Rehabilitation
One week. It took a week of struggling for her to be able to stand on her own. Several days after to walk, even though that itself was excruciatingly slow and awkward. She lost track of how many times she collapsed, either being caught by who she saw ‘practicing’ with, or catching herself on a railing with her good arm. It was frustrating and made her angry with herself, but eventually, all the work paid off. She was walking, for the first time in three months.
Putting on weight was a difficult thing. While she managed to eat in small amounts, solid food was hard for her to take in. The one time she did eat something solid, she spent the next half hour curled up around a toilet, painfully puking her guts out.
She had been sticking with soups and broths for quite awhile, which was helping at least. Still, being skin and bones was preventing her from putting back on necessary muscle mass to regrow her strength. She knew it was a work in progress, so to speak, but it made things difficult. She felt like a burden on the team, a weak link. Everyone else had their powers or enhancement or weapons. She just had her speed, skill and strength. Without that, she was nothing.
She couldn’t stop. She had to keep trying. The team seemed to think she would get better, and would get back to her former self. She wasn’t so sure, but she was stubbornly going to try for them. She was relieved to have only had two more, mild, panic attacks since losing it in front of Clint, Bruce and Coulson, but that was also something she was struggling to recover from. To not flinch when someone approached or spoke to her. To not recoil away when someone reached out to touch her. To not curl into herself when she felt a touch. To let herself relax around others, even though she waned nothing more than to hide herself away and not be around anyone, waiting for the day for everything to change and for everyone she loved to turn on her and hurt her.
One other thing kept her going.
Revenge.
Ross was still out there. So were the three others she wanted to take down, who she called Bull, Weasel and Dagger, respectively. Maybe she was really taking after Clint when it came to nicknaming bad guys, but for that time she only had their voices or a rough idea of their body proportions to go by. Bull did most of the beatings, and had been built like a tank. Weasel had a nasally, high pitched voice, and was typically the rough groping her or mocking her sexually. And Dagger… that was the one that cut a few hundred gashes into her skin over the course of two months.
While there had been many more personnel at the Raft, most were just random people doing their job and avoiding the worse aspects. And while they probably could have used their brains and made a different choice on their own, instead of just following corrupt orders…
She had enough things on her mind.
Four people stood out to her. Four targets, to be taken out, so she could maybe rest easily some day, knowing they would never be able to touch her again. It was a selfish desire. She knew that. But it was what kept her moving, kept her from simply lying down and giving in and not bothering to attempt to fight back, or get back to who she used to be.
Revenge was not a good justification to live.
But at the moment, it was her only one.
She carefully let go of the railing she had been clinging to. Took a step forward. Then another. Her knees were shaking, and she grit her teeth from the stress. Another few steps, and she managed to straighten her back, feeling how hunched she was and feeling the age-old need to straighten up and keep herself as stiff as a board. She may have left the Red Room many years ago, but that kind of conditioning stayed with her for a life time.
Her next step sent a muscle spasm racing up her leg, and her leg gave out and she pitched down to her knees, biting back a whimper. Her leg shuddered with pain from the spasm, and she couldn’t quite slow her own descent on her own.
“Woah!” Strong hands caught her under her arms just before she hit the floor, and she found herself leaning heavily against Rhodey as the pain in her leg slowly began to fade away, allowing her to put weight on it once more. Her breathing came harshly, and she struggled with the urge to hit something, or hurl something across the room in her frustration. Often it felt like she was getting nowhere. She hated feeling so weak, and looking so pathetic, especially in front of the other Avengers. Even though Rhodey understood, more than anyone else what she was going through, she still felt a burning shame and embarrassment at being so worthless in front of him.
“It may not feel like you’re getting better.. but you are,” Rhodey said, and she found herself clenching her jaw around an automatic retort, settling for just nodding her head. He was just trying to help, and her bad attitude was not his fault. It was her own.
“I think a few cheeseburgers will help. Always Tony’s go to,” Rhodey continued. He was going to ramble, and she needed to reply.
She couldn’t quite hide her wince at the thought of a cheeseburger. While it would taste good, her stomach rebelled at the idea of eating something so solid, knowing it would hurt going down and also come back up much faster. She couldn’t bring herself to care much for solid food, given her last experience with it, even if she knew she would need to make the step eventually.
Soup really wasn’t all that filling. At least it didn’t make her sick.
“Maybe cheeseburger soup,” she replied, finally managing to straighten up, putting her weight back on her leg and ignoring the dull ache left behind from the spasm.
Rhodey laughed, but it sounded forced.
