When the elevator finally reached the lower landing the whole thing jerked to a sudden halt. Bracing herself against the side of the wall; she felt—more than heard—the strained cables shudder under the stress of descension.
A startlingly loud, groan split the still, cool air. Outmoded gears continued to scream in protest—no doubt from decades of disuse.
There was a momentary pause, before the grated door screeched out a forlorn noise. Followed by another haunting dissonance.
Secondary steel panels slide back along their rusted frame. Both echoed disjointedly amidst the confined space.
Natasha’s dark, auburn tresses were swept back as a cold draft briskly gusted through the open doors.
Weapon drawn, and at the ready; vigilant eyes surveyed the premise and scanned for any signs of movement.
No threat was detected in the immediate vicinity.
Her senses were fully alert; body coiled tight, like a spring, even though the remainder of the corridor was empty.
Yet any traces of tension were kept from reaching the smooth plane of her porcelain features as she proceeded down the concrete passageway.
To her right, Natasha spied a stairway.
Cautiously, she moved away from the stairs to the opposite end. Attention drawn to a set of steel reinforced double doors; she inspected the locking mechanism and found it to be severely jammed. As though something or someone had pried the double doors open using brute force.
A thin film of dust covered the floors.
In the low light she descried a faint imprint of footsteps. Large, single set; that carried on farther down the adjacent hall.
From this angle Natasha could make out another set. These were heavily overlapped and less distinct. It appeared as though someone had either doubled back or had been followed at a close distance.
Still no sign of Rogers and Barnes at this point—or for that matter the doctor.
Warily she proceeded down the hall.
Splintered panels of glass were lined along one side. Overhead light refracted by the cracked and distorted surfaces; cast ominous shadows along the concrete walls.
At one end of the corridor, was another empty passage. It wasn’t long before the narrow space widened out into a larger opening.
To her left she recognized the faded print on the wall in her mother tongue—Exit.
It was denoted by a ruddy discoloration of an arrow pointing in the direction she’d already come from along the same hallway. On her right was an entrance, which led into an expansive room.
Natasha entered the large space, unable to shake the cloak of oppressive darkness that had settled.
A somber, weighty mantle over what still remained.
Her eyes quickly adjusted to the dimness and she took in the extent of damages.
Exposed wires littered the ground. They sparked dangerously at their broken mangled ends.
Precariously twisted about toppled machinery. Gears and whirring sounds echoed forlornly through the space. The sound was almost deafening once she approached the worst of the wreckage.
She quickly took inventory of the smashed hardware, keeping her footing light while she navigated the destruction.
Natasha drew closer, intent on further inspecting the havoc, only to find buried amidst the rubble—
It’s a trap.
That was the first harrowing thought her mind supplied once she’d peered into broken capsules where the still prone bodies lay. Mostly intact—save for the ones that had been crushed under a hail of debris—undisturbed and lifeless.
A series of internal alarms were already sounding off inside her head—confronted with the sight of five super soldiers that had been systematically deactivated by a single bullet right between the eyes. Completely unaware to the fact they had passed seamlessly from one dreamless sleep into the next.
She couldn’t quite shake the small, insistent pinprick of dread—a low barely detectable undercurrent. Vaguely familiar, and viscerally distinct from her initial wariness upon entering the room, which had precipitately transformed the moment she’d laid eyes on the mutilated bodies.
She flicked her gaze away from the grim scene but the sensation didn’t dampen as she moved through the remainder of cluttered space.
Her heart took up a panicked pulse and she found herself almost short of breath; compounded by the lingering heaviness inside her chest.
Years of training in the Red Room had taught Natalia Alianova Romanova how to quell the human response inside herself. To send the breadth of her emotions below the surface, leaving a smooth, impassive veneer to manifest, molding her features into an equally serene as it was predatory visage.
She’d learned how to suppress her baser animal impulses and curb the inherent fight or flight response in order to maintain a clear, detached understanding that the body was invariably weak but her mind was a powerful asset. One that could be trained; honed, to consciously recognize these natural reactions but dull the response through strict mental discipline and dissociation from her somatic compulsions.
But this—
Something was wrong.
