Red Room

RR3 Into the Nightmare

Chapter 3

The next day at the Avengers Tower, Tony was near finishing his machine. He kept running Natasha’s words through his mind. Fire made me who I am today. You can do it Tony. The machine, you have my permission.

He was in his lab hard at work. He was working on the control panel when he heard a small cough. He whirled around and saw her. She was just sitting on his desk, watching him work. She looked as if yesterday had never happened. She was back to her old self.

“Natasha! You scared the crap out of me! How the hell did you get down here? This room is secure.”

“Psssh, secure. You do know who you are talking to don’t you?” The red head was smirking at him. Her gaze flashed upward to the air vent.

“So that’s how you knew about the machine. Why didn’t you tell me?” Tony didn’t understand.

Natasha jumped off of the desk and walked over to where Tony was working. She picked up one of his tools and distractedly played with it. She leaned against the chair and then looked up at him. “When you said you didn’t trust me a few weeks ago, I knew that you really didn’t mean it. You were just frustrated and I get that. I snuck through the air vents to put those all over your Iron Man suit to get back at you.” She looked over to one of his work stations which was covered in Bob the Builder children’s stickers.

“When the hell did those get there?!” Tony didn’t know how he could have missed the 200 plus stickers covering one of his work stations.

“About an hour ago,” she said. “I didn’t want to waste them. Anyways, when I reached your lab, I noticed that you were trying to get into my case file. I was going to blow up your computer, but I stopped. I don’t know why, but I let you keep hacking. I guess some part of me wanted you to know. And then you just stopped. I saw you press delete. That right there told me that you really did trust me, and respected my wishes, well, kinda. Since then, I’ve watched you work every day on that stupid thing and I’ve heard you over and over struggling with yourself as to if this was the right thing to do.”

Tony smiled slyly at her. “Hey Ms. Stalker, you said to never crack your file to get to know you, you never said not to build a machine.”

“Very clever Tony. The truth is, I want you to know. Clint knows some, but I just can’t tell him everything. I can’t tell anyone everything. It hurts too much. But after what we went through yesterday, I think it’s time you all knew. So, let’s get started.”

Tony was left beaming. He couldn’t believe how this turned out. He had imagined over and over the countless ways she would kill him for asking her to use the machine. He never expected that this would happen.

“Great! So you want to know how it works?”

“I get the gist of it but yeah,” she said.

“Okay. We will both have to lie in these chairs and put these oh so fancy electrodes on. We will both be given an injection that puts us under into a deep sleep. When this here switch is flipped, the electrodes attached to you will transmit your memories from a certain point in your life into this machine. The machine will then send them to me and we will both be placed inside of your mind through the machine. It will be as if we are physically there, reliving the events. We will be able to talk to each other and walk around. This device here, will be attached to my wrist and will bring us to different places in time, inside of your mind.”

Natasha was looking thoughtful. “But what if something goes wrong and we can’t get out? What if it becomes too much and I want to leave?”

“Don’t worry, I have a switch on this device that will take us out of there.”