day 1, clumsygyrl, 1173/150
mini nanowrimo- day one
**author's note** i started writing this about a month or two ago. the "word limit count" is for the last two sections i've written "sunnydale" and "tokyo" specifically.
that being said. it's not complete. i still have one more section or the last in the five + one style of this fic.
concrit welcome!
-----
The Five Times in Natalia Romanova's Life She Was Asked and One Time When She Did the Asking
une: paris (The Losers)
The blade is sharp. Sharp enough that the flesh gives easily and almost prettily against her flesh. Her blood is red, copper penny bright. She smiles at her captor and spits out a mouth full of blood, saliva, and a tooth. The smile is so pleasant and slightly terrifying, he steps back even if he is the one holding the knife.
“I will be taking that from you in a moment,” she says and she knows that her larynx is bruised. Her voice is whiskey rough and she's always preferred vodka over darker spirits. Call her a cliché, but vodka cures most of her ills.
“If you would simply move us from this impasse, petite-fils,” Max smiles at her, full of smarm and charm.
Her arms are tied in front of her, that is their first mistake. That they haven't killed her yet is their second.
Max looks bored and Natalia is even more so. “I have contacts and plenty of backing capital. I just need you to take care of a problem for me. There is a team I want... erased.”
Natalia blows her bangs out of her eyes and tracks the man with the knife as he circles behind her. Max steps away to answer a call.
It's enough time. Before Max can turn back, she has her torturer on his stomach with his neck snapped. Her hands are on her knife and Max barely makes it out of the room with his skin unbroken.
The sounds from Montmarte are faint, but Natalia knows where she is.
She makes sure to collect her shoes and purse before wiping her knife clean and straightening her stockings. This wasn't her worst blind date, but it was certainly not the best.
“Losers,” she says shutting the hotel room door with a decisive click.
dva: moscow (Red Room)
The room is white, not red.
Her vision is blurry and the world moves much faster around her now, or maybe it is she that is moving so much slower. She aches all over as if she's spent her entire day and night doing jumps across the floor. Madame Dovonich will be angry with her if she is late again. She pushes her body up from the floor and wonders why she is not dressed in her leotard and why her feet are bare, without tape or toe shoes.
“Lyubimaya moya.”
She smiles at the man and the words.
“Are you ready to begin again?”
She blinks and nods then shakes her head. “Nyet. No, no.”
The world goes dark.
She wakes and she's lying among white sheets, and the room is still not red.
The man next to her is looking at her and there is a wry twist to his lips.
She is seventeen and she knows now she is no ballerina and never has been.
“Oh, sweetheart,” the man touches her hair, curls a cold metal finger around it and gives it a familiar tug.
Her eyes shut and the world goes away again.
Her eyes open and the man is there with a stranger.
She is twenty and there have been missions and kills and deaths and gunfire. The room she is in is a pale blue and the mattress she lies on is clean but careworn with ancient springs.
The man with the cold arm and the warm smile cups her face with his almost too hot hand. “He's going to take you away, but you're sure you won't join me?”
“Nyet, no. I..”
He kisses her for the first time.
No.
“We have kissed many times before,” she says and he rests his forehead against hers. The gesture is familiar but it is new at the same time.
Time. Her head aches and there are fragments and snippets of blood and laboratories and visions of needles and drugs. Timetimetimetime.
“I keep losing time. Losing sight of you,” she says and grasps both his forearms, one cool and one warm under her palms.
“That happens, kid. They're going to find me and put me under again. Run, sweetheart. Run fast and hard and dodge. You remember everything I taught you.”
“How? I can't even... I can't remember you,” she knows she wants to cry but the tears do not come.
He presses a kiss to her forehead, like a blessing. “I can't remember you at first. Then it comes back. They send me after you or make me find you. Best assignments are you. This is Henre. He's going to help you. Unscramble your brain. I... I think I knew his brother. His brother remembers me or did or does,” he whispers.
Natalia closes her eyes when he does.
The world fades and she is alone.
a trí: cardiff (Torchwood/Dr. Who)
“She's a valuable asset.”
“You're only saying that because, Captain, you'd like to-.”