It felt horribly wrong and Natasha couldn’t dispel the foreboding that had inadvertently seized her stomach. She was instantly filled with a terrible sickening sense, even without having compelling evidence on which to base this inherent—and much to her dismay rapidly progressing—fear upon, other than a handful of observations and the demolition left in the wake of whatever violent altercation had transpired.
In the next few moments what followed were several steady, measured breaths serving as an anchor to tether her inner turmoil; willing it to sink deeper, beneath a stifling mask before Natasha continued to scrutinize the remaining debris.
The whereabouts of Rogers, Barnes, and Zemo were still unknown.
Keeping to the shadows once more, she moved towards the other end of the room while deliberately ignoring how the harbinger—she’d resisted falling prey to—betrayed the futility of her investigation.
Her green eyes glimpsed an opening at the edge of the far wall. Large enough for a single body to slip through amidst the rubble of a collapsed entrance way.
As she emerged on the other side, Natasha immediately detected a significant drop in temperature.
Her breath came out in a billow of visible exhalation.
Slotted openings, heavily encroached by snow, cast the bunker below in cold glacial light.
A rush of gelid wind swept through the small concrete space, which resembled that of a desolate howling. Standing poised at the edge of the dip, Natasha couldn’t dismiss how the anguished reverberation carried a grave warning.
She then dropped down into the lower sector.
Her rising panic scarcely contained behind a porcelain exterior.
Staying together is more important than how we stay together…
STOP—
I didn’t want you to be alone…
STEVE—
I know how much Barnes means to you…
PLEASE—
You know what’s about to happen...
NO—
We played this—
wrong…
wrong…
WRONG—
—best case scenario…
I’m trying to keep you from tearing the Avengers apart…
You’ll only make this worse—
Steve’s not going to stop—
Are you saying you’ll arrest me?...
I’m not the one that needs to watch their back…
Steve’s not going to stop—
I can’t let the doctor find them first—
Are you incapable of letting go of your ego—
—best case scenario…
T’Challa told Ross what you did—
Just because it’s the path of least resistance—
Someone will…
I’m sorry Nat I can’t sign it…
If you don’t either, Rhodey’s going to be—
—regret this…
You let them go, Nat…
I know…
Blood.
Red rivulets branched out across the grooved surface of the concrete floor, fed by smaller interconnected pools of darker, stagnant fluid that flowed from viscous channels hemorrhaging a sluggish course but still streaming at the edges. Closer to the source she glimpsed mechanized armor visible under the stain of sanguine. So similar in hue—crimson metal and the lifeblood coating its smooth sleek surface—but in that protracted moment never had a starker contrast seemed more grotesquely apparent. And there, at the very center; soaked through with gore and embraced by machine—
A pungent reek abruptly hit Natasha, flooding her nose and mouth until she was brought to near tears. Overcome with the instinctual urge to gag, she nearly choked on the putrid air. Her lungs desperately fought for a breath of oxygen that hadn’t been tainted by the foul stench permeating every inch of the bunker. As she breathed in the awful smell it burned down the back of her throat and she struggled to keep her stomach from upending its contents right there on the cold concrete. The foul odor pervading her sinuses brought on a maelstrom of sense memories—of blazing fires and helpless screams that were eventually stifled by asphyxiation if not first by her own hands—only this fetid miasma of burning flesh saturating the air wasn’t because of her. No, she hadn’t been the one to—
She opened her mouth to speak, to sob, to scream—but still no words, no noise passed from between her trembling lips. Natasha’s throat constricted, convulsing around a soundless gasp while her chest heaved with the effort. But nothing followed. The silence was unbearable, a physical weight that seemed to press down all around her, from every side until it had completely overwhelmed the gruesome scene. She was trapped in a disseverance of reality, unable to give sound to the horror that ensnared the focused intensity of her singular fixation. It was wrong; She knew that it was all wrong—there wasn’t supposed to be—not this silence, not the stillness of a—
Sharp and unsettling was the pressure; it jarred her violently, succeeded by a thunderous roar where everything came rushing back in a deafening reverberation, and shattered the silent perpetuity with a frantic, throbbing pulse against her ear drums, in tandem to the bruising force of her wildly pounding heart beat and the shallow, quick stuttered breathes she drew— but the pressure, the pressure wouldn’t release her, gripping hard. Even still she couldn’t look away from—
Then darkness, rising out of the corner of her eye, encroached at the edges of her vision until it finally broke through her line of sight—but that wasn’t right because she didn’t have to see, to know—to know that she’d seen—
Realizations struck Natasha in waves, each gut-wrenching cognizance cannibalized in succession of another before it had even breached the surface of her dissonant turmoil.
