𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒅𝒐𝒐𝒓 ✘ 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐅𝐅

{4¹⁴} {INSATIABLE NERVES}

∆ {4¹⁴} {INSATIABLE NERVES} ∆

NATASHA HAD NEVER found herself more determined about a matter in her life. She hadn't been in the main section of the airport when Rhodey had fallen, but she'd emerged a few minutes later to find an ambulance on site, accompanied by several heavily armoured trucks. She had listened to the ambulance wail in the fresh silence, crying for someone. The fact that she didn't know who, made Natasha's heart jump wildly with fear. 

The tarmac, which was hot and cracked underfoot, didn't dare to slow her down as she ran towards where the main group was. To where Tony, Vision and the kid stood. But there was no T'Challa, no Rhodey, no Roxi. Natasha felt her gut wrench massively as she slowed to a walk as surveyed the scene in front of her with eyes as desperate as those that Roxi had been showing only minutes ago.

To her biased, and terrible relief, she found it to be Rhodey who had needed the ambulance, after falling several hundred feet through the air and crashing into the ground so hard that he should've been dead. From what Tony had muttered, there was no way that the man would've survived the fall had it not been for Roxi, who had somehow summoned up a last burst of power and slowed his fall in the final fifty meters or so.

But when Natasha had glanced around once more, desperate to find Roxi,  to reassure her that she'd done enough, to seek out her own comfort in the ice-eyed woman, her distress only grew when the search proved fruitless. Finally, she turned her gaze to Tony, who had been watching her carefully for the past few minutes.

"Tony.." He knew exactly what she was going to ask, she could see it by the way his eyes flashed with guilt, with a certain kind of worry that he only displayed towards one person. But what did that mean? Natasha had an inkling of a feeling, but was trying to push it down as if it would quash the truth too; make it false in place of an alternative.

"They took her, Nat. She knew they were going to. She didn't fight. She was meant to stay in Berlin. They didn't trust her anyway, and now, they'll probably lock her up with the rest of them." Tony's words were not only guilt-stricken, but were laced quite thickly with a form of remorse that Natasha wasn't sure that she'd ever heard from the man before. But she had been right. However much she had tried to dissuade her mind from the conclusions it had jumped to, it didn't matter; because it had been right.

Because Roxi was not willing to stand by and watch her family fight, possibly die while she stayed in one spot because some people didn't trust her, the woman had been branded a criminal. She had been taken with the rest of them, even after saving Rhodey's life. She had been bundled away with the rest of them, as if she had never signed, as if what she had done for the government over so many years held such little value that they were willing to look all of it over, pretend it never happened, because she hadn't obeyed their rules once, in the best interest of 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes'.

Natasha doubted that it was simply because of that. In fact, she was certain that a large amount of it had to do with fear, as it always seemed to. Fear was a powerful motivator, and people had become scared of Agent Ryder. Not of Roxi, because select few knew who she was, really, as a person. But of Agent Ryder, the ice-eyed, professionally mannered woman who had worked at SHIELD for over a decade before earning herself a spot on the Avengers due to her reputation of getting the job done. Then, of course, there had been the complication, and Agent Ryder had become even more dangerous, in ways that even Natasha doubted that she could imagine.

Sometimes she tried to. Wondered to what extent Roxi's powers extended, because if they went far enough, the woman was likely to be far more powerful than even she herself realised. But Roxi didn't need that pressure, not when she was getting so close to control over her powers, thanks to Wanda Maximoff. So Natasha had kept such midnight thoughts to her own mind, where they flourished well enough on her own anyway.