I'm lying to you // Natasha Romanoff x OC Odindottir

Chapter 25 - Tin Can

"Me! Never!" I laugh a bit too enthusiastically, "I'm Asgardian."

He nods with clear doubt, yet doesn't fight me, "Of course, it's just the doctor in me, that's all."

"Thank you, Bruce," we part and I continue on to my room, finding it all but untouched. I fall back onto the bed and shut my eyes, head heavy with stress and uncertainty. Drifting slowly away, my battered and aching body finally ebbs into a mere background sense.

~~~~~~

"Don't- you can't- NO!" a strangled voice wails. The decimation of Asgard's central courtyard reigns around me. Tyrants of noise and tempests of fire rage on all sides. Amidst all the chaos - despite the evident visual distractions - the whispering echo of an out-of-place (yet familiar) voice alerts me.

"Turn away... leave..." the voice urges me desperately, "don't... don't come here... don't let her win!"

The other, more prominent voice suddenly cuts through the mysterious warning. I frantically search for the origin, finding myself fighting through plumes of smoke and flames to reach the Chapel of Peace. Lying on the large alter - and restrained by a ghostly, dark figure with a vast sword and vicious dagger - is a bloodied woman. Her ginger hair is matted and tangled in dirt and debris. The face peers up at me desperately. Natasha.

The whole building begins to collapse as her cries become ever louder, "Don't! Cyrus! Run... RUN!"

"Don't come here!" the other voice begins to yell in unison, "stay away! Save her!"

And with one fluid movement, the mysterious figure jolts her arm up and disappears. A fountain of pure crimson erupts from the carved fissure now carved into her throat. With one strangled cry, the whole scene deteriorates, "C-Cyrus..."

"Cyrus! C!" an angry voice cuts through it all, the door slamming open at shut in quick succession. I jolt up, my eyes flying open and cold sweat engulfing my body. My breathing becomes calmer before I can regain the rest of my hearing.

"C..." a calm, yet firm, hand grasps my upper arm after a moment. I can't move, even if I wanted to, "Cyrus, look at me, please..."

I inch my head painfully to look up at her, eyes glossed in a thick sheen of welling tears. Blinking them rapidly away, I'm only faced with another nightmare: Her lips becoming chapped and blue; her skin turning translucent and grey; her irises becoming absent and glazed.

"Cyrus!" a sharper tone cuts through the hallucination, splintering at the seems and edges, "...What's going on?"

"Just... just a nightmare, that's all," I wave her off, placing my head in my hands with a deep, shuddering breath.

"No, no don't bullshit me, Kane," her voice becomes heated in determined concern, shifting into a more solid sitting position, "I'm staying here until you tell me what's wrong."

"No," I state blankly.

"No? You leave for 6 months, nearly die on me the day I get you back, say you want to be 'anywhere with me'," she lists in a fiery tone, "and now you just say 'No'."

"It wouldn't help anything if I did, that's why," I explain with a dejected sigh, "You wouldn't get it."

As soon as I say it, I wish I could take it back. I know it's a lie; I know I couldn't be further from the truth. She draws back from me immediately, the retraction of her hand like the setting of the final sun at winter's birth.