More—
“—mnov.”
—pressure
“Ms—”
A massive shudder ran through her with jolting force—She suddenly blinked as the world came back into glaring focus and the pressure from before tightened reflexively. The fierce touch at her shoulder grounded Natasha—raised her awareness to the fact that she was no longer seeing what was exactly in front of her. Instead a black shape stood obstructing her view, but it didn’t matter because the image had already been seared into her memory—every detail scorched with excruciating clarity.
“Ms. Romanov—”
She recognized the familiar, deep accented baritone but it sounded so far away…
“—has been detained and Barnes—”
“—there is nothing to be done for—”
“—Mr. Stark’s critical condition—”
There were words that seemed to fade in and out, but she couldn’t make sense of what they meant when strung together. Even as she watched his lips, how they moved around each of the sounds, Natasha only caught bits and fragments that had managed to filter through the churning turmoil.
“—will return for Captain—”
The hand that had been wrapped around her shoulder was gone and with it the shadow had lifted so she was once again staring at—
She shivered from the loss of contact; an unbidden absence of warmth, but still no sound broke from her trembling lips. Natasha only, stared; eyes fixed, frozen where she stood. Watched how the dark figure descended— his deliberate disturbance of the stillness, shifting metallic limbs in his urgency to disentangle the carapace of immobile armor that was smothering—
The sight, the sounds, it was all too much. Her focus was blurred in a watery sheen that overwhelmed her vision. She felt the cool slide of moisture at her cheek from the swell of tears that were slipping down the smooth planes of her face. The pressure behind her eyes had finally forced her to look away, and as she heaved in a shaky breath, a hoarse, fragile sound had finally broken free, cracking on the release, as if she’d been screaming all along from the sight of it.
“ He’s—”
Natasha couldn’t swallow past her despair.
Violent winds ripped through the bunker, the trenchant wails were the only sound that reverberated amidst the empty space.
Still.
She was still looking.
At—
Looking so still….
Tracks of tears were half-frozen against the pallor of her nearly frostbitten cheeks, but still she could not tear her gaze away, knowing that underneath those closed lids she would find only empty, sightless eyes staring back at her. The same as when she first had seen them—before that dark figure had descended and shut them permanently—glazed over and devoid of their vital spark.
She hadn’t moved, frozen where she stood, even though the throbbing ache in her extremities gradually faded into a hollowing numbness as the penetrative cold robbed her of sensation.
Barely distinguishable was the uniform, soaked through, discolored by blood. And where there should have been underneath—
skinmusclesinewtissueboneSOMETHING—
Anything—not this wide gaping hole ringed by seared flesh, and blood oozing from blackened viscera that she could see right through to the bleeding, snow-covered floor.
Still—
The name stuck in her throat.
Still—
The taste of unspoken horror could be felt on her tongue.
Still—
The sight of—
Left her numb.
He was still—
Instinctually Natasha drew the gun from her thigh holster with expert speed and whipped around, all the while keeping it trained on the ledge just behind her. Even with hardly any sensation in her stiffened fingers, she had them carefully poised over the trigger, ready to fire at the intruder.
Slowly, with purposeful movements, the black figure emerged from the shadows and stepped closer to the edge; out into the light. Hands raised, so as to appear non-threatening.
Natasha didn’t lower her weapon even as she recognized the Wakandan prince—now successive king.
“Please,” T’Challa said as he slowly removed his felid helmet, “I mean you no harm, I simply wish to move Captain Rogers’s body.”
The instant those somber words left T’Challa’s lips it was a full shock to her system. Natasha’s whole frame begun to tremble, the gun shaking violently in her hands, as her fingers strained to keep a stable grip, but by this point she couldn’t even feel them. Gritting her teeth Natasha took a sharp breath, and willed her aching fingers to keep steady. It took every ounce of concentration to do so, eventually managing to get the worst of the tremors under control; she kept her weapon painstakingly trained on the approaching figure.
