My World's On Fire, How About Yours?

This is the absolute worst. Fuck Hydra and robots and Thanos, this is what’s absolutely killing Natasha. This is it. She paces back and forth in a glass container like some damn hamster. The only thing that greets her is her own reflection. She slams her foot against the glass again. The sound echoes throughout the small room but nothing cracks. So contrary to popular belief, the one millionth try is not the charm. Damn shame.

Her foot stings only slightly, but the pain lets her hold onto something real. It’s something else to focus on other than all the gibberish that’s screaming in her brain. She’s been in this cage for so long that she’s losing her damn mind.

She’s used to silence. She prefers silence. But she’s had nothing but silence for too long. She didn’t think it could get worse than the Decimation. She lost almost everything… everyone. But it gave her a purpose. She still had hope. As dumb as that sounds, she still thought there could be a way.

And, boy, it was dumb of her to hope.

First it was the anticlimactic end of Thanos’s life. She hoped finding him would be the solution.

It wasn’t. That hope diminished before Thanos’s body even hit the ground.

Natasha then clung onto the hope that there was a different way to reverse the Decimation. So she flung herself into research, boarding up in a room with only herself and hundreds of thousands of books and computers. She was on that train of thought for only a few months before the hope became smaller and smaller to the point where she couldn’t be fueled by it anymore. Natasha is no longer a book person because of this.

Then she focused on the present. On the tangible.

All the kids misplaced and left without someone to care for. She could fix that. That was something she could do. And so, she did it. Natasha helped those kids as much as she could. There wasn’t an orphanage on earth that she hadn’t personally been to. But she still needed more.

Natasha never stood still. If she stood still maybe everything will catch up to her. That’s what happened right before SHIELD. She let her past catch up to her and if Clint didn’t spare her, that mistake would’ve cost her life.

So Natasha pushes forward, reaching for tangible dreams. She can’t lose any more hope, not when her hope is smaller than an atom right now.

After two years she’s come far. She’s not happy, but sadness is no longer right at her door; it no longer pierces her very soul until she can’t breathe. She longs for the easy happiness Pepper and Tony have. The way they seem to just go on living their lives. They become her favorite people to be around. They’re not a replacement of Clint and Laura but the peace she feels around them is the same. And they offer her that same place in their lives.

Pepper and Tony don’t have that listless feeling that everyone else shares. That listlessness that shows itself when the rest of her fractured team leaves her. First it was Clint. Then Carol. Then Thor. Then Nebula and Rocket. Then Rhodes. And now even Steve is gone, although he was the only one who promised he’d come back.

Every person that leaves creates a slight fracture in Natasha. Untraceable to the human eye, but large enough to where she can feel it. It diminishes that small, small hope she has that they can fix this. She is crumbling inside under a mask of self-assuredness and optimism she wears at every place she ever goes to.

She finds more hope unsurprisingly in Pepper and Tony. They’re going to have a kid. A kid. She hasn’t been this excited and surprised about a baby since—fuck—Clint and Laura’s. And while she may not know how to get back Laura and the kids, Pepper and Tony’s kid is tangible: a sure thing. And fuck if she’s not going to the best Auntie Nat in the whole universe to their kid.

Of course, the very second something decent in her life happens, it gets ripped from her. The universe must’ve learned from the Red Room on how to give her something good just to destroy it. You’d think she’d learn her lesson by now.

Just a few days after she learned of the newest Stark, she wakes up in this room.

She looks around the room. She just sees a hollow reflection looking back. Her red roots began showing a year ago and she stopped caring. She has more important things to do than bleach her fucking hair.

Her body is stiff getting off the ground. She must’ve been on the ground for a few days at least. But what’s the point of the bed in the room if she’s on the ground? Whatever, the interior decorating of the room is the least of her worries. But seriously, even the Red Room had a better style.

Natasha Romanoff doesn’t panic. Panic leaves room for mistakes, and mistakes must never happen. She pushes down any confusion she has and turns it into determination. She will find answers and she will get out of this room.

Once a spy, always a spy. She knows if Steve were here, the first thing he would do is try to use brute force to knock down the walls. But she knows better. You can only make one first impression. You only get one try. They only got one try with Thanos.

There’re two chairs, a table, and a bed. Clearly someone here expects her to be here for a while. She pushes down the confusion over who that person is; one mystery at a time.

She glides her hand over all the smooth glass. It definitely seems to be one-way glass. She doesn’t allow herself to think about who may be watching her.

The glass tells her nothing. No weak points to be found and nothing uncharacteristic about it. Except she can breathe clearly. There’s no stuffiness that would be found if she were trapped in a box of glass. And if she’s really been unconscious on the ground for days the amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the room should’ve made her fuzzy and delusional by now. She should be suffocating, but she’s fine. She’s fine and that’s what’s not fine.

But she can’t find any place where any damn airflow can happen. It’s glass. It’s just glass. It’s just fucking glass. And this glass might be the thing that begins to break her.

She can push away the why, how, and who of this mystery, but she can’t push down how in the fuck this glass can seem to breathe. How it can be so thick and solid and sealed, yet she’s not dying. Unless she is dying and that’s why she thinks she’s not dying.