Rhodey had found himself dealing with a rough couple of weeks as he tried to sort out his feelings on everything happening. After the Civil War had happened, he had definitely found himself fully anti team Rogues, given the permanent injury received as a result. At the same time, he had – logically – understood both sides and why the things had happened the way they had. He couldn’t even be surprised about Natasha ‘defecting’ back to Steve, so to speak. Someone was going to get hurt or killed in that fight, even if that was not the intention of either side, such as that oil truck that exploded and nearly took out T’Challa and Nat, despite being a mistake. Fortunately his suit had been able to take the explosion and the impact.
While that someone had been him, and that injury had been permanent damage to his spine, he was still able to walk thanks to technology, and he was not killed. Still, he had been bitter about it all for quite awhile, especially dealing with his own healing and Tony’s depression as a result of everything that had occurred.
Mistakes had been made by everyone. Feelings trashed. Several were injured. And half of the Avengers, people he would fight with and joke with and hang out all the time with, were gone. Tony had explained what had happened, eventually, and Rhodey had been pissed – at Rogers specifically. Not for protecting Bucky, or going against the Accords, or even fighting Tony in the bunker… but for keeping that secret about Tony’s parents.
He understood Steve protecting his brainwashed, tortured friend from Tony who reacted in a very human, emotional way and who regretted it after, when his emotions had died down and he recognized what had happened. But not for keeping the secret for years.
Things would have happened so much differently if Steve had simply come out to Tony about it, and told him from the very beginning when he first found out.
But that was besides the point. It had happened, and the past couldn’t be changed.
When Tony had come back from his visit to the Raft, pale and shaken and looking horrified, it had taken him a bit of effort to figure out what had happened, and his stomach had bottomed out when he understood. The Raft was supposed to have just been a prison, even if everyone had disagreed with its existence on a fundamental level – seriously, an underwater prison trapping people permanently without a trial?
But it was supposed to be just a prison. Not a place to hurt and torture people. They had already crossed that line a bit with the straight jacket and shock collar on Wanda, but now they had completely crossed over all possible lines. While he certainly hadn’t forgiven any of the rogues, he was not going to stand by and refuse their help to help this rescue mission.
Nothing could have prepared him for what they found. Tony had said it would be bad. What little he had seen had been bad, anyway, and that was just looking at her from a distance. But Rhodey hadn’t expected this.
He had only gotten a glimpse of Tony carrying out a blood-soaked and scrawny Natasha, hair dull and matted with blood, trembling violently in his friend’s arms. He had gotten a better look in the quinjet, and it had hurt. He and Natasha had never been each other’s favorite people. Simply put, their ways of dealing with problems had always opposed each other, and it made it difficult to find any common ground. They didn’t dislike each other or anything. Just, in the majority of group meetings or parties, they were both hanging out with different people.
But seeing her like that had flipped a switch. A very angry, protective, violent switch in which he wanted nothing more than to fly himself over to wherever Ross was hiding out, and blow it out of existence.
He had not really visited her much at all in the medical bay, because it didn’t feel like he had any right to. He had never really been a friend of hers. But he had brooded quietly on his own, filled with an overwhelming desire to take revenge, one that he couldn’t really do because if anyone deserved to get the revenge, it was her.
When she began to attempt to get up and move as when he finally managed to bring himself to step in. Watching has struggle and stagger, barely able to hold herself up, reminded him of when he was attempting to adjust to wearing the leg braces so he could learn to walk again. It had been a pain in the ass, frustrating, awful, and just downright… depressing. All at the same time. But he had managed it, and he knew he could help her as well. Although her difficulties were more based on pain, weakness, and muscular atrophy than his spine being damaged and losing feeling in his legs, it was still going to be a similar process.
She didn’t push him away, which was good. She was cranky as hell, but he had been also and he couldn’t blame her for being frustrated with this situation. Anyone would be.
He had been helping her for a little over three days. He tried to ignore the way she would flinch whenever he reached out to her, or shrank back when he stepped too close, clearly intimidated – subconsciously, at least – by his presence. He also tried to ignore the fact she was still skin and bones, barely having put any weight on at all, likely because she was unwilling to eat anything solid. He had heard about how well it had gone to suggest trying to help her eat.
He tried not to think about why she was so nervous about eating. So he made jokes to try and get her more comfortable, hoping she would at least start eating solid food soon instead of just soup and liquids. While both of those were better than IVs, they weren’t going to be enough to get past the muscular atrophy she had suffered.
Physical therapy was going to be a bitch. And she would refuse to see an actual specialist on it. She already had.
Rhodey walked into the kitchenette, where Bruce and Clint had prepared Thai food. Natasha was there, and Clint was talking to her quietly. “No cheeseburger soup?” He asked, immediately reaching for a plate to pile curry onto. He could have swore he saw her smile. Just a little. So small and fast, he wasn’t even sure it had even been there.
And if her eating a small portion of plain rice didn’t feel like a victory, he didn’t know what did.
Of course, Tony came barging in not long after, nearly making her choke as she recoiled, but the man barely noticed in his energy.
“We have a location,” he announced.