Chapter Text
“Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.”
-C. S. Lewis
It’s an instant decision.
Natasha’s eyes snap open, the world registering.
There is a man, a large, muscular silhouette, straddling her; squeezing the air out of her lungs.
Her hand swipes down off the side of the mattress, feeling for the handgun she keeps half-hidden under the bedskirt. She finds empty space. Natasha continues her arc, hand coming up to the knife wedged between the mattress and box spring, looking for a hilt to grasp, a blade to sink into an ear, under a chin. The knife is also gone.
Natasha focuses back on the man as her lungs begin to scream. His weight is centered firmly over her hips, rendering her legs useless, so she smashes the heel of her palm up under his chin instead.
His neck snaps back, but he stays focused. Natasha opts for a blitz attack; ramming her hands into his face and neck, carving a furrow into his cheek with her nails, just barely missing his eye.
He feels familiar. Natasha doesn’t have the time to want to wonder why.
It works, eventually, and Natasha gets her legs between them. She kicks him off the foot of the bed and he lands with a thud. Not sparing a second, Natasha rolls across and off the bed, landing in crouch. Steve’s shield is where it always is, leaning between his nightstand and the bed. He had been sleeping next to her when she had fallen asleep. He’s gone now.
Natasha rises from her crouch, and closes with the agent.
******
They fight brutal and hard for a handful of long minutes. Natasha hears an alarm start to blare, and has the nagging feeling that the man is familiar. Not his fighting style, not completely; but his shape, his size, his height.
The door blasts open. They disengage as light streams into the bedroom.
Natasha sees the Iron Man suit raise its gauntlets out of the corner of her eye, blue light gleaming from the palms; but Tony doesn’t shoot.
Natasha gets a good look at her attacker.
Her attacker is Steve.
Steve; but not Steve. Steve’s body, his face, but not his expressions. There was something deeply wrong, there, something…evil under his chalcedony blue eyes.
A wry smile blooms across Steve’s face, filling it with a sadism that seeped all thought and impetus from Natasha’s mind.
“…Steve?” Natasha says, voice rough post-asphyxia, and she can feel the confusion that twists her features.
The smile widens, darkens, as new voices and footsteps clamor up the hall behind Tony. Steve seems vaguely, sardonically amused. Natasha’s brows furrow as his eyes flash yellow-green.
What comes next is all a blur of movement.
Steve throws a knife with sudden precision, the same that she keeps hidden under the mattress.
Natasha sees it; feels it bury itself in her abdomen up to the hilt.
She staggers as Steve dives around Tony.
She falls as the shouts and crashes and gunshots from the hall seep into the bedroom’s air.
She closes her eyes as Clint’s voice fills her ears from far, far away.