trigger (of the gun inside my head), an avengers fanfic

A/N: In case the title didn't make it clear, there are many, many trigger warnings for this fic, since it deals with Black Widow struggling with her own triggers. This fic involves themes like PTSD, panic attacks, suicide, sexual abuse, etc. Please, take care of yourself first and foremost. I'm well aware that this story isn't for everyone.

The cover art is a picture drawn by Ishgsk on DeviantArt.

TRIGGER (OF THE GUN INSIDE MY HEAD)

[The following is a transcript of a classified recording, Property of S.H.I.E.L.D., Level 7 Clearance Required to Access, Subject: Romanova, Natalia Alianovna, Codename: Black Widow, Alias: Romanoff, Natasha]

BARTON: Medical has personally informed me that the agent suffered no permanent damage.

FURY: The permanence of his injuries is not my concern. My concern is what prompted this behavior from a woman that you assured me, Agent Barton, was stable.

BARTON: She was.

FURY: So she isn't now?

BARTON: Her mind is a minefield. Every conversation, I'm tiptoeing around trip wires. She's a loaded gun, and the people who brainwashed her... somehow, they still have a finger on the trigger.

FURY: I want to know why she attacked one of our own.

BARTON: The short answer is, I don't know.

FURY: The long answer, please.

BARTON: I don't know what in the hell is going on, and I hate when my decisions turn around to kick me in the ass.

FURY: The woman you called "stable" is handcuffed in an isolated holding cell, Agent Barton, and I need to know why, or else —

BARTON: Did you say handcuffed?

FURY: Is there a problem?

BARTON: Did you read her files? What they did to those children of the Red Room, to tether them to their handlers?

[static]

FURY: You need to find her. Now.

1. Approximately six days, four hours, and eleven minutes after her official initiation into S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha Romanoff tries to strangle an agent in the bathroom.

One minute, they're both at the sinks — the pallid, lethal redhead and an ebony-skinned initiate with tightly coiled braids — not making eye contact, not speaking, but civil by any definition. The next minute, Natasha whirls, pinning the initiate against her chest, with an arm locked around the other woman's throat.

It's reckless, to be certain, but there's still another girl in the bathroom stall behind them, which qualifies the attack as not only unprovoked, but uncharacteristically short-sighted of a Red Room graduate. The third girl sprints from the bathroom, of course, and returns with backup in the form of a S.H.I.E.L.D. security patrol, of course. They drop Natasha to the cold tile floor with a rifle in her face, close enough for her to kiss the muzzle.

But Black Widow doesn't curse, or snarl, or threaten. She doesn't move to attack anyone else. She smiles — a she-wolf's gums peeled back from white, white teeth — and chokes on her own laughter.

Because when they shove her into solitary confinement, they handcuff her wrists.

Because she spent the first ten years of her life with handlers who chained her to the bedpost, when they finally allowed her to sleep.

Because she spent the following confusion of days, days, days that became years pulling the locks shut herself, finally loosing a breath as the cool metal pressed into the fleshy part of her wrists, anchoring her.

Because since entering S.H.I.E.L.D. as a tentative ally, not an enemy, she hasn't felt the mechanical pressure against her pulse, hasn't heard the safe click of the lock, hasn't twisted the key securely into place, even once.

She spends twenty-four hours in solitary confinement. She sleeps them all away.

"Why, Natasha?" asks the Hawk, all earnest concern, "Why did you attack that agent?", and Natasha isn't lying when she says, in a tight little voice that belongs to someone else, "I couldn't sleep."

Medical allows a pair of handcuffs when security tapes show six days spent wide awake and haunted — six days of pacing, screaming into pillows, tapping out messages like Morse code against her thigh, blinking at staggered intervals, talking to a handler that isn't there, pressing her nails into her wrists until they draw blood.

Medical is pleased when her sleeping habits return to normal.

And Medical revokes the handcuffs four days later when, like she wants to sleep forever, she tries to strangle herself with the chain.

BARTON: The psychiatrist thought it would be cathartic to reclaim the childhood she never had.

FURY: Catharsis and a panic attack are very different things.

BARTON: What are my orders?

FURY: We're running out of options. The psych should be —

BARTON: Maybe she doesn't need to be psycho-analyzed as much as she needs a friend.

