It started at an Avengers mission that took them halfway around the world. Natasha went in first to see what it was Doom had recruited a small army of technologically talented mutants to build. After half an hour there was a lot of yelling and her comm piece abruptly cut out. They abandoned the plan and rushed in to help in any way they could, finding her buried neck-deep in a sea of security guards. She was holding her own and more than a dozen were out for the count, but there were just too many of them to take down on her own. Steve dove into the fray while Clint started taking guards down from the entrance.
The facility was left in shambles, research destroyed by Tony's suit, and Natasha clung to Clint's arm to keep from toppling over as they ran back to the Quinjet. Bruce, looking pale and anxious as ever, hurried over to get a look at Natasha. Bruises were blooming over the right side of her face, where she'd been hit and the comm was shattered in her ear, and there were three small tranquilizer darts embedded in her neck. Clint sat her down and she started swaying like she was on a boat in choppy waters.
"How's the pain, on a scale of one to ten?" Bruce asked, shining a light in her ear.
Natasha closed her eyes, teeth clenched. "Six."
"Just six?"
"Six," she stubbornly repeated, color draining from her cheeks. The jet hit turbulence on its way into the air and she leaned over to vomit on the floor.
Steve balked from the other side of the jet. "That doesn't look like a six," he said, concerned.
"Puking usually means at least a nine," added Tony as the armor disassembled itself and folded neatly into a convenient carrying case.
Outright growling, Natasha wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and shook her head. "I operate by a different pain scale. Just get this shit out of my ear before I get a Hoover to do it instead."
Tony passed Bruce a pair of sterilized tweezers and held the flashlight. "A Hoover? Really? Come on, you and I both know that everyone uses Dyson now," he snarked, and Natasha shot him a scowl from behind her hair.
Two days later and Natasha claimed she was fine, but holed up in her apartment to sleep off the residual headaches that came with her concussion and just how much digging it had taken in her ear to get the broken comm out. In the common lounge Tony was busy on his tablet, accessing SHIELD's medical files with only a little bit less ease than the rest of the files. At least they had the decency to try a little harder to protect their agents' privacy. Not hard enough, sure, but A for effort.
A hologram of Natasha's X-Rays were rotating three-dimensional above his tablet when Steve stepped in. "What are you doing?" he asked, head tilted with slight interest.
"Trying to figure out Romanoff's pain scale," replied Tony baldly.
Color rocketed up Steve's face. "Are you sure you should be snooping like that?" he asked just as Bruce and Clint filed in, following the voices.
"What're you doing with Natasha's scans?" Clint demanded. Steve wanted to ask how he knew they were Natasha's pictures without seeing the name, but that felt slightly too invasive. "Stark, if Natasha knows you're going through these-"
"But look at them!" Tony blurted out over him, gesturing violently at the images with fury whitening his face. When there was no reaction he blew them up further, and there it was, some sort of patchwork on her skeletal structure, patchwork with serial numbers, twists of light in her joints, shadows between her ribs and in her abdominal cavity. "Do you fucking see that? It's metal. On her bones, in her joints - fuck, what happened? Barton?"
The agent shook his head, slack-jawed, arms crossed over his chest. "I dunno, this is all before my time," he replied. "But Tasha doesn't have scars, she couldn't to pull off her disguises, I don't-"
"I do, they're just too old to see," a voice said from behind, and they all spun to find Natasha, white-faced and clearly too exhausted to let her anger show, leaning in the door. She looked smaller in her pajamas.
"Nat, we weren't-"
She silenced her partner with a look, then stepped further into the room with gaze intent on the hologram display of her abused body. "They're mechanical enhancements," she said, voice hard and quiet. "Intended to make us physically superior, run faster, jump higher, tread more softly... They didn't wait until we were fully grown, either, so some of us wound up...horribly disfigured. The rest had dumb luck or they would go back into those who showed the most promise, make adjustments."
Staring at the image, standing so close, Natasha's face was cast in light too bright to fit the stark softness of the moment. Her eyes shone like sparks. Steve wanted to be sick knowing that she was one of the few who showed enough promise to be operated on twice. "You could have told us," he found himself saying.
"You should have," added Tony, looking about as bad as Steve felt.
"Why? Because we're a team?" Natasha asked. "This is none of your business; it has nothing to do with how I operate in the field." Her expression hardened when they all (excluding Bruce, who smelled confrontation on the breeze and promptly excused himself) apparently made the same unconvinced face. "What?"
"Well, Tasha, it affected how you operated a few days ago," Clint awkwardly brought up. "The Doc didn't know what to do with you like that, cuz of what y'said about having a different pain scale. I always thought you just meant you had a higher tolerance, but..."
