Whirlwind | W.M.

2

I was awake but all at once I wasn't.

Have you ever had a dream, a dream where you're stuck behind glass, unable to do anything but watch what plays out in front of you? No matter how hard you scream or kick or try, you can't move. Your body is frozen, hard as stone despite what shatters in your chest. It was just like that, I could feel the bedding pressed onto my back, I was aware of everything.

But I was stuck.

My head was spinning, eyes burning and body limp. The lights were so bright that it poured through my eyelids, burning into my brain as the sound of machines circle the air. Everything was loud, so so loud. I wanted to open my eyes, I wanted to get up, to scream— but I was restrained. It was almost as if my body and my consciousness were on two different planes and no matter how hard I willed myself to move, nothing would happen.

I could feel the leather around my wrists, the clanking of the metal chains against whatever bed I was on. My heart begins to thrash, pounding, begging to tear out. I was back— It was happening again. I couldn't be back— It was impossible. It's supposed to be over. I did everything right. I kept my promises and they betrayed me.

They always do.

"Why is she tied up?" I hear a voice cut through the beeping machines. It was Natasha.

"She's dangerous. We're just following protocol." A female voice replied, one I couldn't recognize. I could practically smell the medication around me, bringing forth a torturous string of memories.

"She's just overwhelmed." Natasha argues, I could almost picture her face. Red lips and furrowed brows, her footsteps nearing and merged protests surrounding us.

"She tried to kill you." The unfamiliar voice says as I feel the straps around my wrists move, loosen and eventually fall off.

"She wasn't trying to kill me." Natasha was right next to my bedside, her voice was so near and crystal. The remnants of my most recent memories come rushing back in a thick, harsh flood. My hand on her neck, her haunting words, all the guns and even the look on Steve's.

I used to be you.

"If you need some sort of refresher, she was choking you out." One of them says, not caring enough to mask her irritation.

"If she wanted to kill me she would have snapped my neck. This is new, she's scared and treating her like this only makes that worse." Natasha keeps a chilling calmness in her tone, the kind that's subtle enough to strike fear and authority over whoever was on the receiving end.

"If you're forgetting, she's enhanced. She's not like you. So do you suggest we let a girl who just killed twenty five armed men in minutes, roam freely? Without supervision?" My heart sinks at the conversation, I wasn't sure which part unsettled me most. The way they so casually speak of me or the way Natasha wasn't missing a beat in trying to defend me.

"I'm saying not to treat her like a prisoner. She needs help, not a cage." There was depth to her words that nobody else in the room understood, even I didn't. Everything they were saying was right, I am a danger and I did hurt her but yet, there she stood, right next to me, so adamant on handing me a chance I wasn't even sure I wanted— or deserved.

"If I find her in restraints again, you'll all have a problem with me." Natasha warns subsequently walking out and leaving the room in defeated silence.

The minutes felt like hours when I finally regained mobility, shooting up as I took my first full gasp of air. Every doctor in the room looked at me, terrified as they clutched their tablets to their chests. I look down at my body on instinct, remembering the times when I used to wake up from all the experiments I'd be put through, I'd find tubes stuck into different parts of my body, needles penetrated into my skin as I sat in pain. No tubes or needles, just a fresh change of clothes and the cuffs that restrained me minutes before dangling by frame of the bed.