Wednesday 14th November, 1990

Budapest, city of spires.

The skies were a watercolour of greys, daubed inconsistently with splotches darker and patches lighter. Shafts of cold sunlight split the murky heavens, bisecting the caliginous shadow that masked the ground.

Snow flitted down in feathery particles, veiling the city, obscuring the distance. Snow stuck in archways, and gathered in the nooks and crannies of the bigger buildings; the first snowfall of the year.

Steeples, turrets and domes silhouetted the skyline, the gothic buildings with their barbed embellishments and ornamented arches on a Goliath scale. Beige brick, terracotta tiles and wrought-iron augmentations.

Lanes and roads intersected shabby streets, with crooked paving-slabs, wobbling cobbles, and slanted buildings. Window frames were set awry in their sockets, and doors lopsided in their frames. The potholes in the pavements were the vestiges of weathering winters, and defaced and derelict buildings, the face of a bureaucratic nation.

Bullet holes marred walls, other buildings singed down to their skeletons, flame-licked and scorched from arson. The insignia of the rebel cause branded bleak alleyways on dislodged bricks in walls, sprayed in cursory font. Rubble remained, sites of rebellions, debris torn down in the riots.

The citizens spirits were as dampened as the dank backstreets, with mossy flagstones and eroded cement. People hustled and busted about their business, the roads choking, sidewalks busting, alleys teeming - a veritable hive, buzzing, alive.

They suffered in the damp, garbed austerely, not enough to save them from the bitter chill, or conceal them from the snow. Children shivered, burrowing into their mothers sides, teeth chattering in their skulls. Families convened on street corners, huddling under awnings, and the least fortunate advertised their misfortune, scrounging, begging virtuous strangers.

The wind bit, and Natasha winced, her lips tingling, numb. She loitered under a spiny archway that resembled a crown of thorns.

She was on the outskirts of the Great Market Hall, looking in. The crammed circus was brimming with produce, stuffed with people, crowded with stalls. A cacophony of voices rung out, accented, their poetic language like a stave of classical music.

A concoction of smells wafted through: steam scented with aromatics from a local delicacy vendor - garlic, chilli, onions, freshly fried -, the briney stench of fish a few days old, limply tossed on a bed of ice, the pong of a cheese salesmen a few stalls down, his produce pungent.

The colours were indigenous to the marketplace; advertisements with bold signage, vivid fonts, in bright plastic boxes. The goods of the exotic fruit salesman were like a tropical rainforest; obscure foodstuffs, like a rainbow, on display. A silk seller further down in the bustle had a rippling stock of materials; patterned, embroidered, dyed, all waving like flags in the wind.

Natasha surveyed it with a solemn smile, this was their normality, the normality that she would never have. Labouring on a stall, selling fresh food, and bringing home income to an unconditionally loving family. Her hand dropped to her belly, she fingered the outcrop of her scar through her blouse. It would've been a small life, a simple life, a quiet life.

Perhaps the reason she'd been blessed with leafy green eyes was that she was born to look up, and envy, what she was never to have.

She loved the colours of the outside world, beyond the platitude blank walls of the facility, only broken up by ripped propaganda posters that curled at the corners and creased down the middle. She loved the smells of the food, a juxtaposition to the tasteless slop they dished up in bowls, that bubbled and churned like a bog. She loved the sounds, anything but the sound of anguish, dripping, and gunfire; so much merriment.

She hadn't time to dwell, and memories lurked on every corner, spectres in streets, echoes she'd rather forget.

She slipped inconspicuously through the crowds, just another body in the throng, making her way to the rendezvous point.

"Palm reading! Fortunes! Find out your future here!" Cried a withered old woman, with gnarly fingers like twigs, and wisps of silver hair. "Know your destiny! Grasp your potential!" She advertised, her fingers weaving in the air, wrists jangling with bangles and bracelets.

The paths clogged, Natasha was forced to listen to her villainous cackles and vain cries.

"Have your palm read! Retrocognition! Precognition!" She crowed like a raven, the tassels on her clothing twirling in the breeze, her necklaces clinking where they were tangled at her sagging breasts. "Young one! Oh, young one!" She called out, attention drawn to the red-head in the crowd.

Natasha caught her eye, then turned away.

"Yes! You there! Young one! With your flame hair!" She grappled for her attention, her loud clothes the most eye catching in the grubby grey market. "Palm reading! Only three-hundred forints!"

Then, from the crowd, Natasha's wrist was snatched, and she was wrangled to one side.

"Allow me to read your palm, young one! Know your future!" She addressed Natasha, her bony fingers trapping her, trembling with both the cold and infirmity.

"I'd rather not, I'm really not interested..." Natasha dismissed her.

"For you, young one, I'll do it for two-hundred and fifty! Pity on a pretty face! What do you say?" The old woman's eyes, winged with wrinkles, pleaded. Her placid complexion, baggy clothes and bloodshot eyes elicited a spark of empathy, and Natasha resolved.

"Fine..." Natasha relented, fishing out allotted money from her wallet. "What do you see?" She entrusted her hand to the cradling cold hand of the fortune teller.

A lean finger traced the lines scored across her palm, the old woman's lips pursed with concentration.

"Your love line, so many lines crossed through it!" She announced, the wrinkles in her forehead only deepening. "You have lost so many, dear child. Failed romances are aplenty..." As she shook her head, her earrings jangled, the clutter drooping from her earlobes mingling. "But wait, not just romances... I see family." Natasha's shoulders seized up. "I see a father figure-" Her lips drew together. "-no, no! - I see parents!"

