Work Text:
Natasha sits alone, in a beautiful garden, desperately trying to convince herself that she is not covered in blood.
She'd been eating lunch, recently purchased from the market in town. Hard cheese, cured meat, and peaches so ripe she was unsure how to slice them. She'd saved the peaches for dessert, and now she has bitten into one, messily, and the juice is dripping down the side of her chin in a way far too reminiscent of how the blood of a particularly unpleasant new transfer to her division had felt on her face after he took a bullet for her and proceeded to bleed out in a church's parking lot. (Idiot.) It has been ten weeks since this incident, and she remembers the new transfer's callsign, but not his name.
However, right now, Natasha must have priorities other than the names of dead trainees. She pulls herself roughly out of the memory and catalogs the senses available to her, as she was taught to do. Her memory tells her she is in a SHIELD safehouse, a vacation home in southern France. Her sight confirms this, and adds that the padlocked courtyard gates have very little secure footing, but the garden trellises would be easy to scale quickly. According to temperature sense and proprioception, she is upright in a wrought iron chair. She tastes peach juice and smells the clean air of a cold afternoon. The only outlier is touch, which is dead certain that the liquid on her skin is blood.
The texture of peach juice is nothing like blood. It is too thin, and it dries tacky and smooth with none of the crumbling brown grit. Somehow Natasha does not find this comforting. She concedes defeat, writes off her sense of touch entirely for the rest of the day, and leaves to wash her face.
The real trouble with being a well-trained agent, she thinks, is that she can never permit herself to live in any moment but the present.
There is no force of habit to shorten the walk to the safehouse's bathroom; no temporal distance to keep the memories from clinging to her skin like sweat-soaked Lycra. Every step is mechanical. Every step feels like every other step she has ever taken has felt: like the air is fighting her the whole way. In the back of her head a mission incident report (subtype: psychiatric, self-reported, form 19-603-P) is drafting itself, in unforgiving language.
She leans over the dusty bathroom sink to wipe droplets of peach juice from her chin. Her hands come away from her face without a single drop of red.