"You know what my choice is," she sighed. "It's not like it's much of a choice, anyway."
"Okay, let's go over some rules." Steve, always one for regulations to follow begins. "First, you can't leave the tower without one of us unless it's SHIELD, in which case Happy will drive you there and back. When you're out with us, you'll be with one of us at all times. Now, obviously, we can't go to the bathroom with you, so if we're out and you use the restroom, we'll have to do a body check afterward. In the house, JARVIS will monitor you so that you can still have some freedom, but you cannot do any workouts or physical activity until further notice and you'll have to eat all three meals with us, plus at least one snack. If you tamper with JARVIS at all, we will need to more to 24/7 surveillance by one of us. We're also going to do talk circles twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. We'll all share, but we'll be focused on you."
"I take it you're not very open to negotiating."
"No we are-" Tony started.
"We'll hear you out."
"Okay, checking my body every single time I have to pee when we're out in public is a little outrageous. What if we just do a time limit?" She was more than a bit pissed off about the restrictions, but she was no teenager. She knew that screaming and crying "unfair" would do nothing. Steve looked at the others before nodding his approval of this adjustment.
"3 minutes."
"I don't think I'll get much of anywhere on the rest of those, so I suppose that will be okay for now." The wheels were already turning in her head of how to avoid these regulations. "Can I know what JARVIS is set to monitor?"
"Vital signs, and any other markers indicative of injury. Nothing too invasive."
She scoffed at this remark.
"We could have programmed a daily log of every single action you take, Red." Tony remarked, attempting to mollify the nervous woman. "Speaking of daily activities, time for lunch."
"I'm not hun-"
"No, Nat." Clint says gently, "That's not going to work anymore. In fact, today is the day we figure out how bad things got. We're going to need to weigh you before we eat today."
"You're kidding," Natasha practically spits at them. "I'm naturally thin, it's not a problem. I just don't get hungry quite as often as all of you men. My body requires less food than you all, that's just a fact."
They dragged her downstairs anyway, where a full medical scale was set up.
"Can I have five minutes? To use the restroom, get a glass of water?"
"I suppose," Dr. Banner affirms for the other men. She rushes to grab a glass and head to the bathroom, where she fills it up several times and drinks the entire contents. She frantically searches through the small room and finds a few decorative rocks in the potpourri container, quickly shoving them into the lining of her underwear before emerging with a fake smile plastered on her face. "Go ahead and step on the scale backwards."
Bruce makes a tut noise, writes down '85.2 pounds,' and resets the scale before Natasha can see the number. He shows the other men, whose reactions are something between scared and sad. They usher her to the table and she excuses herself to the bathroom again, tasting copper, this time running for the toilet and falling to her knees before throwing up pure water for almost a full minute. In a perfect storm of events, as she stands to wipe her face off, one of the rocks falls from underneath her shorts just as Bruce rounds the corner to see what the noise was.
"Right, so let's try this again. This time just in your underwear. I'm sorry that it has to be this way, but you should not have tried to trick us the first time."
"Bruce, I can't… The rest of them haven't…" She trails off, leaving the weight of her unspoken words hanging in the air. "Please," she rasps. "I can't.. I can't be exposed like that with him there…"
"I'm sorry, Nat. They need to know, including him."
She hesitantly removes the long t-shirt and shorts she had been wearing, allowing the men to bear witness to the damage she had done. Everyone but Bruce and Tony were stunned as she came out of the bathroom, barely more than skin and bones, with hundreds of cuts littering her body. Thor let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he was holding in, Steve simply steeled his face to be devoid of emotion, and Clint openly shed a tear. What had he allowed his best friend to become?
82.0 was what they had let her become. A shell of herself. Clint had to leave the room so that the others would not be disturbed by his crying as they tried to reintegrate Natasha into mealtimes at the tower. He headed for his floor and briefly considered going to shoot, but argued that he deserved to feel this guilt, he did not deserve the reprieve and clear mind that shooting would bring him at a time like this. No, he deserved to sit with the guilt and feel as bad, if not worse than Natasha felt. He deserved to feel just as hurt as she did for doing such a vile, disgusting thing to her. Even if he had no control over the situation, he should have found a way to do better - she deserved better, she was his partner. But more than that, he loved her. And he had hurt her. Irreparably broken her beyond strong limits that he thought no one could touch. It wasn't just that what he had done was repugnant - he himself was an awful excuse for a man and partner. It was in that moment that he decided what he needed to do. He deserved to feel the pain that Natasha now lived with because of him, and he would ensure that he did. With everyone still preoccupied trying to get Natasha to eat the carrots, roast, and whole grain roll in front of her, Clint snuck out the front door of the tower and darted to the very CVS around the corner where things had begun to unwind for Nat.
"2 packs of lights," he told the teenage clerk behind the counter.
"What kind?"
"Whatever is cheapest," he replied, as he couldn't use Tony's money for this particular project. He thrusted a few bills at the clerk in exchange for the boxes of cigarettes and then rounded a corner, entered a public bathroom inside a Target and began burning holes into his abdomen, one for every day that Natasha had to live with the trauma he caused.