FURY: She's an assassin, Agent Barton, not a troubled child.

BARTON: I would know. I've been both.

FURY: Do what you have to do.

2. The little girl's name is Lily. She is seven years old, wearing a poofy dress the color of strawberries, and smiles when Natasha swallows and says, as loudly as she dares, "Hello."

Lily arches both eyebrows with borderline ridiculous enthusiasm. "Do you want to watch a Disney movie?"

"Okay," Natasha says, because a children's movie is the least threatening option she's been given since Budapest.

Lily chooses "Snow White." After the first ten minutes, Natasha has settled into the couch, with the little girl on one arm and a popcorn bucket on the other. Then somewhere in the middle, Natasha thinks she sees Russian letters branded on the television — INSTILL FEAR, they'd say in the Hawk's strange tongue — and the popcorn bucket explodes like a frag grenade as she launches from the couch, only to collapse halfway to the TV, her throat dry, her teeth rattling, every inch of her reduced to a racing heart and shuddering bones, and she is dying, she is dying, she is dying, dying, dying.

Lily kneels on the floor and holds her close, like she's a doll. "It's okay," she whispers. "It's okay. I've seen all these movies. The darkness always dies. The princess always wins. I promise."

Natasha's lips are shaking so hard that they cut off her voice. I am not the princess.

Except she is not dying. She's reliving a lifetime of trauma in a single instant, and what wouldn't she give to sink her teeth into a poison apple, to sleep her waking nightmares and demons away?

Medical calls it a panic attack.

Natasha reserves the word "panic" for when a strange man enters her peripheral vision or her hand slips against the silver edge of a knife. That was death, in one way or another — and crawling back from it means collapsing into the Hawk's arms like they aren't still deathly afraid of each other — but he holds her like it's all right, or like it will be.

It will be.

BARTON: Give me her complete files.

FURY: I did.

BARTON: We agreed not to lie to each other.

FURY: No. No, you cannot view her complete files.

BARTON: I am her protector. I can't protect her from what I don't know.

FURY: You also can't protect her from what's already happened. But I can damn well prevent you from torturing yourself with it.

BARTON: She wasn't only trained to kill, was she? She was trained to seduce. I see it in the way she moves, the way she looks at me —

FURY: I trust you'll keep your head, Agent Barton.

BARTON: That's not what I meant. She moves like... like she's in pain. Looks at me like I'm a predator. You put her in a room with Agent Hill, and it's like watching her breathe for the first time. You catch her off guard with a male agent, and...

FURY: I'm not going to tell you anything else.

BARTON: Somebody touched her. Somebody violated her.

FURY: She suffered a lot of things.

BARTON: How in the hell does anyone think they can own a woman's body, like it's a rifle, like it's a badge on their uniform?

FURY: Some things even I don't want to know.

BARTON: I look at her, and she doesn't even see me. I can't change this. I can't change this, and I want to hurt something. I want to kill something.

FURY: She's seen enough hurt. Now's the time to heal.

3. Natasha wakes screaming, which is bad enough, but she's screaming in Russian, which is worse. Screaming rebellion and retribution, a plea and a dissent, a cry for a lost lover or an enemy. She doesn't know. She doesn't know.

The harsh syllables launch her headlong, back to trails of crimson through tangled woods, heavy breaths in deepest darkness, her heart beating loud, louder, louder, as if trying to absorb the staccato fury of the stranger's pulse she has so swiftly silenced, spilling scarlet into the snow.

Natasha presses her face into a pillow to muffle shrieks that turn to sobs.

She could probably suffocate herself with the pillow, if she had more self-discipline. If only she knew the kill switch in her programming — her handlers no longer have the liberty of using it, and being able to override her own stubborn will to live in a desperate situation might be critical — then she could make herself choke on this fabric until blissful, quiet dark stole her away.

When the screams stop, she hears a rattling at the door, a lifting of the lock that S.H.I.E.L.D. secures nightly from outside. All at once, the Hawk's silhouette, a graceful slip of shadow, fills the doorway. Its edges shimmer, and Natasha's thoughts blink in and out, shift like static, switching between man after man — all flesh in the dark, and hands and mouths and tongues — strength and sweat and weight in the end, only dead weight and blood as her knife slit their throats and their eyes rolled back into their hollow skulls.