“I really am not saying that,” Jack crosses his arm over his chest and grins. It's cocksure and blindingly white. “Besides Doctor Jones, it's not as if I've ever had trouble mixing pleasure with business.”
Martha shakes her head and tosses the file down onto the cafe table. “UNIT won't want her.”
“Well, I do,” Jack says leaning in and then there's a snick and thud.
A thin blade, shiny in pale light of the setting Welsh sun, sticks up from the flat expanse of the file folder.
“Is that a yes?” Jack asks out into the shadows.
The second knife skims his throat and embeds itself in the lamp post.
“You do have a certain way with the ladies, Captain,” Martha says reholstering her gun.
Jack swallows and gives her a slightly dimmer smile. “You know, you're not the first one to tell me so, Doctor Jones.
cuatro: sunnydale university, california (Buffy, The Vampire Slayer)
“We could use someone with your expertise,” the man in the tac vest and assault rifle says and Natalia smirks at him.
“Many men have said that to me,” she eyes him up and down. “Some have worn less when doing so.”
The pretty little man blushes hotly and it is something unexpected that makes Natalia's smile grow wider. “Er, I could take you to see the Doc. She'd know what to do. You could do so much good.”
Natalia outright laughs in the pretty man's face. He is All American as the pretty little Californian campus could promise. “Oh, you are rather precious.” She wipes the blood off her hands and rises smoothly to her feet. “I do not do good.”
His face wrinkles in confusion. “But you just killed that demon.”
She smooths down her skirt, straightens her tights and gives him a sharp toothed grin. The air is still hazed from ash and bone. “Precious boy, I am a demon. Just the human variety.” She pauses to really look at him. “You should find someone for yourself. A heroine who will fight the good fight with you. A strong one.” She tilts her head and sees the barely there two decades on his face. His name is Riley and she mourns for what he will lose if he continues to fight against the dark. The feeling is still foreign to her. Feeling anything for anyone is still foreign to her even after all these years after breaking from - She shakes her head to lose the thought. She will mourn, however, what he will gain in the process.
“Find some happiness, Riley Finn. You're too young to kill,” Natalia steps around him light and quick. “It does not suit you.”
Riley turns quickly. “You can't be older than I am! How do you know my name?”
Natalia doesn't answer and he doesn't chase after her. He also does not deny her words.
It is probably the smartest thing she's seen him do all night.
go: tokyo (S.H.I.E.L.D.)
The feeling on the streets is like the thrum of a live wire crackling and sparking in the open air. Natalia sips her moon drink and watches the people move in lines and amorphous blobs of humanity. It is just past 1900 and she has kept to herself. A battered backpack rests against the cement column where she sits. Her hair is in braids and her shirt proclaims a university from a decade of aliases past. She thinks there still might be ash and blood in the seams. She is every American college student on an adventure in the Far East.
Her personage is a lie in the play that the world has created.
She knows her lines well, however, and when the bland faced man approaches her to ask her for the time she knows that the scene has changed. She smiles politely and answers in halting Japanese and shrugs when he smiles at her. “I am sorry,” she enunciates carefully in a slightly American Georgia drawl. (She could very well enunciate more clearly a Georgian phrase than an American one, but that was not what was needed for the character.) “I don't have a watch on.”
“American?”
“Yup!”
She shoulders her pack and gives the man a nod. “If you will excuse me, I have to go now. It would not do well for me to be late for my appointment.”
The man's smile is blander still. “Of course. Thank you for your help.”
She smiles back, brightly and tucks the blond hair behind her ear. “You are welcome.”
She walks with purpose toward the underground and she feels more than she hears the aberration in sound. The platform is empty. Her body tenses and she knows that she's walked into something that she has not foreseen for today's travel. She is prepared. She is always prepared.
She presses her back against a wall and scans the area. “Show yourself.” The Southern drawl is gone and her voice is cold.
The thwack of something embedding itself right above her shoulder is enough to get her to let her knives slip down into her hands. She makes an aborted roll but is pinned by her sweatshirt and the arrow sunk into the tile. “I will kill you.”
“Funny, that was supposed to be my job,” a voice calls out, amused and taunting.
