Red Rooms and Ledgers

Schizophrenia

TW: DESCRIPTIONS OF SELF HARM AND OF SUICIDAL THOUGHTS PLEASE BE ADVISED BEFORE READING THIS CHAPTER
If you have self harmed or have suicidal thoughts please call or text 911 or the suicide hotline at 800-273-8255
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Schizophrenia
Noun
A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.
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Natasha never got scars. It didn't matter how badly she had been injured or where she had been hurt, she never obtained any blemishes upon her skin. Her peculiar healing factor was a result of experimental super soldier serums that were tested upon her and her fellow widows. She could remember the pain from the injections and watching from her strapped down position on the examination table as white coats would wheel out dead test subjects. She vividly recalls the anguish from being impetuously stabbed with thick needles containing the doses of serum, and the violent pain that followed. She would convulse and thrash as she screamed until her voice was extinguished, begging, pleading, praying that someone would release her from the hell that she endured.
Despite the trauma, and the slight healing factor that it gave her; the serum doses never did much else for her body nor anyone else's. It gave her slightly better senses, strength, and slowed her aging process, but it was minuscule compared to the effects of the real serum that was given to Steve and to Bucky. That was something that really bothered Natasha, was the absolute worthlessness of the experiments. She would watch as trained assassins would fall victim to the seizures and die, unable to fight the effects of the poisonous substance, and then only hope that she would not fall victim to the same fate.
Torture had been the only true constant within her life. The pain that would always inevitably come to her was predictable and reliable, and she personally believed that it was the pain that made her stronger. Of course when she broke away from the Red Room, she was the one who had to bring the reliable pain to herself, her own fucked up version of a coping mechanism. She was thankful for her lack of scarring whenever the blades danced across her skin, providing a way to release all the emotions and thoughts that she had pent up within her mind.
Of course she hadn't purposefully hurt herself in many years, but now, while gazing upon the ceiling from her vantage point on her bed, she had not changed from the Natasha who had just left the Red Room. She didn't cut herself anymore, she had only learned to channel her emotions and insecurities into a different outlet; her missions and her training. Natasha worked herself to death, she had a need to be perfect and a need to be independent. Her life is spent usually in the gym and training room when she is not tending to her basic needs or doing her job, the exhaustive activities provide her a sense of control over her mind and her body that no other activity seems to give her. She enjoys the pain that is put upon her body that strengthens her and makes her better rather than the old alternative that she used to indulge in.
Speaking of working out, Natasha lifted herself off of her bed and made her way up to the Avengers training room. Her team would probably still be out for a few more days which meant that she would have the gym all to herself during this time. She hated whenever Steve would tell her to slow down on the treadmill, or when Sam would mention that she would hurt herself by lifting too much, or when Bruce would forcibly drain the pool because he thought she was exerting herself too much. She hated that they thought that she needed to rely upon them. Everything she did was so that they could rely upon her, someone who would be a valuable member of the team, some one who never needed to ask for help or had distracting needs of her own. That was probably one of the reasons she didn't want therapy, she didn't like to feel needy or helpless, she was supposed to be one of the strong ones, she was the avenger who could carry out the difficult tasks so that the rest of her team could be vulnerable. At that notion, Natasha began to start on the treadmill without anyone to interrupt her.