my house in Budapest, my hidden treasure chest (closed)

[bornrussian]

WHO: Natasha and Various people!
WHERE: the Aerie
WHEN: July 2512 (November 2020) + backflashes all over the place
WHAT: AU Event Thread Catch-All
NOTES OR WARNINGS: mentions of violence and cruelty, self-harm, adult language, promiscuity, so much angst

Nothing to see under the cut. It's all in the comments

Comments

baby, if you hold me / then all of this will go away (CLOSED to Gene)

[bornrussian]

[Set in some nebulous time after her Quarry win.]

After the Quarry, time slips and slides. Breakfast with her pre-Quarry publicist stretches out for a year, Natasha picking at a single hard-boiled egg for months before she's able to force it down. Then three weeks pass in as many minutes.

It all moves too fast or too slow, and Natasha keeps stumbling along though her legs threaten to cut out from underneath her.

There's a party.

(There are so many parties.)

A designer drops off a cocktail dress with intricate hand-beaded fringe that leaves Natasha's legs and shoulders bare.

She somehow feels both over and underdressed the moment she puts it on.

The floors of the party are smooth marble, the space lit by a million strings of light strung across the vaulted ceilings.

Glass after glass of champagne is pressed into Natasha's hand until the lights start blurring together and voices flow into each other.

There are tables laden with food. The kind of food she'd never even seen before her luck ran out and a shrike caught her redhanded. In between glasses of champagne, and too long conversations where she's lost within the first couple of words, she eats too much. New flavors fill her mouth, and even when her belly clenches, she doesn't stop. Who knows when she'll next have the change to eat? Who knows if it will taste like this?

The party stretches on forever, Natasha passing between strangers who either ignore her or ask her about the Quarry like they have a right to know.

Were you scared?
Is your ankle doing better? You broke it, right? Oh, only a sprain? How dull.
Which kill would you say was the hardest?
Do you have any regrets?
Out of everyone there, do you think you were the most deserving to survive?
What are your tips for future contestants?
Did you sleep with anyone there? Did you want to, though?
What does it feel like to kill a man?

It all spins and spins. Faster and faster. Like a merry-go-round she can't get off. The music and the voices rise to a deafening crescendo. There's a quiet pop then silence. Four faces stare at Natasha and she blinks at them.

In the silence, she looks down at her hand. There used to be a delicate champagne flute in it. Now there's nothing but shards of glass and blood.

Oh.

Thirty minutes later -- uncertain how she got there -- Natasha stands in a small clinic, clutching a blood soaked cocktail napkin in her hand and shivering from the cold night air. Did she wear a coat to the party? She can't remember. She's not wearing one now.

The young man's face is familiar. She flashes on kind words and gentle hands helping her out of clothes caked with blood and mud after the Quarry. Everyone in the room worked on her like they didn't see her, stitching her back up like she was a quilt or burst pillow. But he met her eyes and squeezed her hand when her spine bowed with pain.

"I know you." The words are dull, a little lost. She sways on her feet, fingers curling a little tighter around the bloodied cocktail napkin in her hand. Through the haze of too much champagne, she can barely feel the shards of glass as they cut a little deeper.

[preseance]

"Easy, easy." His voice is soft. If there's one thing he knows from treating shell-shock, it's that the words matter less than the tone. And he knows that look — glassy-eyed and wild. It's a thing that follows just about every Quarry winner whether they want it to or not. The few that come out none the worse for wear probably have something else going on in their minds anyhow.

He'd been washing up instruments, but when she enters he sets them aside and comes to stand just shy of her, reaching out to steady her elbow. The trick is to never quite look at them, never quite stand directly in front of them. He's good at looking like he isn't a threat — his first Quarry patient just about put him through a wall, until he learned to mute certain things about himself.

He recognizes her, in that distant way he tends to recognize all his patients over the years. He knows the wounds she had, the ones he treated. He remembers the vivid shock of her hair, red against her skin. It takes him a moment longer to reach for the name, but when he says it it's with certainty — "Natasha, isn't it? You ought to sit down before you hurt yourself. Come on, there you go." He helps her into a chair beside his cabinet, and holding her wrist gently so she doesn't move it much he rummages around in the top drawer for an ABD pad, which he tears open with his teeth and puts down on her thigh so he can lower her hand down on it.

"How you doing, you all right?" Her breathing's a bit keyed up, but her pulse is no higher than he'd expect from someone climbing stairs. She's in shock, but she's not clammy with it. An easy fix, at least of the physical sort.

[bornrussian]

Someone brought her there, Natasha thinks. They took the time to lead her out of the party and to someone who might help, but they're gone now. She can almost remember a touch against her bare elbow, fingers digging tight against the knot of bones so close beneath her skin.

Maybe if she looks, she'll see marks of their fingers left against her skin. Maybe she could hunt them down after with nothing but those marks to go on. A twisted version of that fairytale with the prince and the commoner and-- what was it she left behind at the ball? A glove? No. Her shoe.

