A/N: sorry for the little hole in the middle of frequent updates! i've been having some excessive training the past two days, and was only free today to finish this whole thing up. i hope the length of this one repays that :) so, this is me trying to get into everyone's heads, and pardon me if the last part gets confusing! just remember that it's all happening in current time(: i'm loving the reviews and advice that i'm receiving too! so thank you!(:

disclaimer: disclaimed.


He hides in the darkness, playing with his fingers as he watches her sleep. Troubled, he recognises. She's talking in her sleep, crying in her sleep, and even with them hidden under her eyelids, he knows her eyes will reflect all the fear and anguish she has ever felt just like a mirror. And mirrors reveal the demons that roam your mind like prisoners with a hall pass, bashing the walls and destroying every corner until the place is burnt to the ground. Poor Natasha. Nobody deserves to take such an emotional roller-coaster when it's going into its grand plunge, and being an assassin with a rock in her chest isn't an exception from feeling such pain.

He makes the greatest effort to keep his footsteps quiet, barely making a sound that's a decibel higher than her whimpering and murmuring. The sounds that escape her lips are getting louder, too. Maybe she's having a bad dream. He closes the distance with equal strides, all the way up to her bed where he towers right over her. Like a protector. He reaches out his fingers to wipe away the mix of tears and sweat that trickles down her face, expecting the assassin to tear out a gun from underneath her pillow upon his slightest touch and point it right in between his eyes.

Yet, for some reason that just can't be explained with the right words and believable logic, she doesn't. A trained espionage agent that has probably slept with her eyes open since the mere age of fifteen, and she doesn't draw a gun in his face. That, surely, has to be the start of her patience and attention to her survival wearing thin, until it finally burns out and she snaps painfully without elasticity.

He sits down on the floor, right beside her bed where he has perfect view to her face, her fingers and her arms. She has the tendency to dig her nails into her skin when she has a bad dream, if they have all noticed correctly. So, for the next couple of hours, he will serve as her fellow guardian until the sun comes up and emblazons her skin with the calling of another dreadful day for her, and for all of them. By then, it will be as if he'd never been there. That is, unless he feels that there is a need to send his hammer crashing through the wall and leaving yet another gaping hole in the room, and another incident that Tony can add to his list of destructions.

Thor likes it, playing the eyes, ears and hands of the unprotected damsel in mental distress. Guarding her in every way as she barely sleeps through one of her roughest nights. It's not anything to be ashamed of, really, because he'd do it for anyone of his buddies. His family. To see them suffer is, by far, something he detests the most. And to say that he doesn't care, it has to be the mother of all lies. Thor, although a god and a king, is a sentimentally closeted man, like many of the others. But his heart is big and giving, and the generosity and heartfelt concern that he willingly provides, without the need of consent, is as vast as an ocean. It never really seems to end if you look out into the horizon, until the sea splits with the sky and the sun. He has heart.

So he doesn't mind hushing her when she starts to sob in her sleep, and he doesn't mind loosening the puncturing grip of her fingers on her arm. He doesn't mind covering her back up when she kicks the sheets off in case she gets cold, and he doesn't mind losing sleep for a friend like Natasha. No boundaries held.

The click of the doorknob turns his attention from her to the group of men standing at the door. "She okay?" Bruce whispers as he walks over to her bed and sits right on the edge, eyes scanning her face. Her forehead wears a glossy sheen of sweat, finding glow in the littlest of moonlight that filters through the gaps between the curtains. "Nightmares..." Tony's voice is small as he enters the room last. It sounds guilty, almost. "Pepper's been having them too, you know, ever since our honeymoon when I-" He sighs, punctuating the unfinished sentence as he settles down on the floor beside Thor and hangs his throbbing head. Steve claps him on the shoulder, and if he normally shrugs it off, he doesn't today. Instead, he mumbles a word of thanks and rests his head in his hands, his fingers massaging the temples on both far sides of his forehead.

"You've been here all night?" Steve addresses the blonde haired man hiding by the side of Natasha's bed. Thor nods. "Couple of hours. Her night has been rough for the silent lady she is. Very." He continues after the gesture. The men turn their gazes to face the floor, and after deep exhalation, Steve finally breaks the silence. "So what do we do now?" He asks, voice softer.

