She'd been at SHIELD for 5 months.

Clint still tailed after her like a lost puppy. She's not supposed to know that the condition for her parole included constant supervision, but she's not bitter about it. The strings he'd had to pull to get her here - besides, it could have been someone else assigned on her tail. If it had to be someone, at least it's her, friend (?). She'd been in 'containment' for nearly three weeks after he'd brought her in. Not interrogated necessarily, but certainly not untouched. There was a lot she'd had to account for. Barton had also not escaped unscathed either. She was shocked, but not surprised, to learn that he'd been out on his first solo mission with SHIELD when he'd picked her up. Apparently the only reason he'd been suspended and not terminated was thanks to his direct superior, Agent Coulson. Coulson didn't trust her, but trusted Clint, and trusted his judgement.

"Natasha Romanoff," she looks up from her cell to see a bald man wearing a long leather coat and an eye patch looking down at her curiously. "Welcome to SHIELD."

She feels a tug of something familiar, another man, different eyepatch, different skin, looking down at her with the same expression. She doesn't know what's real, these memories, these faces. Sometimes, when she dreams, she dreams of flying.

Six months later, they're still working out her triggers. She's lived in fear for enough of her life that it's barely an added weight, tensing in an unfamiliar environment, fingers forced still during an overheard conversation, words out of order, overlapping conversations and commands. A flash of red, a castle on a hill, freezing winters, a silver tongued voice inside her head. Usually now, with practice, with training, someone from SHIELD will get her out of it. Once, the soft strings of Tchaikosvky coming from Coulson's radio had her down for a week, words, sounds, movements overlapping each other, screaming "extend! Reach! and jump!" soft skirts and blistered feet in point shoes, and "HOLD!" and starving girls and a soft touch -

Director Fury calls her into his office.

She stands beside him, high above the rest of the base, watching the men and women below as he watches her, unashamed.

He begins. "From what I know, your resistance to many forms of harm, your susceptibility to suffering bruises rather than broken bones, your ability to survive off of little food and water, your extraordinary mental strength and agility, the beyond human levels of physical endurance, and immunity from most diseases and poisons - even more impressive, the ability to break through the USSR's best damn attempts at mind control with no signs of a relapse - " here she glanced at him, sharply. He continued without pause, "Ms Romanova, has anyone ever told you that you were special?"

She's much to well trained to freeze under an obvious attack, but she can't help her heart from thud-thudding even as control remained. She gives him nothing but open curiosity, even as icy fear runs down her veins, though she doesn't, she can't remember, why is this -

Her lack of response is response enough for him. "Ms Romanova, have you heard of the term, mutant?"

Her tests come back with mixed results. No clear signs of anything, nothing statistically significant to suggest the presence of a mutation, and yet -

"See here, the high white blood cell count?"

"And here, the endurance and metabolism levels? We haven't seen anything that comes close to this since Ca-"

"You don't think?"

"That the Red Room had access to a knock-off super-serum? No way, that's beyond improbable."

"As improbable as her results?"

"There's no way! It is much more likely that the recessive mutant gene - "

"That there is still no evidence of - "

Natasha is escorted out of the room by a senior agent, who walks with her back to her room and stands by silently as she keys in her access code, and doesn't move back down the hall to resume his duties once she's safely in her room. She doesn't slam the door behind her, too numb to feel irritated at the thought of having her another guard dog, but she does push her boots off aggressively. "Stupid SHIELD and their stupid tests. It's a good thing they haven't found magic yet;" she thinks, before her mind screeches to a halt. She barely manages it to the bathroom before her head throbs as if struck by a baseball bat. Blinded by the migraine, holding her pounding head between her hands, not wanting to remember anymore, but needing answers, but thinking at all is making her so nauseous and - she can't do this, but she has to. She thinks, as she leans heavily over the toilet, gagging and sweating, of a house, impossibly constructed, with turrets and little rooms striking out at impossible angles, of a great big castle with moving stairs and - she whimpers as the floor seems to tilt and she holds onto the toilet for all that it's worth, heaving the upper half of her body across the seat, squeezing her eyes shut to keep out the bright lights of her bathroom, wishing for the cooler dimer light of candles, soft gentle breeze, cool stone and soft grass, an orchard, a home, a woman's worried looks as she swishes her wand at the pot on the stove, and then to the knife cutting up the vegetables before they both look up at the chime of the clock, with the hand moving from to work, to travelling, and then home, and the flash of green flame before a man with a head of thinning red hair steps out, brushing off his robes.

