Struggles
She woke slowly. Peacefully, compared to the last thing she remembered while being awake. Her muscles ached from her repeated, impromptu trips to the floor and from trying to use them, but she didn’t feel like she had seriously hurt herself anymore than she had already been hurt. Her panic attack in front of Tony was less easy for her to compartmentalize, being a complete and utter loss of control and dignity for her.
She didn’t want their pity.
Her eyes slowly opened, and she saw Clint sitting stiffly in a chair near her. She frowned at him, wondering why he was so uncomfortable. Was it her? Was it something else? She looked further around the room, eyes falling on something – someone, and freezing. Her chest tightened, lungs seeming to freeze up in her chest once again. He was dead. Dead. Had been for years. There was no way he was here right now, sitting in a chair opposite of her bed, half asleep, with a bruise on his face that looked remarkably like a fist.
“Clint,” she said aloud, raspy and hoarse, and the archer flinched next to her, having only just noticed she was awake. “I think I’m hallucinating,” she added.
The sleeping man – no, the ghost – raised his head, looking at her with eyes she remembered from long ago. One of his hands was black, she noted. Why was it black? The ghost was different than she remembered the man being. Older. More wrinkled. She squinted weakly.
“Yeah I might be hallucinating too,” Clint responded, his voice sounding dry and edged with anger, and she immediately knew it was real.
He was real.
“How are you alive?” She whispered.
Coulson smiled sadly.
“One of Fury’s projects. Brought me back to life. I still don’t quite understand how, but I was definitely dead for a long time,” he told her. His expression dimmed slightly, as if seeing the sharp flare of pain in her eyes. “I had wanted all of you to know I was still alive. I promise,” the man said. But how could she believe someone who had pretended to be dead for years. She – they – had grieved for him.
But it wasn’t as if her own track record was clean. Not at all. She closed her eyes, swallowing back her pain and anger and focusing on the one positive to all of this – Coulson wasn’t dead. Her friend was alive. And well. Mostly.
“What happened to your hand?” She asked.
Coulson raised the black hand, shrugging a little. “I touched one of those crystals that turns humans into stone. Had to cut my hand off to not be turned into a statue. Got a fancy prosthetic. Usually I try to cover up the color to match my skin tone but…” He trailed off.
He hadn’t wasted the time to cover up his prosthetic hand, too busy trying to rush to the tower to talk to them.
She understood.
“What happened to your face?”
“I happened,” Clint responded curtly.
Ah. Clint was pissed. He had a right to be. They have grieved for him. Felt his loss so strongly, it had hurt them for years. He had been alive all this time, but they hadn’t even known. Apparently, yet another lie Fury had told to them, and perhaps that hurt a bit too. But at the same time that she knew she should be angry, and should be upset, at the moment all she could feel was a tremendous amount of relief. Relief that Coulson was alive, and he was here right now, when she was so weak and fragile and unable to control even her most basic emotions. He had never judged her weaknesses, never made her feel like she was less than anyone else. He had stuck up for her with Clint, at the very beginning, not even knowing who she was or even half the things she had done, giving her a second chance.
Maybe later she would be angry, but for now, she could only feel happy that he was here.
At some point, Clint softened up a little, and they all began to talk about the missing time between Coulson’s ‘death’ and him being here now. It had definitely been eventful for him, full of ups and downs. She tried not to feel hurt thinking about how he had gotten his own team, having left them behind for his ‘new life’, as Fury had put it. She understood the reasoning, in a logical, emotionless sense. It had been for the good of the Avengers, and everything they had done as a team, as well as to protect Coulson from people that would seek to discover the means of his revival – although from the sounds of it, he had already been attacked by a handful of people for that very reason.
If they had known, they could have done something to help protect him from all the mess that had been going on over the past few years. Between their own messes. Or maybe they wouldn’t have. The Avengers had had a fair share of their own messes, some that they caused, and others that had been thrust upon them. She was busy running for her life with Steve from the Winter Soldier and HYDRA while Coulson was hiding out with his new team to also try and survive when SHIELD fell.
The calmness she as feeling now as a stark contrast to the pure, violent fear and anxiety she had felt the last time she was awake. Of course, having had the panic attack, a lot of that emotion had left her little bubble of emotion, bursting out of her instead of remaining bottled inside. It was a relief now that they were gone, although she still felt slightly mortified that Tony had seen (and heard) all of that nonsense coming out of her.
It was humiliating.
An hour later, she had seen everyone. Tony, Steve, Sam, Scott, Wanda, Vision… and then Fury, Thor, and finally.. Bruce. She had been shocked to see him, just like everyone else had been at first, but she was told the watcher from Asgard, who Thor called Heimdall, had finally located Hulk on an alien world called Sakaar. After that, Thor had gone to rescue Hulk, who had not wanted to be rescued, before he ended up captured and they fought in a gladiator arena. The next several minutes was an argument between Thor and a lady called Valkyrie (not her real name, Natasha noted), about who had won the fight, which she watched with sleepy bemusement.
