Leave the Noise Behind, an avengers fanfic

Natasha knew how to shoot a gun.

It was instinctive to wrap her hands around the grip, let her arms absorb the shock, plant her feet into the ground and let the world shrink to her and the target.

No one in the Red Room was a stranger to target practice. Sometimes the targets were paper. Unfeeling paint in the shape of human bodies. Sometimes there were moving targets or a crosswind to work around, but Natasha had learned to get the job done regardless.

But there were days then they would haul a person in. Sometimes men and sometimes women, with a black canvas bag over their heads, exhausted from hours or days or weeks of interrogation. Sometimes they would keep on their feet, sometimes the guards would have to drag them on their knees and unceremoniously put them on the chair they would shortly die in. Sometimes they blubbered, whimpered, begged for mercy, and sometimes they were calm. Accepting. At peace with death.

The peaceful ones puzzled her.

Natasha wondered if they even realized what was happening, that they were about to die. She couldn't fathom why someone wouldn't fear dying. Natasha had feared death then. She often dreamed of dying and would wake with a rabbity heart and fear in her stomach and vow to herself that she would not be the one to die. She was convinced, too. She believed then that all she had to offer Death was her middle finger, that no knife, bomb, or bullet would be the end of Natalia Romanova.

She ridiculed the victims. Perhaps not consciously, but she did believe that if she was ever caught, she deserved whatever fate would await her at the hands of the enemy. The ones who got caught, they were told, were the ones who had gotten sloppy, and Natasha was not sloppy.

So, if the handlers told her to, she would raise her gun and take her aim and put a bullet in the brain underneath that canvas sack. The body would slump sideways and be dragged out in much the same way it had been brought in,

There wasn't even time for blood to drip on the floor.

Now that she was an Avenger, her dreams happened in much the same way. A victim was dragged in, dumped into a chair, Natasha put a bullet in their brain.

After bullet

After bullet.

She emptied the whole clip, and still she kept going. She couldn't stop. There was blood pouring out of the sack now. It dribbled down thin, malnourished chests and spilled onto the floor, and still Natasha poured bullets into a dead prisoner.

She couldn't see her handlers, but she could sense their grim pleasure. This didn't make sense. She was wasting ammunition, the prisoner was dead. But she couldn't stop.

Even as her mind screamed at her body to stop she pulled the trigger again but before she could hear the bang she was waking up in her bed and she was safe.

5:48 AM.

She could still hear the gunshots.

Cold, calculated, precise.

Even.

Steady.

Bang.

Even her socked feet on the ground, soundless, seemed to stamp out the rhythm of her gun.

Bang.

Gripping her head in her hands, she mentally willed away the gunshots, praying to the empty morning for peace.

Still the noise persisted. Everything she did was a reminder of her own terrible deeds, the rhythm of her own gun.

Bang.

She broke, finally, leaving the unbearable silence of Stark Tower, yanking a sweatshirt over her head to combat the early chill. She slid some shoes on her feet and slipped out of the building. JARVIS was probably the only one to know she left.

The the ghostly grey light of early morning hung over the city like a heavy shroud, but nothing could smother New York completely. The gunshots filling her mind were quieter here, drowned out by the sounds of the city. Sirens wailed in the distance, aproned employees at the cafe on the corner were opening up for the day. Construction and repair crews began to arrive on site to finish clean-up operations after the Battle of Manhattan. Business people in suits and skirts climbed into ubers and taxis or trotted down the steps to the subway.

Natasha paid little attention to her direction, she just kept walking, determined to leave the noise in her mind behind her.

As Natasha kept walking, the neighborhood changed. Steam billowed from grates in the street. Two kids smoked a joint in the dim stoop of a corner bodega. A radio played from an apartment window. Somewhere, a baby was crying and someone else was shouting in Spanish. Someone's motorcycle was idling in the distance. Sirens continued to wail and a large truck beeped incessantly as it backed into a loading bay.

She kept walking. Some found the cacophony of the city unbearable, but for Natasha it was like a lullaby. The sounds of so many people living a dying and being rose up around her and drowned out the unwelcome noise in her head. She kept walking in the early morning as the city ebbed a flowed, and kept walking until she could leave her nightmares behind.