Chapter II : Touch the sky
Pairing: Natasha Romanoff x Former Hydra Experiment!Fem!Reader
Summary: After years spent inside a HYDRA facility, the outside world is overwhelming, unfamiliar, and impossible to understand. As Natasha tries to guide her away from the only life she's ever known, every new sight becomes a reminder of everything that was stolen from her.
Warnings: Psychological abuse, human experimentation, captivity, trauma, emotional neglect, social isolation, dehumanization, forced conditioning, PTSD themes, institutional abuse, references to child abuse and extreme deprivation.
A/N: This is a bit short, sorry. Please excuse my english as it's not my first language
Series Masterlist Prologue Chapter I
The first difficulty appeared before they even managed to leave the facility.
Natasha had assumed that, once the cell door was open, the young woman would try to get out. That was what most people did when they found themselves locked up against their will. Even those who had been captive for years usually reacted with a mixture of desperation and hope when finally presented with a chance to escape.
While the alarms continued to blare through the complex and the red emergency lights kept flashing overhead, the young woman remained exactly where she was, sitting in the dark corner of the room as if the thought of leaving that place were more terrifying than staying.
Natasha watched that reaction with growing unease.
It didn't seem like a rational decision. The facility was being evacuated. The HYDRA agents had either fled or were being captured. The main power system had suffered significant damage during the assault. Even someone completely unaware of the details of the situation should have understood that staying there posed an obvious danger.
Yet, the young woman showed no intention of moving.
Her eyes remained fixed on Natasha, attentive to her every move, but her body stayed motionless. It was a strange stillness. It lacked the defiant rigidity of someone refusing to obey, as well as the desperation of a person paralyzed by panic. Instead, it looked like the reaction of someone confronted with something entirely unknown.
And perhaps that was exactly what was happening.
As the seconds ticked by, Natasha began to wonder how much this young woman actually knew about the outside world.
The question was deeply unsettling.
From the moment she had seen that room, she had suspected that HYDRA kept her isolated from the rest of the facility. Now she began to wonder if the isolation had been far deeper than she imagined. If for years she had been confined to similar spaces, interacting solely with scientists, guards, and trainers, then it was possible she had never made a decision for herself.
Perhaps no one had ever asked her what she wanted to do.
Perhaps no one had ever given her the option to choose.
Natasha knew all too well what happened when an organization spent years molding a person’s mind.
The Red Room had used different methods, but the goal was the same: to strip someone of their identity until they became a useful tool, to eliminate anything that might interfere with orders, and to replace free will with obedience.
The difference was that Natasha had memories from before all that. She had known another life before the training.
The young woman in front of her perhaps had not.
That possibility was hard to ignore.
"We need to get out of here," she finally said.
She kept her voice low and calm, making sure the words didn't sound like a command.
But something shifted in her expression.
It was a movement so slight that someone else might have missed it. Her eyes darted briefly toward the open door before returning to Natasha.
That confirmed an important suspicion.
Maybe she didn't know all the words, but she understood enough.
Natasha let out a slow breath.
It was a minor relief within a much more complicated situation, but it was a relief nonetheless.
"I'm not going to force you," she continued after a few seconds. "But this place isn't safe anymore."
The young woman looked back at the exit.
For a few moments, she remained completely still.
Then, very slowly, she stood up.
The movement was so simple that anyone could have overlooked it.
However, to Natasha, it carried enormous weight.
Because she hadn't obeyed an order.
The outside world provoked a reaction that Natasha would never forget.
Up until that moment, the young woman had remained relatively contained. Scared, distrustful, vigilant—but still behaving in a way that Natasha could understand.
Everything changed when they crossed the facility's emergency exit.
The moment her feet touched the ground outside, she stopped.
Natasha walked several paces before realizing the girl was no longer following her.
When she turned back to look for her, she found her completely motionless.
She didn't look scared; she didn't look confused. She was simply looking up.
