A/N: I write these when I get into a depressive episode and get triggered, so I am sorry if they come in spurts. This is more of a passion project and it doesn't seem like many people are interested because I only have 1 review haha, it feels a bit like shouting into the void, but sometimes I come back and read it and it makes me feel pretty okay about my writing skills. There are, of course, some errors here and there, but this story has been living in my head for so long that it deserves to be shared, even if it's only for me and my one fan :)
T/W: There is an implication of future underage sex and more explicit discussion of sexual acts in this chapter, as well as some minimal description of torture.
When he returned to the tower, Clint had dozens of neat lines of perfect circles on his abdomen and a pack and a half of cigarettes in his pocket. It stung every time his skin stretched over his muscles as he walked and he sadistically smiled at the pain, certain that it was nothing compared to what Natasha felt.
"Where have you been? She refuses to eat for any of us and says she wants to talk to you first."
"Hey Nat," he says, taking a seat at the table gently next to her. He gingerly holds himself in a way that the burns on his stomach ache but not excruciatingly so. "What's up?"
"You can't let them do this, they're ruining all of my training."
"Nat, we've talked about this," he shifts so that his body is angled toward hers. The food in front of her has gone cold in the time he was gone and looked fairly unappealing, but he knew that she could not afford to lose another pound. "That's not your training. Sparring with me, shooting with Steve, that's training. Not this. This is punishment and it's punishment you don't deserve."
"You don't understand, you weren't supposed to know. You weren't supposed to find out what he did."
"Nat, you didn't tell me, it's not your fault."
"It was my job to protect you and I failed. I don't deserve food. I can't eat this." It broke his heart to hear her say those words and he knew immediately that he needed a new approach for this. They would have to tackle her thoughts about what she deserved later, but for now he planned to use his own harmful logic to help her.
"Okay, but you protected me for how many weeks? That's worth something. How about this, how about you get one bite for every day you protected me?"
"I guess… That makes sense…"
"Do you want me to heat it up for you?"
"No." She slowly reached out, starting with the carrots and taking cautious, small bites. Then, she slowly ate half of the roll and a few bites of meats before pushing the plate away again. "There. I did it. Can I be excused now?"
"It's Monday, let's go to the living room so we can talk." She begrudgingly walked toward the common space, escorted closely by Clint and Steve. Steve gave him a look, behind Natasha's back so that she couldn't see, silently telling him that what she had eaten was not good enough. He knew. But they could only expect so much on the first day, and he was sure that they could use this strategy to continue helping her. He couldn't ignore the stinging on his stomach as Natasha leaned against him on the couch, and he uncomfortably shifted so that her weight was on his shoulder instead. She gave him an odd glance, but settled herself nonetheless.
"Okay, would you like to do something easy or hard today? I know it's been a hard day, but you might want to get the hard stuff out of the way now and save the simpler things…" Steve trailed off.
"Whatever you guys want," she yawned against Clint's shoulder, letting her hair fall in front of her eyes and temporarily hide her from the incredulous stares of her teammates. Tony looked around the circle before broaching what the team found to be the most important subject.
"Viktoriya has been detained in a maximum security facility pending further questioning. We want to know what we're going to hear before the team goes in." He was met with a look of confusion from Natasha. "We want to know exactly what happened in the Red Room. Not questions and answers, because we don't really know what to ask. We want you to tell us what happened, what a typical day was like for you. So that Viktoriya can't surprise us. If it would be easier, we can use augmented reality to go into the memory with-"
"No." She objected immediately, jostling Clint as she sat bolt upright. "I'll just… I'll tell you, but… No. You can't do that to yourselves." The men silently agreed with slight head nods. "When do you want me to start?"
"Let's start with when you were ten," Bruce piped up. "That seems to be when you would have been treated best, when you were the top of… your class."
"You won't like that choice," she sighed, bringing her knees to her chest and letting out a deep breath. "But okay."
— Flashback —
She woke on a bare mattress with no feeling in her hands. Both wrists had been handcuffed above her bed last night because she had devised a way to remove the cuffs when one hand was free and, yesterday, she was beaten for it. Her whole body was sore, but at least they did not have a ballet performance for another two weeks. She was grateful for this, but she also knew that is why she had received the rough punishment that left her back aching and more of her body bruised than not. A room attendant came over to her bed and unlocked the cuffs, handing her a paper with her day's schedule written on it. She rubbed her wrists to regain some blood flow as she looked over the schedule and saw that she was to report to ballet for five hours that morning, followed by the usual Interrogation Training, Combat Drills, and Elimination. In the middle of her schedule, though, around the time most people would expect a lunch break, was a new class called 'Art of Seduction' followed by an unfamiliar word she couldn't quite pronounce, but looked to be Italian - fellatio. It was never a good thing when classes were added to her schedule unexpectedly, and she dreaded the afternoon as she stripped and dressed in her ballet tights, leotards, and pointe shoes. There was no privacy in the barren room where the girls slept, just rows of beds identical to hers, with a single black trunk at the end. The only designation that separated one bed form the next was the Widow Number on the trunk, surrounded by tally marks for their running record of kills. A daily reminder of what she had done, with extra deep marks for the other widows she had eliminated from the program. She knew all of their names and ages by heart, vowing not to forget what she had done to get to where she was.
