Chapter 25
The shower beats down on Clint as he examines his body. His face smarts, and fingers hurt the most.
He lets his thoughts flow; allowing them to pass through him.
He hears the door open, and he peers out, finding Natasha stripping, looking up to him as she steps into the shower, hugging him under the spray.
“Are you okay?”
She hugs him harder.
“Seems to be the question of the day,” she mumbles against him.
He pulls away first, looking her over.
She still hasn’t set her arm, and the bruising is evident.
The burn marks on her stomach now scarring and the cuts on her body bright red in healing.
He brushes the hair out of her face, careful of the bruises.
She examines him, carefully drawing her hand over his broken splinted fingers.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
He nods.
“It’s been a really long couple of months, hasn’t it?”
“Clint?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
Natasha kisses him gently and then kisses his cheek.
“I wouldn’t be here without you,” she admits.
“I just needed you to know, that I appreciate everything you do for me, your kindness and patience, always saving me.”
He hugs her close, turning up the water so it’s more her temperature.
“Always Nat,” he assures. “Always.”
“We need to do something about that arm.”
.
Bruce hands Tony the compounds as Jarvis runs the numbers.
“What do you think?”
He glances at the mixture, the way it turns almost florescent before it settles.
“Test it again,” he says, wanting to be sure.
“That’s the third time,” Bruce reminds him.
“I know, I just want to be sure.”
Nodding Bruce give the order to test it again, watching as compound seems to eliminate the infection.
“And it’s generic?”
Bruce shrugs, “from what I can tell, yeah I think so?”
Tony nods.
“Did the girl leave?” Bruce asks, all caught up on the last week.
“Yeah, she left after Natasha left the door open.”
Bruce cleans the table, as Tony eats his gummy worms.
“Do you know where she went?”
Tony shrugs.
“Natasha said I couldn’t track her, so no.”
Bruce rolls his eyes, “sure.”
Tony knows he’s not lying, he’s technically not tracking her, he’s tracking the phone they gave her, the money too. But technically not her.
“Do you think Nat is okay?”
Tony puts the antidote into vials, making them easily injectable if needed.
“I don’t know,” he admits.
“I hope so.”
.
Jace realises quickly that she has no where to go. No purpose in life without the Red Room. She’s free but it’s costly.
She stays in a hotel room and feels the existential crisis of living.
How did Natasha do this?
How did she live when there was no one telling you want to do?
What was the meaning of life? For her?
It’s something she wanted for so long, that now she has it she doesn’t want it.
She doesn’t understand why she is still alive, and so many other widows are dead.
Jace thought she was different, that she could live a peaceful life, live for simple pleasures, but after four days of doing so she’s just so… lost.
Bored.
Angry.
Lonely.
She laughs at herself that it didn’t even take that long.
Maybe Dreykov was right. She’d always be theirs.
Night seems to be the worst and it’s around 11pm where she can’t stop thinking, gathering a coat she’d bought, she goes to find the only person she knows will understand.
And might have some answers.
.
Jarvis flashes the bathroom light, waking Natasha up as she recognises the Morse code.
Roof.
The signal repeats and she gets out of the warm bed, putting on her coat, unsure what the AI means.
The elevator takes her straight to the top and she puts away her knives. The three on her body perhaps enough.
It’s not who she thinks it is.
“Jace.”
The woman turns, dressed in the clothing Natasha provided her, with a long coat that seems new.
“Natasha.”
They stand opposite each other, like a standoff except there’s no drawn weapons.
“How are you?”
Jace stares at her.
How do you explain that the world is ending?
“How did you do it?” she asks, “how did you survive?”
Natasha is tired. Her casted arm itches and the wind is cold. But as soon as Jace starts, she knows what she’s asking for.
“You want to know why I saved you?”
Jace nods and sits on the side of the building, turning her back on Natasha, legs hanging over the side.
