Bruce Sees A Therapist (to be changed later)

18| Nightmares Suck

Natasha had a very normal day. She woke up, kissed Bruce, and they went to have breakfast. She watched him train with Aurelia out in the fields, while she read a book on parenting.

That day, Natasha remembered feeling normal, happy, glowing, even. Then she had to run to the bathroom and vomit, which was a thing she was used to.

She washed her face and looked at herself in the mirror, checking and finding a small breakout of red dots on her chin. Nat sighed.

While she waited for Bruce and Aurelia to finish training before dinner, she watched them again, twisting her ring around her finger and occasionally taking it off and flipping it around to wear the stone upside down.

Nat slipped the ring off of her finger and examined it, something she's done for what seemed like the millionth time. She can picture it without opening her eyes, but seeing it brought a warmth to her chest.

It was a lovely ring, made of copper-coloured vibranium and inscribed with the words, '22•12•2016   I adore you'.  There was a single emerald resting at the crown, and in her mind she knew that there was a matching one in red on Bruce's finger.

Natasha glanced out the window again, and suppressed a scream. A beaten and bloody Bruce hung from a rope in front of the window, blue and dead. His neck looked broken. She saw her hands were trembling, but the ring was gone. In her hands was a note in her handwriting, addressed to Bruce:

Bruce. If you're reading this, then I left. I'm sorry. I thought you wouldn't want me to be injured, so I had Rex and Yelena go on a spree to take out all the operatives that were in the woods. I'll be fine. I'll be back soon. I'm sorry, Bruce.  x Natasha

Her eyes widened. She tasted blood in her mouth. She coughed out a scrap of paper, a message in Bruce's slanting script:

You broke your promise. You left me.

The paper was flecked with blood, and Natasha's heart thudded, making her head throb.

She pressed her wrists to her ears, trying to block out the pounding in her skull, like someone had taken a scalpel to her brain and taken something out. After what seemed like days of this agonizing pain, it subsided.

Natasha opened her eyes again, except she was no longer in the house. She was on a cliff.

This scene seemed familiar, as if she'd been here before, though Nat was certain she hasn't. It was snowy and slightly cold, and she had a suit on that seemed like it was new. She peered over the edge and saw herself, spread eagle a hundred feet below. The ground there was smooth, gray bar the blood Nat could see pooling around her cranium.

She saw someone behind her from the corner of her eye and spun around, poised to fight.

A man with a hood and cloak glided towards her, except it wasn't a man, she saw, it was some creature with a red skull as a head.

"Do you see?" The creature asked, eyes laughing at her. "This struggle is fruitless, Liebchen. Just close your eyes and it is all over. Give up. You are nothing. You have no place in the world."

And suddenly Natasha was sixteen again, talking to her teacher, one that broke her over and over again until the pieces that were left were smaller than dust.

But it was never enough.

Natasha looked down and the floor disappeared, making her fall through nothing and into darkness, waiting for the inevitable ground that meant death, but her eyelids went red and when she opened them, she was in a room like Aurelia's.

The young doctor was sitting across her, except she was not young, but she was not old, either. She looked like Melina and Katerina, or Yelena or May. She seemed always shifting, but Natasha was sure it was Aurelia Rex.

"Have you learnt?" Aurelia asked. Her voice echoed and faded, like she had yelled into a canyon. "Do you know what you did wrong?"

Natasha opened her mouth to answer, but she choked on something in her throat. She had a tube down her throat. Why? She blinked and opened her eyes.

She pulled the tube out and coughed, feeling the abscence of it all too well, and looked up at the ceiling, expecting a normal plaster thing instead of the tiles of glass that looked up to a sunset sky.

Where was she?

Nat looked around and down to herself. She was dressed in a simple hospital gown, one that buttoned up the back. She saw a bag on a chair next to her and opened it curiously. Inside were her clothes, a blouse she hasn't seen in two years and jeans she had forgotten she bought.

Natasha locked the door and stripped, noticing bandages on every single limb and one wrapped around her shoulder. She pulled her clothes on quickly, wincing as she felt the jeans tighten around her legs. She hoped that her injuries weren't recent.

Rummaging through the bag to check for more supplies, she found a vest that had so many pockets it had to belong to Yelena, and a couple dozen weapons inside them.

Inside the bag, there was a Glock .22 and a few rounds in a little box underneath the pistol. She looked through the rest of the bag before tossing the jacket and the gun back in and deciding to take the whole thing with her. She found some socks and opened the door to the unknown.

Nat crept out into the silent hallway, looking for cameras that either didn't exist or were very well hidden. She looked at the fire map at the corner and located the stairs before going down them carefully and quietly, pausing at every noise.

She made her way to the entrance, where there was a little shop where she stole some shoes from.

As she left the building, she glanced at the plaque by the door:

THE BANNER-ROSS SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL SOCIETY

Banner-Ross...? Natasha blinked. She didn't recall reading this in Bruce's file. Nor Betty Ross's.

She looked closer.

FOUND 1990, it read in a smaller print.

So it isn't new, but SHIELD didn't know? There was a huge building that broadcasted the name of the organization that occupied it since 1990 and SHIELD didn't notice? Or maybe it just left it off the record.

Her heart thudded painfully. Was Bruce inside? With Ross? She shook her head. Time to move. She had to find some other place, even if this was a friendly-occupied building.

She had to go somewhere she hoped Bruce wasn't, because Nat knew she broke a promise to him, and she simply needed to get away.