The Lie

Natasha lifted her leg straight out, perpendicular to her perfectly rigid body. Her pointed toe touched the hardwood floor once more, and then up came the leg again. Her fingers held the bar with such determination that her snowy knuckles shone bone white beneath the bright studio lights. She watched her reflection in the dark glass, tiny flecks of snow falling, barely visible, on the other side. A tall man with a mustache was instructing her, "Come on, Natasha. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three-"

The world glitched, like the camera lens she had been looking through had been dropped, and then focused in again. The ceiling rose and fell away from her as her fingers wrapped around a cold metal bar, straining as she lifted her chin level with her knuckles over and over again. Someone was shouting, "Come on, Natasha! Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three-"

"Come on, Natasha. Enough daydreaming, back to work now," instructed a scratchy voice. Her vision glitched again, and all of a sudden she was watching herself through a television screen. Up went her leg, and down again. Up again, down again. "Count with me, Natasha. Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three-"

"F-forty-onnne...for-forty-twooo..." Natasha mumbled. She let out a quiet whine and tossed her head to the side, her shoulder pushing weakly against Clint's arm.

"-responding well to the dosage," said a voice, echoing around the ceiling of her ballet studio as she practiced.

"Of course, she's strong," echoed another voice. Her vision glitched; the television screen returned.

Natasha struggled, unable to move her hands as though she were restrained, strapped down. She let out another whine, louder this time, her neck tense and her chest beginning to shake with her shallow breaths. Unconsciously she pushed at Clint, one hand driving against his ribs, the other scratching slightly at his chest, her fingers curling and uncurling over his skin.

"Is she under now?"

"Pretty much."

"Alright, Natasha. I'm going to count, and I want you to-"

"-to offer my condolences on the death of your husband-"

"Please, call me-"

"Alexi," Natasha gasped. Finally she found the strength to roll onto her back, one hand stretched out across the empty side of the bed, scrabbling at the sheets as though she were trying to reach for something just beyond her fingertips.

Her vision flashed again, the unsteady, staticky scenes that had been rapidly replacing and overlapping each other finally stopping to show a handsome young man with a strong jaw and dark hair, smiling a charming smile. "Call me whatever you like...but my name is Natalia," she heard herself say, but the words felt like they were spoken by someone else.

The young man's smile widened as he addressed her, his cheeky tone cocky but sweet. "So...Natasha-"

"-you are a widow now," said a distorted Khrushchev, his face struggling to show through Alexi's.

"Nnooo," Natasha whimpered, her lips trembling, her head shaking back on forth on the pillow. She kicked at the blankets a little, her whole body beginning to twitch as she pulled at the sheets, unconsciously trying to tear them away, her other hand grabbing onto Clint's arm with her full strength simply because it was there and solid.

Her vision glitched in and out again, over and over, flashes of ballet performances overtaken by the glint of knives in the dark, hints of movement, still images of red hair tangled in metal apparatuses, caught in bolts, plastered to a pale forehead. Applause sounded all around her, slipping in and out between the sound of explosions and machine gun fire. Blood flowed in rivers, parting in the middle and cascading in velvet curtains down either side of an elaborate stage.

The lights flared on suddenly and she was sitting in the audience, her wrists and ankles strapped down to the armrests and legs of the theater chair. Something wrapped around her neck and clamped onto her head, and then suddenly metal rings were digging into her face, holding her eyelids open as she stared at the stage, at a red haired girl strapped into a medical chair, her eyes pinned open, mouth slack, drool dribbling over her chin as shadows of ballerinas danced over her zombified features.

Natasha sat bolt upright with a yelp that rang through the room, her pale eyes wide and gleaming in the oppressive darkness, her chest heaving with the force of her terrified breaths. Her heart thundered once, twice, and then she fell to the side on her elbow, oblivious to Clint's frantic, worried questions as a powerful wave of nausea rolled over her. He gave her shoulder a gentle shake and her stomach flipped painfully, bile rising in her throat hard enough to make her whole body convulse.

She scrambled out of bed, clumsily getting to her feet and stumbling out of the room as the world doubled and folded over itself. She rounded the corner, and her hands and knees hit the cold tile of the bathroom floor as soon as she crossed the threshold. The sudden change in position made her stomach contract painfully. A shudder wracked her slight frame, immediately followed by the sickening splash of vomit spilling into the toilet in front of her.

With shaking, barely responsive hands Natasha pushed the seat up just in time for another powerful heave. Her hand crashed down onto the edge of the toilet bowl, her fingers gripping it with white knuckles as her cheek collided with the other ridge of the bowl. The world spun and shifted uncomfortably around her, her eyelids fluttered, and when the next wave of nausea hit, her head would have rolled straight into the pool of retch she'd produced if not for a pair of cool hands that emerged from somewhere out of the darkness.