Steve—
Can’t be, this isn’t—
was—
couldn’t be—
As per her training, Natasha knew at her core that the only way to stay alive was to strike first, and while it had been ingrained in her to never turn her back on her enemy, she was fighting every urge screaming at her to abandon her weapon and look behind her, to run to— because maybe there was a chance, maybe she’d been wrong when she’d first laid eyes on the sight of—him— the blood and that gaping hole—maybe if she were to check his pulse a small part of Natasha, the part that was deceitfully—delusionally—hopeful she would find something, something that would tell her it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t, couldn’t actually be—
Dead.
“Please,” T’Challa tried again, this time softer while he carefully took another slow step forward. He calmly spoke to her in soothing tones, as if she were some wild animal easily spooked, “my intention is not to hurt you.”
Anger bubbled just beneath the surface, tinged by rattled uncertainty, but she clamped down on the rising emotions, desperate to find what little self-control she could scrape up off the floor in her raw state. She hated how exposed she had let herself become, that as a former spy assassin she had already shown too much vulnerability to this man. The fact that he’d found her, the Black Widow, petrified by the gruesome sight; on the verge of near mental collapse in her futile attempts to fully register the sight of St—the body— when she’d first discovered it here, in the bunker. Natasha couldn’t afford to show any more signs of weakness. Not in front of T’Challa.
Glaring fiercely at him, the auburn-haired woman forced her legs to move. She felt stiff and uncoordinated, and her movements held none of her usual lethal grace—having practically succumbed to glacial rigidity—but through her sheer will of determination, Natasha positioned herself protectively in front of—
Him.
She had then finally found her voice.
“Don’t come any closer.”
It held a tremble to it, and despite her best effort her body was shivering, prolonged cold exposure had finally taken its toll on her petite frame, still she did not back down from her defensive stance and kept T’Challa in her line of sight.
The warning hadn’t had much affect other than to further emphasize the extent of her own vulnerability, given the helpless situation she’d stumbled upon; nevertheless Natasha was hell-bent on standing her ground against a potential threat such as the King of Wakanda who had spent the last 48 hours since the untimely death of his father, the late T’Chaka, masquerading as a vigilante with an unfinished vendetta.
“Please, Ms. Romanov—”
She quickly took a step forward—a last ditch effort on her part to intimidate the warrior-king—and from tightly gritted teeth she hissed, “Why the hell should I trust you?”
Her voice a harsh, hostile rasp of sound, but still there was no denying the fragility of a desperate plea she couldn’t fully suppress.
Natasha knew very well that T’Challa had seen through her attempts and, no less deterred, continued to slowly advance until he stood at the ledge and soundlessly dropped down into the lower section of the bunker.
The gun was now a dead weight, clasped tightly within the palms of her achingly numb hands, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—lower it. Holding onto the frigid metal in some ways was the only thing keeping her together, a reminder of her place, of what the Red Room had deigned her only purpose to be.
Despite the weapon Natasha still had trained on him, T’Challa stood evenly with the auburn-haired woman; hadn’t even flinched when she reflexively—now at closer range—tilted the handgun for what would certainly be a well-practiced kill shot even as her piercing green gaze, wary as it might be, searched in earnest every line, furrow, and curve of his, open, as it was urgent, expression scrutinizing the glint held within the depths of his charcoal black irises for even the slightest reason to pull that trigger.
With a sharp inhale of breath; gelid air burning through her sinuses and down the back of her throat Natasha gradually lowered her weapon, but not her guard.
Never her guard.
The Warrior-king took this concession as permission and silently moved past her.
If it weren’t for the fact she’d been watching his movements, Natasha wouldn’t have felt the hand he brushed against her cat-suit clad shoulder as he passed. As far as she was concerned, it was nothing more than a meager gesturer what with her acuity deadened to the sensation of even the slightest touch. Only an imagined warmth, to those firm solid hands he’d grounded her with flitted to the forefront of her mind, and perhaps for that reason alone she did not shy away from the brief contact, and instead had allowed it, for just a split second, to sooth the worst of her harrowing emotions that bled at the edges, threatening to strip away yet another mask she was determined to preserve.
Maintaining her composure was vital from this point forward; she could not afford to make another mistake in the presence of this man.
