It begins as it ends.
Alone.
The sea is dark, and the boat seems to be battered by it’s rage.
Natasha understands.
Doesn’t blame the sea for its ire.
She wants to vomit, the rockiness of the storm turning her stomach.
Walking to the port, she holds on the the rail and pushes herself up the stairs.
“How far away are we?”
The man at the helm laughs.
“Why? Got places to be?”
Natasha wishes she did.
Fuck you, she thinks.
She pushes the voices back. They come in waves, sometimes she can outthink them, sometimes she can’t.
She clenches her fist.
“How far?”
The man turns on her, towering over her aggressively.
“The hostages,” she starts.
There’s a sharp sting on her cheek.
Don’t react, the voices whisper.
He stares at her.
“Don’t forget your place, Natalia. You are here to guide them. Nothing more. These Shield scum, they deserve all that’s coming for them.”
Liar.
He puts his hand under her chin.
Don’t react, the voices tell her.
Save yourself.
“You’ll be back before you know it, back to the darkness and back to where you belong.”
He pushes her head back, just as the ship rocks backwards.
Natasha stumbles.
He turns his attention back to the front, and she takes it as her leave.
Her face hurts.
She thinks of the two hostages.
They beat them too.
Go back to them, the voices tell her, see what the other side looks like.
Her face hurts.
Don’t think about the pain.
Don’t be weak.
Natasha shakes her head.
The voices recede.
She touches the knife on her side.
Not yet.
There’s two hostages.
A man and a woman.
The woman she doesn’t like.
The man though.
The man, she likes his blue eyes and hopeful smile, every time she comes into his eye line.
It’s different to the usual shudder and look of hatred and distain that she usually gets.
Separated from the rest of the widows, Natasha finds that she misses them.
Misses the tentative strings of trust.
Oksana with her hope of escape.
Gretchen with her self destruction.
Mina and her anger.
She wonders how they’d describe her.
Dreykov must have known that this would be torture.
Because here she was.
Alone.
In the dark.
On a ship.
With a crew that hated her.
.
Clint hates boats.
He decides that if it was up to him, he’d never get on a boat ever again.
“Are you okay?” he asks Elsie, her face green with sea sickness.
“Peachy,” she mutters.
“I hate boats,” she groans.
“Who’s idea was this mission?”
Elsie stares at him.
“Yours?”
He grins humorlessly.
“Feels stupid now, getting captured by Hydra to find the base.”
She vomits in the corner and Clint groans.
“Don’t do that,” he tells her.
“I’m a sympathetic vomiter.”
She looks so forlorn at him, that the boat tipping and rocking seems to stagnate in Clint’s mind.
“I didn’t expect boats,” she mutters.
Clint looks out, the worry that the boat was unstable in the storm continuing to invade his thoughts.
The jailer, the woman with the braided red hair, is back, and looks disdainfully at Elsie.
Clint don’t expect the next chain of events, and if he were to think about it, the actions of the next day shaped his life in ways he couldn’t even predict.
The boat lurches as a wave hits.
It feels like it goes almost vertical and sends Clint, Elsie and their jailer backwards.
Clint swears and Elsie follows suit, fear in both their voices as the boat smashes back down on the sea.
The jailer gets to her feet, and Clint wonders what she thinks, it seems she’s weighing up her options around whether to go out in the cold or stay below.
Water rushes in.
Clint thinks something is likely wrong, he can hear an alarm, as the ship goes up again. This time he’s ready, hanging onto the bars and moving with the motion of the ship.
Elsie swears loud.
She’s not as quick as he is and she’s flung back, smacking her head on the metal.
“Shit!” he swears.
The jailer looks from her place in the corner; she’d copied Clint and watched Elsie.
“Help her!” he asks urgently, as the ship slaps back down.
Something is definitely wrong.
The alarm and panic from above now permeates down.
It seems louder now as more water rushes in.
“Fuck,” Clint says as the boat lifts again, the wood and metal cracking as the boat seems to break apart.
He looks to Elsie, still unconscious.
The water rises.
He didn’t notice when the woman disappeared, it was just him and Elsie in there and no way out of a sinking ship.
.
Natasha fights her way out of the bowels of the ship, up to find panic and mayhem.
The waves are terrifying and she feels like she should be more afraid of death as she stares at a wall of water, the wave like a tsunami.
Save yourself, come the whispers.
On a whim, she finds a rope and attaches herself to the rail and the water pounds down on and around her.
She’s not sure it’s the right decision.
The boat can’t stand it.
It breaks like a twig and there’s panic within all the crew. She watches men get dumped into the sea.
Others jump.
Her rope holds her and she thinks of the two held down below, with no way out, dying a death with their captors.
