---

January 15, 1997
Manhattan Diamond Exchange

‘Crusher’ Creel had a magic power; it was both his blessing and his curse. It was a blessing in that he could transform his body in miraculous ways, but a curse in that it made him a magnet for superheroes. It never seemed fair. Being the Absorbing Man should have been a free ticket to the best things in life, but whenever he tried to take what he wanted some superhero would always show up and stop him. So Creel had learned his lesson, albeit not the lesson the superheroes had tried to teach him. He had learned to be sneakier.

There was a time when Creel would have absorbed the size of a building and simply smashed his way into the diamond exchange, oblivious to what alarms he was setting off. Now he had learned how to sneak like a burglar and disable motion detectors. It was finally about to pay off too, as he had actually, finally, made it to the diamonds storage room where a fortune just waited for him to scoop it up into a sack.

Unfortunately for ‘Crusher’ Creel, someone else in the room with him knew how to sneak too. She too had evaded detection by security. Creel did not see or hear her enter the room and come up behind him. The Black Widow stood poised for a moment, targeting with her arms extended, before activating her wrist-mounted weapons. He was completely taken by surprise when she shot him in the back of the head and the top of his back with exploding pellets. He was dead instantly.

“Yes, finally!” the Black Widow whispered, pumping a fist in the air in a moment of triumph. Then it was time to move on, for every alarm in the exchange seemed to wake up from the explosions. It hardly mattered; the Black Widow knew the way out and could reach the roof access door by wall-climbing faster than any security guard could arrive. She was off the roof and on a neighboring building before she heard the first police siren in the distance. She was two roofs away when she spun around, pulled her short blonde hair away from her face, and tried to see who was following her.

She could not see anyone but her intuition told her someone was there. Rather than confront a foe she could not see, she turned forward again and moved on, doubling her speed and performing more acrobatics in crossing from building to building. A block away, she was confident she would have a strong lead on anyone following her. She turned back again, crouched low on a high ledge and watched for her pursuer to come into view.

---

Natasha Barton had materialized slowly on the roof of the diamond exchange, in time to see a woman in a tight-fitting, black leather uniform not unlike her own fleeing from the scene. Natasha could hear the alarms below her and the sirens in the distance and put the clues together. This woman was fast and agile, surely an Olympic-level gymnast – but so was Natasha. She not only closed the gap with the woman she was pursuing, but kept out of sight as she did so. Finally, when the woman stopped to crouch on a high ledge and watcher for her pursuer, Natasha thought it was time to step out on the ledge and confront her. “Hi,” Natasha said.

The blonde woman turned and fired, but to Natasha’s experienced eye she telegraphed the attack and Natasha was able to leap to the wall, run across it and land on the ledge behind the blonde woman. The narrowness of the ledge worked against the blonde woman now as she spun around to attack, but had to spin around too slowly and Natasha was already waiting at close range to block the elbow jab she anticipated.

“Wait, I know you!” Natasha said. The recognition had dawned on her suddenly that this was the same blonde woman as the freedom fighter she had seen working with Killraven.

“Well I don’t know you!” the other woman protested with suspicious intensity. She altered her fighting style to short jabs with both fists, pushing Natasha back across the ledge every time she stepped back while she blocked with her forearms. Then she switched tactics again, extending a length of cable from her wrist weapon, exactly like Natasha’s ‘widow’s line’, only this woman held the length like a garrote and lunged for Natasha’s neck with it.

Natasha risked taking another step backward. Although it was only a one-story drop from this side of the building to the next lower building, around the corner of the ledge was a sheer, five-story drop to the sidewalk in front of the office building. Natasha lifted her right leg high and kicked the other woman in the stomach. The other woman doubled over but also slipped her garrote around Natasha’s leg like a lariat. Rather than wait to be thrown off-balance, Natasha let the woman hold up her right leg, swung her left leg up in an arc into the air and kicked the other woman in the head, knocking her hard against a window. Then Natasha pushed off from her attacker with both feet, did a quick flip in mid-air and came down on her feet right at the very tip of the ledge’s corner, facing her opponent.

“Look, just stop attacking me!” Natasha paused to say. “I only want to talk!”

“Fine, you want to talk? Then stop wearing my mother’s face first!”

Natasha froze, staring hard at the young woman dressed like her before her. The word ‘what’ was frozen on her lips, but went unspoken.