One pushed the hair away from her face while the other rested on her shoulder, holding her just firmly enough to keep her in her slumped position curled around the toilet. It would squeeze gently or slide along her upper arm when the cold sweat drenching her weak muscles made her shudder, and the other continually held her hair back and away from her face and neck. Several impossibly long minutes passed in this way while Natasha fought with the mentally induced sickness until, finally, after heaving nothing but stomach acid several times, the waves of nausea and vertigo began to pass.

She let out a long, shaky sigh as she released her death grip on the porcelain bowl, immediately slipping back into a pair of waiting arms. They cradled her against their chest, propping her up as gently as possible so as to avoid upsetting her further. Normally this was exactly the kind of thing she didn't want after one of her night terrors, but tonight, after that episode, she didn't have the strength to protest. She barely had the strength to wipe her mouth with the back of her twitching hand.

A few moments passed in silence before Clint quietly asked, "Nat...how do you feel?"

Natasha forced herself to swallow her disappointment at the sound of his voice before she gave a barely audible, pitiful groan. She forced her eyelids to flutter open, but as soon as her gaze met Clint's she wished she'd have saved her efforts. "Been better," she managed.

The corner of his lips pulled upward at that and he gave a weak chuckle, whether out of pity or genuine amusement she couldn't tell. "You can say that again," he said gently. When she didn't respond immediately, he added, "I don't think your dreams have ever made you sick before..."

Natasha closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. "They have, just...just not recently," she forced out. She knew exactly where this conversation was going, and it was not good for her health.

"Can you tell me what you saw?" Clint asked as he leaned down to plant a kiss on her sweaty forehead, as though that would make her more inclined to answer this time.

She let out another sigh before she told him weakly, "Not unless you want me to get sick again."

"What do you mean?"

Natasha let her eyelids flicker open once more. Clint was looking down at her, concern touching every part of his familiar face. He had no idea what he was asking, the kind of road he was trying to go down with her. If he had asked her this question a few weeks ago, before she started to trying to repair the damage in their relationship to keep him under control, then she'd have promptly told him to fuck off about it. Now, however, as she looked into his grey eyes, so full of curiosity, concern, fear, it wasn't nausea that turned her stomach.

"Do you remember how I told you that before they got a hold of me, I used to be a ballerina?" she asked him, deliberately avoiding the name of the organization that had made her what she was. He nodded, and she felt her heart drop as she admitted, "I lied."

Confusion flooded his features. "Okay...then what really happened?" he asked, his tone free of the judgment or accusation that she had been hoping for.

Natasha shook her head. "Nothing," she said at first, getting a hand on his shoulder to pull herself into a sitting position. She couldn't have this conversation slumped against him, depending on him to keep her together. Her head lowered into her hands for a moment and she dug her fingers into her eyes, massaged her temples, wiped the sweat from her cheeks and forehead.

"Natasha?" Clint prompted slowly.

She let out a third long sigh and refrained from pulling her face from her hands. "I mean it...nothing happened. It was always just..." her voiced trailed away and her eyes shut tighter, tight enough to be uncomfortable.

Damn, this is hard.

"It's all bits and pieces...faces, sometimes...training," she tried to explain, shaking her head as she struggled with the recollections. Everything was so jumbled up in her brain that just trying to think through what was real and what wasn't gave her headaches.

Clint laid his hands on her upper arms again, but when she tensed he had the sense to refrain from pulling her back to him. "Why can't you remember?" he prodded gently.

Natasha shook her head and carefully cleared her thoughts away. She took several deep breaths and reached out to grip the toilet bowl again, just in case. "That bullshit ballerina story...They conditioned me to believe it, to cover up wha—"

Her voice cracked as her stomach heaved again, forcing her to swallow hard and shudder before taking another handful of deep breaths. Tentatively, she continued, "It was p-part of the Black Widow program...Can't think about the brain w-washing w-without—"

Natasha leaned over the toilet once more and dry heaved several times, each painful contraction trailing away in a helpless whimper. When she finished, Clint tried to lean over her, to wrap his arms around her but she swatted him away. Another couple of minutes passed before the vertigo receded once again and she was able to sit up, shaking like a leaf in a storm.

For some reason, Clint was silent. It was strange enough that Natasha felt compelled to look over at him, but as soon as she did she regretted it. He was staring at her, just staring, like one stares at a rain soaked, malnourished puppy cowering in a gutter. Pity filled his grey eyes as he regarded the broken thing sitting before him, and suddenly the assassin experienced another wave of nausea and revulsion that had nothing to do with the Soviet scientists she was still outrunning.

She didn't say another word that night as she got to her feet, brushed her teeth and allowed Clint to take her back to bed. It took all the strength she possessed to even crawl between the sheets again, to let him wrap his arms around her, hold her while he fell back to sleep. That was a mercy she neither deserved nor received for the rest of the night. Instead she was forced to lay awake and stare out into the darkness, to confront the awful truth she'd been trying to burn at both ends for weeks now. Its emerald eyes stared back, as they often did, beckoning to her until she snuck away to answer their call.