Fear
She lost track of the number of times she had woken up only to fall back asleep not long after. At some point she became aware that her dreams weren’t full of nightmares like they had been, and she knew she had a certain other woman to thank for that. She also became aware that at some point, the glass shards she was coughing through in her chest faded away, and so did her cough too, until it was just a mild inconvenience.
At some point, she was also able to speak again, although it was painful to talk and her throat felt like it was being ripped open by daggers, inside and out. At some point she was able to stay awake, and hold onto conscious thought for more than a few minutes at a time.
Which meant it was time to move.
It was a long, painful process to try and untangle herself from the bedsheets. Her ribs throbbed in pain with the movement, and she struggled to properly grasp onto anything with the broken bone in her arm, despite the splint. It took her an absurd amount of time just to sit up, and her world has grayed out considerably around the edges, vision blurred, body wavering as she fought for stability. She was so weak and pathetic, unable to sit up. How would she be able to stand and walk out of here?
She turned her body so her legs were hanging over the foot of the bed, breathing slowly as she allowed herself to relax, vision clearing. She hesitated briefly. How long had it been since she last stood on her own?
Might as well try, she thought.
Then she pushed herself off the bed, and her feet hit the ground, and every muscle in her body simply failed all at once. She collapsed in a heap, and an IV in her arm throbbed painfully as it was nearly ripped out of its place in the fall. Stupid of her not to have noticed. She shuddered from where she lay on the floor, as limp and useless as a helpless child. She hated it. This feeling of helplessness. She was no more useful now than she had been when she was shackled and gagged on the floor of her cell.
She refused to submit. Trembling violently, she began to pull herself up with her arms, using the side of the bed as a brace. She had almost managed to pull herself up, swaying, trembling, her vision graying at the edges, when her muscles failed her and she collapsed back down.
Fuck.
“What the hell are you doing?” The voice was shocked. A little angry. Sharp.
She recognized it, but her heart still jolted painfully in her chest, immediately racing. She looked up, fear coursing through her despite her desperate efforts to clamp it down, and looked at Tony. He was at the entrance of the room, standing without his armor, stepping forward. She jolted back on reflex, smashing her head against the edge of the bedframe, and squeezing her thin body between the frame and the medical equipment.
She was panicking. Fear made her breaths come in short, fast bursts. The pain was somehow muted, buried beneath fear and anxiety as she gasped for air, trembling as she curled in on herself. She couldn’t fight. She couldn’t move. She was useless, broken.
A liar. Deceitful. A traitor. She had hurt him.
She wouldn’t blame him now for getting his revenge. For giving her what she deserved, knowing she deserved it. Logically she knew that he had gotten her out of there, and wasn’t going to hurt her, but the sheer rush of panic that was racing through her was impossible to ignore, and she couldn’t even begin to clear her head from it. She felt wetness on her face, and raised a shaking hand, mortified, to feel the tears running down it.
Pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.
The red room would have whipped her bloody for this. Cut her open, awake and feeling, as they told her they were fixing her. Making her stronger, better. The pain made her stronger.
“Shit. Okay,” Tony was stammering from just outside her narrowing field of vision. “Oh fuck, what do I do?”
Perhaps in any other moment, his awkwardness would make her laugh. But right now it only made her more anxious and stressed, fueling her panic and sending her heart into a pulsing speed, beating so fast it was starting to hurt. Her chest hurt. Her lungs were useless husks within, unable to take in air. That’s why she was gasping so hard, but still so breathless. Was her chest on fire or was it just the broken ribs aching?
Tony had dropped into a crouch. His blurry form was approaching slowly, trying to look as non threatening as possible. She understood that. Logically, she was able to determine what he was doing.
But her body still recoiled with a fresh pang of terror as she struggled even further to hide herself, trembling as she raised her arms in front of her face defensively. The cast on her arm would deflect one or two hits, although it would hurt, before the integrity of it began to fail. Then she would have to try to block the rest of the hits in the flesh of her other arm, only to realize belatedly that there was only bone – the flesh had wasted away, just like her strength.
She drew in a single desperate, gasping breath, feeling as though she was choking on the air itself. Why was she choking? Why couldn’t she breath? Her heart raced a frantic rhythm. She couldn’t… couldn’t.. what?
“Nat, breath for me. In and out. Come on, momma spider,” Tony was saying.
She shuddered at the words. Somehow focused on his face long enough to remember why she was afraid to begin with. Realized even if she deserved it, she didn’t want to do it again. Couldn’t handle it. Not again.
“T-t-t-tony. I’m sorry. Please, I c-cant. Please don’t hurt me,” she gasped out, somehow managing to stumble through her words only a few times.
For a moment his face seemed to crumple, and she didn’t understand why he looked like he was about to cry. Then she realized she must have hurt him again, and she had promised to herself that she wouldn’t do that, and had already broken the promise. She curled in on herself, gasping, heart racing, and trembling violently, feeling as if the entire room was shaking.
