Chapter 12
“Clint’s gone,” Steve announces.
He smells like fire and is covered in chars and soot.
“Are you—“ Tony starts, and then processes his words.
“What?”
“Clint’s gone,” he repeats. He eyes Bruce warily; and then nods to him.
“Are you okay?”
Bruce pushes past him.
“Fine,” he says quietly.
“We have to go find him,” Steve finishes.
“I need to go back to the Tower,” Bruce starts.
“What?”
Steve lets his anger flow, frustration of the incident of the last two hours getting the better of him.
“Natasha is missing, probably being tortured, Clint is in there, blind; no idea where to find her, and you want to go home?”
“Steve—“ Tony starts.
“No.”
He pauses.
“No.”
He sinks down into copilot seat and takes a drawn breath, his face pale and sad.
“They are just people out there, they don’t know what was happening here, they didn’t know anything about the Red Room; and we just destroyed their home, their marketplace, their school. It was on fire. We are destroying everything. Natasha is gone. Clint is gone.”
He looks to Bruce.
“You can’t go too.”
Tony looks exhausted as the helmet and face shield comes away.
They’re failing.
All of this work and they’re failing.
He pulls up the screens and hopes against hope that Clint was at least listening when he was talking about tracking.
His cell phone is still connected and the little purple light that pings on the screen almost makes him lose his balance in relief.
“Clint?” he calls, the phone connecting after two rings.
“You’re all being too slow,” Clint opens, “I’m not apologising.”
“It’s okay, we’ve got you on screen. Did you find her?”
There’s a pause and then a quick answer.
“No.”
Tony watches as the purple dot turns, some direction to where he’s going.
“But you have a lead,” he guesses.
“Yes.”
Steve stands, his emotions big in the room.
“I’m going to drop the Captain here to help. Bruce and I will go back to the states, there’s something he needs to do.”
Tony puts Clint on speakerphone as the cloaked plane rises at Bruce’s command.
“Natasha’s been drugged, she won’t be herself when you find her,” he tries to explain, looking to Bruce who won’t make eye contact. “They’ve given her a medication to make her compliant, a way to make all the widows do as they say.”
Clint is silent.
“You there?”
“You can fix it?”
Bruce shrugs and Tony nods.
“We need to go back home. If … when you find her you can bring her back, and we can fix her.”
“Okay,” Clint complies, “do whatever, just be ready.”
They hover in cloud cover, Steve standing at the entrance, of the plane, ready to jump.
“You’ll come back?” he asks, directing his question to Tony.
There’s a short nod, a clasp on his shoulder and Captain America leaves the plane.
Bruce wrings his hands together.
“You think they’ll find her?”
Tony doesn’t answer.
If they can’t no one can.
.
“March,” comes the order.
Natasha lines up with six other widows, recognising only Lena and Max in her group.
Dressed neatly in their widows uniforms, Natasha feels messy and tired. She’d braided her hair, old habits in a familiar place made her feel simultaneously better and worse, the tiny bit of control she has.
Standing, she follows the order, she has no choice.
The mess hall is as she remembered, stark and grey. There are far less girls and women there though, than perhaps there were in her childhood, but she can’t be sure at the extent of the place.
Three groups of six enter alongside their group and Natasha can’t stop the fear that settles in her chest.
Everyone is staring at her.
At least that’s what it feels like.
She lines up with the others and takes her tray of food. Mashed potato, a meat like substance and milk to wash it down with. The water fountain they all have access to, is too far away even though she knows she needs it.
Sitting mechanically, the loyalty oath plays over the loud speaker, Dreykov’s voice permeating in all the corners of her mind.
Max leans over, and spits into her potato, grinning as she digs into her own.
It seems that there is some voluntary actions despite the chemicals that course through.
She tries to move her arms to eat, but nothing happens, she needs a command, a word, something to let her know she can proceed.
It doesn’t make sense.
In her cell, she had voluntary movement.
Here, nothing. She’s at their whim and everything is conditional.
She thinks it might be proximity to the guards.
Pheromones… isn’t that what Jace had said?
“Eat,” the command comes.
She sucks down the milk before anything can happen to it, the potato now inedible.
The meat like loaf looks and smells like if isn’t fit for human consumption but she tries it anyway.
Natasha knows instinctively that she needs to eat, that worse days are coming; she has no idea if this is the only meal of the day.
For her at least.
“Don’t eat it,” the girl on her left advises quietly.
She glances to her and there’s a subtle shake of her head.
Stuck, Natasha doesn’t know if the warning is real and there’s some sort of poison, or if the warning is fake and they’re messing with her.
Compulsively, she reaches for it anyway, the order was to eat. Taking a bite, she swallows it down and reasons with the voice that tells her to eat more.
I did it.
I ate.
I followed the instruction.
She sits in limbo. Stomach growling, she settles for keeping down the tiny amount she’s eaten. It’s not long before the next call comes.
“Line up.”
Legs move and the woman walk in spider lines. In truth, Natasha has no idea what is happening, she just follows, hoping to stay under the radar.
