∆ {4¹⁴} {INSATIABLE NERVES} ∆

NATASHA HAD NEVER found herself more determined about a matter in her life. She hadn't been in the main section of the airport when Rhodey had fallen, but she'd emerged a few minutes later to find an ambulance on site, accompanied by several heavily armoured trucks. She had listened to the ambulance wail in the fresh silence, crying for someone. The fact that she didn't know who, made Natasha's heart jump wildly with fear. 

The tarmac, which was hot and cracked underfoot, didn't dare to slow her down as she ran towards where the main group was. To where Tony, Vision and the kid stood. But there was no T'Challa, no Rhodey, no Roxi. Natasha felt her gut wrench massively as she slowed to a walk as surveyed the scene in front of her with eyes as desperate as those that Roxi had been showing only minutes ago.

To her biased, and terrible relief, she found it to be Rhodey who had needed the ambulance, after falling several hundred feet through the air and crashing into the ground so hard that he should've been dead. From what Tony had muttered, there was no way that the man would've survived the fall had it not been for Roxi, who had somehow summoned up a last burst of power and slowed his fall in the final fifty meters or so.

But when Natasha had glanced around once more, desperate to find Roxi,  to reassure her that she'd done enough, to seek out her own comfort in the ice-eyed woman, her distress only grew when the search proved fruitless. Finally, she turned her gaze to Tony, who had been watching her carefully for the past few minutes.

"Tony.." He knew exactly what she was going to ask, she could see it by the way his eyes flashed with guilt, with a certain kind of worry that he only displayed towards one person. But what did that mean? Natasha had an inkling of a feeling, but was trying to push it down as if it would quash the truth too; make it false in place of an alternative.

"They took her, Nat. She knew they were going to. She didn't fight. She was meant to stay in Berlin. They didn't trust her anyway, and now, they'll probably lock her up with the rest of them." Tony's words were not only guilt-stricken, but were laced quite thickly with a form of remorse that Natasha wasn't sure that she'd ever heard from the man before. But she had been right. However much she had tried to dissuade her mind from the conclusions it had jumped to, it didn't matter; because it had been right.

Because Roxi was not willing to stand by and watch her family fight, possibly die while she stayed in one spot because some people didn't trust her, the woman had been branded a criminal. She had been taken with the rest of them, even after saving Rhodey's life. She had been bundled away with the rest of them, as if she had never signed, as if what she had done for the government over so many years held such little value that they were willing to look all of it over, pretend it never happened, because she hadn't obeyed their rules once, in the best interest of 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes'.

Natasha doubted that it was simply because of that. In fact, she was certain that a large amount of it had to do with fear, as it always seemed to. Fear was a powerful motivator, and people had become scared of Agent Ryder. Not of Roxi, because select few knew who she was, really, as a person. But of Agent Ryder, the ice-eyed, professionally mannered woman who had worked at SHIELD for over a decade before earning herself a spot on the Avengers due to her reputation of getting the job done. Then, of course, there had been the complication, and Agent Ryder had become even more dangerous, in ways that even Natasha doubted that she could imagine.

Sometimes she tried to. Wondered to what extent Roxi's powers extended, because if they went far enough, the woman was likely to be far more powerful than even she herself realised. But Roxi didn't need that pressure, not when she was getting so close to control over her powers, thanks to Wanda Maximoff. So Natasha had kept such midnight thoughts to her own mind, where they flourished well enough on her own anyway.

Natasha had known that the government would be after her the moment she had shot at T'Challa with her widow bites, and had allowed Steve and Bucky to escape the airport. After they had finished whatever mess they'd created in Siberia, it hadn't been hard to find them. But now, here they stood, on one of the first rooms they'd been able to reach on the Raft. They were getting Steve's side out, and they were getting Roxi out. It was a simple plan, and with the force that they held, Natasha had doubted that much would be able to go wrong.