She’s not sure how she feels about that.
The voices have other thoughts.
We’ve been to hell before.
What’s a watery grave.
Get them out.
Save them.
Leave them.
They can’t help you.
No one can help.
You’re going to die anyway.
Water envelops her, more panic around her.
The man that hit her, falls helplessly in the sea.
Good.
Less evil in the world.
Even though you’re still here.
Natasha holds her breath as the water passes over the part of the ship she’s attached to, the broken ship seems to be pliant in the sea.
Acting on instinct, Natasha swims down and finds where the woman and man are stuck.
They’re still alive, panicked; and she thinks she’s sees relief as they see her.
That’s a first.
They’ll kill you, the voices pipe up, as she unlocks the cage.
The man comes out first, pulling the woman with him.
She looks dead.
Natasha swims up to the break the surface, exhaustion hitting her.
Boat debris floats around her.
Save yourself, murmurs the voices.
The man pulls the woman up onto some of the debris, as another wave come.
The darkness envelops them and Natasha loses them.
She finds her knife and rope and hangs on.
She’s so cold.
You’re going to die here.
She takes a deep breath.
You’re going to die.
You’re not allowed to die.
.
The beach is hard and sand is everywhere.
Natasha had fought through the night to hold onto debris of the ship, her knife embedded deep and the rope she’d found wrapped around wood until exhaustion had taken her.
It was the best she could do, washing here up on the beach and she couldn’t remember how she got there.
The storm from the night before had turned into sunshine.
She didn’t feel well.
She’d probably ingested liters of sea water.
She knew she needed to get up, assess the danger.
Get up.
The voices never stopped.
She was so tired.
Kowtowing to overwhelm, she passes out, still attached to the ship debris that saved her life.
.
Clint decides that he’s never getting on another boat as long as he lives.
He’d held onto Elsie for as long as he could, but with nothing to attach them together, he’d lost her in the dark and wet.
He’d not lost hope that he’d see her again.
He hoped.
Maybe she’d made it to the beach.
Maybe she’d swam, regained consciousness, not inhaled water.
Maybe.
His heart sinks.
Perhaps not in this lifetime, but maybe.
Looking around, the beach is lit by the daylight that breaks upon it. It seems strange that the storm that broke the boat was behind them.
So fierce and angry, he felt sure he would die.
Elsie was right, this mission wasn’t worth it.
Hydra’s base would present itself to them in the long run.
He feels sad, and cold and depressed as he pulls himself into a sitting position, wondering just what to do next.
.
Natasha feels the hot sun on her skin, warming her cold body.
Get up, the voices tell her.
They’re coming for you.
They’re all dead.
It’s your fault.
He’ll kill you for this.
Unless you get back.
Natasha knows they’re right.
The tracker in her leg means they’ll find her wherever she is, there’s probably someone on the way.
She gets to unsteady feet. Swaying, she feels blood on her face and wipes at it.
Her clothes are wet.
Her body hurts.
Pain is in your mind.
It’s nothing compared to what you’ve felt before.
She breathes.
It’s not dark and that she is thankful for.
She’s never admit it, but she’s scared of the dark. The unending black where she can’t find her way to the light.
Natasha squints at the morning sun, hoping for more warmth as another shudder rolls over her body.
She wonders if they’re any survivors.
She should check.
No one would check for you, the voices snarl.
Shaking her head, she focuses on her surrounds.
There’s a body.
And another.
They must have been close to the island.
She checks them systematically but she knows a dead body when she sees one.
The third body though, the blue eyed man, she approaches it cautiously. The woman is nowhere to be found.
He’s breathing.
Alive.
It would be better for him if he was dead.
She sits down next to his body and waits.
She should check for other survivors, but it feels to her that this is the only one that matters.
.
Clint feels his body be shielded from the sun; the shade allowing his eyes to peak open.
He doesn’t know when he fell asleep.
Exhausted and probably on the verge of hypothermia, he’d succumbed to fatigue and now, he wondered just how fucked he was.
He doesn’t know what he expected, but the braided hair jailer sitting next to him with her head in her hands wasn’t one of them.
Scrambling back, just far enough away, he seems to startle her as she copies his action.
They’re at odds.
She stands, and Clint pulls himself slowly to his feet.
He thinks his ribs are bruised or broken. So repeated banged against the debris of the ship.
Clint doesn’t know how to start, so he pretends it’s like a school yard bully.
He doesn’t even know if she speaks English.
Raising his hands, he introduces himself.
“I’m Clint,” he says, perhaps a little dumb, his voice croaky.
She doesn’t reply.
Stares blankly at him.