T’Challa seemed to have sensed her silent, steely resolve, and having carefully taken up the blood-stained, lifeless body into his arms—with a greater reverence than someone in his position and newly elevated status would necessarily be expected to show—the warrior-king’s low, comforting voice filled the space between them.
“You have every right to be mistrustful,” he said gently while he stood up with his burden.
He turned to face her, and Natasha evenly returned his solemn gaze, stifling back a fresh surge of anguish, watching the way T’Challa cradled St—the body that had crumpled in on itself, making it appear somehow smaller, held in such strong and powerful arms.
“We cannot stay here, the others need immediate medical aid so we must move quickly. Barnes and Mr. Stark are already loaded on the quinjet.”
‘The one you let get away’ had not been explicitly stated, perhaps out of consideration, but was at least on her part, understood since she had been the one who had made that particular judgment call, having put repeated shocks of high voltage electricity into T’Challa’s vibranium, woven suit rendering him incapable of his pursuit.
She decidedly chose to meet his words with deliberate reticence.
T’Challa looked at her with calm expectancy, and she simply gave him a curt nod, painstaking in her effort to let her features remain a smooth, unreadable canvas despite the persistent tumult of distress and suspicion lapping at the shambles of her mind.
Without breathing word of it, the king somberly took up position and began to lead the way out of the bunker. It seemed, as Natasha observed him, T’Challa’s willingness to turn his back on her—while an indication of trust that the former spy-assassin would not capitalize on his open display of vulnerability—underlay a deeper consideration that his choice meant she then wouldn’t be expected to do the same.
Together they silently made their way through the wreckage, back the way they had initially came. Another intensive drop in temperature had Natasha shivering uncontrollably against the cold, and a lethargy creeping into her muscles, but she resisted, pushing forward, determinedly not letting her gaze rest on the dead limbs that dangled listlessly, swaying in T’Challa’s firm but strikingly gentle grip. She kept her eyes fixed high enough so as to keep the limp recline of blood mussed, blonde matted hair and an ashen face from her periphery.
Up ahead she caught sight of several splintered walls of glass. Light skimmed across the cracked and distorted surfaces washing across the adjacent concrete walls in broken fragments. Her sharp green gaze traced along what once was whole, but had become fractured, scattered into a spider web of stitched shards, casting dark and disturbing shadows against the opposite wall where sinister shapes danced amidst the harsh glow of artificial light bathing the dismal corridor and ruin scattered about the floor.
Natasha couldn’t quash the burgeoning sense of sickening despair taking root inside her.
From the very beginning they had played right into Zemo’s hands, having let themselves be distracted by each diversion—the bombing, framing of Barnes, and the threat of reawakening an elite death squad.
And like all the rest, Natasha had allowed herself to become willfully blind; too caught up in the minutia of the Accords, more concerned with muddling through government sanctions tied up in red tape and reparations to make up for her endlessly gushing ledger.
And so here they were, in this barren wasteland where relics of a long dead regime had been tucked away in the cold and desolate tundra; to be forgotten—lost in snow and to time.
Now it was too late.
She had been too late.
In the wake of tragedy it seemed almost laughably ironic how only then was someone then distinctly able to see each pitfall, and miscalculation, that every aspect of failure became glaringly obvious, and the mistakes magnified in such a way as to be irrefutably detectable once faced with the irrevocable outcome of death.
That’s what Steve was now.
Dead.
Because she hadn’t anticipated—but even with all the necessity of foresight, conditioned into her by the Red Room, it was impossible to predict what kind of ground work mechanical monstrosities and the destruction of a sovereign nation would ultimately lay on top of unexpected civilian tragedy in a third world African country.
Because she had wanted to believe Steve would eventually see sense—if he was allowed to run his course, that he could then be persuaded to their side if Barnes’s innocence was declared; if only for this crime.
Because she had trusted him—even though she knew she would regret having done so once letting him go; for altogether different reasons in the aftermath, when all that remained was simply a body.
Acorpse.
A lifeless hull of the man she had come to know—if not quietly acknowledged within herself a semblance of familial fondness for in rare moments when she had allowed the other to glimpse what was hidden behind surfeit façades that had become as familiar to her as a second skin.
