AN: The following story is set after the events of The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World. It's based largely off of the Marvel cinematic universe, although I incorporate certain background elements from the comics that I feel further enhance the characters. I hope to keep it interesting and update regularly, so thank you to anyone who takes the time to check it out, and enjoy!
This chapter includes a fair bit of gore at the beginning.

Night Terrors

Natasha's hands were red, slick, warm.

She scrabbled at the wound, desperately attempting to scoop bits of blood and organ back into the dark hole, surrounded by wet, sticky, filthy cloth. Pieces of intestinal lining squished under her fingernails, trapped there as she teetered between holding pressure over the fleshy crater and filling it in with its own offal. Tears stung her eyes and her panicked voice sounded hollow in her ears, as though someone else were begging for help, begging for this man to live.

The red climbed up her wrists, rolling easily off the specially engineered fabric of her catsuit. It stuck to her skin, glued down in the places where the blood had crept inside it.

"Natasha," a voice rasped, pulling a strained, subdued whimper from the person speaking for her. She tore her eyes away from the gaping body beneath her hands for the first time, and they alighted on the chiseled face of a middle-aged man, dark stubble clinging to his cheeks and a full mustache framing his upper lip.

"My Tasha," he repeated, the words icing over her heart. A bubble of bright blood popped between his lips. A thin red line slid over his cheek.

"It was you," he breathed, his voice growing weaker all the while. She shook her head, uncomprehending, so he rasped, "It was always you."

Her fingers, still struggling to staunch his bleeding, closed around something hard and cold. Her eyes blinked rapidly, and suddenly her stranger began screaming, wailing in the moonlight, snow collecting in the man's eyebrows and mustache as the light reflected off of his dull, clouded eyes. She leaned forward and felt her hands sink further into the man's stomach, and she recoiled immediately. Her hands burst forth from their position, buried in his entrails, coated in red. Blood flew in every direction, bits of destroyed flesh raining down on the light layer of pristine snow coating the ground. A gun, dripping with the innards of the dead man, gleamed in her stained fingers.

"NO!" Natasha screamed, her ragged voice ripping through the stillness of the dark room. Her bare chest heaved with the force of her gasps, her pale green eyes wide and bright with terror as she sat staring all around her.

A pair of hands seized her shoulders, and before she thought on her actions she whipped around, her hands moving imperceptibly quickly in the darkness. In the blink of an eye she threw her assailant away from her, a heavy thud sounding as his back connected with the floor. "Nat! Nat, it's me!" his voice urged. She could see his palms outstretched toward her in a gesture of surrender but hers were still curled into fists.

"Nat, it's alright! It was just a dream! You're alright!"

The red around the edges of her vision dissipated at the word "dream," and she squinted down at the man through the shadows. "Clint?" she asked, although the word was more a whimpered realization than a question. Her senses returned to her, and she realized that she was kneeling in the center of their bed, fists in front of her as though she meant to attack him again. He was on the floor, on his back, his expression quickly moving from pleading to pitying as he watched her sink down to the mattress again and hide her face in her hands.

"Hey, Nat—" he started as he pushed himself to his feet and climbed onto the bed again. Clint tried to slide his hand along the backs of her shoulders, but she cringed away from his touch. "Nat, it's alright. Whatever you saw, it's in the past. Nothing can hurt you now unless you let it," he tried to soothe, but she gave a rough sigh and turned her face away from him, her hands dropping down into her lap. Undaunted through his need to help her, Clint pushed, "C'mere, Tasha—"

"Don't call me that," she snapped at him before she slapped his incoming hand away, a little harder than she'd meant to. She didn't apologize as she slid off the mattress and stood, collected a tank top and the underwear she'd had on earlier from the floor and stalked out of the room.

The sound of the door crashing shut echoed through the apartment briefly before the stillness took over once more. Natasha was raw, an open wound, and the silence was like cold water numbing the red, inflamed flesh. She stood on the other side of that door for a minute that seemed to last an hour, her dull eyes staring out the window across the apartment. She couldn't hear Clint inside the bedroom, so she assumed he had laid back down again.

Smart boy, she thought, not without some sarcasm. Usually he didn't let her get away so easily.

She finally took the opportunity to put on the clothes she'd carried out and then padded down the hall. A few minutes later she sat at the kitchen table, heels on the edge of her chair, calves resting against the table's edge, a mug of hot, black coffee clutched between both of her slender hands. Her eyes stared into the dark, glassy surface of the liquid. Ivan's tortured, accusing expression stared back at her. The clock on the oven read 3:26 a.m.

Natasha didn't know whether she was more upset by the dream or by Clint. Whenever she woke up screaming in the middle of the night like this she always felt like she was made of glass, fragile, transparent, ready to spill her secrets or shatter at the slightest touch. It was a horrible, horrible feeling, and some nights, like tonight, she simply needed to be left alone.

Clint didn't understand that. He always wanted to comfort her, to make her talk about what she'd seen, to make her get it off her chest so she could let it go. Heal. He didn't understand that she wasn't like him. She couldn't just sit down and have a conversation about the things she'd seen, done, allowed to be done. She couldn't let him see her this way, so vulnerable that she couldn't hide her fear, her regret, her guilt. He meant well, but she started to resent him for it a long time ago.

"You didn't come back to bed," Clint observed as he poured himself a mug of coffee. He took a sip and frowned when he realized that it was cold.

Natasha didn't answer him. She still sat curled at the table, her own mug wrapped between her hands, a thin layer of dried brown coffee stain coating the bottom of it.

The clock on the oven read 6:19 a.m.

"Look," Clint sighed as he placed his mug in the microwave, evidently too lazy to brew a new pot, "I know it was a rough night. Maybe if you talked about it—"

"No," Natasha said suddenly. Her voice was sharp, sharper than she'd meant it to be. "Not today, okay?" she added, carefully softening the edges of her words. Clint sighed, but he said nothing. She took that as a victory.

The microwave blared and Clint threw the door open in an effort to cut off the loud noise as quickly as possible. Natasha finally stood from her curled position on top of the chair, her knees cracking loudly. A grimace crossed her face as she stretched her tight muscles, an expression that wasn't missed by her partner. He furrowed his brows in concern and made to reach out to her again, to touch her elbow, but Natasha wasn't ready for that yet. She abandoned her original intention to set her mug down in the sink and left it on the table instead before she turned and took a few quick steps away from Clint.

What she needed was a shower. A very, very hot shower.

She couldn't help her mind from wandering as the water ran over her snowy skin, slowly easing the tension that had crept into her muscles throughout the night. It would be a difficult day, she could tell that already. Fury wanted to brief the two of them about a new mission in a little over an hour, her dream the night before had her on edge, and she just knew that Clint would be shooting her concerned sidelong glances every time he thought she wasn't looking.

Natasha hated those stolen glances more than anything.

It wasn't that she didn't appreciate his concern, except she didn't. At all. She understood that he loved her and wanted her to make peace with her past, but if such a thing was possible she was confident it wouldn't be borne of any of his efforts. She had done things, horrible things, and there were days when she opened her eyes and didn't know whether it was Natasha Romanoff staring up at her ceiling or someone, something, completely different. Natasha Romanoff wasn't even her real name. It was the Americanized form of her name, but sometimes it still felt like a different version of who she really was. There was no way that Clint Barton, in all of his forty-three years, could possibly understand what that was like. Only one person truly understood what any of those things felt like, and he was dead.