To anyone else it looks risky; suicidal maybe, but to Natasha it looks like trust.
“Why did you save me? Why didn’t you send me to Shield? What’s the point? Why is this so hard for me?”
Jace whispers the last words but it’s loud enough to for Natasha to hear the breaking of her heart.
She mirrors Jace’s position and sits with her on the edge of the building.
Natasha kicks her legs, practicing the words in her head before saying them out loud.
There’s so much she wants to tell her.
“Living is hard, but I think it always has been. We have an obligation to ourselves to survive, if we didn’t we wouldn’t have lived this long. We have to sit with every painful emotion, all the disgust, the hate, the foulness of our lives and then still find ways to love ourselves despite that. Why did I save you?”
She remembers this conversation with Clint so vividly.
“I saved you because you’re worth saving. Even if you don’t feel like it. Life..” she pauses again, “I think it’s hard for everyone. Finding a purpose, a way through.”
The silence is comfortable as Jace thinks on her words.
“Do you know what you want to do?”
The night is calm, only a whisper of a breeze in the air.
Light pollution lights the buildings as Jace gets lost in her thoughts.
“No,” she decides on.
“You can stay here, if you want?” Natasha offers.
“No,” Jace says almost immediately.
“I think I need to find my own path. My own way.”
There’s horns, and traffic below, the city loud in their own silences.
“Dreykov’s really dead?”
Natasha hears the desperation in the words. The vivid memory feels like a flashback as she’s back in the room, the feeling of the gun in her hands and Clint’s over the top of it.
She sees his body deflating as death takes him.
“He’s really dead.”
Jace nods, looking at her hands, running her finger over the scar on her palm.
“There are others like him. Some maybe worse, still in Russia, scattered maybe all over the world.”
The Red Room was always pervasive. Natasha thought, she’d done it, taken it out years ago.
The last few months had proved that wrong, it had also showed that government bureaucrats protected each other.
The Red Room was not just a Russian entity. It was like the CIA, the KGB, the FSB or ASIO.
“How many?”
She’s not sure she wants to know the answer.
“Enough.”
It’s fair.
“And the girls?”
Jace shrugs and sighs in a single movement.
“The drugs we’ve been injected with can be tailored, sometimes it’s the guards, sometimes it’s marks, sometimes whoever they’ve been sold to.”
Natasha feels sick.
“Will you stay here?” she asks, “just for five minutes, I need to get something.”
Jace doesn’t respond straight away but nods under Natasha scrutiny.
Getting up to leave, she pauses at the lift.
“Five minutes.”
She’s less than the 300 seconds she promised. Jace is good at counting time.
It’s 247 seconds when Natasha steps back through the doors, holding vials of clear liquid. She holds up her hands to show she has no weapon, as Jace lowers her gun.
“You’ve always been better than me, at helping others,” Natasha says, speaking Russian making her clumsy in her words.
Jace scoffs and turns her back. Natasha has helped thousands of people.
Literally.
Given little girls hope.
Saved men, woman and children from monsters and aliens.
“No it’s true.”
Natasha sits back down and hands over the vials.
“You have this way with words, of saving people without violence. It’s why Dreykov knew you could always be counted on to diffuse situations he couldn’t. It’s why you were always the one that was in charge of the rooms. You could do it without even thinking.”
She swallows down memories.
“You can save them. The others still out there. This is the antidote. I know that you don’t want to be here or join shield or be part of a agency, but maybe we can work together in a way? Maybe saving those that are stuck under the guards or marks. Those that Dreykov…” she pauses, taking a shaking breath, wishing she had more sleep to make the pitch.
“Do you think you can?”
Jace stares at the vials in her hands, and then tucks them into her coat.
“I can try,” she says quietly.
Natasha shifts closer to her so their shoulders are touching.
“Salaam, Jace,” she whispers
Jace looks into the sunrise, her face a mask of sadness.
“Alas Natasha, it’s not as it should be.”
.