The next few days passed without incident from Natasha, though she had made minimal progress with eating and grew even more anxious by the moment. Her teammates had tried to be helpful and offer half-hearted suggestions like snapping her wrist with a rubber band or holding an ice cube tightly every time she wanted to harm herself, but she had been conditioned to withstand much more painful encounters and the temporary solutions did nothing to abate her rising anxiety and urge to cut. Nothing replaced the feeling of a blade against her skin and, worse still, she could feel herself gaining weight by the second. Every morsel of food they forced her to eat felt sticky against the inside of her stomach and sloshed as she walked, disgusted with what her body was becoming. In reality, she had only gained three pounds and Bruce was disappointed with the speed of her progress. He has expected that by cutting exercise completely, she would gain weight more quickly, but had failed to account for the simple fact that she barely ate a few hundred calories a day and even that was a constant battle. Considering her Basal Metabolic Rate, she should still be losing weight. It made no sense other than her body being pushed into starvation mode and hanging onto everything she ate.

By Friday, they had to discuss giving her an NG tube if she continued to refuse to eat an appropriate amount of food. It would be difficult to explain if Maria or Nick stopped by unexpectedly and they knew she would resist, but the field had been quiet for too long and they knew a mission would come soon. They simply could not afford for her to make such slow progress with the possibility of a mission looming. So when they sat her down for discussion on Friday, they had to make another ultimatum: either SHIELD is notified of her condition or she eats at least 2,000 calories a day.

"Even if you laid in bed and did literally nothing all day, at your height and weight, your body still burns about 1,200 calories. To gain two pounds a week, you need to eat 7,000 calories a week on TOP of that 1,200 a day. You should be eating 2,200 to make the progress we need to see."

"Absolutely not. I can't eat that much, I've never eaten that much."

"Your other option," Bruce continued "is to have us insert an NG tube which goes from your nose to your stomach and feeds you. But if Maria or Nick stops by or we have to go on a mission, it will be extremely uncomfortable to remove it and re-insert it at that frequency, so SHIELD would need to be notified."

"This can't seriously be happening." She nearly shouted. "First, you take away the only thing that makes the nightmares go away. Now you want to ruin my training all together? Are you serious? You can't be serious."

"You cannot go on missions if you keep losing weight." Steve says it in a tone that leaves no room for discussion.

"Steve," she pleads. "Please, I gave you the blade. Please don't take this too."

"No, Nat."

"What else do you want to torture me with this evening?"

"Wow, and they say I'm the dramatic one," Stark carried a glass of whiskey as he sat on the couch next to her, with Clint on her other side.

"Nothing, I think that's enough to deal with today." For this, she was grateful. The others were quick to suggest movies they could watch and they eventually agreed on The Great Gatsby and ordering a pizza for dinner. She had been so caught up in the plot and analyzing F. Scott Fitzgerald's idea of the American Dream that she didn't realize as she ate two entire pieces of cheese pizza and a breadstick until the end of the movie, nearly an hour later when Clint squeezed her shoulder and told her how proud he was.

"What do you me-" she looked down at her plate and the panic began to rise in her stomach. She ran to the bathroom, quickly followed by all four boys, one of whom stuck a foot in the door frame to stop her from closing it. She fell to her knees anyway and began to put a finger down her throat, but her hand was caught by Dr. Banner.

"Stop! Let go!"

"No, Nat. You can't do that."

"I can't let it sit there," she cried, tears beginning to fall freely down her cheeks. She wriggled against his grasp and managed to kick him out from behind her, combat-style. He was soon replaced by the much larger and stronger Thor. "Please, let me go, I have to do this, please!" She cried and kept struggling against his strong embrace.

"Lady Natasha, please stop. Just breathe."

"I can't, I can't breathe. I can't. I need… I need, please. Clint, please," she made eye contact with him. Seeing his expression unchanging, she changed her approach. "Clint, you owe me this. After what you did, please. You did this to me and I have to get it out. Make him let me go." His face fell instantly and the other Avengers turned their heads in shock to look at him as he ran away swiftly. Thor's grip loosened ever so slightly, but he regained control mere milliseconds later as he realized what she was doing. She struggled for at least fifteen more minutes before going limp in his arms and crying onto his shoulder. She was no longer yelling, but pleading quietly with them to let her empty her stomach. Most of them had never seen her beg before, so the sight was quite stunning in all of the worst ways. Their hearts broke for her, but their resolve remained. Thor stroked her hair comfortingly and carried her up to his room to calm down.

"I better go check on…" Steve trailed off, still somewhat stunned by the scene that had unfolded.

"Yeah, yeah. I'll just clean up the living room. Let me know how he is, please."

As Steve emerged on Clint's floor, he heard nothing. He almost turned around, thinking that the archer may have gone to the range to free his emotions, but then he heard the unmistakable click of a lighter. After so many years in the army where many of his peers found their only solace in lighting up cigarettes and hoping to speed up their own deaths, he knew what one sounded like from a mile away. He rounded the corner to enter his room and saw Clint, shirt discarded, standing in front of the full length mirror in the corner of his room pressing a cigarette to his bare abdomen.

"Clint!" He was so startled that he dropped the cigarette on the floor, then quickly picked it up and extinguished it on the plate beneath the mirror. He crossed with arms across his stomach, hugging his sides and refusing to turn around.

"This isn't what it looks like," he begins.

"Really? Because it looks like you're burning yourself with cigarettes, but I'd be happy to hear what other explanation you can possibly come up with."

"Um," he pauses, trying to spin a convincing lie. He glances around the room looking for a shirt to throw on and cover himself, eventually finding a purple one on the opposite side of the bed. "Okay, so it is what it looks like. But it's not… It's not like hers. Just one a day, that's all. Just one. For what I did to her. One for every day. It's less than what I deserve."

"No, Clint." He sighs. "Is self-harm what Natasha deserves?"

"That's differe-"

"No. It's really not."

"She didn't do what she thinks she did. I did."

"Clint, as much as we hate to admit it, she has done bad things. She has killed people."

"But she was under the Red Room's control."

"And you were under Loki's."

"Listen, just. You can't tell her about this. Or anyone. Please, Steve. We have to focus on her, she deserves our help first. Or your help. I'm sure she probably doesn't want mine after what she said tonight."

"I won't tell her, because she has enough on her plate. But Clint, she didn't mean that. She wanted to hurt you so that we would let her hurt herself. She wants us to believe that she is what she believes. She wants us to think she's bad and deserves punishment, that we should allow her to do this to herself because she deserves it."

"But she doesn't."

"And neither do you." Clint is silent for a few moments so he continues. "But you have to tell the others."