Here you go lovelies!
Maybe death
and failure
aren't so bad
when we
are faced
with
living nightmares
As Natasha was marched through the compound, she noticed that it was eerily quiet. The last time she was here the screams of the prisoners echoed continuously throughout the passageways. But now, the only sound was the clunk of the agents' boots and their heavy breathing. They passed by a room flickering with light. The door was closed, but Natasha swore she could hear sobbing. "How many prisoners are in here?" She spoke vehemently, and for this her head was smashed against the wall. "No questions." Rumbled the guard who had his hands wrapped in her hair. She gritted her teeth as a trickle of blood made its way down her face from the crown of her head. The walk seemed to lag on for a century, and her head was throbbing by the time she was tossed into a cell. The door was slammed shut, making the the pain in her skull intensify tenfold. The cell, if that's what it could be called, was no larger than a small refrigerator box. Maybe five feet tall, three feet wide, and two feet deep, Natasha was in a state of discomfort. She had faced worse though, and at least it looked mildly clean, only a few spatterings of fresh blood here and there, and the darker red stains seemed old. The cell walls were made of rusty bars that made her feel like a wild animal trapped in a cage. Guards stood shoulder to shoulder around it's perimeter, turned towards her, watchful of her every move. She couldn't sit. Couldn't move. She could could only shift slightly from foot to foot. It was uncomfortable, but something she could deal with. It told her that they were planning to phsycologically torture her, which was somewhat of a relief to her. Physical torture was tedious. She spent the rest of the night dosing in the corner. She warpped her arms around herself defensively, as if she could protect herself from the leers of the guards, who looked at her as if they were savage dogs, and she was a piece of meat. Natasha arched her back against the rusty, almost chalky, feeling bars and felt their coolness seep into her bones. Occasionaly, one of the guards would yell, roar, and bang loudly on her cell and Natasha would wake with a start. The other guards would laugh, and she would try her best not to groan. These rude interuptions became more and more frequent as the night wore on, and she soon she spent the majority of her time waking up instead of sleeping.
With the dawn came the torture. She was fetched from her cell by a man with a diamond earring, a greasy ponytail, and rotting teeth. He immidiantly put a gun to her back and she froze. But it wansn't because of the threat the gun posed. It was because she recognized it. The sleekness of the model, the weight of it against her back. It was unmistakably her gun. The man laughed and chills went down her spine. "You noticed. Mr. Razin said you would" the man spoke proudly, as if he had been the one to think up of such an idea. She shrugged, which earned her a blow to the left side of her head. "You will learn to respect us, Natasha," the guard who had hit her smiled mockingly. The corridor they had been walking along twisted sharply, and the walls changed from a dirty bown brick to pristine snow color. An uneasy feeling began to spread throughout Natasha's body...something primal was telling her to run, and run fast. It took a copius amount of energy that she didn't have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The guards looked at each other and became more and more restless. Four of the seven guards eventually stepped back and looked uneasily towards their leader. "You'll join her if you don't get back up here" he barked, raising the gun he held and turned it on them. After one last glance at one another, the men resumed their posts around her. The familiar touch of the gun returned to the small of Natasha's back and the man roughly prodded her forward. They reached a small cube of a room, where Natasha was forced into a blindingly white jumpsuit. The material was crude and rough, it was more like wearing a potato sack than anything else. It covered every single inch of her body, it fitted over her shoes, gloves attached to the sleeves and went over her fingers, and a hood was strapped over her crimson hair. The uneasy feeling increased. The white was unnerving, as if every color in the world had evaporated. When they emerged from the room, the whitewashing continued. The walls, ceiling tiles, floor, lights, and even the grout in between the tiles was a brilliant shade of white. The guards themselves had put on masks and body suits, completeting the white wash. It was a desperate attempt to wear Natasha down mentally, yes, it would eventually drive her mad, but not before she...or someone else, figured out a way to get her out. How long Razin would keep her trapped behind the snowy white walls was unaswerable. They entered the final room, the room where she would be kept locked up, and her hands were chained together. The chain wrapped around her wrists several times, and short, sharp, needles embbedded themseleves through her gloves and into her hands. The chain itself was, of course, white, and attached to a loop on the wall, allowing her to move a few feet either way. The guards left her in the white silence, looking undone themselves. Her head throbbed, her stomach lurched, and the floor spun below her. The once proud Romanova had been reduced to a shadow of her former self by the color white. She leaned against the wall to her back and closed her eyes. She slid silently down to floor and rested her head on her knees. She attempted to recall certain colors, a game that would become one of her favorites in her time during the whitewashing. The color of her hair, dark blood red. The color of the grass in her hometown of Stalingrad, a lush emerald green. The color of the city at night, shimmering and irredescent. Her thoughts drifted from colors to memrories from when she worked for the KGB. They had sent her out on countless interrogation missions that ressembled torture rather than finding out information. She had spent a considerable amount of time at this compund in fact.