"What canwe do? Mourn, grieve, and get us though this horrible setback? Because that's pretty much whatever options we're left with." Bruce answers. His voice is clearly stained with defeat. They all sigh heavily, nonetheless agreeing with his words. What, really, can they do except rot in the mourning of their close friend? Tony finally coughs up an answer. "We act."

All their heads turn to look at him, faces plagued with question. "What?" Bruce gasps.

"We act. We hack into SHIELD's database and dig out his mission file, find out what went wrong and when it did. If someone's waiting for an offence, a reaction from the opposing, they've got it." The man continues, explaining his answer with a few more words. Steve instantly retorts. "That's illegal. If the Director knows it's us, which he will, he'll-"

Tony raises his voice over Steve's, pulling in some valid points. "I've had my fill of give and take for this man, and I'm done giving him any more options. I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore. He doesn't tell us what he knows, doesn't discuss his plans, and after sending our friend for a mission half across the world, all of a sudden and for no good reason, Clint ends up dead and he's not talking." He hisses, getting a little more agitated with each word he spits. He inhales deeply and continues with a calmer pace and tone. "A man like that doesn't face up to other men when he's done something worth suspecting about. He has to be hiding something he knows from us, something that happened during Clint's mission. If he's not telling us, then for Clint, Natasha, and for all of us, we're breaking in. So you in, or you out?"

After much rationalising, the rest of the group finally replies with positive answers and a symphony of agreeing words. The room falls into silence again, as if waiting for another pained moan or whimper to subconsciously form on Natasha's lips. They watch her roll over a little more, as if acting on well practiced instinct, and bite back a scream that surely begged to escape her. The soft but shattering sound, like a cry from a voiceless throat, is slightly muffled by the pillow as her muscles tense up and she curls up tautly. Asleep, she pushes her face further into the pillow as her fingers have a tighter grip on the cushion, and she writhes almost soundlessly.

"God! Is this what Clint's been handling all the while?" Steve questions, worry staining deep in his slightly fractured voice. Tony shrugs. Bruce rubs and squeezes her leg, trying to relieve the contracting muscle, while Thor goes back to loosening her fingers and rolling her over again. Steve rubs her back and shoulders and hushes her until she stops screaming, and Tony simply strokes her hair in grimace. When Natasha finally stops resisting everything that's torturing her in that pretty little dark mind of hers, the men stand back and really take an extended minute to think about what hell she's been through.

What hell she's survived, and what deaths she has escaped, and how everything that's supposed to ruin her and drive her to insanity really did take a toll on her, but before everything that's happened, they just didn't seem to think that she was affected by them at all. Sleep really does reveal every true thing about a person. Sadly to say, her sleep reveals every little piece of hell she has managed to keep inside of her. "I guess we're all worried about the same thing." Another female voice sighs hoarsely from the door. Pepper walks up to Tony and he wraps his arms around her, kissing her forehead. "We're all having a rough night." Bruce sighs.

"We were just about to go do something down at the lab. You should go back to sleep, maybe drink some water before that, okay? I promise I'll be back before dawn." Tony murmurs into her hair tiredly. He doesn't know how long it's been since he's caught even a wink of sleep. "I think I'll stay here with Natasha. Don't over exhaust yourself, Tony. It does more harm than good, and you haven't slept since last night." Pepper says, rubbing his wrist as she speaks into his shirt. He tousles her hair softly before croaking a sound that seemed like agreement and leaving the room with Bruce and Steve flanking him on his heels.

Thor turns to look at Pepper. "Any chance that you might have some cards on your hands? I learned a new game, Go-Fish if I'm not wrong, and it might be an amusing way to pass time." She chuckles slightly, shaking her head. She sits down on the floor beside him and rests her elbow on the bed. "Not right now, Thor. I think we need to pay more attention to Natasha than to a round of Go-Fish. How is she, anyway?"

"Not too good." He ponders for more words to say, because the silence is just too overwhelming sometimes. "You know, there is this... gut feeling, ah yes, gut feeling in me that makes me think of Jane when I look at her. Troubled, lost, and knowing that she might never see her loved one again." Thor isn't one to pour his heart out in words, but Pepper encourages him to go on. It's healthy, isn't it? "When I left for Asgard to save my father two years ago, after promising Jane that I would be back for her, I broke a bridge that connected my world to yours. I never went back to her, never had the chance to find her, and now I just wonder if she thinks that I am completely gone, like Natasha with Clint.