Who leaves a party without their shoe?

The tumble of thoughts is interrupted by her name on his lips -- everyone knows her name -- and his hands settling on her and guiding her into a chair. His hands are as gentle as she remembers, and she stumbles unsteadily -- her too tall heels are strapped tight to her feet for her to lose them -- where he directs.

There's something almost pliable to the way she lets him move her around. Like she's a doll to be posed at will. It's not far off from the truth these days, she supposes.

Natasha's eyes follow his movements dully as he pulls things out, his fingers firm around her wrist, and she frowns down at the white pad when he settles her hand down on it. The frown deepens at his question. She can't remember the last time someone asked her that.

(That's a lie. Outside the Quarry, there was a short concrete tunnel, and in it, Bucky Barnes. His arms wrapped tight around her, his nose pressed into her hair. Are you okay? And inside of her, the growing anger found a target.)

Something hot rolls down Natasha's cheek, and drips down on her hand. She blinks down at it, her throat suddenly so thick she can barely breathe through it. She tries to lift her hand, finds it trapped. She tries the other one, and when it moves freely, she wipes the back of it across her cheeks.

"I don't remember your name." The admission comes slow and thick. "You wrapped my ankle. After the Quarry." It's not all he did. He worked on the cuts and scrapes too, the knife wound she'd bandaged up as best she could. It got infected before the end of the Quarry. By the time he unwrapped her makeshift bandage, it already throbbed with heat. Gave her a fever, she thinks. Or maybe that was something else.

"I'm sorry."

if you take my hand (CLOSED to other!Bucky)

[bornrussian]

In the moments before they are all sent into the Quarry, restless bodies all crammed into the same tunnel and trying not to look at each other, a strange kind of calm settles across Natasha.

Her fingers are still warm with the memory of Bucky's hand in hers. He'd leaned in close just before they came to take her away, his breath warm against the shell of her ear.

You take every opportunity you get.
Come back to me.

The Quarry lies ahead of her, all she needs to do is get through it. On the other side, Bucky awaits, and with him the chance to carve out a life for themselves.

She can do this.

The Quarry looks like no other -- Natasha remembers the smiling face of the man who designed their deaths as he claimed this was one to remember -- with tall walls built out of trees intertwined with each other towering above each contestant and leading them down winding paths towards the center. Of course, some of them dead end into traps, others into little pockets of safety.

Through it all, a cold wind blows hard enough to cut through the contestants, rustling the thick carpet of slowly rotting leaves that cover the slick dirt of the ground.

It doesn't take long for the calm to evaporate and fear to climb into the space it leaves behind.

Later, she'll have trouble remembering the order of events. Does she twist her ankle before she finds the cunningly hidden box with the slim knife? Or is it after she finds herself cupping her hand to drink out of a puddle? The knife comes before her first kill, that she knows for certain. Because afterwards -- her body bruised from the assault, his body like a fallen tree trunk on the ground -- she couldn't slip the knife free from between his ribs. She sat on the forest floor, the cold of the wet leaves seeping through her pants, tears gathering in her eyes and tug-tug-tugging at her chest, as she tried to pull the knife free, cursing under her breath as it stayed stuck.

The man catches her before twilight. His body is twice the size of hers. She remembers him from the interviews, and from two moons ago when his triumphant smile was splayed wide across the larger than life screens. He's a snipe.

The fight is quick. A graceless scramble with his body pinning hers against the forrest floor within the first three seconds, a meaty hand wrapped tight around her throat and stealing her breath. It's her left hand that finds the knife, her fingers clumsy and losing their grip between their bodies, and pushes it into his chest. Bucky taught her where to stab to ensure a killing blow, but it's different when the body on top of hers is that of a stranger and he's squeezing her throat hard enough her vision begins to dim around the edges.

Then, as suddenly as it begun, it's over. His fingers loosen around her neck, and his body collapses on top of her. The hilt of the knife digs against her chest until she finds enough strength to shove the dead man away.

His body tumbles onto the rotting leaves, eyes staring unseeing up at the sky, the knife lodged in his chest.

Hands slick with blood, Natasha tries to pull it out. Her fingers slip and slide against the hilt, and despite her best efforts, the blade stays right where she put it. She ends up sitting on her ass next to the corpse, trying to find her breath, waiting for the tremors to go away.

How long she spends, sitting next to her slain would-be-killer, Natasha doesn't know. But she is pulled out of her strange trance by a crunch of leaves under a boot. Her eyes snap up just as a second man rounds the corner.

Without her knife, she has nothing. Some sort of instinct makes her scramble to her knees and she throws up her hands, covered in dirt and dried blood, her eyes wide and shining bright with tears.

"Please! Don't!" The note of pleading trembles through her voice. "Not like this."