Natasha was erroneously benign, Clint concluded. She had run some not-so-errant errands that were nothing to do with employment. His mission didn't entail a sequestered walk along the secluded banks of the Danube, whilst engrossed in a book. Alongside her in her flapping beige trenchcoat, were the dull and murky depths of the river, rippling, and rollicking and spraying onto the banks in gusts of wind. The body of water seemed alive at such proximity, roaring as it rushed by, and ripping the town in two.

"I think it's on Stalingrad," Clint denoted, trying to make gawking through a pair of binoculars look surreptitious. "What the hell has Stalingrad got to do with anything?" Clint relayed the information, unable to decrypt her enigmatic behaviours that seemed to lead her all over the city.

Natasha was rapaciously reading through the book, rapidly turning the pages as she consumed the information compiled on the history of what she'd known as Volgograd. She'd been starved of outside influences for so long; everything that entered the Red Room was falsified, classified, and desensitised. At the base, she could never be certain that the sources she consumed had any foundation in the truth; the truth was reserved for the deserving.

What was the truth anyway? What did it matter? Surely any version of a story you put your faith in is the truth? Your truth? Or did the truth remain the truth regardless of you regarded as the truth?

Natasha couldn't fill her head with those dissonances, conflicting ideologies about aligning her mind with her duty, and wanting to strip every layer of propaganda, proselytization, and prejudice from her brain.

The fact remained that the truth had been concealed from her, and a decade had been stolen from her since she'd last checked the date; slipped through her fingers like grains in an hourglass.

Her lithe fingers tracing line after line of foreign script, she flipped the fluttering page to reach the gaping gap between the last page of the book and the cover that closed around it. The hardback made a satisfying clap as she slammed it shut. She closed it with closure, and wanting to dispose of her dissenting materials, she threw the book into the river as if trying to skim a stone on the sea.

She'd done much the same with the newspaper earlier on, dumping it in a flaming bin that herberts huddled around in their hovel. It had stoked the hungry fire, pages crackling as the flames engulfed them, a burp-like black plumage rising as the ink combusted, and the pages and curled in. The paper diminished to dust before riding the smoke upwards.

The pages of her book waved their goodbye in the wind, fanning out, before flopping on the river. Hardly a ripple was made amongst the tumultuous tide, and the book bobbed amongst the rest of the detritus that had gathered at the edges of the frothing river, before the opaque waters swallowed the parchment and ink down, and dragged it into the stomach of the churning river.

"She tossed it in!" Clint cried, incredulous, and tailed her back into the town; over the chain bridge and strolling by the parliament with its terracotta tiles and ivory spires that seemed the spear the clouds on their tips.

But finally, she rendezvoused. If it hadn't been for his eyesight like that of a bird of prey, he would've missed the exchange; the tip of the hat of a passerby and the swapping of a manila file that matched her raincoat. Not a word was exchanged, but the transmission of information was done flawlessly.

Her job was to get the sensitive information back to her sub-standard hotel room, with its grotty bathroom with tarnished taps, and the single bed with its starchy bedspread and itchy synthetic blanket. It was still a step up from the facility, but she almost missed the metronome perfect dripping that accompanied her in her quarters. And instead of her pillowcase smelling of sweat and smuggled vodka, it smelt like cheap detergent.

She kept her face neutral, acting as if compromising documents hadn't just been tucked under her arm. It wasn't difficult; she'd been practicing pretences for years, and having numbed herself to her emotions, it was easy being impassive. She was as wooden and expressionless as a puppet, and Clint couldn't help but observe her rigid manner.

As she entered the lobby of her hotel, Clint broke away and lingered outside in the dingy bed and breakfast. "The place she's staying in looks worse than one of those motels you find on deserted highways..." He uttered into his collar, frivolously rubbing his hands together to drum some warmth into them. 

Natasha arrived back at her hotel room, with the door wonky on its hinges. She crammed the tarnished key into the stiff lock and muscled her way in, faced with a room even less appealing than the chipped wooden door.

She flung her coat on the floor and kicked her heels off, her feet hitting the unheated wooden flooring, and frisbeed the file onto the bed. She flopped down onto the bed with it's drab floral bedspread, the springs digging into her bag through the deflated mattress. She gave herself a reprieve, trying to recuperate after the jewellery store incident. 

Finally feeling alone, with no one but the four peeling-wallpapered wall to judge her, she broke down. She strew a hand over her mouth, trying to cage her sobs behind lips and teeth. Her lipstick, red as blood, stained the back of her hands, and black smudges from her mascara, black as night,  ran down her cheeks. The rage she had stashed within her heart translated to lament, and she rolled over, hugging a pillow.

"I miss you Alexi," she whispered, praying by some miracle that he could hear her; but the thunderous clouds hardly looked hospitable. Heaven was far from Earth. 

She felt fragility, she felt vulnerability, she felt insecurity. And then the guilt flooded her system like a hit of heroin. She hadn't survived all of this time to weep over a man, she hadn't taking lashings to sob over a man, she hadn't killed her way to the top to cry over a man. 