She slips out of the overly large sweatshirt and pushes herself into a shadowed corner. “You are bad at your job.”
“I'm really not.”
She scans the empty platform and sees one of the darker shadows move. She's quick and lethal in her throw and the sound of metal slicing through cloth and sinking into meat makes her smile. “I am better than you.”
A body tumbles to the ground with a loud grunt.
The sound of it hitting the cement is even more satisfying. She stands over the man with the square rough jaw and watches him pull her knife from his side. “Son of a bitch. Goddamn it.”
Natalia smiles when he pouts at her. The smile is almost real. “I could have killed you by now.”
“Why haven't you?” The man asks and he pushes himself up with blood streaming from his side.
She knows who he is or at least who he is representing. The price on her head has only grown since she's decided to pick and chose her clients. “I'm waiting to see what you will offer me.”
He glares at her and sets her knife down by his hip. There is sound and commotion at the mouth of the stairs. It will not and would not take her long to escape from the area; it would not take much to end his life before doing so. They both know it. “A life where someone else could watch your back. Aren't you tired of running, Natalia?”
That makes her pause. She has done nothing but run since waking up again. “Running is what I know.”
The man grins and there is a look in his eyes that she recognizes. It is one that she has seen in her own gaze. “How about we give you somewhere to run to instead?”
She eyes him and watches his hand get slicker with his own blood but his eyes are trained on hers, steady and strong even as his face pales. “Perhaps it would not be bad working on a consistent basis with a group who values my skills.”
“Well, let me tell you about S.H.I.E.L.D. then,” he says and winces when she uses her sweatshirt to staunch his bleeding wound. “My name's Barton, Clint Barton, by the way.”
Her palms presses harder against the wad of fabric. “You already know my name.”
Clint inclines his head. “I do. So, Natalia, before my boss comes in wanting to shoot you, let me tell you about the awesome benefits for working for us could entail.”
Her laugh echoes against white tile and hard cement.
tbc with -
the one: the avengers (The Avengers)
so, possibly 150 was a very conservative estimation of how wordy i can be...whoops.
**author's note** i started writing this about a month or two ago. the "word limit count" is for the last two sections i've written "sunnydale" and "tokyo" specifically.
that being said. it's not complete. i still have one more section or the last in the five + one style of this fic.
concrit welcome!
-----
The Five Times in Natalia Romanova's Life She Was Asked and One Time When She Did the Asking
une: paris (The Losers)
The blade is sharp. Sharp enough that the flesh gives easily and almost prettily against her flesh. Her blood is red, copper penny bright. She smiles at her captor and spits out a mouth full of blood, saliva, and a tooth. The smile is so pleasant and slightly terrifying, he steps back even if he is the one holding the knife.
“I will be taking that from you in a moment,” she says and she knows that her larynx is bruised. Her voice is whiskey rough and she's always preferred vodka over darker spirits. Call her a cliché, but vodka cures most of her ills.
“If you would simply move us from this impasse, petite-fils,” Max smiles at her, full of smarm and charm.
Her arms are tied in front of her, that is their first mistake. That they haven't killed her yet is their second.
Max looks bored and Natalia is even more so. “I have contacts and plenty of backing capital. I just need you to take care of a problem for me. There is a team I want... erased.”
Natalia blows her bangs out of her eyes and tracks the man with the knife as he circles behind her. Max steps away to answer a call.
It's enough time. Before Max can turn back, she has her torturer on his stomach with his neck snapped. Her hands are on her knife and Max barely makes it out of the room with his skin unbroken.
The sounds from Montmarte are faint, but Natalia knows where she is.
She makes sure to collect her shoes and purse before wiping her knife clean and straightening her stockings. This wasn't her worst blind date, but it was certainly not the best.
“Losers,” she says shutting the hotel room door with a decisive click.
dva: moscow (Red Room)
The room is white, not red.
Her vision is blurry and the world moves much faster around her now, or maybe it is she that is moving so much slower. She aches all over as if she's spent her entire day and night doing jumps across the floor. Madame Dovonich will be angry with her if she is late again. She pushes her body up from the floor and wonders why she is not dressed in her leotard and why her feet are bare, without tape or toe shoes.
