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Natasha doesn’t know how she gets back to the safehouse.
The last thing she remembers is the surge of adrenaline that cuts through her nausea, a rusty warehouse door drenched in more red than her ledger, then flashes of street signs and store fronts connected by filthy alleys, one right after the other.
All she knows is that, at some point, she's reaching for the spare key hidden in a loose brick two steps from the stairwell, which tells her that some remaining shred of self-preservation must’ve steered her back to relative safety.
‘Relative’ being the key word.
It’s an old SHIELD hideout. More of a broom closet than anything. Abandoned for decades and shoved to the bottom of a throwaway fieldwork file from before she'd been an agent.
No one should be able to find her here—not the men she left behind at the warehouse (whether or not they're still breathing) nor any of her remaining allies (few as they are).
All she knows is that she’s on her own again.
Alone.
Somehow, even with her faculties failing, Natasha manages to shut the door behind her before she stumbles, fumbling with the lock.
Her fingers are slippery with blood. Probably hers. Could be someone else’s. The warehouse was full of it, last she remembers.
The lock catches mid-turn before her grip slips again, and she curses under her breath, sounding eerily close to a whimper.
Pain she can deal with. Pain she is intimately familiar with.
But the last reliable thing she has in this life is control, and even that is fading fast.
In fact, it’s almost too much to handle while the world continues to spin—and she’s pretty sure there’s an open wound somewhere, or everywhere, and her hands are trembling too much to lock this damn door.
It clicks into place, finally. A wet, shuddering breath escapes her lips, then a thump as her forehead makes contact with the door frame.
The rest of her body follows before she slides down into the dust and dirt, leaving a streak of crimson across flowery wallpaper stained in mold and torn by age.
Awareness nags somewhere in the back of her mind. She knows something needs to be done to stem the life bleeding out from her wounds, but slowly, surely, time slips away in tandem with reality.
The inside of her elbow itches. She doesn’t know what they injected her with, but it makes her hear things. It shows her things that aren’t real.
At least, she’s pretty sure they aren't real.
A figure lurks just around the corner. Slight movement at the edge of her vision.
It's the same one that's followed her the entire way back, appearing in shop windows, in alleyways, in shadows on rooftops.
The worst part is its face. A face she hasn’t seen in years. One that should be lifeless in an unmarked grave on the Red Room’s training grounds.
“Go away,” Natasha forces out, hoarse, through a dry throat. She swallows painfully and tries again. “Leave me alone.”
The figure is silent, its gleaming eyes boring holes into the side of her face.
Natasha clenches her eyes shut—and wishes she had the strength to cover her ears when it starts to whisper.
Nonsensical sounds at first. An endless drawl of misery.
Then it begins to plead. For mercy. For life.
For its sister.
Whispers and mutterings, over and over, in a gradual crescendo until they turn to screams that have Natasha flinching. The back of her head smacks hard into the rotten wood behind her, and she sees stars.
She tries to back away, pressing herself painfully further into the wall with trembling fingers scrabbling for purchase at the floorboards, splinters digging and lodging beneath flesh, but her limbs have grown numb.
She’s cold. So cold.
Maybe things could've been different. Maybe she could've said something, done something else that would've led to her walking out of that warehouse unscathed.
She'd be in one piece, but it would've taken her months to complete her goal.
No. At the end of the day, this had always been the plan. This is what she does, after all—offer herself up as bait, let her body be used, abused, ripped to shreds and torn inside out in service of some greater purpose.
She fights and endures until she breaks and scatters into a million tiny pieces. Breaking is what she was made for. It works because no matter how many times she does it, she can always put herself back together again.
The Red Room shaped her. They drew the seams, and by design, she falls apart.
Natasha got her intel, in the end.
The only cost had been herself.
Even with her eyes closed, nausea roils and churns within her. There’s nothing to expel at this point, but her body has a mind of its own when she chokes on nothing but air and heaves, the motion sending her agony alight where it radiates through to the deepest parts of her.
Natasha didn’t think she had anything left to lose. She was convinced there was nothing but a void inside of her, swallowing up anything and everything that made the mistake of drifting too close.
But this ugly pain, new and old built upon layers and layers of scar tissue, proves there’s still a part of her that’s alive. A part of her that can still feel. And the more she burns, the more it drowns out the voices eating at her sanity.
The figure looms at the corner of her eye, closer now, with its mouth flapping wider and wider as it screams with sharp teeth filed down to points. Its eyes are devoid of light. Nothing but a pair of black holes drawing her in.
She drops her gaze to the open wound in her thigh, gaping and still steadily oozing blood. Her fingertips graze over the seams, rough and shredded from a serrated knife. One of the edges catches on her nails, pulling with the motion and prying the wound open before it flaps back into place.
Not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
The screams are louder now, ever present and building and piercing her ears.
Natasha digs the tip of her thumbnail into the corner, observing with a hazy awareness the well of blood flooding over the entirety of her finger, rivers of hot red that spill down her thigh to gather in a pool on the floor. It seeps through the rotted wood in branching lines, spreading to her periphery like arteries.
A long time ago, in the basement of a frost-covered Siberian facility, someone once told her that love is warmth.
But this is the only warmth she deserves, so she presses harder into the wound, tearing herself open and setting her whole leg ablaze. Her vision swims enough for her to gag, and her pulse grows weak, but still she digs, eager to reach the part of her that might still have a semblance of worth.
She wonders if she digs deep enough through flesh, she'll hit slick hardness instead. Deadened steel as sharp as a blade. Metal forged in the shape of a loaded pistol.
She wonders if that could bleed out of her, too, until she's ruined beyond recognition. She wonders what it would take to grind herself into dust. A state beyond salvaging.
Maybe then she could finally rest.
Eventually, when her broken body is surrounded in nothing but the result of her sacrifice, the screams fade to nothingness and leave only her ragged breathing.
The figure draws back, blending into the darkness, as her vision grows black. The shadows extend, reaching for her with searching fingers, taking hold and stealing the strength from her muscles.
She’s out before she hits the ground.
.
Time passes. By some miracle, Natasha wakes.
She blinks back into consciousness with a sinking sensation in her gut as realization crashes into being.
She takes a moment to gather her bearings, cheek pressed flat against rotted wood and crusty with dried blood. Strands of messy, knotted hair stick to her face and obscure her eyes, fluttering to the movement of her eyelashes.
Daylight filters through the blinds, highlighting dust particles dancing in the air and warming where it soaks into her bare skin like an embrace.
A cough expels through cracked lips, weak and painful.
Beneath her, the crimson pools have molded themselves into stains in the floorboard, ruddy brown in misshaped pools, tiny droplets, and finger-shaped streaks all over the walls.
Her entire body hurts, but a particular pulsing burn begs attention in her thigh. It's long since settled into something muted, a mere echo of the night before, and part of her mourns what could have been.
The serum in her veins seems to have finished what her body couldn’t, stitching her back together against her will. What a cruel irony, Natasha thinks, that the Red Room has stolen this away from her, too.
Then again, her body has never been her own. Once again, it urges her to action.
So, she does what she always does. She picks herself up. Fixes her mask. Glues the cracks shut and smooths out the imperfections.
She begins anew.