Circles him as if in a fight. He keeps his hands up, watching her as she watches him.
“Do you have a name?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Where are we?”
He doesn’t think she knows better than him, but he asks anyway, wondering if she’s had time to assess the situation.
He gets up and moves, testing the tentative stand off.
“Don’t,” she growls angrily, raising a knife.
“You speak English then?”
He gives her a lopsided grin, the one he likes to use to give a air of nonchalance.
He knows it’s disarming.
It does nothing to her facial expression.
“Are we alone here?”
Her face changes, almost into a frown.
“We’re never alone.”
He doesn’t know what that means, and hazards a look around.
He sees blonde on the beach and his heart stutters.
“Elsie,” he whispers and takes off in a run.
She runs after him, both of them likely looking ridiculous in trying to run on the sand.
He feels her catch up, tackle him and he pushes her in response.
“Don’t move,” she growls.
“It’s my friend, it’s…”
He doesn’t care, he pushes her back and her knife appears out of nowhere.
He’s prepared to fight, he just needs to see if Elsie's okay, she might be breathing, there might be some signs of life.
It’s a miracle she survived this far.
“No,” the jailer growls, her face wild.
He scrambles, and she punches him, he takes it falling back but using it to get on the other side, closer to Elsie’s fragile form.
She comes at him again, grabbing his feet and pulling him down.
“No!”
Her scream is feral.
They roll onto the ground and Clint fights back angrily, kicking his foot back. It lands solidly in her chest.
It throws them back and she twists and blocks, aiming an elbow at his head.
It narrowly misses his face, and he pulls her down, aiming to at least disarm her.
It doesn’t work, she reads his play and he finds a knife to his throat.
“No,” she says again, breathing heavily.
“I just want to know if she’s okay,” he tells her looking over to Elsie’s body.
The knife recedes from his neck. Slowly, she stands, and steps back from him.
Clint stands too.
It takes a moment, but he takes a further step towards Elsie with her watching him.
Clint takes it as permission.
He kneels at the body, touching her cold face, grief hitting him like a truck as he realises she’s dead.
He starts CPR and pushes on her chest.
It’s redundant.
He knows it as he breaks her ribs; as the body rises and falls which his presses.
“She’s dead,” the woman says.
Clint knows she is.
He feels the rage rear it’s head and he charges her.
The woman has a look of shock as she falls back into the sand.
The knife comes back it and he hesitates.
“It’s your fault,” he growls.
She pulls up and uses the knife to direct him away from her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him.
Clint pauses.
“You said that before,” he says harshly, “of course it matters.”
“She mattered, and now she’s..”
“Dead,” Natasha finishes.
“She’s dead.”
Clint collapses onto the beach.
He’s lost, he doesn’t know what to do.
Doesn’t know what to say, so just lays down and closes his eyes, his body shivering.
.
Natasha watches him carefully.
He’ll try and kill you.
She tries to ignore the voices
She’s dead and you’re not.
He’ll want revenge.
Like he said. It’s your fault they’re all dead.
The rest are dead.
They’re going to come for you too.
How are you always the one that lives?
Natasha doesn’t know.
Too stupid and stubborn to die.
Natasha shakes her head.
She’s exhausted.
Let them come.
If they kill her, she doesn’t care.
She lays down next to him.
He's going to kill you, the voices tell her almost frantically.
“I don’t care!” she yells.
The man looks over to her.
“About what?”
It’s then that she realises that they’d got the better of her. The words, the voices, the stress.
“Nothing.”
He’s going to kill you.
The voices almost sing the words.
“What did you mean, that we’re never alone? That it doesn’t matter? Why doesn’t it matter that we’re here alone?”
His words are slow.
“Why do you work for Hydra?”
They’re alone on an island.
At least that’s what she thinks.
For now.
She doesn’t even remember saying those words.
Tell him.
Don’t tell him.
The ocean crashes around, lapping at their feet.
Natasha feels the weight of the sun and looks up to the light.
“They’re coming,” she says, despite the push back.
“I have a tracker, embedded in my thigh.”
“They’ll come for me…”
They’ll always come for you.
“And for you.”
And they’ll punish you for this.
He sighs.
“I have a tracker too,” he confesses.
Natasha turns to him.
“Where?”
He shakes his head.
The knife appears.
“Where?”
Clint doesn’t answer straight away.
She takes a step forward, knife pointing at him.
“You are my mission, my hostage.”
If his people come first, they’ll kill her.
If she can remove the tracker, maybe she can send it into the ocean.
He smiles again.
“It’s in my blood,” he clarifies.
You’re fucked, the voices tell her.
She can’t kill him.
She can’t bleed him dry.
All she has is hope that her people come first.
