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(no subject)

Who: Natasha Romanoff + various
Broadcast: N/A
Action: Starstruck, Heron, Vanquish, Iskaulit & Siourew
When: Throughout February

Visits - Starstruck & Heron

[Don't let it be said that Natasha Romanoff isn't good to her word. She's said she would pay visits to a couple of ships, and in early February, she proves good to her word.

First on the agenda, she stops in on the Heron. It gets priority because it's not just a social call. She said she'd help Barnes out with his hair—it's obviously been a while since anyone gave it a trim, and he's agreed to trust her enough to help him out. Hopefully Barnes is in. She didn't call ahead to check.

Later, she'll show up on the Starstruck. She's actually been here a couple of times recently, eating Wanda's cookies and stopping by to see Peggy, but she's trying to make more of a habit out of it. Steve clearly wanted her to. And she hasn't seen him on those visits, so here she is again.

In Starstruck's kitchen.

Making herself some coffee.]

Exploring - Siourew

[Natasha takes the opportunity to get down on the planet. Or around it, as the case proves to be. Either way, she's taking advantage of the opportunity to get outside, to see a real sky, breathe fresh air and stretch her legs.

If anyone wants to join her for a hike, she wouldn't turn down the company.]

Hallucinations - Vanquish, Islaulit & Siourew

[As the month wears on, the tone of things changes for the worse. Natasha hadn't assumed she'd escaped the glitches affecting various members of the fleet, but she had seemed no worse for them so far. That changes as the month wears on.

It starts with flashes out of the corner of her eye. Little girls who watch her with eyes too old for their faces. They stand in ones and twos, tucked around corners and in shadows, glimpsed in the reflection in a window, there for only an instant, then gone. It doesn't end there, though. After the flashes, aural hallucinations. Voices come straight from her memory, clear and distinct, speaking in any of half a dozen different languages. They bark orders. Praise her dedication. Quiz her on training. A few words, a phrase, and then they're gone.

Then the visions escalate. The girls stay are no longer just girls. They're ghosts, sporting evidence of the injuries that killed them—they're students she killed along the way, bruised or bearing bullet wounds. Sometimes they're missing eyes, missing mouths. They float in windows.

They don't speak, because the dead don't. They just follow her. Isn't that fitting?

Natasha tries to go about her days normally. She visits the shooting range, or bars. She makes her meals in Vanquishes kitchen and she stops into bars on Iskaulit. She even goes back planetside hoping getting away from the fleet will ease the glitch, but there's no such luck. By the end of the month, she might walk into a room and for five full seconds, it's as though she's stepped into the past, back in Russia, back in the Red Room, watching girls be winnowed away until only the weapons remain, or she might turn a corner and find herself standing face to face with the distorted face of one of her marks from her early days as an assassin. She tries to hide it, but as time goes on, even she can't entirely hide the signs of stress.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tempting. [ she drawls, threading the humour a little more thoroughly into the conversation. ] But I think I'll do without.

Suppose it's not to everyone's taste.

Can't be helped, really. [ a ghost of a smile. ] At the risk of being called old-fashioned.

Not sure it's exactly a new invention.

-- Good God, the way I hear some future folks talk about mocha-bloody-ccinos and what else? [ a shake of her head. in truth, she'd only been riffing on their conversation's subtext, but now is a legitimate opening to complain about coffee. ]

[Natasha smirks at that, torn between being amused by Peggy's cultural displacement and her take on fancy coffees.]

I admit those aren't so much to my taste. But it's just another level of cream and sugar—and if you don't like coffee, you might find you like a gingerbread-orange latte with caramel more.

By that point, it's pretty much a milkshake.

It sounds like madness.

[ peggy doesn't mind a complex meal or a bit of showy baking. but taking a brewed beverage and making it all the more complicated? it's as though it defeats the point. and the thought of all that sugar...

nope. ]

And it sounds expensive.

Probably. You haven't tried it at all?

Coffee? I've had coffee. [ and she's made more carafes than she can count. ] But not the designer kinds.

They're not so bad, if you have a sweet tooth.

[Natasha, on the other hand, seems to prefer her coffee bitter.]

It's all about what you like.

-- Sugar was never easy to come by. Even before the war. [ after all, she grew up in the belt-tightening years after the previous war. ] I like a nice dessert as much as the next person, but none that are all that sweet.

Same with my tea, really. Honey at most.

I can't believe you have me defending Starbucks.

-- Is that the mermaid or the clown?

[ serious questions only. ]

[Very important questions, really.]

Mermaid.

[ scowling: ] Not always a simple task to keep those mascots straight.

I'm pretty sure mascots aren't a recent invention either.

[And if Steve were here, she might shoot him a pointed look.]

-- Of course they're not. [ nor had she said as much. however: ] It's more a case of lacking the communal cultural touchstones the rest of you lot seem to have.

[ even now, plenty of conversations involve trying to convert conversational shorthand to something that makes sense. ]

Which is fair. Just trying to point out that you take a pretty oppositional stance about the future sometimes. Like it's an adversary and you're squaring off to fight.

[This is said with very real sympathy. Natasha is no stranger to culture shock.]

I expect that kind of thing from a soldier, but less from a woman I figure you could drop is just about any country in the world in her own time and not have to worry about her finding a way to blend in.

-- I suspect my face doesn't blend as well in the future as it has in the past. [ which is her way of saying that it's isn't the modernity she fights, but the legacy. she doesn't like it. even its better parts feel heavy and presumptuous. ]

There's a SHIELD agent here. I don't doubt you've crossed his path already. He recognized me in an instant.

We talked briefly. And I don't doubt he recognized you.

[He recognized Natasha, too. Though with as much as her face has been in the news, that was not surprise. Fame is a terrible turn for a spy.]

Faces aren't all that hard to update, if you want to. Though it'd be a shame to lose those curls.

[ peggy laughs. she snags a curl and pulls it straight. ]

Shall I let you in on a secret? They're hardly natural. Little more than pins and elbow grease.

I recognize the style. More elbow grease than people tend to put into their hair these days.

So I've noticed. [ present company excepted, darling. because natasha's hair isn't half-so-lackadaisical as some of the styles she's seen in the fleet.

admittedly, it's a routine that's getting harder and harder to achieve daily when she's got steve rogers bargaining for extra quarters of an hour in bed every morning. ]

[Natasha's hair only ever looks effortless. Same as her makeup. In some ways, Natasha's a lot less in step with modernity than she might pretend.

But she does follow her own advice about blending in.]

Just so long as we're clear I'm not saying you have to change anything wholesale.

-- It's appreciated.

[ despite the negligible nature of the conversation. after all, it's doubtful she'll ever have to blend in with the 21st century. ] As is the attempt to make coffee more palatable. I promise it's appreciated. All of it.

[ no matter how standoffish she gets, or how much she squares up to the future. ]