"Natalia, you are nearly late. Warm up quickly," the ballet instructor chastised her as she ran into the room gracefully. She quickly ran through a number of stretches and technique basics before joining her fellow widows on the floor and running through their choreography perfectly for nearly 4 hours, ending with one hour of pure conditioning. By the end of the class, he feet, abdomen, and back ached for rest, but she instead had to run to change for interrogation and combat. It was difficult to keep track of time in this place, with no sunlight or clocks visible to the girls, but she had guessed that it was about 10 AM, as they were typically woken up around 4:30 AM and ballet had lasted 5 hours. After being nearly late to ballet, she knew that she could not afford to let her thoughts wander like this.
In Interrogation Training, she was in a small room with only one instructor and none of her peers. It was best, she was told, to have no support as interrogation would be done independently in the field. She had never been captured and tortured on any of her assignments, but she assumed that one day someone would outsmart her and it was vital that she understand how to withhold the secrets of the organization. Today was actually not as tortuous as usual, they only used sound and cuts. The man had begun by playing the "good cop," offering her an extra ration if she talked. Then, he moved on to placing headphones on her, with her arms strapped behind her and her eyes covered, and played a tone that made her want to tear her ears off of her head. When she still resisted giving him information, she was strapped to a table and once again given the opportunity to talk. She refused and the man took a sharp knife and slit her side five times. Still, she refused, and again, he moved to make a small stab wound just below her ribs. She never broke and so, was released to her next scheduled training.
Since her shirt had been cut to shreds, she was allowed to run to the sleeping quarters and get a new one before attending her new class. She was greeted by the unusual sight of desks in rows with pads of paper and pencils placed at each desk.
"Happy birthday, Natalia," the male instructor greeted her. "You are ten years old today, so you will add a new dimension to your training that will assist you greatly. Class, please welcome Widow 1136. She has the most kills of anyone in program history."
"Welcome," the other girls greeted. There were only nine of them total, one from each class above her plus her. She had assumed that all of the girls in the 19 class had been sent on more long-term assignments and they were generally kept separate form the younger girls. Natalia took a seat in the front row of three, in the center seat of three and almost felt like a normal school girl for once. Until the instructor began lecturing and the girls around her began furiously scribbling in the notepads with words unfamiliar to her like cleavage, penis, and sex. The man briefly stopped the course of his normal lecture to ask one of the other widows to explain what sex was to her and the widow next to her explained the process, which utterly repulsed Natalia. Their body's were weapons, why was she expected to sully her weapon with such acts?
"As I was saying," he continued. "Sex will be one of the most powerful tools you can use to extract the information we need from your marks. You are no longer meant to simply kill them and gain whatever information you can from their surroundings, but now to get information directly from the source."
Whatever confusion she left that class with about her new role was quickly resolved by fellatio class. She learned how to expertly pleasure a man with her hands and mouth, first on an item called a "dildo," then on her instructor's penis. He was more violent than the controlled experience of the dildo, where she set the pace and slowly tried different techniques with the odd plastic in her mouth. When her instructor took her mouth, he was rough and pulled her hair, choking her on his penis, and spewing a warm, white liquid all over face at the end.
"Next time, you swallow." He slapped her hard across the face and turned her around to the rest of the class, white liquid still plastered on her face. The older widows laughed at her mistake and made fun of her inability to please a man, claiming that she must not truly be the top of her class and that she would never make it.
She carried that anger into elimination and, with her face still sticky, she broke the neck of her opponent in the first few minutes of the elimination round, not even bothering to see which peer she had killed. That night, she carved one deep line into her trunk and then followed the room attendant with the trunk to a private room, where she was told she would sleep from now on. The new room contained only one bed, her trunk, and allowed her the luxury of her own shower. The water was cold and she could barely stand for more than a few minutes, but she got to rinse the sticky substance off her face and wring the blood out of her hair. As she tried to sleep that night, she quickly realized why her interrogation was so tame earlier that day - she was being given sleep deprivation interrogation in her own room, with loud music piped in through hidden speakers and bright lights that she could not turn off. She laid in bed staring at the ceiling for several hours before her instructor from Fellatio came to her room and pulled his pants down in front of her. His soft penis was hanging limp, not fully hard and pointed toward her as it had been earlier.
"Time to learn how to swallow."