“Lyubimaya moya.”
She smiles at the man and the words.
“Are you ready to begin again?”
She blinks and nods then shakes her head. “Nyet. No, no.”
The world goes dark.
She wakes and she's lying among white sheets, and the room is still not red.
The man next to her is looking at her and there is a wry twist to his lips.
She is seventeen and she knows now she is no ballerina and never has been.
“Oh, sweetheart,” the man touches her hair, curls a cold metal finger around it and gives it a familiar tug.
Her eyes shut and the world goes away again.
Her eyes open and the man is there with a stranger.
She is twenty and there have been missions and kills and deaths and gunfire. The room she is in is a pale blue and the mattress she lies on is clean but careworn with ancient springs.
The man with the cold arm and the warm smile cups her face with his almost too hot hand. “He's going to take you away, but you're sure you won't join me?”
“Nyet, no. I..”
He kisses her for the first time.
No.
“We have kissed many times before,” she says and he rests his forehead against hers. The gesture is familiar but it is new at the same time.
Time. Her head aches and there are fragments and snippets of blood and laboratories and visions of needles and drugs. Timetimetimetime.
“I keep losing time. Losing sight of you,” she says and grasps both his forearms, one cool and one warm under her palms.
“That happens, kid. They're going to find me and put me under again. Run, sweetheart. Run fast and hard and dodge. You remember everything I taught you.”
“How? I can't even... I can't remember you,” she knows she wants to cry but the tears do not come.
He presses a kiss to her forehead, like a blessing. “I can't remember you at first. Then it comes back. They send me after you or make me find you. Best assignments are you. This is Henre. He's going to help you. Unscramble your brain. I... I think I knew his brother. His brother remembers me or did or does,” he whispers.
Natalia closes her eyes when he does.
The world fades and she is alone.
a trí: cardiff (Torchwood/Dr. Who)
“She's a valuable asset.”
“You're only saying that because, Captain, you'd like to-.”
“I really am not saying that,” Jack crosses his arm over his chest and grins. It's cocksure and blindingly white. “Besides Doctor Jones, it's not as if I've ever had trouble mixing pleasure with business.”
Martha shakes her head and tosses the file down onto the cafe table. “UNIT won't want her.”
“Well, I do,” Jack says leaning in and then there's a snick and thud.
A thin blade, shiny in pale light of the setting Welsh sun, sticks up from the flat expanse of the file folder.
“Is that a yes?” Jack asks out into the shadows.
The second knife skims his throat and embeds itself in the lamp post.
“You do have a certain way with the ladies, Captain,” Martha says reholstering her gun.
Jack swallows and gives her a slightly dimmer smile. “You know, you're not the first one to tell me so, Doctor Jones.
cuatro: sunnydale university, california (Buffy, The Vampire Slayer)
“We could use someone with your expertise,” the man in the tac vest and assault rifle says and Natalia smirks at him.
“Many men have said that to me,” she eyes him up and down. “Some have worn less when doing so.”
The pretty little man blushes hotly and it is something unexpected that makes Natalia's smile grow wider. “Er, I could take you to see the Doc. She'd know what to do. You could do so much good.”
Natalia outright laughs in the pretty man's face. He is All American as the pretty little Californian campus could promise. “Oh, you are rather precious.” She wipes the blood off her hands and rises smoothly to her feet. “I do not do good.”
His face wrinkles in confusion. “But you just killed that demon.”
She smooths down her skirt, straightens her tights and gives him a sharp toothed grin. The air is still hazed from ash and bone. “Precious boy, I am a demon. Just the human variety.” She pauses to really look at him. “You should find someone for yourself. A heroine who will fight the good fight with you. A strong one.” She tilts her head and sees the barely there two decades on his face. His name is Riley and she mourns for what he will lose if he continues to fight against the dark. The feeling is still foreign to her. Feeling anything for anyone is still foreign to her even after all these years after breaking from - She shakes her head to lose the thought. She will mourn, however, what he will gain in the process.