She can feel herself breaking down. Her mind is coming apart. Gears are popping loose and trains of thought don’t reach their destination. Maybe she is dying. She’s delusional. She needs to THINK. She can’t mess this up. Just THINK damnit!

She closes her eyes tight and covers her ears, but only for a second. An old habit from the Red Room that only shows up whenever she’s dangerously close to a breaking point.

Her eyes open and her hands drop. So now she focuses on the tangible, on the known. The weakest points of glass windows are the parts that are closest to the wall. The center is supported in every direction. The easiest way to break a window is the go for a side.

The sturdiest piece of furniture in the room is the metal table. She knows those two facts for sure.

She grabs the table and throws it at the edge of one of the walls. She watches as it hits the wall and bounces off. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She picks it up again. The more force, the more likely it’ll break. She holds it above her head and throws it harder. As it leaves her grip she shouts. Not out of pain or strain, but it escapes nonetheless. The table just makes a louder noise and lands farther from the wall.

AGAIN, her mind screams at her. She’s lost all advantage of stealth of the first attack or even the second attack. Those mistakes in a field would leave her dead. WHY ISN’T SHE DEAD. She throws the table again; this time a feral noise emerges from her. The table breaks on impact. The glass should’ve been broken. Any normal glass would’ve broken even the first time. WHAT IS WITH THE GLASS.

The same time the table breaks is the same time Natasha breaks. She picks up the chair and throws it at the glass. It breaks. She throws the other chair. Now she’s down two chairs as their remains scatter the room, useless to her.

She doesn’t even get to the bed before her legs give out on her and she sinks to the ground. She can no longer move forward. Everything she’s pushed down has caught up to her and she’s drowning in it. Maybe she is dying. She can’t breathe. She can breathe, but she can’t BREATHE. She’s trying to suck in air but she’s going too fast. That wastes oxygen and she KNOWS this. But she can’t stop. She needs to THINK damnit. But her body refuses to listen and soon her mind slips away. Maybe she is dying. Everything’s getting darker and she’s stopped feeling anything. Black dots shield her vision and cotton seems to block her mind. If she’s dying at least that means she’s right and that fucking glass is just cutting off her oxygen. Tangible. Known. And so, Natasha Romanoff finally closes her eyes and accepts her death peacefully.

Sike.

Natasha wakes up on the ground and the harsh light floods her eyes. Her mind feels like it’s covered in a thin layer of fog and her lungs have a slight tinge in them. So she’s not dead. But she should be. So she’s in the exact place as she was the last time she awoke.

In the midst of the remains of the destroyed furniture sits a chair. It’s a different chair. Sturdier. More so than the table she threw yesterday. There’s no way she could ever overlook it in any mental state.

It’s clearly a taunt. Someone is letting her know that she knows nothing. That they’re in charge and she’s trapped. They have the upper hand.

They’re daring her to throw it. To throw it, and her sanity, like she did last time. But Natasha Romanoff only makes a mistake once. She won’t show them any weakness again.

She’ll handle the mystery. She won’t crack again. They gave her something tangible. There is someone behind that glass and there is a way out. That’s all she needs to go on.

Natasha picks herself off the ground with her façade back in place. She’ll get through this and she’ll be damned if getting out of her prevents her from holding Tony and Pepper’s kid in that delivery room.

Well that was one year ago? Two? Three??? Natasha doesn’t know anymore. She has no way to count days. It feels like a lifetime. And the only thing that’s changed is how much she fucking hates silence. Oh and her damn foot hurts a little now. If she were a normal person, her foot would’ve probably been broken beyond repair now. But she knows that in an hour she’ll probably end of kicking the wall again. Lucky try one million and one here she comes.

Natasha sighs and sits down on her bed. Even going out of her mind, she maintains a look of poise and control. Her shoulders never slump and her head doesn’t dare fall into her hands. She keeps her promises and she promised herself that she would never be seen broken. And so she’s kept that act up ever since that first day in the room.

She glares over at the chair in the corner of the room. It hasn’t been touched ever since it appeared in her room the first day here. It never seems to collect dust. She bets whoever is behind that wall keeps it in pristine shape just to taunt her. She’s lost count of the amount of times she’s wanted to throw that damn thing at the walls just to relieve some stress.

She’s long since abandoned the thought that she’s trapped in glass but it’s a material she’s never experienced before: definitely from elsewhere in the galaxy. That’s at least a clue she’s managed to put together. Which is…something at least.

She takes a deep breath in and tries to calm her mind which gets more frantic every day. She breathes out, trying to turn the silence from being suffocating to refreshing.

She breathes in again. A soft banging begins on the wall to the left of her. All chances of calm exit her body immediately.

She presses her head against the wall and listens to the various pounding coming from it. Suddenly the sound is right in her ear and the wall makes the slightest movement.

Natasha yanks her head away from the wall as if she were burned. She holds her ear which is so used to no sound that the noise makes her eardrums feel busted.

Even though her ear is throbbing, and the banging won’t stop, Natasha’s face begins to slowly mold into a smirk.

Well hello, neighbor, welcome to the neighborhood.