Disclaimer: I own nothing, it all belongs to Marvel

Authors Note: I wrote this because I liked the idea of a post CACW Natasha centred fic. I saw some posts about her from the book that was released before Avengers: Infinity War, "A Heroes Journey" and thought about the idea of what could have happened if Natasha had been held after CW by General Ross. I know they didn't have a lot of screen time in Civil War but in the scene where they suggest the Accords, I felt like Ross had a strong dislike for Natasha and imagined what could have happened that caused it.

Just to be clear, I like both Steve and Tony but when it comes to the Accords I am firmly Team Widow because I think she was trying to find a way to show the government that they were willing to compromise and work vigilantly on the idea of preventing civilian casualties but also understood that there were always going to be situations in which the Avengers would disagree with the Government (I mean the tried to drop a bomb on New York in the first Avengers film!)

Like Tony, Natasha understand the idea of holding a guilty conscience of what happens in the bigger picture of a post-world saved but lives destroyed situation and, in all honestly, believes that she has understood it for years. It probably had a part in why she joined SHIELD in the first place. Yet like Steve, Natasha also realises that Governments do have agendas and can sometimes even be infiltrated by those who are trying to cause more harm than good – which was shown in Winter Soldier. She has worked both for the KGB/Red Room and SHIELD/Hydra and both times she was doing the same job – spying and assassinating – because she was told she was doing it on the "right" people. Choosing to put all of SHIELD/Hydra's secrets online, along with her own, was her way of going against these agendas and doing the right thing.

As a result, I wanted to explore how Civil War left Natasha because, while I understand that her life and her history cannot be told through the MCU at this moment in time, I thought it would be an interesting part in her cinematic timeline to tell her story. If I do continue this, I would probably use the story to carry on telling Natasha's story – ignoring Infinity War – and including bits of what I think would forge an interesting backstory of a great character.

Warnings: There is varying descriptions of torture, not explicit I don't think, but it does cover varying injuries that have stemmed from this torture. In terms of her mental health; Natasha is not in the best place, her mind has lead her down a dark path and there are a lot of thoughts that, I felt, when writing this, connect to a depressed state of mind. Please don't read this if it is going to cause you any upset or trauma.

Side Note: Some hints towards Natasha/Steve but not overly strong. In this chapter it could just be a close friendship. If I do continue this story however, they will become a couple. Also, some hints of a Tony/Natasha friendship because I think they could've been friends!

Natasha was tired. Tired and aching.

She could hear the blood pounding in her ears whilst the cool tiles of the floor pressed into her cheek, creating a numbness that was not unwanted. Being tired was nothing new to Natasha, she had lived her entire life with some degree of tiredness lurking in her bones. When she first joined S.H.I.E.L.D, she had thought that this tiredness was alleviate itself after she had begun to wipe away the red tucked in her ledger yet since the discovery of Hydra and the unravelling of the Avengers, everything had gotten worse.

At this point, all she could hope for was that this tiredness would soon wrap her into a gentle and unending peace. She had been here long enough, surely death wouldn't be too far away.

Her friends were gone, they were either a whisper in the wind or had severed ties with them completely. Not that they could be blamed from the latter, if Natasha had a choice, she would have cut ties with herself too.

Steve had left her behind and Tony had watched her walk away and neither had come back for her.

She knew that this was a very bitter thought, but at this point she had been here too long to give way to anything deeper than her bitterness. For all she knew, at least one of the two parties were looking for her, but her captor had been very clear that she was hoping beyond all sense of reality if she had thought that to be a case. Apparently, the government had reported that she had fled the compound and was still out in the open. They had spent days planting leads and false facts into the air to see if they could lure Steve back into their clutches or catch Tony out on breaking the Accords.

She hated General Ross. She'd kill him if she could.

He'd cornered her in Berlin, she had gone back to help in the rebuilding of the airport. She had wanted to try and do something right before the government had caught up with her after T'Challa reported her for her actions. As soon as she arrived she spotted Everett Ross trying to establish what had happened, he and the CIA were trying to us CCTV and satellite footage to find the feet of which to place the blame. Natasha quickly changed tactic and decided to bite a bullet, most likely one of the nicer ones that would be coming her way now that she had no protection whatsoever, but before she could turn herself in, a cloth had been pressed over her mouth and nose; the smug face of General Thaddeus Ross swimming before her eyes seconds before they closed.