It was almost normal. The most normal she had felt in a long time. Even if sudden movements made her flinch. Even if lights were a little too bright, or some noises too loud. Even if she couldn’t stand or even walk, despite her legs being probably the least injured part of her.
Later, Bruce carried in a bowl of soup. She tried not to look at it like it was a threat. It was the first time she was offered actual food, not nutrients through an IV, and although she ached for actual food, she knew being able to stomach anything was going to be a nightmare. It was not the first time she had to deal with re-adding food to her stomach after not having eaten for awhile – mostly due to the occasional captive situation she had dealt with while working with shield, and before that, ‘training’ in the red room. It always sucked.
Bruce must have noticed her looking at the bowl with trepidation.
“It’s just broth. Just to get your stomach ready to accept food again. Maybe we can add bits of vegetables into it later, or other things that are easily digestible,” he said. She nodded at that, still wary but definitely wanting something in her stomach. Liquid nutrients or not, she was still hungry.
Her hand shook while she tried to properly hold a spoon. While she wasn’t left handed, she had been trained by the Red Room to use both hands. The problem lay in strength and mobility. With her right arm broken she couldn’t really grasp at all, and her left hadn’t really done any useful motions in quite some time. It took an effort to control it enough to not only get a spoonful, but manage to get the entire thing to her mouth. The soup was warm but not hot, likely so she didn’t burn herself when she managed to splash some all over her own arm in one of the failed attempts.
“I can help you if you want,” Bruce had offered, not quite realizing the connotation of his words when everyone tensed.
She froze, dropping the spoon into the bowl, memories of being forcibly fed tasteless “food” to keep her alive flashing through her mind. Her heart was racing. She could almost feel it through the memory, the gag being shifted slightly, food shoved in, and then choking because she was unable to chew, trying to force it down even as her lungs screamed for air. She was surprised she hadn’t suffocated or choked to death during one of those ‘feedings’, although undoubtedly it would have happened at some point if they had fed her more often or had her longer.
The idea of being fed by someone, even someone she trusted, sent her heart racing at what must be a mile a minute. Pain and panic gnawed at her and she started to claw her way backwards in her cot, the bowl of soup managing to be caught by someone else before it went flying and made an even bigger mess.
“Nat? Nat! Shit, I’m sorry. It’s okay, no one will feed you anything,” Bruce was saying, slightly green, stammering in the background of her buzzing thoughts and fear, fighting to be heard over the sound of memories of mockery and insults and painful strikes.
A hand was on her own, gentle but firm. At first it made her panic more, waiting for it to turn into pain. It didn’t. It became grounding, and she forced herself to focus on it, blocking out everything other than that hand until she finally found herself calming down, and began to look past it to see the arm and body it belonged to.
Clint. It was Clint.
She found herself able to breath again.
Embarrassment and shame immediately followed, realizing she had freaked out in front of several members of her team, and felt tears prickling at her eyes.
Fuck.
“Hey. You’re alright. There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Clint said with so much confidence in his words that she found it difficult not to believe them. But she knew better. Had been trained better. She was a disgrace to her own past, to everything she had been through, letting this effect her so much and so badly. She should be better, should be able to handle herself normally, and the only recovery she should need was physical.
“There is. This isn’t the first time. I was trained for this,” she broke out roughly, not caring at the moment that there were others in the room than just Clint, and not caring that her voice cracked several times, or even that tears were starting to build in her eyes. All she saw and cared about was that Clint was there, and he wouldn’t judge her for saying these things.
His eyes darkened at the reminder of her past, and she knew he hated knowing what they had done to her, but they had done it to make her stronger. But she wasn’t strong. She was weak. She wasn’t marble, she was glass.
She shuddered.
“They didn’t train you. They tortured you. There’s a difference. Breaking you so that no one else could is not training,” Clint nearly snarled the words, and she recoiled back before she could stop herself, hearing that anger and immediately expecting to be hit. Her breathing had hitched, stuttering to a stop as she instinctively protected her aching ribs.
Clint flinched back, looking shocked for a moment and then sad. “I wasn’t angry at you,” he said gently. “I would never hit you.”
She knew that too. Why was so she readily expecting to be hit at any moment? Clint wouldn’t hurt her. Even when they had ‘fought’ during the Civil War, he had been pulling his punches. So had she. They had simply tried to push each other down.
In the end she had been relieved it was Wanda that sent her flying and not Clint, if only because she would have a hard time accepting it from Clint.
“I know… I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice barely audible.