She went to the bathroom, snivelling, and stared herself down in the mirror. She looked like a clown, with her caked makeup smeared about, it was comedic, seeing a women of such prepossessing power reduced to a wreck. 

She ran the taps and splashed water on her face, towelling away the watercolours dripping from her cheeks impatiently. She was unmasked. A thought occured to her: for how many years had she worn this face? Without a stray grey hair wired into her head, without a wrinkle on her babushka-perfect face. They'd preserved her like a relic, she'd been denied the right to grow old gracefully and waste away like an autumn leaf on the breeze. They'd defied nature.

Her cat-like green eyes had never changed, apart from they'd lost their sparkle: like a dull emerald in a century old ring. And she was paraded around like an heirloom of the Soviets, a symbol of times before, obselete, displaced from her time of origin; she didn't want to be treated like a trinket any longer. 

Did she not deserve her out? But she suspected unemployment came at the price of death. 

Perishing the thought and turning her mind back to service, she scooped her auburn locks up and ripped a strip of material from her standard issue black tank top; knotting it behind her head. She stepped back into the main room, and grabbed the file from the bed.

She flipped through. They'd dubbed the mission 'Tiny Dancer', the horrible irony of giving it such a capitalist consumerist name. Natasha felt her guts knot when she read the briefing. 

There was to be a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet's Swan Lake - anything that didn't involve Russian music would've been seen as a crime against the Soviet empire, Tchaikovsky was a paradigm of their culture - and Natasha's job was the prospect the innocent and unknowing young girls, and pick out the ones who had potential for KGB agents. 

Natasha hadn't understood as a child why the ballet was such a perfect place for recruitment; but now, having served with the Red Room facility for nearly a century - still that kicked up panic in her heart - she understood clearly. If you were capable of the acrobatic and contortionist moves, you had potentiality for martial arts. If you could survive the brutal training regiment, you had potentiality to survive the back-breaking regime of the Red Room, the insomniac hours, the minimal nutrition. If you were willing to parade on the stage a symbols of the nation, you'd be susceptible to the indoctrination of their scheme. But she'd always been the black swan. The ugly duckling. Never the perfect ballerina or soldier. 

A note was attached, in Aleksander in his sharp and jagged scrawl, a spot of ink dripped on the page as a full stop; a product of his overpriced fountain pen. 'I hope you like the dress and heels, Tsarina.' 

Natasha looked back to the door where a black bag on a coat-hanger had been hooked on the door; that explained the squiffiness of the door. It looked as morbid as a body bag, and she was convinced the revealing dresses might one day be the death of her. She unzipped it with morbid curiosity, the scarlet satin spilling out in a waterfall, black lace lingerie accompanying it; a holster sewn into the top of the stockings; the garter belt hid the sheathe for a hunting knife, and she mustered a smile. The dress was to die for. 

In the bottom of the bag was her artillery; a wash-kit armed with a pair of handguns and an arsenal of makeup. She wondered what trouble she might encounter at the ballet, though she'd had the sense someone was lurking in her shadow for the whole day; and like an echo off a cave wall, the words of the old soothsayer in the Grand Bazaar came back to her. 'I see a man! No! Your paths have not crossed yet!' and 'He can't look after himself' so she only hoped; it would make slitting his throat all the easier. 

She tucked away her emotions, compartmentalizing, and functioned like a machine. 

She applied her makeup like warpaint in the grotty light of the bathroom, sat on the rim of the rotten plastic bathtub, with rot around the edge of the plug and hair clogging the holes. She wore the dress like armour, weapons stashed in places where only uninvited eyes would linger; and no sooner than they did, they would never linger again. She'd often thought of levering the eyes of perverts out of their sockets, but then she would've made her way through the entirety of the male programme at the Red Room, including Lukin himself. 

She peered out of the window to see the sun setting over Budapest, the light dropping low enough to be seen between the spires and the dense layer of clouds, lightly obscured by the low lying cumulonimbus on the horizon. The spires intersected the orange band of light, silhouetted black against the sky. Then she looked down into the street where she'd be trudging through the snow in rhinestone heels.

A figure loitered, by the foyer, looking up the window every now and then; juvenile in face, and mumbling into his collar. Jackpot, she'd found the weasel who'd been on her scent all day. She applied perfume to her pulse points, giving him something to sniff out, and pulled her elbow length gloves up her arms like a criminal wary of leaving fingerprints. 

"Got you," she whispered, drawing the curtains and making for the door. "Tili tili bom, close your eyes now," she sung eerily, remembering the rhyme Ivan used to sing her to sleep with. "Someone's walking outside the house, and knocks on the door..." She flicked the light switch off and slipped out of the hotel room silently, dropping the key into her clutch. "Tili tili bom, the nightbirds are chirping, he is inside the house, to visit those who can't sleep..." She made her way down the corridor, curls draped across her face, falling loose from her bun. "He walks, he is coming... closer..."

A/N - I know it's been a long time since I updated, but I hope this was to your tastes, I know it's lacking in dialogue, but I think a lot can be said and shown through actions that words just can't convey.

Dedication goes to @JustLettingGo, for helping me through a lot of shit. Particularly my mental health. About time I did a dedication. x