It had taken less than an hour to comb through the letters from Natasha's box. Not a lot of people felt so strongly about the woman that they would go through the effort to send hate mail.
They'd matched the handwriting on three of the letters.
The rest had been a whole lot of men angry that a woman could kick their asses, or were crude remarks about her figure and/or ability to do a 'mans' job.
Empty threats sent by insecure men in basements.
The other three had been different.
The handwriting had been decidedly female compared to the other letters, and the words had flowed in half-finished sentences that sometimes didn't make a whole lot of sense.
The gist of it was basically one large rambling warning for Natasha.
That she would 'get what was coming to her' and that she would 'pay for what she had done'.
Steve and Bucky exchanged glances before nodding and sealing the three letters in clear plastic bags, standing up to either deliver the letters to Tony in the lab or to talk to Shield.
They didn't have much to go on.
The woman had left no name and the paper was just plain and pulled from a generic notebook.
Not that they'd been expecting something as useful as hotel stationary but something would have been nice.
But after a brief call to Shield, Maria assured Steve that they could scan the handwriting in and see if it matched anything on their databases and if not, they could extend their search to other agencies.
Steve made sure Tony knew to send the photos to Hill ASAP and headed down to the med room to sit and begin their wait.
…
Almost ten hours passed before they had any news.
Natasha wasn't getting better per se but Bruce assured them that the fact she wasn't getting worse was somewhat of a good sign.
The Shield team had finally gotten a hit on the handwriting; it hadn't come from their files but they'd also sent out copies to multiple business' and establishments until they'd found something.
The writing matched case notes at a doctors' office downtown, belonging to one Rosa Swan MD.
They'd sent a team and had brought her into Shield immediately.
It hadn't been hard to get a confession out of the woman; she had been sure that Natasha would already be dead and that she had done what she had set out to do.
In fact, she was practically gloating in the faces of the agents Shield sent in; Maria Hill had insisted it be her a long with two much bigger agents should the woman see fit to try and escape (not that Hill couldn't have taken her, but back up was always a good call).
She didn't try to escape and seemed relatively calm about the whole thing considering she'd not thought she would get caught.
The woman had never actually even seen Natasha in person but held her responsible for the death of her husband.
He'd died during a battle The Avengers and Shield had had months previous.
He'd been a police officer and had helped clear the streets during the start of the fight, but along the way had gotten caught up in the whole mess.
When she'd searched for information about his death, the only details not redacted were the location of where he had been found and the person he had last been seen with; Agent Natasha Romanoff of SHIELD.
Instead of grieving, she had devised a plan that would draw out Natasha's pain to match her own.
First the two letters, spread months apart, made to rattler her.
To get Natasha to look over her shoulder and be fearful of what was to come.
To scare the woman, to make her suffer.
To make her scared for her life.
Next, the letter sent to kill; received only a week earlier and that unfolded to reveal a lethal amount of anthrax.
Inhaled or spread now across a single a page, a half empty box and a small chunk of floor where Natasha had stood to open the letter.
Sent far from home, supposed to be untraceable.
She had been shocked when the Shield swat team had crashed into her office.
She thought she'd been smarter but Shield and The Avengers had been smarter still.
She was being held indefinitely at a Shield facility where she would face charges or would rather just…disappear should Natasha not survive.
Clint had taken the news with mixed emotions; anger, sorrow, more anger, confusion, helplessness, relief at having found the woman who tried to murder his girlfriend.
The archer recognised the womans' husband as he scanned through the un-redacted file.
It stated that Agent Romanoff had risked her own life to save his; had fought valiantly to try and keep him alive but that he had died of his wounds before Natasha had had a chance to try and call for help.
A couple of black boxes covering text had been the difference between life and near death.
….
A week passed and Natasha had made no signs of waking up.
But her vitals grew stronger every day and the organs that had begun to fail seemed to be improving a little too.
She was still nowhere near well but the chest drain had been able to come out into the third day and the brain shunt carefully removed into the fifth as the swelling began to subside and the fluid stopped collecting.
The anti-toxin and antibiotics still filtered into her body every hour on the hour, as well as nutrients and glucose to give her body what it needed until she would wake.
And she would wake, Bruce had grown certain of that during the first day and knew it now even more.
But that didn't mean the wait wasn't agonising and still terrifying to the team.
The members crowded the hospital room daily and Natasha was never left on her own.
They had conversations, talked to Natasha instead of at her, played her favourite music.
Clint slept carefully curled in a camp bed that had been set up next to Natasha's, hand in hand until he woke in the morning.
He ran his fingers gently through the red hair that remained; some had been shaved to make way for the shunt.
He wiped down her face, arms and legs with a wet cloth every morning and night.
The others were also a near constant in the room, for which Clint was grateful.
Being left alone with his thoughts had never served him well.
Soon Natasha's fever had abated some and whilst still a little high, was nowhere near life threatening anymore.
She still couldn't breathe on her own but Bruce was confident that when she woke up, she would be able to have it removed.
Things were looking up, but still she slept.
It was understandable; she had almost died numerous times and her body needed to conserve all its energy into healing itself.
A week turned into ten days and things were brighter still.
Her temperature back to normal levels, the anti-toxins being weaned down until she didn't need that either.
On the eleventh day, Natasha opened her eyes.
And finally it was like the team could breathe again.