She was young, maybe seventeen or eighteen, young and naiive. She thought she was working for the good guys, the people who had helped achiveve greatness and peace, saved her from a fate worse than death. Looking back, death didn't look too bad. It was one of her firt solo missions: observe, interrogate, and torture the prisonors in a fortress just outside of Moscow. An assistant woke her up on the desginated day amd dressed her in a baggy gray sweatshirt, a black tee shirt, and dark jeans, the woman allowed her to wear her standard black boots. The assistant then led her down through the front lobby, out through the doors, and to a military convoy. She was hauled up roughly by a stoic-looking soldier into the back of one and the convoy left headquarters. They drove on the back roads, and everytime they passed a house, the children in the front yard would sprint back into their homes, their eyes wide with fear. It was a long drive, the road unpaved and bumpy. She spent the trip in silence, the young men before her no older than herself, already damaged by the hardships of war. She watched them as they watched her, their thoughts the same: we are too young. The convoy stopped in front of a 25 foot high metal fence, every inch bristling with barbed wire. The men with Natasha tensed, jaws set, eyes wide. A guard emerged through the gate and strutted towards her, motioning for her to join him. She jumped down and the men behind her began to follow suit, until the guard scowled and shook his head "Only the girl goes past these gates. Go back now, and tell Ivan we will return her when she is done." A young soldier with an innocent face stood and peered at the guard. "Our orders are to accompany Miss Romanova at all times and return when she returns." The guard glared at the boy, and in one swift motion slid his pistol from its holster and pulled the trigger. The soldier stiffened, then collapsed forward onto the dusty dirt ground. A perfectly round bullet hole in the center of his forehead, and a single trickle of blood ran down his face. Natasha barely flinched, and looked back to see the body. The soldier looked almost as if he was asleep, aside from the fact that there was a hole in his head where a hole should not be. Innocent. "I don't give orders twice. Romanova, follow me, please." The first few weeks of her observation passed quickly, uneventfully. Prisoners cried, screamed, and begged to be let go. Tedious. During the fifth week, she was ordered to select a random prisoner, and whitewash them. She paced in front of the tiny cells for hours before selecting a middle-aged woman with matted black and white hair. She had cold, calculating gray eyes. "That one" she pointed to the woman, and the guard unlocked the door and it swung open. The woman's wrists were bound in white chains, and she was proded in the back and the procession started forward. Gaurds surrounded the woman on all sides while Natasha followed at the rear, taking notes. The woman was secured in the white room, the door slid shut. After several minutes the symptoms started. Twitching, pacing, discomfort. She lasted three hours before the screaming started. The guards looked away, uncomfortable. Natasha stood with her back completely straight, her arms folded, and she stared at the woman intently through the one way glass. Another hour passed. And then she cracked. It started with the prisoner biting her lip. And then she was knawing at it. She spat at the pristine white floor, splattering it with crimson blood. She smiled, cackled, and continued to chew on her lip, spitting over and over again. The guards were reluctant to stop her, in fact, they seemed to enjoy it more than the screaming. The woman was now able to tear larger chunks of her lips off. She whirled around and around, laughing, and the she stopped suddenly and looked at Natasha through the glass. Where the woman's bottom lip had been was now a patch of ragged, bloody, jagged patch of skin. Bits of teeth showed through, and she smiled. She grinned. And laughed. And then something behind her eyes snapped. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes. The guards grimaced, the enjoyment dissapting from their eyes. "It's a horrible way to die, Miss Romanova. Go back to the city. And don't come back here ever again" an older looking guard ordered. Natasha nodded her head and walked down the empty corridor. She discarded the white jumpsuit, flipped through her notes one last time, tossed her ID card to the security guard at the front door. Her boots made a soft thudding sound on the gravel and she half-walked half-jogged to the main entrance gate, where she could see that a line of military vehicles were already lined up, ready to take her away, back to KGB headquarters in the city. And she vowed, something she had always found silly and childish, that she would never return.