You choose where they touch you, her handlers said, and you choose when they never move again. You choose, Natalia. It's a lovely thing, a lethal thing, to own a man, body and soul. Do you understand?

"Are you all right?" says the Hawk.

"I was sleeping," Natasha says on impulse, because she's frozen, trembling, and suddenly no and don't touch me aren't in her vocabulary. Is there a question in his eyes? Who has ever let her answer? She can't look. She won't.

They promised she'd be safe here, he promised he'd keep her safe, they promised and she's alone and he's looking at her in the dark —

"You were screaming," says the Hawk.

Natasha is keenly aware of her thin nightgown, the chill air against the hollow of her throat. Her hands cover her breasts of their own accord. Don't look at me.

The blood drains from the Hawk's face. "Did you think I —"

"Never mind what I thought."

"I didn't mean to frighten you."

Her lungs are raw. "Leave," she grits out. "Please."

"I'm sorry."

"I'd rather you were elsewhere than sorry."

The Hawk hesitates for an instant, long fingers knotted together as if in prayer. Then, softly, his voice less like a caress and more like sunlight: "The screaming. Is it because Medical took the handcuffs?"

"I don't need..." These words are in Russian, slick and cold. She's choking.

The Hawk steps closer, so that he's standing beside her bed, but there's no threat in his eyes, no starvation in his hands. "Can I... can I try something?" He swallows. "Can I touch you? Not like that, I swear. But the handcuffs... I thought... I have an idea."

The Winter Soldier kissed her like a demand, and her answer was yes, to be sure, but his mouth was a drug. His hands were the only thing that could wash the blood from her skin, that could write different stories on the lines of her body. And the many men in the dark, they gripped her like the weapon she was.

Can I touch you?

Natasha takes an unsteady breath. "No one has ever asked me that."

The Hawk inclines his head. "I'm asking you now."

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," Natasha says, fiercely, because she doesn't want to sleep with strange hands on her body, but she doesn't want to sleep alone.

The Hawk crawls, tentative and fully clothed, on to her bed. He wraps his archer's fingers around her wrists, like bracelets, like irons, and her pulse spikes against his wrists as she understands. His calloused fingertips, his finely trimmed nails, his careful application of pressure to her nerves...

Handcuffs.

"Can you sleep now?" whispers the Hawk. His hands are anchors on her wrists.

Her back is pressed against his chest, and it's solid and strong; a shelter, not a prison. "Stay," she says into his arm.

He keeps her close, like a promise, until she falls asleep. He's gone when she opens her eyes.

SUBJECT: I'm a spy, not a soldier.

FURY: You're a hero, is what you are. There are children fighting cancer, New York natives nursing wounds from alien tech, women recovering from assault in that hospital — and your valiance in the Battle of New York inspired them.

SUBJECT: I know.

FURY: They wanted to see you.

SUBJECT: I know.

[static]

SUBJECT: I couldn't go in there.

FURY: Where?

SUBJECT: The hospital.

FURY: The Chitauri threat was gone, Natasha. The building was to be kept under strict surveillance for as long as you were present. The children —

SUBJECT: Have you noticed, Nick, that wherever I go, somebody bleeds?

FURY: Those people needed a hero.

SUBJECT: It's a shame I'm just a hired gun.

FURY: Not anymore.

SUBJECT: There are things you will never know about me.

FURY: Things?

SUBJECT: A hospital. A fire.

FURY: Is this about San Paolo?

[static]

FURY: You can tell me anything.

SUBJECT: That's why I never will.

FURY: I may be the director, Natasha, but I'd like to consider myself your friend.

SUBJECT: I don't have friends. I have people who trust me and people who don't.

FURY: I trust you.

SUBJECT: You should know better, Nick. Never trust a spy.

FURY: I know you, Natasha. You're more than a spy. You're —

SUBJECT: The only thing you can trust is that you'll never, ever know me.

FURY: But damn it, I'll keep trying.

[static]

SUBJECT: I know.

