensor readings finally began to appear on the ships on screen. “They’re building up a massive power surge on all three ships. Whatever weapons they’re carrying, I’m dropping out of hyperdrive before they can fire them.”

“You can’t be sure if ramming one will take out the other two ships,” Peter said.

Natasha paused and smiled; leave it to Peter to guess her strategy. “With the kind of power surge I’m seeing, I figure if I hit the one in the middle, the other two are goners. You’re not going to try to talk me out of this?”

“You just save Gwen,” Peter said, choking up, “and both our little girls.”

Hitting the buttons in reverse order must have missed some protocol because the ship jerked hard when it dropped out of hyperspace, but it did work. Without having taken any breaking precautions, Natasha’s ship came out of hyperspace with tremendous velocity. She barely had time to use the control pads to maneuver her ship into the path of the middle Skrull warship, but she did it. And then—

---

What drifts through your mind in your final moments?

Clint wondered that, at the end, 18 million miles away. Luckily, Dane had his back because Clint could not cope enough to continue to engage in the combat as the Skrulls’ rallied and tried to take back their ship. Clint could only remember all the wonderful moments he had with Natasha, like the first time they met when she was a spy and he was a circus performer. She had that short, poofy black hair he always hated back then, but her exotic looks and that costume that was as much like lingerie as it was like a supervillain costume had him smitten at first sight.

And there were more recent memories too, like Natasha holding their beautiful baby, wrapped in the blanket from the hospital, in the passenger seat of the limo Tony Stark had loaned them. Natasha was having trouble leaning out to close the door and hold the baby at the same time, but Clint was so busy taking pictures that he did not notice. She was mad at him for taking pictures, saying she looked hideous. “Never to me,” he told her. It was true. She had more wrinkles around the eyes and baby weight had ruined her figure, but to him she was just as beautiful as the day he had first seen her.

A few days later, Natasha was nursing their baby in her favorite chair. Clint was standing in the doorway while they discussed baby names. He made some goofy suggestions that she called him an idiot for, but it had the desired effect of getting her to smile. He would do anything to see that smile again. Even at that time, thinking they had all their lives ahead of them, he marveled at that smile of hers. He was just so glad to have her, all too aware of how undeservedly lucky an old carnie like him had turned out to be, and excited about their future as a family.

“Don’t leave me…” Clint said out loud, repeating the sentence he had been saying to Natasha in their last moment in contact with each other.

---

---

To Be Continued...

Next: In Black Widow #11: Daredevil guest-stars as the Black Widow has her final showdown with Mr. Kline! Huh? How is any of this even possible now?? Don’t you dare miss “Don’t Say You Don’t Remember” next month and find out!

---

Previous Issue | Next Issue