Natasha raised her head from her knees and rubbed her eyes. How long had she been in this room? A few minutes? An hour? A white bowl of white rice was pushed into the room through a flap in the door, far enough into the room for her lick up the grains with her tongue, as her hands were incapcitated for the time being. Come on Barton. She inwardly groaned. She kicked the bowl away and settled back against the wall. The color of the old books in libraries, faint, dusty, pastel. The colors of the Medditteranean Sea, crystal clear turqoise. The color of the sky during a storm, swirls of purple and black, with glimpses of yellow lightning.
People started to actively avoid Barton now, they scurried silently down hallways, avoiding his piercing gaze. He walked with a purpose now, whereas before he had ambled about aimlessly. He waited in the lobby of SHIELD headquarters for the better part of an hour, pretending to retread the email Natasha had sent him. Close to midnight, he heard the elevator door open, then close, and then he heard the thud of boots on the marble tile. Fury nodded to him tiredly, and Clint nodded back, still acting as if he was remotely interested In the email. The front doors swished shut behind Fury, and all was quiet again. Barton sat, pausing for only a second to make sure he was truly gone before leaping up an sprinting to the elevator. He sprinted out the second the doors dinged open, and towards could ins office. He stopped at the door, knocked, and waited impatiently. Coulson's reply came a few moments later, "Come in." Coulson sat behind his desk, his head in his hands, and hundreds of papers in front of him. "What do you want Barton?" He continued to read the latest report, by looking up from the paper. "I dunno. I haven't been able to find anything else about Agent Romanoff's location." Coulson sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. He rifled through a stack of papers on his desk and handed them to Barton. "Bring those to Fury's office. I'll see what I can do about finding more information. The key is on the back of the door." Barton took the papers, snatched the key card off the doorknob and took off down the hallway. His plan was going perfectly. He slid the key card through the scanner and the door popped open. He walked in, nodded at the security camera in the corner, set the files on the desk, and began searching. He expertly picked the lock on the filing cabinets and flipped through dozens of files before he found the one he was looking for. Coulson was fast asleep on the beat up couch in the corner of his office. Barton slipped in silently, left the key on the desk and took the elevator down to the cafeteria. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and sat down at a table tucked away in a corner. After doing some more highly illegal snooping, he discovered the notes Natasha had handed over when she met with Fury for the first time. Among these he found extensive notes on the prison where Natasha's coordinates had come from. He had nicknamed the prison "The Dirge" after how Natasha had written in her notes that "the hills are alive with people screaming." So Natasha hadn't left him with useless knowledge about where she was after all. He took a sip of the coffee and grimaced when he realized that it was cold and bitter. He tossed the cup in the trash, picked up the file and headed back to his room. He had five days to memorize the information. She could last five days...right?
The whitewashing continued for three days. Natasha was curled in the corner when a guard unlocked the door and yanked her to her feet. She was dragged back to her refridgerator-sized cell. "Get ready Romanoff. That was just the beggining, the real torture begins soon."
Hope you liked it! The next few chapters should be relatively short, so I'll have them up much sooner. Please review, it gives me warm fuzzies and helps me write so much faster.