Waiting to be bound again

I blink my eyes and slowly I open them. I'm lying on my back, and I can see a white ceiling above me. Wait, now there are pictures on the ceiling… It's a tall tree with a blue sky behind of it, and the next image is a waterfall. If this is a new way of torturing me, showing me pictures of the outside while I can't ever leave this hell, that is just low. Even for them. Softly I start to hear beeps, every couple of seconds… "beep". The rhythm doesn't change, it's going on and on. Slowly I turn my head to the left and see a machine standing next to my bed. I can see a line on it that goes up and down, and there is a stand where some bags with fluids are attached to. There are tubes on there that go all the way to… my arm. Of course, they are probably testing something new on me. I look at my hand, where one of the tubes disappears into my skin, and notice that there is a clean bandage around the tube. Something that they have never done before, until now it has always been a dirty and unhygienic mess. While looking at my hand, I notice two more things. The first one is that my hands are not shackled to the bed, and this confuses me. They have never forgotten something like that. The second thing is that I am lying on a bed, an actual real bed, not the thing I have been sleeping on the last couple of years. It has a comfortable mattress on it with clean sheets and my head is resting on a fluffy pillow. I don't understand what is going on. When I turn my head over to the right, I can see someone sitting on a chair that is a couple of meters away from my bed. I recognize the woman, it's the tall brown haired girl who spoke Russian to me.

She is fast asleep, breathing in and out at a peaceful pace. I watch her and I can't deny that I am curious. None of the guards ever spoke Russian to me. The woman is wearing some jeans with a red blazer on top of it and black boots. A pretty scarf makes the look complete. Her brown hair is hanging loose, and her head was resting on her right shoulder. I concentrate my thoughts on the nameless woman, it has been a long time that I have tried so read someone's mind on purpose but I want to give it a go. I want to know where I am, the only thing that makes sense to me is that I am locked up again by a different group of people. But the clean sheets and the fact that I'm not tied up doesn't add up to that theory. I focus my thoughts on the woman, focus it on her breathing. In, out, in, out. I close my eyes and reach out to her, it's as if my thoughts are orange tentacles softly touching her mind. The moment I feel that I have arrived at the gate of her consciousness, I try to push in. But I am met by a raging storm, red and fierce. It chases me away from the gate, away from the woman, and my eyes snap open. It takes a moment for me to pull myself together again, and when I look at her I am met by emerald green eyes that are observing me. Wait, I could swear that her eyes had been red the last time I'd seen them. She just sits there, looking at me as if she is trying to figure me out. Minutes pass and the only movement she makes is that she tilts her head to the side. I'm afraid to look away.

This is when I can feel the red storm again, only this time it's not a storm but it are strings. She is trying to connect to my mind, I can feel it. The only thing I can think is NO, she can't enter my mind because then they will know that I have been terrified all this time, that they had hurt me and broken me. No, I have to keep my guard up and give them the impression that nothing they can ever do to me will break me. She softly smiles at me when she senses that I am blocking her out. "So, you are a mind reader too, are you?" her voice softly asks. It is a very pleasant voice to hear, there are no hard words and it doesn't sound as if she wants to kill me here and now. But I know that this can just be another trick to get me to give in to obedience. So I stay silent and act as if I didn't hear her, while staring in her eyes. We look at each other for some time before she softly smiles. She picks up her phone and types in a number, putting her phone against her ear. After some seconds the person on the other end of the line must have picked up because she starts talking. "Yes, Shuri it's me. The girl is awake." She waits for a moment, the other side is probably replying, and then she ends the phone call with saying "Yes I'll see you in a couple of minutes."