“I don’t know if you’re a Skrull, or some kind of new Adaptoid, or what…” the girl claiming to be her daughter went on, angrily, but clearly shaken, “but you’re either going to stop wearing her face or I’ll knock that face off you myself.” She shook a finger at Natasha as she spoke.

Natasha studied the other woman’s face closely. “…Yelena…?” she asked hesitantly.

“Stop that!” Yelena cried. She fired an exploding pellet, her own ‘widow’s sting’, from her wrist weapon, but telegraphed the move by thrusting her arm forward as if for a punch and Natasha was able to dodge around the corner of the building in time. The missile struck a window across the street and shattered it. Yelena raced to the corner, but there was no sign of the ‘imposter’ on the building’s front ledge.

“Yelena…Black Widow…” Natasha said from the ledge one story higher. “I was the original Black Widow. I was thrown forward in time when you were just a baby.”

“Liar!” Yelena yelled, firing another blast at the ledge where Natasha was standing. The ledge crumbled but Natasha had already jumped clear, down to a flagpole jutting out from the same level Yelena was on. Yelena blasted the flagpole too, but not before Natasha had already swung off it and back toward the ledges, landing one story lower but on the far end of the front side of the building. “My mother died saving the world from an invasion fleet!” Yelena lowered herself down from her ledge but began crawling on the vertical face of the building on all fours. Her burning gaze she kept riveted on Natasha and her lips curled back in a snarl as she grit her teeth between words. “You’re making a mockery of every reason I took her place as the Black Widow!”

“So you were stopping a crime back there at the diamond exchange,” Natasha said with relief in her voice. “When I appeared on the roof and heard alarms, then saw you leaving, I thought the worst. I’m sorry! Your father must be so proud!”

“My father is dead!” Yelena growled as she fired her ‘widow’s line’ from her wrist weapon right at Natasha. Natasha twisted out of the way but grabbed onto the line, not knowing of the electrical charge it carried. Natasha was momentarily paralyzed by the jolt, which was just what Yelena had wanted. In the time that bought her, Yelena hopped down onto the same ledge, sprinted up to Natasha and began choking her with both hands.

“Yelena…please…” Natasha managed to say, tearing at Yelena’s strong hands with her own. “If there’s any…chance I’m…telling the truth…hear me out…”

“With all the masters of disguise and shape-shifters and evil clones out there, you expect me to just accept you at face value?” Yelena asked. “You’re just another bad guy and, if I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that you have to kill the bad guys before they kill you, or everyone close to you.”

“If you…really mean…that…then why…are you sparing me?”

Yelena kept choking for a moment longer before she loosened her grip. She knew it was true that she was holding back, so there seemed to be no need to pretend that she would kill this woman. At least not yet. “How can you prove you are who you say you are?” she asked instead as she stepped back.

Natasha rubbed her neck and glanced down at the four-story drop to the street that could have happened at any moment Yelena had simply pushed her off the ledge. “Any number of ways. Take me to a mind-reader with the X-Men or have your Sorcerer Supreme cast a spell on me. This is, when? The ‘90s? Surely there’s some scientific maternity test by now.”

“This is 1997. My mother died 25 years ago. If you are her, why are you only coming back now?”

“When the warp drives exploded on all those Skrull ships…” Natasha said, thinking hard. It was so difficult to remember now what had happened. “It must have created a small time warp. I was sucked in and thrown into the future. I’ve already been to another alternate future that was…well, it was pretty bad. This future takes place around the same time but looks more like the world as I remember it. I’m drifting through time, but I’m hoping that I’ve gone as far forward as I’ll go and will start drifting back to my own time soon. If that makes sense…?”

“Not a word of it. But keep talking.”

“Even back in my day there were times when it seemed like we’d lost one of the good guys, but really hadn’t. I attended Captain America’s funeral back in ’68, but it turned out he had just gone into hiding to retire so his son could take over being the new Captain America.”

“And then we lost him too.”

“Oh God, Steve Jr. too?” Natasha held her breath for a moment. “Are any of the old heroes still around?”

“Some of them…”

“Yelena, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you…at least, not yet. I’m going to find my way back. I’m going to be a good mother to you. I’m going to keep your father alive so you have two loving parents, just like you always should have.” Natasha looked around at herself. She felt that tingling then numbing sensation again she had felt just before she left Killraven’s time.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Yelena asked as Natasha started to slowly disappear.

“I’m drifting again. Don’t worry, I’ll find my way back to you. I love you!” Natasha managed to say before she vanished completely.

---

---

---

Previous Issue | Next Issue