Avengers one-shots!

Drowning

(TRIGGER WARNING: There will be talks of self-harm, death, and attempted suicide. Just a warning)

NATASHA'S POV:

Somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke screaming. Steve and Clint ran in, followed by Tony, Bruce, Sam and Wanda.

"Are you okay Natasha?" Steve asks, putting his hand on my shoulder, but I flinch at the touch, and he pulls his hand away.

"Why don't you guys get out, I'll talk to her." Sam says, and everyone shuffles out of the room. "Hey Natasha," He says quietly. "Do you wanna talk?"

I shake my head no, but I choke out a whisper. "I don't wanna talk about it at all."

"Do you want me to leave?" He asks and I nod.

"Okay, sleep tight." He says and turns off the light.

——TIME——SKIP——A——COUPLE——HOURS——LATER——

I blink, and flick on the light. Memories come flooding in from last night's nightmare, and tears almost well up in my eyes. Note, the word 'almost'. I wander out to the kitchen, where everyone is looking at me weirdly.

"Natasha, we have some questions about last night." Steve started. "Which you do not have to answer-"

"It would be nice if you did." Tony interjected.

"No, No, you guys deserve to hear the full story. I should have told you a while ago. I knew I'd have to tell you sometime, because eventually your questions would be too much. I'll just give you a warning. It's not a very nice story." We all sit on the couch, and I put my face in my hands. The tears I was holding in drip down my cheek, and I shut my eyes tightly. I take a deep breath and look up at them, their faces filled with curiosity.

"Well- well-" I stutter. "I had a daughter. As in past tense. I HAD a daughter. I was just 14 when they forced me to get pregnant with her. They, as in the Red Room. When I was 19, I betrayed a direct order. Instead of killing me, which I would have preferred, they killed her. They killed Lelyah."

(A/N: The name can be pronounced different ways, Lil-EE-uh, le-LIE-ah, le- LAY- uh, or le-LEE-uh. The second one is my personal favorite.)

"For a while, I wondered why they killed her, but not me. They killed her because they'd spent so long trying to perfect me. I was perfect. I was their perfect soldier, their perfect student. That was the first and last time I didn't listen to them."

"How'd they-" Tony asks.

"How'd they kill her?" He nods. "They put me in a room. A very small room, just big enough for me to stand. They put Lelyah in another room, right next to mine, but it was bigger, and there was a wall of glass between us. They locked her in, then the room started filling up with water. It was slow, so we could panic and have a couple of minutes to talk."

"That was the nicest thing they did for me. They let me have a couple minutes to say goodbye. She was only five, she didn't realize what was happening. She didn't understand why I was crying, why I was telling her I loved her, why I was saying goodbye, telling her I'd see her again someday. Hopefully soon. I got to watch my daughter drown to death in front of me, and I couldn't do anything about it." My voice broke as I kept telling the story, and a shaky breath escaped my mouth.

"After that, I didn't know why I was alive. Why should I have been alive? My daughter was dead, I had no one to protect. So I tried to kill myself. Multiple times. Every time, I was stopped. Right before I was able to pull the trigger, they took the gun from me. A couple days before I would've died of dehydration they forced me to drink something. And the final time, I tried to hang myself. That time I was quite close to succeeding. I did hang myself, but my instructors caught me right before I suffocated."

"They told me, doesn't being the last Romanov mean something? Yes, it does. It means you killed everyone else I cared about. I see her death play over in my head at least once a month. October is always the worst month for me. October 31st, the day my daughter died."

"I think about her death a lot. Her death is the deepest red in my ledger. I've told myself to move on, try to forget, but something so traumatizing like that, you can't move on from. You can lock it behind a door, visit it from time to time, but you can't move on from that." I get up and walk towards the kitchen, so they can't see how fast the tears running down my face are going.

(A/N: I know Jemma was the one who said that, but I just really wanted to put it in.)

"By the way, if you tell anyone about any of this, I'll kill you."

"We figured." Bruce said. "Are there any dates we should be aware of?"

"October 31st and March 16th." I choke out, the tears running even faster now. Steve gets up, and pulls me into a hug, letting me sob into his shoulder.

"I'm sorry." He whispers.

—x—x—x—x—

Ooh angst! Sorry if this was bad, I just thought of this as I was falling asleep and in the morning I tried to recreate what I was thinking of.

Song Recommendation: Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi

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Chloe