Gone.
Steve was gone.
That thought alone made her vision go fuzzy at the edges, everything fading in and out of focus, caught in the haze of a dream. No that wasn’t right, not a dream…
An inexorable nightmare and with every burning breath of tundric air, the severe loss was irrefutably cementing itself as a fixture of reality.
Even as they reached the quinjet Natasha was confronted by a blur of images and muffled sounds; until her gaze unconsciously strayed once again to the limp body—resting on a makeshift gurney—only then did the details become ever sharper and grotesquely vivid. Her senses narrowing down to a single point, hyper-focused on the mess of dried blood; coagulated black mass, marring the tightly woven texture of dark blue Kevlar, and across waxen skin, stretched over deadened muscle; flaccid until rigidity would inevitably set in once the tissue decayed. The stench of charred flesh still lingered, clinging to the air within such a tightly confined space. She couldn’t shake herself from the morbid spell, fixated on the soft white sheet as it was gently laid over top the body.
Death was something she understood, what she dealt out in equal measure, having used her specific skill set whether it had been in the service of the KGB, SHIELD, even the Avengers…
The Black Widow was intimately familiar in carrying out devastating execution.
But in this moment, Natasha was struggling to suppress a nauseating tremor that threatened to expunge the bile churning within her stomach, struck with a fresh wave of despair while the thin sheet settled to the contours of the body. In the midst of her bleary state, Natasha was only half aware to the presence of others splayed out on similar surfaces—to the streak of battered metallic red just within her periphery, to the sight of stubbed and singed metal shards protruding out from the left-most unconscious figure—
Every scrap of her self-restraint was called forth in order to keep from reflexively shuddering under the firm press of T’Challa’s palm against her shoulder.
A sudden return of sensation now that she’d gotten out of the frigid cold; requiring Natasha to consciously will her body to not twitch a muscle, or breathe a sound at the touch of gentle pressure.
She recognized how it had been intended to rely reassurance, but even still the most cynical parts of her were desperate to pull sharply away because despite the simple touch T’Challa had offered her, there was still an element of the unknown lurking in the shadows, and because of that reason Natasha couldn’t simply drop her defenses, not while having to put herself and others at the mercy of this Warrior-king.
She moved to face T’Challa; subtle movements that were meant to extricate herself from his touch.
If the other had noticed the careful shift he didn’t let on that he was aware to it. Instead T’Challa stayed in close proximity, and it was this genuine ease to his body language—neither encroaching on the space still shared between them and yet having made no move to withdraw his presence from her side—that set Natasha’s nerves on edge; by the mere fact, between one heartbeat and the next, the king had managed to involuntarily coax a flickering wane to her guarded inclination.
“Where are you taking us?”
Her words hung—barest hint of uncertainty behind the timbre—between the two of them.
There was a long, almost thoughtful pause from the man beside her before T’Challa eventually spoke with reassurance, “Somewhere secret, a place that no one else outside of my people could ever hope to find.”
Then another pause before he met her sharp, green eyes and breathed with unwavering certainty, “You will be safe, all of you, will be safe. You have my word.”
Had it been some else, Natasha would have easily dismissed the other’s reassurance as an evasion of the question, while regarding the sentiment behind his words as nothing more than meaningless platitudes meant to mollify unspoken fears or doubts; having been fully confronted with an inconceivable tragedy.
And yet it had been the intensity behind the king’s conviction, which seemed to genuinely urge her to think otherwise and believe in his words. And if Natasha had been any other person than who she was she very well might have.
Maintaining a level stare with T’Challa, she appraised him for any tell that would contradict his previous statement. He seemed in some way mindful of her conspicuous scrutiny towards his demeanor, perhaps even welcomed it if it meant that he could then convince her of his own sincere certainty.
Suddenly, a loud, sharp noise came from the direction of the quinjet’s cockpit.
T’Challa, wordlessly held her gaze for what seemed to be another interminable moment, before he took his leave to answer the call.
Only after he turned away from her did Natasha finally look away, her eyes softened in grief as she once again glanced down at the sheet; thinking back to the certainty with which the king had spoken those last words to her.
No, not all of us…
What quickly followed that dismal notion was an even more treacherous train of thought.
Because I didn’t stop him…
End