[right] ██████ ████
Moscow[/right]

“Наталья.”

It is a rare moment of lucidity. 

The training room is quiet. It is late, shadows stretching across stark lines and concrete. She knows that it will not last—she leaves in six hours for somewhere, and they will dose her before she leaves. She will be instinct and fangs and a Widow.

Right now, she is something else entirely. The facility is secured for the night, handlers returned to plush rooms and tools returned to their proper places. But while she isn’t quite a woman, she’s more than a tool, and she used [i]their[/i] training to steal through rooms neutered in their emptiness.

She breathes deep, looking down into dark eyes, presses her forearm deeper into his windpipe. It does not hold him for long. A moment later he surges forward, and she catches a sharp blow to her ribs when she slips away. They tense, strafing each other in perfect silence. He watches her with something like pride, something like humor, and her own lips quirk in response.

[color=#cc0000] “Иаков.”[/color] 

[hr]

[right]August ████
Madripoor[/right]

Everything is supposed to be red. Her blood is thrumming with [i]fightfightfight[/i], and her body moves with another’s command. She knows this, knows the haze and the rush, knows that she will hunt and kill and kill and kill until she finds the right prey. Those distant, flickering thoughts should not be here yet. She is still in a humid summer, curled around a thing in a suit, still batting her lashes and playing at adoration. She doesn’t stop, [i]can’t[/i] stop, fingers curling around silk and pulling its face closer to hers.

Its eyes are supposed to be [i]red[/i]. 

She breathes it in and it tumbles into her web of poisoned lips. She lets it slump back, rising to her feet, and tries to find her thoughts again, but they slip away, and she follows the smoke back to her mission.

[hr]

[right]Lisbon, Portugal[/right]


She’d gotten Clint going. She’d undoubtedly regret this later, thick in a firefight with him chattering in her ear about T-shirt ideas and tangentially related stories. Natasha arched a brow as he dove right into another story, barely taking a moment to breathe.

And then he was armed and moving. Natasha moved on pure instinct, reaching beneath the desk to close long fingers about the butt of the glock squirreled away there. He spoke as he moved, and Natasha was already pulling Sam’s sweater over her head, moving for her gear.

Readying for war was muscle memory, as natural as breathing, slipping into black and red. Holsters strapped, weapons placed, spare ammunition already staged. Bites locked, armed, and she was snapping laptops shut, collapsing their work center into a massive, silver case. 

She met Clint in the hall, following him through the silent hallways, every sense trained on the environment. They neared the door when she threw out an arm to stop Clint, slinking back into the shadows near the empty reception desk. Footsteps. Maybe a dozen. She’d hoped that a raid on Yuri hadn’t meant that they’d known about [i]their[/i] monitoring. No such luck.

[color=#cc0000] “Company,”[/color] she said curtly, and then paused as a smirk lit up her lips. [color=#cc0000] “I’ll race you to the car. Winner gets to choose where we eat next.”[/color]