It’s a poor hope.
You lose.
Either way.
You’ve lost.
“Get up,” she snarls.
Fear pools within her, the uncertainly of everything makes her vomit, as she’s unable to stop it.
He steps back and looks at her, his face upturned.
It’s only fear, the voices remind her.
Move forward.
Ask him questions.
More information is good.
“Are you… are you okay?”
She stares.
It’s not a question she’s ever been asked.
Kindness.
It’s uncomfortable.
He wants something.
Of course he does.
“Get up,” she repeats.
Clint does. He approaches his friend’s body and she doesn’t stop him.
She’s lost as to what to do next.
The voices tell her to kill him whilst his back is turned.
But she can’t.
He places the body up and places it carefully onto wood, tying it down and covering it as best he can.
She doesn’t understand.
“Is anyone else alive?” he asks, wiping at his face, the track of tears visible.
Don’t answer.
He’ll fight you.
He'll take you hostage.
“I don’t know,” Natasha answers, pushing past the voices.
She twirls the knife, allowing it to glisten in the sun.
He understand the threat and shrugs.
“What’s your name?”
Don’t tell him.
She turns and looks out on the horizon.
“How long will it take them to find you?”
He moves down and looks out with her.
“I don’t know.”
“You?”
Natasha shrugs.
“I don’t know,” she admits.
“Will they…”
She looks over to where the dead body is.
She doesn’t feel like she holds any of that sentimentality for any of the other bodies on the beach.
If they come first, they’ll kill you.
Natasha doesn’t want to ask the question of what they’ll do with her if his people come first.
“We need to find water,” she states.
One thing at a time.
He nods. Looks over to his dead friend and sighs heavily.
He’ll kill you when he gets the chance.
He blames you for this death.
“At least our clothes are drying.”
His words are incongruent to the death around them and Natasha wonders if this is not the first time he’s lost someone.
Wreckage of the boat is everywhere.
Natasha knows there must have been some sort of rations, but whether it survived to the beach she’s doesn’t know.
“What’s your name?” he ventures again.
She’s doesn’t answer.
She can hear them coming.
She had hoped for more time.
Time for what?
For him to kill you?
Capture you?
Rescue you?
The helicopters whir in the distance.
Clint looks up.
“Yours or mine?”
She’s not sure what she hopes for, her people or his.
“Hey.”
He’s closer to her than she likes, than she expected and she pushes him away, pushes him down and grunts angrily.
“Don’t.”
Her knife in her hands, he raises his in defence.
“If they’re mine you can come with me? You can tell us about Hydra.”
Lies.
“And why would I do that?”
He shrugs.
“We’ve all heard the stories, of what they do to little girls. To women.”
He looks her up and down and she can feel the shame burning on her cheeks.
“I just thought…”
She steps forward, brandishing her knife.
She’s never had a way out before.
The opportunity hurts.
You think you can run from your past?
It’s always with you.
She knows it won’t come up again.
“They’ll take you to the base,” she admits, still holding the knife up.
“They’ll torture you for information.”
There’s a look of worry that passes on his face.
You don’t want that for him.
You saved him for a reason.
“What if there’s another way?”
What if.
She steps back in contemplation.
The helicopter closes in.
It’s for her.
How do you keep going with all that heaviness.
She said they’d torture him.
But really.
They’re going to torture her.
Strap her in, with the mouth guard, put in the IV, and then she’ll be lost in pain.
With the voices tethering her to world.
Remember to breathe.
Natasha takes a deep breath.
She needs an ally in the world.
Someone outside of her life.
She can’t do this.
What if.
The helicopter closes in.
She closes the gap between them, and cuts his arm.
He stares at her in pain, reacting with a shout and pushes her away.
Grabbing at his arm, she coats her hand in his blood.
Tell him.
It’s only then he seems to understand what she’s doing.
“Run,” she tells him.
“Go. I won’t say anything.”
Clint doesn’t need to be told twice.
The time to hide is now.
The helicopter descends.
“I’ll find you,” he calls.
Fear pounds through her.
They’ll kill you for this.
She glances back to the man running, and then to the girl on the beach, and the dead bodies all around her.
Sometimes, the darkness feels as though it never ends, she feels buried into it, like she’d never to see the sky again.
But.
He said he’d come.
A light.
In the darkest places.
Hope.
.
Epilogue.
Clint doesn’t know if the tracker in his blood becomes inert when outside his body.
He sits in his own helicopter, holding onto Elsie’s cold dead body.
The jailer.
Her sad eyes and even voice, he thinks she wants saving.
Needs saving.
The co pilot turns to him, holding up the tracking information and nods.
“We have a lead,” he says.
.