General Ross had always been one of her biggest critics. She had faced a lot of hatred when she had been spared by Nick Fury under the borderline pleas of two of his most trusted agents; Clint Barton and Phil Coulson. Not that she had been phased by that at the time, her job was to be uncaring. If you cared for someone, you may be led to believe that you had a place with them and the Black Widow had no place in the world.

However, it is only a fool who confuses lack of care for lack of attention. Natasha had felt a lot of heat coming in her direction from the US Military and it was a man named Ross who seemed to be at the heart of it. When she managed to get a look at his face, she had felt the gentle pull of something in the back of her mind. It was not an unfamiliar pull, it was one that she had felt before. The sign of a memory that had been ripped from her mind. She gave it no more thought.

There was nothing for her left to give to it, after all.

The next time she had seen Ross, she had been trying to adapt to the newfound sense of freedom that her emotions had given her. She had felt sympathy for him but while the stirring in her gut had told her to apologise, the fire in his eyes and the hatred barely contained under his skin had told her to steer clear. She had, that evening, confided in Coulson about her fears. What could she have possibly done to make the man hate her so much? Phil had told her that he didn't know but that she needed to stop blaming herself. There was a difference, he said, in being a person who chose to do bad things and being a person who'd had their memories altered so excessively that they couldn't form their own opinions, let alone make their own choices. There was a difference in knowing what you were doing and doing what you know. There was a different between being a human and a puppet, your movements defined by the pulling of your strings (and by the tearing away of your memories, womb and humanity, apparently).

Wow, she really had let the bitterness seep in. She would have laughed if she could find the air to do so.

She wondered if that was what Steve thought about Barnes. If that was what he saw in him. Phil had practically adored Captain America and his Howling Commandos, if he were still alive, he'd probably have argued that same case for Barnes. That just because he knew what he had done, that he remembered, it wasn't the same as knowing and understanding what he was doing at the time.

Natasha envied Barnes. She still didn't know what she had done. It was likely that she would die before she ever found out.

Saying that, death was looking more and more appealing.

Ross had dragged her here, to an underground cell – at the Raft, of all places. So close yet so far away from the people she longed to be close to. She wasn't stupid. She had known as soon as Ross had told her just how close she was to Clint, and the rest of the captured "Team Cap", that Steve would get them out. Steve wouldn't allow anyone to be imprisoned because of his actions, whether they chose his side willingly or not; the Steve Rogers that she knew wouldn't leave anyone behind.

Except her.

And Tony, too, she supposed. But it wasn't her place to think on Tony right now, he probably hated her. The consistently fragile trust between the two of them had probably shattered into dust now. She mourned for it, desperately. Tony was probably the only one who understood just a fraction of what it felt like to be the only person walking away from a tragedy alive and unscathed with nothing awaiting you but the eternal guilt that the event you had just walked away from was also caused by your own two hands.

Steve, at the end of the day, would always be able to find hope. He could always see the good in what they had done even if the job came with multiple casualties. She had no doubt that he felt the pain and the grief, of course she knew that she did. Natasha knew Steve Rogers better than she knew anyone else alive, even Clint. Steve, unlike Natasha and Tony, could find the good in anything and everyone; like a birthmark etched onto a soul, Steve Rogers could see your heart and if he decided there was good in it, he would make sure it was felt. That was what he could see in Barnes, he could see that capacity for good, so he would fight for it.

Natasha cracked open her eye and investigated the tiles of the cold floor. The parts that weren't tarnished by aging pools of her blood gleamed in a stark, almost blinding white. Pushing against her body's will to crumble back into the floor and gasp her last breaths away, Natasha sat herself up and leaned her body into the wall, sitting upwards for the first time in days. The opposite wall, also a bright white, tiled monstrosity reflected that which she needed to see.

Herself.

Honestly, she looked like shit. Her hair was mattered and clumped from the blood that had lugged it together. Either from her broken nose or the wound on the back of her head, she wasn't too sure, but she also realised quickly that it didn't matter much now. Her left cheekbone and jawline were varying shades of purple, also likely broken. She had bruises around her neck, now these had a more complex history; they had originated from Barnes and his strangulation attempt, but Ross had thought that they deserved "freshening up" and so one of his loyal brutes had taken it upon himself to wrap his hand around her neck and squeeze until she had passed out. While Natasha had lost all sense of time and didn't know how long she had been here for, it had been long enough that this process had been repeated several times.