Her mouth opened long enough to catch flies, but closed it without a word. "What do you want me to say?" she finally asked. "Some days I wake up in so much pain I don't want to get out of bed, but you know what? I do it anyway, because the only other options are a lifetime of drug addiction or taking a page out of Banner's book. That's pretty fucking bleak, don't you think? Getting up anyway, it's what I do, it's my thing. If I don't get up I'm resigning myself to the reality of what they did to me, and I don't know if you've figured it out yet, but I don't do that." What little color to be had in her face suddenly drained as her voice pitched and rose, and Clint stepped in at last to play interference.
"Put it away, Stark," he ordered in a low voice, hand on Natasha's wrist tugging her out. She trailed after him, then met abreast with him, then yanked her hand free and stormed off down the corridor.
The room went a little dimmer when Tony tucked his tablet away, silent and tense. "Well. Clearly we need to work something out. Steve, you're team captain, I think I'm gonna defer to you on this," Tony nodded.
That, if anything, told Steve just how serious this was.
He waited until a few hours had passed, until she was hopefully feeling improved from the morning, before bringing a peace offering. A tray of her favorites from the kitchen, all rich hearty dishes and her favorite spiced tea. Natasha was still in bed but she sat up when he knocked. "What's that?" she asked, gingerly touching her injured ear.
"Rabbit stew, cheesy bread, and a tiny little chocolate souffle."
Her eyebrows shot up in touched surprise as Steve settled the tray across her knees. "Who told you?" she asked. "Barton?"
"What, I can't be observant?" he shot back with a smile, sitting on the edge of the bed at her feet as she took a small bite of the stew. "But no, actually, yeah, Barton told me. Is it okay? How, uh...how are you feeling?"
Slowly and with deliberation, she put her spoon down on the tray and took her sweet time dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. "It's down to a four today, which is good, considering I'm still injured," she said, hand hovering around her ear again. "If it's above seven there's something seriously wrong. Ten is if I'm being actively drawn and quartered by wild horses. Nine is fire, because fire burns your nerve endings, and you don't feel it after a while. Eight...eight is being frozen in a cryogenic chamber that wasn't completely sealed. Seven and below are harder to gauge, being less urgent. Usually I level out at around a three."
"That's every day?" Steve blurted out. "You're in pain every day because of this?" How did she sleep at night? How did she manage to function at all with a daily pain scale that involved such incomparable experiences as fire and ice?
She met his eye, completely calm, and shrugged one shoulder. "I'm in pain every day because of a lot of things. What's one more on the list? Besides, I've learned how to push it aside, put it away until I've done what needs doing. Most days I hardly even notice anymore."
"But you're in pain every day, Natasha," he repeated, voice gone soft. His hand found her ankle under the sheet and held her there, gently. "You don't deserve that. No one deserves that." He thought suddenly of how Natasha never referred to herself as 'I' when she explained what had been done to her as a child. It was always 'us.' She wasn't the only person who suffered, but maybe the only one who lived as long. "If it were me, or Clint, or Bruce in this position, I know you'd want something to be done too."
"But if nothing could be done, I wouldn't press the issue, either," Natasha pointed out.
Steve noticed she was stirring her food but not actually eating much, picking her bread into little pieces between lethal fingertips. It probably wasn't easy eating when it felt like there was a softball lodged in the side of her head. "The only person saying nothing can be done so far is you, Natasha," he told her with a tentative smile. "You live with geniuses and doctors and super soldiers now. If we can't figure something out, we aren't doing our jobs right."
That, at least, made her laugh gingerly while holding her ear. "I guess we'll see," she conceded with a nod.
"And until then, I hope you know that you don't have to go out in the field if you're having a bad pain day," added Steve. "Unless it's another world catastrophe, we can handle it. Hell, maybe we'll call Spider Man or Wolverine in; what I'm trying to say here, Natasha, is that you don't have to worry about disappointing us or leaving us in trouble. We've got your back."
A smile curled her lips, and she offered him a spoonful of her meal. "Remind you of something?" she asked, and when he took a bite he was shot back to an illegal pub in 1943 where he met the most remarkable girl. Part of him wondered if she lived her days in unmanageable pain even then, but he didn't dare ask while she was smiling and relaxed. He left her that way to rest, gingerly picking at her food but still in good spirits.
After that, though she was by no means a changed woman, it was clear to Steve that Natasha had taken their conversation and at least considered it. The allowances she made for them were small but noticeable. Natasha performed no less admirably in the field, of course, but there were down days when she would step into the communal lounge looking wan, and tip her head with a strangled look in her eyes when they made room for her to lie on the couch with her head on Clint's leg. Other days when asked how she was, she would reply with a number. Anything above four was out of the norm unless she was injured.
It wasn't a perfect system, but they got by and they were all learning.