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The blood loss would have been worse if she wasn't brought as quickly as she did—thank god for your resilience, was what the doctor Fury trusted enough to fake his own death had said. Thank God? God had never wanted nothing with her, God had no power over her blood or the lithe, exhausted body it leaked out of—only the serum they had injected her with years ago had any power over her at all.
The same serum that had bitten her in the ass just minutes before when she vomited whatever remained of her fluids on the first toilet she had found. It was an annoyingly endless cycle of pain—the vomiting made her weak enough for her to hold on to the edge of the toilet, if she held onto the toilet, she had to shift her shoulder too much, had to press on the pale bandages wrapped around her collarbone and chest, which just resulted in more vomiting from the sharp pain that made every single one of her upper-body muscles ache like she had been shot again, and again.
But she had hauled herself away without even a wrinkle in her blue pantsuit or a stray strand in her wig—had wiped the corner of her now thin lips and focused instead on the silence surrounding her now that she wasn't heaving her guts out.
Rogers had gone off to find a suit for the approaching war, or whatever other patriotic nonsense the supersoldier had the subconscious habit of saying as if he were still entertaining a crowd. He had taken Hill and Wilson with him; if the silence haunting the emptying tunnel hideout said anything at all—only the distant beeps of medical machines and the shuffle of feet filled the cool spring air she was more than thankful for. The cold breeze prevented sweat, the cold breeze was easier to swallow down through the burn in her throat the bile had left her with.
Fury was somewhere out there, she was sure, speaking to that anxious doctor that hadn't shown any nervousness while preventing her from bleeding out, or, probably planning another move nobody would know until they had set up another gravestone for him in another part of the world.
I didn't know who to trust.
The words had been tumbling through her mind since he said them, had been producing more and more anxious edges to whatever she could pass for a soul, had made that old, reliable instinct to shut off everything and everyone until nothing remained but silence in her mind all the more tempting to embrace. Nothing would hurt her if she felt nothing, she was sure, not even one of the few people she trusted, one of the few people she cared about enough to grieve over.
I didn't know who to trust.
Not even if she had bled for years now for this agency and his orders outside of it, not even if she had broken her bones again and again for his missions, not even if she had fought so tirelessly to prove she was more than her past—she was more than the red hourglass she had carried over from Russia, more than Natalia, even if she would never truly leave her. It seemed it didn't matter how much she tried to wipe her ledger, she was still the near-feral young girl Fury had sent Hawkeye to terminate and instead found standing in his office like a cat his reckless agent had wrangled inside. It didn't matter in the end, nothing did now, HYDRA had grown inside SHIELD—had been SHIELD since its very creation if the remendants of Zola had been right about that. He hadn't been right about her, however, it made her want to smirk all the way until the creep had sent missiles their way—not even HYDRA's finest knew her truly, not even they knew how deep the lies seeped into her already too-thin file.
