AN I do not own Avengers!
Natasha didn't like Coulson. He had a wide, no-nonsense face that she could appreciate but he had soft eyes that screamed weakness. His eyes were dark but they weren't cruel--and that wasn't the kind of leadership she answered to. His calm, logical reasoning and way of talking to her made her uneasy and it made her even more so that she couldn't figure out why. He spoke to her softly in Russian at first, fluent but with an accent, and attempted to calm her.You're safe here. We won't hurt you here.But that was bullshit and they both knew it. They would slit her throat the second she wasn't useful to them.
"Miss Romanoff," he began, yet again in Russian. "I know that you're scared.The Red Room can't reach you here. We can protect you here." The Red Room couldn't reach her here? She'd never heard a stupider thing in her life. The Red Room could get to her anywhere, anytime, for any reason and she could never hide from them. They knew she was here right now. They were probably watching the feeds from the cameras. If she talked, she'd be extracted and face hell.
"I can tell that you aren't feeling talkative. The doctors recommend rest and I will be sedating you for it. Good night, Miss Romanoff." The pump next to her head whirred and she watched the liquid slip down the tubing to her IV with resigned disinterest. This man liked to drug her when she didn't cooperate, though she wasn't sure why. What did drugging her get? It wasn't painful or torturous. Though, maybe they knew she was agitated by not being able to control her own consciousness. Maybe it was some new form of sensory deprivation and they thought that soon enough she'd say anything to stay conscious. Little did they know.
Tabuny, Russia 2006
She sat still. That was the only word to describe what she was currently doing with her body. Still. She didn't breathe more than a shallow whisper of air at a time. Her back was straight--so straight it might have actually been inverted--and her stomach was tight in little knots of anxiety. They could come in at moment. She tried not to be on edge, she didn't want to jump when they did come, but it was hard not to strain with every one of her senses for any sign of them.
The tiny click of a handle was the warning she needed.
A short, stout man shuffled into the room with a small box in his left hand. She could guess by the shape that waterboarding likely wasn't the training topic of the day but it could have been tools for nearly anything else. He set it lightly on gouged wooden table in front of her, not giving away the weight. With one hand he gestured towards her in a stay motion. Though, she wasn't sure why because she wasn't allowed to move until given permission anyways. With the other hand, he lifted out a small box of syringes.
"What is your name?" She stared at him, eyes unwavering from his forehead. That was a trick she'd learned with the other girls--to stare at their foreheads until they were so fed up and self conscious of something there that they had to check--and she liked to try it on the lower ranked men of the Red Room. He appeared impervious.
"I will not ask again, what is your name?" She stayed silent. "Very well. Soon you will scream and tell me anything just to remain conscious." Without another word of warning, he inserted the syringe into her vein--she didn't flinch, to flinch was to be weak--and she was pleasantly surprised when it didn't burn. However, the sadistic grin he gave her made her uneasy.
"Wonderful. We'll begin with 25mL of synthesized mescaline." He spoke more as if he was making notes to himself rather than to her, so she stopped maintaining eye contact and started at the wall in front of her. Slowly, the edges of the door began to blur and sharpen unpredictably. Watching it, the rectangular shape began to waver and shift into a sharp, tooth-like triangle jutting out at her, just hoping to catch her ankles. She didn't move.
"Thirty minute interval. Subject appears to feel minor effects." There was a beat of silence when she felt him step closer to her, too afraid to turn and look or break her gaze from the door. The longer she watched, the more the edge of the wooden table began to glow a brighter brown--then an orange, then a yellow--until it was a brilliant, blinding white. It angled towards her, the points always towards her. Was this what it felt to be drugged?
"What is your name?" No, she shouldn't talk--wait, nocouldn'tshe couldn't talk. Couldn't tell him anything. She stayed quiet, half because she tried to and half because her mind was still spinning over shouldn't or couldn't.
"Very well." She felt a slight pinch again in her arm but didn't have to guess what it was. With more of the drug, the light began to dance and morph like fire dripping down from the ceiling towards her feet. The wisps turned to spikes, slamming down into the floor and into her feet, though she didn't feel any pain. How could something stab into her so hard and not hurt?
The man walked into her view but it was wrong. He was suddenly full of flat surfaces and cube-like geometric shapes. His legs were triangles, balancing on tiny points. And his head was misshapen and exaggerated--a face scratched out of wax. His lips and eyes just holes where there should have been expression. The color was a horrible burnt mustard color--a face raked together out of someone's ear wax. The smell made her nauseous.
She had seen something like this before--while on assignment in a small part of France--a cubist painting, in a museum. Except this one contorted and stretched in impossible ways, reaching out for her and scaling the height of the ceiling. She blinked frantically, trying to get the distorted image out of her mind, but the blinking only made it worse. Her eyes fixed on her own feet, trying for anything that wouldn't twist and stretch unpredictably.
But her bare feet were just pale rectangles jutting up from the floor. She tried to move one--not caring anymore that she was supposed to stay still--but to her shock it dislodged and began to roll in place. Soon the entire cement floor was broken into jagged chunks that rolled and swelled like waves, carrying her foot along with it. A sea of sharp, swirling points like some death machine from a YA novel--just terrifying enough to leave her unsettled, but not realistic enough to be reality.
"What is your name?" That voice again, except this time it came from a jumbled up stack of shapes in the corner. As the silence built, they stretched, reaching for her.
"I said, what's your name?" The hands gripped her wrists but instead of dragging or hurting her, her hands released with a wetpop!and slid into the raging sea below her. "Very well." He administered a third dose.
That was when she appeared. She was small, slightly broken up but nothing compared to the man she assumed was in the corner. The little girl, maybe two or three and barely up to the height of her chair, approached with a slow, rhythmic one-two step. She was dragging a stuffed animal behind her.
"Who are you?" Natasha whispered, hoping for an explanation. The girl didn't look up. As she walked, the stuffed animal came into view--a white teddy bear. But with horror, she realized the bear's head had been torn off and blood was spilling onto the floor, dripping down against the white fur. What kind of monster tore apart a girl's teddy bear?
"What do you want?" She tried to sound calm but the little girl was just a foot away from her and had stopped suddenly. Her hair covered her face but her eyes shone up through it: bright and innocent at first but a cloudy, milky white underneath. Completely white, without a pupil or an iris. Inhumanely white.
"What are you? What do you want?" The girl stared at her but Natasha had assumed she was too young to speak. She chewed her tiny lower lip at Natasha and swallowed a chunk that broke off. Natasha wanted to puke.
"Romanoff." She jumped, shocked at the voice from the child. It was mature and clear--not a child's--but it wasmale. A deep, gruff, grating sound against her temples that chilled her blood in her veins.
"Romanoff," the girl barked at her, as if it wasn't disconcerting enough already. "You've failed us."
You've failed us.
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