The Animal Inside
Natasha runs.
Hot, harsh breath follows.
Natasha runs, and the long, grey hall before her stretches out into the distance. The walls here are smooth, no doors through which to escape. Just the hall, the breath, and her heart pounding in her ears.
Suddenly, the hall divides in two. The steps behind draw closer. Natasha chooses left, and this hall shrinks and narrows; she's on her hands and knees, crawling. She's sure she's gone now where it cannot follow, but the animal never falters so she cannot either.
Another fork. She chooses right. Her lungs sear from the effort of flight. She feels a twinge in her right knee, and then the hall ends. Just before she hits the dead end, she glances behind her and sees the green monster grin in triumph.
She wakes from the dream as the Hulk lunges. Her neck tingles where his hands had closed in, and she rubs the area with a hand dotted with sweat. Natasha has had this dream before, a few times since the incident in the Carrier two months ago, but the last one had been a few weeks ago, and she thought she was finally past everything.
Apparently not.
Opening her eyes, Natasha contemplates whether sleep will return to her that night. Usually not, but the glimmer of sky between the curtains covering her window indicates that the night is still young, which means the upcoming day will be especially long, an undesirable result since the day involves a training session with Steve and Clint with new gear designed by Tony, Bruce, and the rest of Stark Industries.
Natasha sighs and reaches for the glass of water beside her bed. Before the shadow stops moving in the corner of her bedroom, her hand has grasped the small knife beneath her pillow and thrown it across the room. The air crackles as the knife passes through the chest of her target to land with a soft thunk in the wall beyond.
"Impressive," Loki murmurs as he turns to peer at the knife in the wall. He skims a finger over the top of the blade, and the air sizzles again with the same static charge. Not the real Loki. A projection? But from where?
Loki glances at her over his shoulder. He arches a brow and says, "Bad dream?" For a moment, Natasha wonders if she's still dreaming, one monster replacing the next, but she knows the feel of reality too well to consider the notion for long.
Loki turns towards her, and Natasha sits up and turns on the lamp beside her bed. He's wearing the same suit and jacket he wore to steal the eye from the German scientist; his brow is still arched in inquiry about her dream. Ignoring the question, she says, "What do you want?"
He chuckles at that. "For a spy schooled in deception and subtlety, you can be surprisingly forthright sometimes."
"When it suits my purposes," Natasha says. "And it does now. So why are you here?"
Now he ignores the question. He stares at her with narrowed eyes and says, "Yes, direct confrontation must be the way. Your previous trick won't work again. I know you are no blushing damsel. You cannot play coy to win your information now."
Natasha nearly sighs, but restrains the impulse. Revealed emotion would allow for Loki to gain the advantage, and she cannot allow that. "Why are you here, Loki?"
He again ignores the question and continues his contemplation of her. His gaze flits from her to various articles in her bedroom, sparse save for the bed and bed table, a chaise lounge beneath the window, and a pile of black suitcases in the corner, upon which she had tossed her fighting uniform only hours before.
"Do you know," he says, "that only two others have successfully deceived me as you did on the Helicarrier?"
Natasha shrugs. "I know what people see when they look at me for the first time," she says. "Especially men." She pauses now and meets his eyes. "Even men from different worlds."
He smirks at that and takes a step closer. "They see a doll—a toy with which to be played."
"Yes."
"But you're no doll. Instead—what is that delightful code name that you carry?"
Natasha knows that he knows, so she stays silent.
After a moment more, he says, "The Black Widow." He relishes the phrase, emphasizing each syllable, searching through the vowels and consonants for something, she does not know what. He regards her again, and she starts to feel anger bubble at his scrutiny. "You weave your web of words over men, and, lost in their flush of power, their triumph over so small a thing, they fall into your trap and are ensnared."
His voice has the same eloquent thrum as on the Carrier, but the look he gives her now is devoid of the previous arrogance. Instead, curiosity takes precedence, underlined by confusion. For him, now, she is no doll; she is a specimen to examine, an oddity to understand. The bubbling anger starts to boil.
"Why are you here?" she asks again, and she knows he hears the edge in her voice, but she does not care. She hates labs and experiments, distant men who peer and poke and prod. She received enough of that in Russia, and she will not subject herself to it now.
The assessing look on his face flickers, and she sees some other emotion lurking beneath. Loki glances off to the side, and she knows he's seeing far beyond the walls of her Manhattan bedroom. Does he see Asgard? Some other world? Thor had said that he was taking Loki home to stand trial for his crimes. Had he escaped? But, if that was the case, why would he come here, to her, even in a projected form, to converse about lies and deception?
He flickers again and turns away. Staring down at her suitcases, his hands clasped tightly at his sides, he says, "I regret the slur I used against you in our last conversation. You are no mewling quim. You are—" He stops, tries to start again. "Even Thor, for all his power, succumbs to the manipulation of sentiment, but you know. You know about love. And sentiment. It is for children."
He stops again, turns, and looks at her, and the emotion in his eyes shocks her. He stares at her unguarded, and she sees, for a moment, the man beneath the monster, the one for whom Thor must care.
"Why are you here?" she asks again, but the edge in her voice is gone, and now she is the curious one, assessing him for the clue to this unexpected course of action.
Loki holds her gaze and says, "My sentencing happens today. Odin will…render his judgment against me. I believe even your society grants last requests to the condemned."
Natasha holds her breath, unsettled at the confession.
"How did you do it?" he asks. "How did you stop being who you were and become who you are? Barton told me about your past. The red in your ledger. How did you…stop?"
Natasha remembers the girl from long ago, the ballerina who killed, and the man who showed her another way. "Someone gave me a chance," she says. "And I made a choice." She pauses. The truth sticks in her throat, so accustomed to guile, to lies and to fictions. "We choose who we are," she continues. "What we become. I chose this."
Loki smiles, a smile of surprising sadness and regret. She begins to understand the anguish Thor experienced, the pain of the betrayal of this man. "Regrettably," he says, "not all of us are so fortunate as you." She sees a flash of blue, of red eyes and of ice. She hears the roar of the Hulk in her dreams.
As if he knows, he says, "For some, no choice can soothe the animal inside."
She stays silent, unable to reply. All of her tricks and skills, all of her methods of persuasion and manipulation, fade before this, the last regret of a sure-to-be-dead god who wished to speak with her.
He looks off to the side again, and his mouth tightens into a thin line. "I must go," he says. His eyes cut back to her, and she waits. He regards her a moment longer and then turns away. "Goodbye, Ms. Romanov," he says. "Pleasant dreams."
With that, he flickers and is gone. She blinks and swallows and looks around her room, strange to her now, the world tilted and changed in the last few minutes. The clock beside her reads 2:59 in the morning. Moonlight glints off the knife that she threw, casting the wall beyond in shades of ice and silver.
Natasha closes her eyes and sighs. She knows now that sleep will not come for her again tonight.
Sleep will not come.
Fin