For several seconds, Natasha didn't understand what was happening.
Then, she followed the direction of her gaze.
The young woman was staring at the sky.
A strange sensation began to settle in her chest.
Above them stretched an immense blanket of gray clouds, illuminated by the final rays of the evening. The wind shook the branches of nearby trees, slowly shifting the dry leaves scattered across the ground. It was an ordinary scene—an image so everyday that most people would barely give it a second thought.
However, the young woman’s expression made it impossible to consider it ordinary.
She was watching it as if she were beholding a miracle.
As if she had never seen anything like it.
And the longer she stood there motionless, the harder it became to ignore the conclusion forming in Natasha's mind.
It was possible she really had never seen the sky.
The idea felt so absurd that a part of her tried to reject it immediately. But another part knew that HYDRA was perfectly capable of such a thing.
They had held people captive for decades. They had performed unjustifiable experiments. They had destroyed entire lives in the name of secret projects.
Depriving someone of sunlight for their entire life?
It wasn't even close to the worst thing they had done.
Natasha watched as the young woman slowly raised a hand.
Her fingers reached into the air, as if trying to touch something that remained just out of reach.
The wind stirred a few strands of her hair.
She seemed startled by it.
Then she did it again, over and over, like a child discovering something brand new.
That sight provoked a rage so intense in Natasha that she had to look away for a moment.
Because she wasn't witnessing something beautiful. Not really.
What she was seeing was the evidence of everything that had been stolen from her.
The memories she would never have.
The chance at a normal childhood.
All of it was contained in the simple fascination with which she stared at a sky she should have known her whole life.
The trip on the Quinjet passed in an uncomfortable silence.
Not because the others tried to ignore her; rather, the opposite was true.
Steve, Bruce, and Clint made several discreet attempts to interact with her during the flight, though none met with much success.
Natasha observed each of those attempts from her seat.
He introduced himself with the same quiet kindness he used with practically anyone. He explained who they were and assured her she was safe. He did so without getting too close, fully aware that any sudden movement could make things worse.
The young woman listened—that much was clear.
Her eyes remained fixed on him throughout the entire explanation.
But when Steve finished speaking, there was no response whatsoever.
No questions, no gestures, no sign of recognition. She simply kept watching him.
It wasn't a hostile look, nor was it friendly; it was a strange gaze, as if she were studying him.
Analyzing every word and movement while trying to decide what to do with that information.
Bruce had a bit more success.
Midway through the flight, he offered her a bottle of water.
What happened next confirmed several suspicions Natasha had been gathering since the rescue.
The young woman took the bottle cautiously and began to examine it; she didn't seem interested solely in the water. She inspected the clear plastic, the label, the cap, and even the tiny glints of light reflecting off the surface.
She did it with such absolute concentration that Bruce ended up exchanging a silent look with Natasha.
They both understood the same thing: this wasn't normal curiosity. The reaction suggested something far more worrying.
Because the young woman wasn't looking at a familiar object; she was trying to comprehend an unfamiliar one.
When she finally managed to open it, she took barely a small sip before carefully closing it again. Then, she spent several minutes holding it tightly against her chest.
Natasha felt a sickening pressure settle in her stomach.
Throughout her life, she had seen similar behaviors in people who had suffered extreme deprivation—individuals who hid food even when surrounded by abundance, or people unable to use basic resources because they had learned to act as if those things could vanish at any moment.
Those habits didn't arise spontaneously; they were survival mechanisms, responses developed over years of uncertainty.
And every new detail reinforced the feeling that they were only just beginning to grasp the true extent of what HYDRA had done to her.
Natasha leaned her head back against the seat and watched the young woman for the rest of the journey.
For the first time since the rescue, she began to suspect that the biggest problem wouldn't be the visible scars.
It would be all the others—the ones no one could see.
The ones that remained hidden beneath years of isolation, conditioning, and fear.
And those were precisely the hardest wounds to heal.