4. Their third training mission, side-by-side as the Hawk and the Widow, is arguably her first success. Natasha knows it was a trivial assignment — designed to test her personal strength more than to accomplish anything of note — but she tosses the useless damn flash drive on Fury's desk with a flourish, grinning before she turns on her heel and strides, with an actual laugh, out of the room.

The Hawk awaits her in the corridor, leaning one arm on the wall. He flashes a proud smile. "You did well, 'Tasha."

She isn't sure when he started using that name for her, but it sends a flush of heat through her veins. "Of course I did."

He laughs. "Of course you did."

There's a brief, lightning-charged moment when he looks not at her but into her, when his gaze travels not over her body but straight into her chest, into her heartbeat that's steady, sure, for the first time in weeks.

Abruptly, a shout distracts Natasha from the Hawk's face. She wheels, then freezes.

A rush of white-clothed medical staff sweeps like a snowstorm down the hall. They're wheeling a stretcher, speaking to one another in hurried voices. The victim is covered by a sheet that used to be white and is very, very red.

As the stretcher rolls past, the sheet ripples, shifting, so that Natasha catches a glimpse of the wounded. The screaming woman can't be older than twenty-five. Half of her face has been burned away to black and black and red.

Natasha's chest clamps, and suddenly she's swaying on her feet. The white-clad Medical staff whirl by, but it's too late because she's already back in that hospital fire, running when she should be doing anything else, running from her handlers, from her duties, from herself.

Dreykov's daughter is somewhere in the upper wing. Natasha can see the girl in her mind's eye. The smoke leaks through the ventilation and slides under the door and bites through the cracks in the floor.

Natasha is sure Dreykov's daughter screamed. She still hears it at night, a wolf's scream, alone, howling at the moon because no one else will listen.

"'Tasha." She's on her knees on the tile, the Hawk's long, lean arms rattling her shoulders. "'Tasha," he says from faraway.

She opens her mouth and it tastes like salt. She wants to say, The world is on fire, and I don't care. She wants to say, Let go of me, let go, I'm not a hero, I wasn't programmed to save anything but my vital organs and some semblance of a mind.

But all that emerges from her aching throat is, "I can't breathe."

"Natasha —"

"I can't breathe."

He holds her, his breaths coming so fast that he's breathing for both of them, and she thinks he would be her oxygen if she asked, he would be her lungs if ever they failed, and it terrifies her.

ROGERS: You were screaming.

ROMANOFF: You shouldn't have been there. You shouldn't have seen that.

ROGERS: I've seen it before.

ROMANOFF: But Clint, he didn't... he never...

ROGERS: I know what you two had was... complicated, Nat, but if you slept together —

ROMANOFF: Steve —

ROGERS: — I have no doubt he's already seen that.

ROMANOFF: It didn't happen. When we slept together. I mean, before we slept together. I was a living time bomb when S.H.I.E.L.D. found me. I couldn't close my eyes without falling into my own private hell, and he held me and he held my wrists and when I listened to his heartbeat —

ROGERS: I held you on our last assignment, Nat. And you woke up screaming your throat raw.

ROMANOFF: I don't understand it, Steve. I swear. I know you're trying —

ROGERS: It's okay.

ROMANOFF: Don't say that.

ROGERS. It's okay. He was there when you needed him. What you have... I'm not him.

ROMANOFF: Clint. James. They're pieces of me. They're under my skin. They've embedded themselves in the most broken parts of me, and if I try to pry them out, they're not just splinters, Steve, they're support beams.

ROGERS: Bucky.

ROMANOFF: What?

ROGERS: I can't get used to it. You calling him James.

ROMANOFF: You know that I want you. Only you. But I need James and you need Bucky when things get dark, and maybe the Soldier... maybe he killed him.

ROGERS: You never let me tell you what happened. When JARVIS said you were screaming. When we found you.

ROMANOFF: Steve —

ROGERS: He sang.

ROMANOFF: What?

ROGERS: He sang to you, Bucky — James. He sang to you in Russian. I have no idea what he said.

ROMANOFF: Did the song have a title?

ROGERS: Bayushki bayu.

[static]

ROMANOFF: He's still in there. He's still James.

ROGERS: Still Bucky.

ROMANOFF: Still human.