"Yet, a part of me feels that because I am a king in my land, I am not allowed to feel, and feeling just feels... wrong. But I cannot help this gut feeling that is killing me inside!" She listens attentively as Thor spills out a bunch of words and emotions, watching him throw his arms up in the air and holding them grounded to his knees. Then, she clicks her tongue and thinks of a reply as she is reminded of something from the past.

"You know, Thor, I had an aunt when I was a kid, and she worked in the hospital. I went there to visit for a day, and you know what she told me?" Pepper starts. Thor frowns, then shakes his head at her question, so she continues. "She told me that, no matter how thick-skinned we try to be, there are millions of electrified nerve endings in our skin, open and exposed and feeling way too much..."


Natasha can't escape this. Everything about this terribly warped unreality feels just as real as it shouldn't be. She wants to escape it because it's pulling her through so much pain with every little nerve that lights up upon the slightest touch on the surface. Like razorblades on her skin, the torture is simply unbearable. So exposed and raw and naked. Why is she watching Clint disappear every time she opens her eyes to nothing but the nightmare? And why does it feel so real?


"Some of them burn out while the others spark, and it might feel painful, surging as fast as the impulse of anger that fuels the mind..."


When he's alone, he's alone. And everything hurts and feels as if his body is about to fall apart. Perfection be damned and forgotten. His head throbs, his chest swells, and his arms and legs are just dead weight acting with gravity. It's not the lack of sleep, he knows, because it feels completely different. Feeling... Feeling... Feeling. Everything is about feeling. Even as his fingers slam against the keyboard and punch the keys with frustration, it's still about feeling. Steve is only there to keep Tony in line, while Bruce is working on doing the same thing he is. Hacking. And it really isn't working, with both men tired and not thinking on the right level, they can't crack the encryption codes.

Tony feels like putting a fist through his screen, because it's all just so frustrating! It's an act of impulse, but he doesn't have the mind capacity to control himself anymore. He just might drop dead on the floor if he doesn't output his uncalled for anger somewhere. He almost does it, when Steve makes him back away from the device and looks him in the eye. You're just tired. Calm down. Steve tells Tony in a firm tone, catching the attention of Bruce. Tony takes in a deep breath and clears his clogged mind, letting through the anger from the back of his head to the front, injecting a little more awareness in him and letting him feel a little more awake. He nods Steve off, and then continues to work his fingers a little faster to find conclusion in their search.


"The spark might feel like something hot burning your flesh, and it might hurt a whole lot, more when you try to push it away."


Thor's heart is in half. The desire to protect his loved one, Jane, from all the terrible things in the world is soaring. Yet, that desire is whatever that's draining life from him in the form of incurable pain. He knows that he's not human, and he's supposed to be a calloused man and ruler. So he tries to forget Jane, tries not to think about her all the time and tries not to miss her. But love is tricky. Unfulfilled, it is a hurt locker. It hurts twice as much when he tries too hard to change what he feels.


"Try as we might to keep from feeling the pain, sometimes it's just unavoidable."


Do her screams escape her lips in real life? She's already doing the best she can. Running in opposite directions than she did before, hoping to find an end to this never-ending abyss of torture. They come in the form of hallucinations. Sometimes, it's his voice. Others, it's his smell. Then, there's his being, where a scene plays out right in front of her, and every time the story takes a turn for the worst and it ends with death. Every single time. And all these tear a million shards through her chest, punctures every vessel and cuts her all over until she wishes to just die and end it all. Feel painless. But with every scream she bites back, growing every single time, Natasha knows that it's never going to end. Not in this life.


"Sometimes, that's the only thing left to make everything feel real. Just feeling."


After an hour of key punching, Bruce's screen finally reveals the inside of the SHIELD database. He punches a few more keys to get around it and find Clint's mission file, and when he does, he's stunned. "Guys..? I think I found it, but you wouldn't want to read this..."


TBC!

sooo... drop me a few lines as you lovely people always do?(: it's really helping me write this better, really. xx.