Something was wrong.
Natasha could feel it in the furthest reaches of her nerves, the hairs on the backs of her neck standing on end. A metallic tang in the air and an eerie silence surrounded her as she gripped the bedsheets around her. She sat up smartly.
Clint.
Natasha leapt fluidly onto her feet, adopting a feline-like wariness as she started searching around the apartment for her partner. He wasn't meant to leave, he always slept later than her, and he would have left a note if he'd gone off on his own.
Natasha tiptoed down to the living room, her bare feet tapping on the wooden floorboards. The living room was in the same pristine state they'd always left it in. And it still felt wrong.
A heavy ball of worry and fear grew in Natasha's stomach, and she tried to swallow down the bile rising in her throat. There was no need to worry, she kept on reminding herself. There's nothing wrong. Natasha dragged in deep breaths as she tried to maintain her composure. It was deeper and more serious than her partner disappearing, this she could tell. Natasha paced around her kitchen in her nightgown, stepping between the bars of light piercing the room in between the metal slats on the window.
The lack of noise from outside shouted at Natasha like the ear-splitting silence caused by an explosion. It drew her to the metal blinds obscuring the window, and the light streaked across her porcelain face and danced across her messy, auburn ringlets. She hesitated a moment before pressing the control at the side of the window. With a soft click and a –beep – the blinds started rolling up the window, revealing the morning outside.
What Natasha saw then made her abdomen clench and her knees buckle. Her gastroesophageal reflux heaved and tightened, and she couldn't stop herself from vomiting on the floor out of pure shock. Smoke billowed from shattered apartment buildings into a sulphuric coloured sky, and small houses were burnt to the ground. Heavy purple clouds trembled and threatened to break over the small city, small rumbles of thunder escaping into the otherwise silent scene. No people were in sight, and nothing moved, apart from the rubble which littered the floor, being picked up by the wind and carried across the block. It was a scene of devastation. Of an apocalypse.