"I'm not sure this is a wise investment..." Natasha uttered, trying the snake her hand free, but gaunt fingers clamped down.

"No, no; please! I have more! The transaction is already made!" She insisted, her kohl smeared eyes darkening. "Your... Your fertility line; it's not in good shape, young one." She informed her, then cocked her head. "No, not young..." She concluded. "The lines on your hand hold age; you've seen labour and lived labour," she remarked. "You're- something is wrong?"

The woman's attention was stolen from the palm by the snivelling Natasha was emitting, her brow creased, and chewing her lip.

"Plenty. If I can stop wasting my time, I'm on a tight schedule-" She snagged her hand free and turned, only to be faced by an impenetrable flock of people.

"I see a man!" The old woman prophesied, a wrinkled arm reaching out to try and draw Natasha back, the bracelets jingling like a wind-chime.

"I'm sure you see plenty!" Natasha spat back, shooting a glare over her shoulder before scouting out a gap to join the concourse of people.

"No! Your paths have not crossed yet!" She frantically flailed at the Black Widow, preaching her wares.

"I don't need another man in my life. They've been nothing but trouble!" Natasha hollered back to be heard over the the sound of the rowdy fruit and veg salesmen across the way.

"There's a difference between what you want and what you need, old one," the old soothsayer did dare dub her.

"I know what I need! I can look after myself!" Natasha retorted, finally intercepting the rushing stream and starting to sail away.

"He can't look after himself!" She shouted back, her voice lost in the tempestuous sea of people.

Her hands trembling, Natasha made a sharp exit, trying not to let the words bother her. Seething, she ploughed on through and re-emerged on the other side of the bazaar.

~

A coffee helped her clear her head in an open square. Black, a shock of caffeine, utilitarian in nature. She hadn't the patience for trivialities such as froth and chocolate sprinkles, or for frivolous ornamentations such as milk, alcohol shots or sugar; which destroyed the very bitter essence of the thing.

It was hot enough to scorch her tongue, and it felt like a fire pit inside of her by the time it reached her belly. Good.

She occupied a lone table out on the cobblestones that tipped in the wind on the uneven ground, the saucer sliding on the metal tabletop as it swayed. It clanked and rattled, an ambience she was attuned to, almost homely. She was the only person foolish enough to sit out in the snowfall, drinking her coffee outside of the quaint café.

The temperature didn't bother her. Growing up in Russia, she had learnt to survive the hostile winters, and had even come to love them. Flashes of a city forked through her mind like lightning. Volgograd- or was it Stalingrad? Did it matter? Trained in the Siberian snow in shorts and a tank top helped build up a resistance to the cold, or at least, that's what she told herself. And she wasn't the type to complain about something as trifling as the temperature; and the word 'discomfort' was long since erased from her vocabulary.

The coffee cup was searing hot in her palms, the porcelain conducting the warmth into her future-telling palms. She missed the pinch of an engagement ring on her finger, and the way it used to click against things she held; the skin felt bare where it used to sit, exposed. She sipped, shuddering as the drink rolled through her.

She was going to savour the coffee, they had no such commodities back at the base, and her palette screamed it's thanks for the satiation.

She tried to commit the details of the place to memory, they were things she could squander like a miser when she was returned to the base and its four grey walls. Her quarters. Her prison. She could shut her eyes and replay it on the back of her eyelids, and make believe that she was free.

The fountain, the rushing sound it made as the spray landed in the basin, the amount of faucets it had. The arrangement of the cobblestones, and how they sounded under foot. The smell of car fumes that got trapped between buildings and funnelled out in the square where they converged. The distant dissonance of cars, chugging past through the slush of unsettled snow, and their shrill car horns.

What it would be to own her own car. What it would be to have anything truly her own. She snorted and slurped at her coffee again, the scarlet of her lipstick staining the rim of the mug.

A thought hung in the air about how long it would be until she would be sent on a mission again, or if her time keeping was as sound as she'd suspected - Alexi had planted doubts in her mind. Small seeds of doubts that she nurtured with every revisitation, that were blossoming into trees. Like, she knew Natasha wasn't her real name, but her real name was beyond the reaches her imagination.

Imagination, that was something they'd drummed out of her. And something Alexi had injected back into her. That's when she'd realised just how deep inside her skull they'd embedded themselves. How indoctrinated she really was, even with her internalised rejection of the Red Room, her silent rebellion.

If it wasn't for the fact she was completely certain she was being watched, she would've made a break for it. It was as easy as dashing into the open and never meeting at the collection point. Adopt a new name, a new face, a new place.

A scrap of fabric flew from a nearby rooftop, a vandalised Soviet flag, the hammer and sickle snipped clean off, fell. If only the entire regime was that easy to fell. She banished the thought sharply, her sense of self-preservation kicking in.

She finished her coffee and used the mug as a paperweight for her currency, paying the cheque.

She took her leave.

A/N - Yes, I know, it's about bloody time. Hope the third person didn't throw anyone too much, but this will be how it is formatted from here on out, flippant POV changes every 2000 words would make you feel restless and is unprofessional (is that a pun? I think that's a pun!)

Today I am off to London MCM Comic Con, dressed as Wanda Maximoff, who knows, might bump into some of you today! I have a Hydra pin on my LEFT lapel on my red leather jacket, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. Necklace; otherwise I look like MCU Aou Wanda❤️

Dedication when I'm not in a rush!