She moved her gaze down to her body, her right leg was broken in at least three different places. Her ribs felt so close to being shattered completely that it was either sheer luck or a very twisted sense of fate that had stopped her from puncturing both her lungs in several places. She fortunately, still had all her teeth, but she knew that was only because Ross still had hope that she would become so delirious or desperate that she would spill every secret she knew before dropping down dead.

Unfortunately, this meant that she had bitten her tongue and cheek on numerous occasions and the result had let to a lot of sore cuts on the inside of her cheek and the swelling of her tongue. She could still speak, but it was painful.

Then again, so was breathing. In more ways than one.

Moving on, she noticed that her wrist was dislocated on her left hand (Ross would want a signed confession from her just to further her humiliation – not that he had told her what he wanted from her, or, even, why he was doing this to her, but he was not Loki or Ultron. He was a prick with a lot of power at his feet but his skill in manipulation was sorely lacking. She could read the basics of him even without trying.) but her left wrist was still aching from a break in her earlier days of confinement. The odd angle it hung at was proof of that, as well as the fact that it had not healed properly – it would almost definitely need to be rebroken.

They had ripped her finger nails of when she arrived and had carried on doing so all throughout her stay, they had not been done in a week or two which meant it was coming soon. She was not fazed by this. It was child's play, literally in her case. That had been one of the first acts of torture that she had been trained in. The girls in the Red Room would be paired up and ordered to tell each other a lie or a truth. If the girl you had told your chosen option too thought that you had told her a truth when, really, you had told her a lie, you would be able to rip a nail from her finger in that hopes that the pain would teach her to become a better reader of lies. On the other hand, if the girl opposite you guessed correctly she would get the take the nail from your finger to teach you to become a better liar. The girl who lost all ten nails first, before any other girl in the room, would be killed for she was beyond help. It was only done once a year, for the start of the recruiting. The easiest method to kill the weakest girl.

In her first year at the Red Room, Natasha had lost nine nails before a girl had lost her tenth. After the girl had been killed by her competitor, Madame B had called Natalia to her and told her that she expected better from her. She said that If Natalia wanted to survive and thrive as an Agent for her country that she must learn to be better, in all respects.

The next year, Natasha didn't lose a single nail and the girl opposite her had her neck broken by Natalia's own hands – fingernails coated in a deep red polish to mark the occasion – before the nameless girls first nail-less finger had stopped bleeding.

Pulled from the memory, Natasha looked down at her fingers. Many, if not all were swollen and looked infected. While they had allowed Natasha the privileges of a bathroom and three meals a day – even if she couldn't eat them anymore – the lack of cleanliness in her cell and of herself was becoming more and more apparent. Her body was becoming too weak to keep fighting infections. Even with a weaker strand of super-soldier serum running through her veins, she was still only human, and her body couldn't fight alone forever – and neither could she.

It was here, looking down at her fingers that Natasha scoffed. She was ten fingernails down; shouldn't she be dead by now? Meeting her own eyes in the reflection of the wall, Natasha gazed into her own, almost unfamiliar eyes. She had spent a long time avoiding herself in the mirror. Her whole life, practically. Yet, here, in this cell, where no one else could truly see or know her, she braved the ache in her heart and looked at herself.

Natasha Romanoff.

Whatever she had been, whatever she was. She was here now. Tired or not, she could sit here and wait to die, or, she could escape – because yes, even in her state she was still Black Widow and she could do anything she wanted, that was what Clint had said to her when she joined. She could be anyone she wanted to be, do anything she wanted. She had wanted to be a good person, an Avenger. A worthy friend to Tony and a trustworthy partner to Steve. Together they had all played a part in ruining that, but she could still, at least, accept the good she had done (a more than decent selection, really) and die a peaceful life somewhere she chose to die. End the fight on her terms, which is really all she had truly hoped for in her death.

Snapping out of her reverie, she heard footsteps marching towards her door. Placing her hand in front of her she pushed herself into a standing position. However, just before her hand fell back to her side, she brought it back up to her face.

There, on her left hand, on her forth finger – the only one that, while cracked and sore, looked to be free of infection – was a small, still new and beginning fingernail.

For the first time in what felt like years, she smiled. Clearly her fight wasn't over yet.

A win was a long way off, but a chance was right in sight.