That was, until, they had reached the room that Steve's side were being held in. Clint, Sam, Scott, even Wanda were locked up in this room, though the latter with far harsher restrictions than the rest. But Natasha couldn't find Roxi anywhere in the room. Where was she?

So she had asked all of them, even Scott if they knew where she was. They'd all had the same answer; no, and were all tinted with a concern that Natasha had no doubt was streaming through her eyes like sunlight through windows. Eventually, she'd had to find one of the staff who was wearily hazy rather than knocked out, and had practically forced the information to leave his lips.

As soon as he'd told her, she'd taken off, uncaring how she might seem, unusually. In actual fact, the room hadn't been too hard to find. It was lined with a plastic bock on the outside, wrapped tightly around metal walls that could be nothing less than 50cm thick. Even with the width, which had most definitely been added as a precaution against Roxi's powers, Natasha could still make out faint lines in the edge of the metal, which had even dented the plastic. Roxi had been trying to get out, or at least to release everything built up within her.

Roxi nearly always did little things with her powers, even if they were as little as turning on the lights from across the room. She was used to using them daily, but now, they'd been forced to stay inside her, clamped down by a force that she couldn't manipulate. They were likely to show themselves in some way, and in violent bursts of shockwaves seemed to be the quickest way for Roxi to get it out of her system.

When Steve finally managed to get the door open, it was dark. Not the kind of dark that said it had always been, though. This was a conditional dark, produced by something Roxi had done. Besides, with the light from outside seeping into the penumbra, Natasha could make out the shape of hanging lights swaying slightly from the ceiling. They held no tint, nor buzz or shroud of warmth when she dared to put her hand close to it. They had been out for a while.

When Natasha's forest green eyes finally found Roxi, she found it hard enough to suppress a frown that it managed to twist the edge of her lips. The icy-eyed woman was not caught by a straightjacket like the one Wanda had been wearing moments ago, and while there was a slight redness around her neck, she did not hold one of the collars that the Maximoff had being wearing either. Upon further inspection, Natasha found the latter cast to another corner of the room, where it was almost impossible to see when the door opened as it had been.

What was nearly disturbing to Natasha was that she found none of the broken shards of everything that she had become so accustomed to seeing in the woman's beautiful, icy eyes. Instead, what she found was entirely resolute. An unnerved look, panic, dread; whatever you wanted to call it, it was what Natasha found in Roxi's eyes that day.

She didn't waste a second longer after that. She had found herself beside Roxi before she could quite comprehend what she had done, and had helped the woman up, taking in the rather harsh scent of what seemed like disinfectant instead of the pretty woman's normal scent of mint and lemon.

Roxi hadn't struggled on the way to the Quinjet. Hadn't protested about being able to walk by herself. Had barely acknowledged Natasha's dire concern with a weak smile and a few whispered words of reassurance, though she didn't seem to have the energy, or perhaps the stomach, to meet Wanda or Clint's eyes after what had happened in Leipzig. 

She knew that now, despite her best efforts, and her best reason for signing, she was now a criminal. A dangerous liability of a criminal. Yet, part of her mind couldn't rip itself from the dread of wondering about Rhodey, who she hadn't been able to save. She had been right. Everything had changed, and it would continue to. She had truly lost, and there was nothing that she could do about it. At this point, Roxi knew that the Avengers were no longer truly a team, but in her heart, in her mind, they were her family, even if some of them were new, or odd, or 15.

That was why, that first evening out of many to come spent on the run, that Roxi sat down and began to write.

{A/N:} This is quite short, and the next one will be too. Tbh was expecting it to be shorter, but here you go. How are you guys' weeks? Hope it's going well. Also, one more chapter, then we're onto Infinity War. How odd. Anyway, future me might wanna add something so yeah I'll leave some space.

Future me does not want to add something.

Anyway, please vote, comment, let me know what you think, etc., thanks :)

1710 Words

Written: 13 / 05 / 2021

Published:  29 / 05 / 2021

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