After some time has passed, one of the doors opens and I see a couple of people walk into the room. One of them I recognize, it's the small redhead that had tried to stop the bleeding when I got shot. She can see me looking at her and she looks back. The last time I saw her she had been wearing that black jumpsuit, but now she is wearing normal clothes. Jeans with a black tank top. I don't know why I keep looking at their clothes, it's has just been a very long time since I have seen somebody wearing something that are not guard clothes or doctor coats. She rests her back against the wall and just looks at me in an intimidating way. The other two people I have not seen before, one is a man with very short light brown hair and blue eyes, and the other is a girl with a beautiful brown skin color, black hair and dark eyes. Then I see that she is wearing a doctor's coat and I freeze, my heartbeat starting to go up. The woman that has been sitting on the chair gets up and walks over to me. "It's okay, Shuri is not going to hurt you. She simply wants to see how your vitals are doing." I don't really understand what she is saying, but at least now I know that the girl is called Shuri. She walks over to the monitor that I had seen when I first opened my eyes, and presses some buttons while keeping an eye on the screen. "The girl is doing pretty good considering the circumstances. But she is still far away from being allowed to leave this room, she needs to heal more. I want her capable of walking without ripping out her stitches, that would be very bad news and she can't use any more of that." the woman with the name Shuri says while giving me a friendly smile. I am confused, she talks about me not being allowed to leave this room but at the same time she is talking about healing me. The man starts to speak "Hello. My name is Clint, the girl who is treating you is Shuri, the one standing at the wall like a statue is Natasha, you have already met her, and the noob over there is Wanda. We are part of the Avengers, and we promise to never hurt you like they did at Hydra. We will try our very best to heal you and help you build a live of your own." He stops talking and gives me a warm smile, he sounds like a really kind man but appearances can deceive.

"Can you talk?" the woman named Wanda asks me. I look at her, I can… well at least I think I still can. I used to be capable of talking, but I stopped talking a long time ago. After looking into her eyes for a couple of seconds I softly nod my head. That is all she is getting from me. "That's very good, little devochka (girl). Is there anything we can get you to help you feel more at ease?" I hold out my left wrist, presented it to them. They were going to lock me up like the others did, I am certain of it, so I might as well save myself the pain of a fight. Wanda looks at me confused, as do Clint and Shuri. "What do you want?" Clint asks me softly, not understanding my behavior. I can't tell them, and the fact that they are not locking me up makes me nervous. I move around in the bed and sweat appears on my forehead. At this point the woman named Natasha pushes herself off the wall and walks over to me. She watches me for a second before sighing, and saying: "She is waiting for us to chain her wrist to the wall." Clint takes a deep breath. "She is waiting for us to lock her up?" Natasha nods. "It's a technique they also used in the Red Room so I am familiar with it." Clint looks shocked by that information and I can see he wants to ask the red head more about it but something holds him back. Probably the look she was giving him, warning him to let it go. "Wanda, can I have your scarf please?" Wanda looks confused but doesn't argue, she removes the scarf from her neck and passes it on to the red head who might be shorter then her, but was looking taller than everyone else in the room. Natasha takes the scarf and walks towards me. She takes hold of the arm I was presenting and wraps it around my wrist, not too tightly but still giving me the pressure my body has gotten used to. "There you go." She softly says. "I am not tying you up to something and I'm not doing this with your other arm, but this should help you sleep." She looks into my eyes and softly adds "It helped me." I don't think anybody else has heard her. She takes a step back and in a normal volume she says "There is a red button over there, press it if you need anything. No matter what it is you need and no matter what time it is." I just look at her. "Can you tell us in some way whether you understood Nat?" Wanda spoke, her voice thick with an accent that I can't place. Slowly I nod, I do understand their words but their actions are a mystery to me. "Good." She says and she sends me a smile. I want to smile back, but I just can't. "Okay now guys, get out of here before I kick your butts out. My patient needs to rest." Shuri says which caused Clint to laugh. "We will get out of here no worries. Get better kiddo! And don't hesitate to press the button when you need us." He gives me a smile and walks out of the room, Shuri, Natasha and Wanda follow him. Before Wanda closes the door, she gives me one more smile.

It takes me a long time before sleep takes over my body, but when it finally does I am not met with a peaceful slumber. There are nightmares all around and the face of Strucker keeps haunting me.