“Find some happiness, Riley Finn. You're too young to kill,” Natalia steps around him light and quick. “It does not suit you.”
Riley turns quickly. “You can't be older than I am! How do you know my name?”
Natalia doesn't answer and he doesn't chase after her. He also does not deny her words.
It is probably the smartest thing she's seen him do all night.
go: tokyo (S.H.I.E.L.D.)
The feeling on the streets is like the thrum of a live wire crackling and sparking in the open air. Natalia sips her moon drink and watches the people move in lines and amorphous blobs of humanity. It is just past 1900 and she has kept to herself. A battered backpack rests against the cement column where she sits. Her hair is in braids and her shirt proclaims a university from a decade of aliases past. She thinks there still might be ash and blood in the seams. She is every American college student on an adventure in the Far East.
Her personage is a lie in the play that the world has created.
She knows her lines well, however, and when the bland faced man approaches her to ask her for the time she knows that the scene has changed. She smiles politely and answers in halting Japanese and shrugs when he smiles at her. “I am sorry,” she enunciates carefully in a slightly American Georgia drawl. (She could very well enunciate more clearly a Georgian phrase than an American one, but that was not what was needed for the character.) “I don't have a watch on.”
“American?”
“Yup!”
She shoulders her pack and gives the man a nod. “If you will excuse me, I have to go now. It would not do well for me to be late for my appointment.”
The man's smile is blander still. “Of course. Thank you for your help.”
She smiles back, brightly and tucks the blond hair behind her ear. “You are welcome.”
She walks with purpose toward the underground and she feels more than she hears the aberration in sound. The platform is empty. Her body tenses and she knows that she's walked into something that she has not foreseen for today's travel. She is prepared. She is always prepared.
She presses her back against a wall and scans the area. “Show yourself.” The Southern drawl is gone and her voice is cold.
The thwack of something embedding itself right above her shoulder is enough to get her to let her knives slip down into her hands. She makes an aborted roll but is pinned by her sweatshirt and the arrow sunk into the tile. “I will kill you.”
“Funny, that was supposed to be my job,” a voice calls out, amused and taunting.
She slips out of the overly large sweatshirt and pushes herself into a shadowed corner. “You are bad at your job.”
“I'm really not.”
She scans the empty platform and sees one of the darker shadows move. She's quick and lethal in her throw and the sound of metal slicing through cloth and sinking into meat makes her smile. “I am better than you.”
A body tumbles to the ground with a loud grunt.
The sound of it hitting the cement is even more satisfying. She stands over the man with the square rough jaw and watches him pull her knife from his side. “Son of a bitch. Goddamn it.”
Natalia smiles when he pouts at her. The smile is almost real. “I could have killed you by now.”
“Why haven't you?” The man asks and he pushes himself up with blood streaming from his side.
She knows who he is or at least who he is representing. The price on her head has only grown since she's decided to pick and chose her clients. “I'm waiting to see what you will offer me.”
He glares at her and sets her knife down by his hip. There is sound and commotion at the mouth of the stairs. It will not and would not take her long to escape from the area; it would not take much to end his life before doing so. They both know it. “A life where someone else could watch your back. Aren't you tired of running, Natalia?”
That makes her pause. She has done nothing but run since waking up again. “Running is what I know.”
The man grins and there is a look in his eyes that she recognizes. It is one that she has seen in her own gaze. “How about we give you somewhere to run to instead?”
She eyes him and watches his hand get slicker with his own blood but his eyes are trained on hers, steady and strong even as his face pales. “Perhaps it would not be bad working on a consistent basis with a group who values my skills.”
“Well, let me tell you about S.H.I.E.L.D. then,” he says and winces when she uses her sweatshirt to staunch his bleeding wound. “My name's Barton, Clint Barton, by the way.”
Her palms presses harder against the wad of fabric. “You already know my name.”
Clint inclines his head. “I do. So, Natalia, before my boss comes in wanting to shoot you, let me tell you about the awesome benefits for working for us could entail.”
Her laugh echoes against white tile and hard cement.
tbc with -
the one: the avengers (The Avengers)
so, possibly 150 was a very conservative estimation of how wordy i can be...whoops.