She stops, panting, back in her room at SHIELD, and realizes she's shaking and sweating and her heart it beating faster than it had through all of those SHIELD tests the scientists had put just her through. She vomits, then gags, and vomits again. Poison? No, impossible, nothing these muggles have is enough to - She heaves, but this time there's nothing in her stomach to expel. She sinks down onto the cold tile, shaking and feverish, head pounding, before her body gives in, slumping over, exhausted.

She wakes up from her daze, uncomfortable and disorientated. The knocking at the door makes her groan, and reluctantly she gets up from where she'd passed out on the bathroom floor, holding a hand to her head as the pounding at the door gets louder. Shaking out the pins and needles in her legs and back, she reaches blindly for the door, flinging it open and ready to stab the person who thought it wise to wake her up.

It's Barton. Of course it's Barton.

His insufferable face is grinning at her, bright green eyed and bushy-tailed, before giving her a glance over, eyebrows pulling up into a frown.

"What happened to you?"

She moves to slam the door in his face, distantly noting the empty hall and the lack of guard dog, before the sight of Barton slithering past her into the room pulls her back.

"No actually, are you okay?" he asks as he makes his way past her into her kitchen/sitting room/entry hall. It's a small apartment.

"I will be when you leave," she growls, voice hoarse. She tries to clear her throat as subtly as she can before trying again. "But actually, please leave." She says, as he still makes no move to leave.

"What happened Nat, you're pale and clammy and - " she slaps his hand away as it tried to make its way onto her forehead. "Oh God, are you pregnant?"

"Am I - what?"

"You know, you look just like Mrs Van Teesen did when she found out she was pregnant with twins."

"Thanks Barton"

"No, not that you look fat, I mean pregnant, I mean, you just look like she did, before she got fat, I mean, like, at first we all thought it was food poisoning - Oh Gerta no! - you didn't get food poisoning from the cafeteria did you? I keep telling Gerta that the fish casserole is deadly but she doesn't believe me - "

"Barton, shut up." He snaps his mouth shut as she tries not to make her pounding headache too visible. "I'm not pregnant. The Red Room made sure of that. And I wasn't poisoned."

"Oh. " He says, after a pause, "So that means I won't be a dad after all?"

"You, honestly - " He cracks into a grin and she scowls, and pushes him for the heart attack he just gave her.

"Relax Red, our babies would be too beautiful that they couldn't possibly exist anyway."

She snorts, "Not if they had your nose."

He grins, and this time its contagious.

"Common, shower then training." He says, gently stearing her back towards her bathroom. "Can't wait for you to beat my ass into the mat again."

Barton grunts as he's nailed onto the floor, Natasha's legs wrapping around his neck, foot pressed against his windpipe, hips hard on his lower back, keeping him down.

"You know, when I said you'd beat my ass to the ground, you didn't have to take it so literally," he says, voice muffled from where it's being pushed into the floor by her feet.

She releases her hold, and helps him up into standing, grinning as she watches him shake out his muscles and crack his neck, working out his cramped muscles.

"Ow."

Agent May makes a quick note on her clipboard, giving Natasha a nod before heading out of the room.

"Lunch?" offers Barton, from where he's leaning against the wall, stretching out his hamstring and trying not to put too much weight on his bruised knee.

"Lunch." she agrees, and they make their way to SHIELD's cafeteria.