You’ve been on the floor for a while now, though time has started to blur—minutes or something much longer, you can’t really tell anymore. Your body doesn’t fully respond, like everything arrives delayed, heavy, disorganized. Your head doesn’t exactly hurt, but it’s filled with a dull noise—thoughts that never quite form, dissolving before they can become anything clear.

The house is silent, but not in a peaceful way. It’s one of those loaded silences where you can hear the fridge humming in the kitchen, the ticking clock somewhere down the hallway, light slipping through the window without changing anything. Everything looks normal from the outside, but you’re too far from that normality to reach it.

It’s hard to hold yourself up. It’s not a sudden collapse, more like that moment when your body stops coordinating with what you want to do, and you end up on the floor without fully deciding it. The last thing is still tangled in your mind—that urge to shut everything off, to quiet the noise of HYDRA that never really goes away completely, always coming back in broken memories, flashes, sensations you never asked for.

The door opens.

The sound cuts through the house differently than everything else. It isn’t loud, but it changes the air. Footsteps enter firmly, without hesitation, moving through the space with a kind of certainty that doesn’t need to look around to understand what’s happening.

They stop when they see you.

The silence that follows isn’t shock or panic—it’s a brief moment of assessment, of reading the scene without words. Then movement resumes, but now with direction.

They come closer.

There’s no rush, but no unnecessary delay either. Every step is controlled, precise, like even in situations like this the body already knows what to do. They crouch beside you in one smooth motion, coming down to your level without overwhelming you, but also without keeping distance.

Natasha Romanoff is there.

She doesn’t look away from you even once. Her eyes go straight to your condition—how you’re breathing, how you’re holding yourself on the floor. She doesn’t scan the rest of the house more than she needs to. She doesn’t look for explanations outside because she already understands too quickly where the problem is.

You’re not fully present. You are, and you aren’t. Your body feels heavy, your mind still caught in that distant state where everything feels far away. And still, you recognize her, even like this. Not as just anyone. She’s the person who got you out of HYDRA, the one who took you in when there was nothing stable left, the one who became the closest thing to a mother figure in your life without needing to say it out loud.

So her presence isn’t unfamiliar. It’s known. But it’s also too real right now.

She fully crouches beside you. Her hand comes in just enough to check that you’re conscious, that you’re still here—no shaking, no force, just minimal contact, steady and careful, like anything sudden might break you further.

“Look at me.” Her voice is low, firm, close.

It takes effort to focus, but you do. The world is still unstable, but she isn’t. She’s the only fixed point in the room.

Her eyes don’t leave yours.

And even though her expression stays controlled, there’s something in the way she remains there with you that doesn’t change: she’s not going anywhere. Not now. Not in this state. Not with you on the floor like this.

The question comes after, direct, without detours, but not harsh.

“What did you take?” There’s no judgment in her voice, but there is immediate clarity about what she’s seeing. About what’s happening. About why you’re like this on the floor, your body out of sync and your mind far away, trying to escape whatever keeps coming back even when you don’t want it to.