driftfleet | (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

They never came looking for you? [She would have thought they'd want to take her out to protect their secrets if nothing else.]

That's not as easy as it sounds. Especially after I joined SHIELD.

That's something then. [Just thinking about other young ballerinas. Even worlds that haven't crumbled have their cracks.]

[Decades worth of young ballerinas.]

It is.

As far as I know, there haven't been any new Black Widow at least.

You had a special ranking among them?

Not exactly. More like, I was the most famous.

Famous sounds like a bad thing in that line of work.

Depends how you look at it. In some ways, it is. In other ways, there's been dozens of us over the years but if someone's talking about the Black Widow, they're talking about me.

[The way Natasha says it isn't bragging. She's not proud of her reputation. It's just a fact.]

Still not a good thing.

It's probably helpful in leveraging yourself now. Similar to how I assume the codenames and uniforms back home had something to do with having a more intimidating stature. Definitely wasn't needed for protecting my identity.

Depends on the circumstances, honestly. Most of the time I could do without it.

But my identity's been blown for a while now.

Some people are very protective of those. [Kara was initially and Spider-Man was back in the prison.] Does it bother you that yours is blown?

I'm a spy. Of course it bothers me. But... [Natasha sighs, shaking her head.] But it was worth it.

That's something at least. And it is a pretty name. Shame to have to fake it up.