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The room she is in is not clinical in the way one might expect. The Red Room does not operate out of hospitals. It operates out of large empty houses, closed down schools. It is all wood and dust, there is no stark and clinical white.
The air still smells like antiseptic and beneath that, like bile and blood. It is cold, too. That isn't special. The Red Room is always cold. Natasha stares forward at the wall, with its faded paper that used to be floral. It was probably a pretty house, once.
The thick leather straps around her wrists are tight and make her hands tingle slightly from the loss of circulation. There is a needle in her arm. There is a man in a white coat fitting the needle to an IV to a bag of fluid that she knows is somewhere behind her head, but she cannot turn to see it. There are straps around her biceps, and her chest, her ankles and her forehead, too. Immobilising her completely.
She does not know why it is taking so long. In her periphery, even as her eyes are fixed blankly ahead on the wallpaper peeling away where wall meets ceiling, she can see that there is nothing yet affixed to the needle in her arm.
Her skin is prickling with goosebumps. In the cold room, she is clad only in a black leotard, and the chair she is bound to is almost all metal. It leaches any warmth from her skin, leaving her little more than cool marble. Like this, she can almost convince herself that she is nothing more than that.
Natasha does not get frightened. She does not cry for her mother at night, her hands do not shake when Madame B passes behind. She does not flinch when she is staring down the barrel of a gun. This is because she is a Widow, and she is one of the best.
It is only here that she almost forgets that. It is only here, in a chair that holds her at an angle that means the only thing she can really see is the ceiling and the top of the wall, that her breath is shaky instead of stable. It is only here, tied and bound, that her pulse pounds jackrabbit-fast against the thick leather squeezing her wrist.
There is a hole in the ceiling where a chandelier used to hang. There is a needle in her arm and it is moving slightly inside her flesh as it is affixed to a tube, which is attached to a bag, which is full of something.
Natasha is the best. She can dance and shoot and kill. There is still nothing she can do to fight poisons in her veins.
(Tatyana, four days ago, had been taken to the room with the chair and never returned. Tatyana had been good. It had not kept her alive.)
There is a needle in the crook of her elbow and she can feel as it drains fluid into her veins. Her chest moves too-quickly, each breath shallow due to the tight binding that keeps her back against the chair. She stares at the hole where a chandelier used to hang and lets her errant emotions and anxieties curl up in the place where her heart should be. Her thoughts hide away in her mind. Natasha stares upwards without blinking and counts her breaths.
They reach one hundred and twenty-seven before the pain hits.
Natasha's breath stutters in her chest, careful even in-and-outs turning into a gasp sucked through clenched teeth. It is cold fire all through her veins, spreading through her whole body and burning through her skin from the inside out. Every pulse of her rapid heartbeat just exacerbates the pain further. Her eyes are screwed shut so tight that black and white geometrics bloom along the insides of her eyelids.
She has been shot and stabbed and whipped, frozen and burnt, and this is worse than all of that. There is no way to divert her attention because it's her everything, body and mind. Her bone marrow being scraped out with a spoon, her skin being peeled straight off her body.
Natasha is whimpering, crying like a child and there is nothing she can do as her muscle fibres come unbraided beneath the skin. Her eyes could be open or closed and there's no way she can tell because her vision is bright, stark white of unbearable pain.
She is twisting and pulling against the bindings as wet messy gasps escape her lips. Even as a Widow, there is nothing she can do about pain like this, not when every nerve receptor has been struck like a match and is now burning through her body, inside and out.
Blood drips from her nose. Her head attempts to jerk against the belt keeping it pinned to the headboard, her ears are ringing with a sound like screaming, or maybe it's her that is screaming. Her thoughts are nothing more than muddled soup at this point.
As the pain crawls up her throat, she gags bile down her black leotard, stomach attempting to turn itself inside out as if that will do anything to make it stop. Make it stop. Please, please, make it stop. Those words maybe escape her lips or maybe stay tucked away in that lockbox where a few stubborn tendrils of thought remain.
It hurts it hurts it hurts, please! Begging. She is no longer a Widow, no longer Natasha, no longer anything but a desperate animal trying to claw its way out of a trap. Like a dozen snares restricting every possible limb.
Her body is shaking uncontrollably, trembling as her muscles tighten and loosen uncontrollably. Blood trickles from her nose and slides down her face. Natasha is nothing but a faint memory at the centre of a world of only pain. There is no awareness of the passing of time, there is only pain and that is all it has even been and will ever be.
"Sedate her," she just barely makes out over the screaming mind and pounding heartbeat.
And everything slips away.