She felt a hand on her, and she flinched violently, but otherwise, was no longer checked in enough to react. She was forcing herself to withdraw from the situation. Focus on something else, other than what was going on. Let her body do what it wanted. She couldn’t handle the range of emotions – the fear, the pain, the sadness, the anger. All of it. It was all overwhelming, and unable to even strike out to defend herself, or just to blow off some steam, as she would often do in these situations, there was nothing else she could do but internalize it.
Her head ached. Her chest ached. Her arm was pulsing. Weak, quaking muscles throbbed and she wanted to cry, only to remember that she was actually already crying. How embarrassing. She was worthless, truly.
She was being pulled out of her hiding spot, gently. She curled even tighter into herself, protecting her vitals from being struck. Her broken ribs were only just beginning to heal, and she didn’t want to break them again. She choked out a desperate sound, struggling to get air past her strangled throat and into her compressed lungs, trembling so hard her teeth were clattering together. Arms wrapped around her, and she whimpered out a sound, bracing herself for a hit that didn’t come.
“I won’t hurt you, I promise,” the voice said consolingly. She recognized the voice, but couldn’t quite believe it based on the thoughts and emotions that were lighting up her mind.
“I betrayed you!” She gasped the words out,despite not wanting to say anything at all, even if it was just to protect herself. “I deserve it!” She ducked her head down, trying to protect it with her shoulders, in preparation for a punch that she was expecting to land.
It didn’t.
“You don’t deserve this,” Tony said, gently squeezing her shoulders.
She wheezed harshly in her distress, coughing into his shirt, struggling to understand. She did deserve it. She was responsible, had done horrible things, had hurt him. Hurting people was all she had ever done.
“I swear. Just breath in and out. Like me. Copy me.” No questions. Just orders.
She could do orders. A question would have sent her over the edge. She tried to focus on him. His breathing. Forced herself to breath in when he did, and out when he did, even if her lungs weren’t cooperating and it didn’t feel like she was getting any air. She shook. Tears continued streaming down her face. But she followed his orders, because maybe she could at least do something right.
After a long time, her aching heart began to slow. After longer, her lungs started to function at least semi-properly, and her vision began to clear, only for her to realize just how tired she was.
Her eyes began to drift shut, still shaking, but significantly more in control. A thought occurred to her.
“Did you call me mama spider?” She asked, her voice hoarse and weak.
Then her eyes slammed shut and she drifted into darkness he could even answer.
Tony was shaking as he finally made it to his office space, staggered to a chair, and sank down into it right before his legs gave out. He had been through many panic attacks, especially since the events in New York, and later, Siberia. But having seen someone else having a panic attack and trying to help them through it? When they were someone that could, in a normal situation, lay his ass out flat within seconds if they got spooked? He knew the only reason he had managed to get close enough to help was because she was too injured to fight.
It was not a nice thought.
Walking into the hospital room and seeing her struggling to lift herself off the floor – and failing, due to how weak she was – had made him speak out a bit too loudly in his alarm. His voice, and definitely his tone, had sparked an immediate reaction in her, making her entire body jolt toward him, and triggering a panic attack of epic proportions.
And fuck, he had not been prepared for that even in the slightest. Not the way she curled in on herself, staring up at him in fear as she struggled to breath. Not the words that had come out of her. The words hurt, because he knew they were based at least partially on truth. She was scared of him, not because of anything he had done, but because of what she had done, and the expectation that she would deserve to be beaten because of it. I deserve it, she had said. She was scared of him hurting her, coupled with the knowledge that she thought she deserved it. He didn’t know how to deal with that. Didn’t even know if he could. The guttural sounds of distress she had made when he held her had made his heart hurt.
But somehow, miraculously, she had listened. Managed to trust him enough to follow his advice and calm her breathing until the panic attack began to fade.
She had fallen unconscious not long after, which had made it significantly easier to lift her still emaciated body onto the hospital bed and check to make sure she had not injured herself in either her impromptu trips to the floor or the subsequent panic attack.
He had fled the room quite quickly after that, ashamed of himself as he did so. But he couldn’t stay in there. Not with her words of fear still sharp in his mind.
He had automatically moved to the files. The videos. FRIDAY had clipped together various recordings, making sure to leave out anything that had her named specifically. He looked it over, one more time, just in case. His heart was aching in his chest, and his head was starting to pound, and he just wanted this done. Wanted that bastard to pay for what he had done.
Twenty minutes later, several text files and several videos had been leaked onto the Internet, or directly to media outlets in some cases. A bombshell. It would crack over the council like a batch of rotten eggs.
He only wished he would be able to see Ross’s face when all the evidence of torture had committed, some of it by his own hand, was known by the entire world.
Within an hour, Tony’s cell phone was blaring with text messages and phone calls.
He grinned coldly. There would be no place in the entire world that Ross could hide that the Avengers could not find him.