She’s holding on by threads and trying to be conscious in all of this, stay alive, Clint had asked.
She wishes she could tell him she’s trying.
.
The first blow hits Max in the stomach.
No weapons this time and finally given time to heal, Natasha knows she has the upper hand. Max’s fight style is predictable and she can read her blows by the way she stands.
Defending against two kicks, she dodges right and elbows her in the head.
Dazed, Max steps back allowing Natasha to hit her again, knocking her to the floor chocking her.
“Don’t spit in my food again,” she growls in her ear.
Her voice feels foreign, even to her own ears, the malice and brutality of the action as she feels Max tapping out.
Natasha doesn’t let go.
Wants her to feel the fear that she can’t stop feeling, for someone to take it from her.
If anger is the way, she’ll take it.
It’s only as a guard says stop, that she lets go.
Unable to hold the position, she gets to her feet and stares down at the coughing girl.
“Come here.”
The guard orders them both over and hands Natasha a knife.
“Mark it,” he says monotonously.
Natasha twirls there knife, still feeling the mark on her thigh, she wants to return the favour, she feels Dreykov’s hand digging into it.
Instead, she draws the knife along her jawline, the blood dripping to the floor. It’s shallow skin, and will heal quickly; it seems mean, but it’s a kindness.
Watching the next fight, she’s given water by one of the nameless girls that she takes gratefully.
She should know better that nothing in the Red Room is kind.
Almost straight away she starts to feel light headed, she’s called up to fight, and her legs almost buckle underneath her.
She should have listened to Jace.
Unable to say anything she looks back to the smirking girl and puts her arms up.
She’s taken down easily, her arm pulled back behind her. She hears the bone snap before she feels it, and evidently the guard does too.
“Stop,” he commands.
Pain radiates as she feels bone on bone rub together.
Her vision blurs and she wants to vomit whatever she’s drunk out.
“Medical,” he commands.
Another guard takes her, holding her by her other arm and pulling her along. The Black Widow takes over, Natasha retreats back into her mind, reveling in the safety of it.
It’s not so bad, having a protector.
She doesn’t even flinch as the cuffs are placed over her wrists, the arm straightened and injected; a brace placed over it; immobilizing it.
Natasha assumes that the soft plastic can be easily broken, they wouldn’t give her a weapon here.
“One week,” the doctor informs her, “only fractured and no displacement.”
Glazed eyes stare into nothing, as she’s injected again. It works against the drugs that were in the water bottle and she vomits on purpose.
Then grins at the doctor.
.
The black widow struggles against the thick cuffs around her feet, torso and wrists.
Natasha pays attention; confused about how she got here.
She’s lost time, taking over, there’s a conscious decision to be present.
She promised Clint.
She can’t leave.
But she wishes she could.
The mouth guard is back in, and shivers pulse through her body.
There’s a white hot burning sensation coming from her abdomen and she realises that she’s not alone in the room.
“Ah, welcome back Natasha,” comes the dry voice of
Ranskahov. He reheats the bar and looks over to where a woman is sitting, a two way mirror behind her.
She wants to ask how he knows that’s she’s back, but perhaps the change is obvious. Perhaps it’s obvious in all the girls.
Everyone always had a way of retreating.
Her heart rate is doubling, and the struggle against the handcuffs hurts. Broken arm, she remembers.
She wonders what she did to end up back in here, but then, like in childhood, you didn’t really need to do anything to end up in there.
“We were asking about Shield. We want to know what they know. You haven’t been forthcoming so far,” he updates her, and presses the bar to her stomach.
Natasha screams.
The hot iron scalding, welting as she tries to move away from it.
“Hm. Yes, that’s all I seem to get out of you.”
He pulls it away and reheats it.
“You can make it stop, any time you want.”
He presses it again, and Natasha smells her skin burning. She doesn’t care how she sounds when the scream breaks free.
Looking down she counts five lines, the welts raised and white.
“Stop,” the woman says. Natasha now recognises her as a one of the doctors.
Natasha is injected with two needles and she blacks out again.
.
Gasping, pain and heat radiates across Natasha’s abdomen, her arm and her head. It takes longer than she wants for her to become conscious, but she’s thankful that she’s alone.
Her widows uniform is wrapped around her waist and she presumes that they just dumped her into the cell after they did whatever they wanted to her. She doesn’t think shes been unconscious for long.
Nothing internally feels painful, and for that, she is thankful. She inspects her body seeing needle marks on the inside of her arm and feeling a slight raise in her neck.
The other arm is splinted, the cheap plastic splint doing nothing to immobilize the arm. She pushes the uniform down, wincing at the pain that now seems to throb nonstop throughout her body, thumb running over a raised section.
Tony’s tracker.
It feels like so long ago that she was with friends.
That she was wanted and loved.
Finding Jace’s dagger, she digs it into her hip, groaning and clenching her teeth. Luckily it’s not deep as she pulls out the wet tracker, her fingers sticky with blood. It’s dead, it’s clear, no longer transmitting.
But, Natasha thinks, if she can get some electricity to it, she can start it up again, maybe make it send the distress signal out.
And it gives her hope.