5. There is a lullaby that Russian mothers sing to their sons. It is soft and gentle and lilting. It is harsh and rough and fierce. It is a flurry and a snowstorm. It is a black night with a hundredfold shining stars.

It was whispered from Widow to Soldier, in their world of red walls and red knuckles and red hair that spilled unbound to her bare shoulder-blades. His metal finger traced, absently, symbols up and down her spine. They did not have mothers. They were not meant to have sons.

They were soldiers, and this was their warrior's vows, their children's song, their reckless, foolish, promise in the dark.

Sleep, my beautiful good boy,

Bayushki bayu,

Quietly the moon is looking

Into your cradle.

I will tell you fairy tales

And sing you little songs,

But you must slumber, with your little eyes closed,

Bayushki bayu.

The Widow pressed a kiss to her Soldier's forehead, and his hand of flesh cupped her face and brought her lips lower, lower, till they met his. His teeth grazed her bottom lip when she drew back. Again she sang.

The time will come when you will learn

The soldier's way of life,

Boldly you'll place your foot into the stirrup

And take the gun.

The saddle-cloth for your battle horse

I will sew for you from silk.

Sleep now, my dear little child,

Bayushki bayu.

In Avengers Tower, as an army of mechanical intelligence marches through Natasha's nightmares, as ugly screams break from her chest and shatter the night. Ultron, she says. It never ends. We are a virus. It never ends.

The newest arrival at Avengers tower still has his hands cuffed, but he pushes past the living robot, the man of thunder, and the man on the bridge alike. He has to plead with the archer, though, before he's permitted to kneel at Natasha's bedside. He lowers his mouth to the shell of her ear. And softly, softly, he sings the next verse.

You will look like a hero

And be a Cossack deep in your heart.

I will accompany you and watch you go,

You will just wave your hand.

How many secret bitter tears

Will I shed that night!

Sleep, my angel, calmly, sweetly,

Bayushki bayu.

Natasha stirs. Her lips move without sound, and the archer and the man on the bridge stare, in muted wonder and horror, as she articulates every Russian note in perfect time.

I will die from yearning,

Inconsolably waiting,

I'll pray the whole day long,

And at night I'll wonder,

I'll think that you're in trouble

Far away in a strange land.

Sleep now, as long as you know no sorrows,

Bayushki bayu.

A hand of flesh, trembling, catches a hand of metal, and it shudders like it can feel again.

On the road, I'll give you

A small holy icon,

And when you pray to God, you'll

Put it right in front of you,

While preparing for the dangerous battle

Please remember your mother.

Sleep, good boy, my beautiful,

Bayushki bayu.

The Winter Soldier's history is written in crimson. It is at the Widow's bedside that he finally cries.

+1 She thinks she heard a bomb, but it's only his heart against her cheek, loud and loud and louder, burning away all the things that came before. Her ears are still ringing when his mouth brushes hers, and the world is fire, and they are the white-hot core of the flame, and it's happening too quickly for her to be afraid tonight.

His kisses taste like ashes, all she has ever known, but this time they coalesce into a firebird's wings.

"You're shaking," says the Captain, and he is, too, a ripple of red and white and blue, a tattered flag above a lonely fort.

"I thought I heard bombs," says the Widow, curling her fingers into his chest, kissing her secrets into his mouth, "but it was your heartbeat."

A/N: Continuity for this intersects with compromise (and those who disagree), then goes well beyond be my shield (five times we touched) into my speculation about what happens after Age Of Ultron, which hasn't released in my country yet. I realize that my Cap/Widow-centric fanverse will no longer be plausible given the Hulk/Widow romance said to exist in the film. I've decided to embrace my own AU, all the same. I've invested too much in it to let it die.

The hospital fire flashback with Dreykov's daughter is a reference to the sins Loki lists to Natasha during their scene in the first Avengers film. I explain my theory on this further in be my shield (five times we touched.)

My primary goal with this fic was to realistically explore the implications of the trauma Black Widow has endured in her lifetime, and to show how it affected her relationships, how her friends played a significant part in facing her demons without being defeated. I don't want to use the word "recovery." Black Widow will always be recovering. Every day is recovery. This was a focus on the darker moments, the struggle, since those are things we likely won't see in the PG-13 MCU.