CALLA WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING with an empty space beside her and a faint, crinkled outline of where Natasha had been. There seemed to be a blurry space in her mind where the previous night's events should have been, but instead there was nothing but an endless vortex of static. Crinkling her forehead, the girl let out a soft breath as she sat up and glanced over at her alarm clock, feeling a sense of rest that she had never felt before. 

It was certainly weird. 

In fact, she had to do a double-take at the alarm clock, almost not believing its accuracy. "Oh shit," the teen murmured, nearly falling on her face as she scrambled out of bed. Under normal circumstances she would have basked in a few more moments of astonishment and pride, perhaps shouting it from the rooftops and gloating to Tony; but today was different. Peggy's funeral had been scheduled much earlier than anyone expected, but of course no one had the heart to question it. A Quinjet was reserved, and anyone who wished to attend was welcome to. 

Calla had absolutely no qualms about joining Steve in paying his respects. The super-soldier had been taking Calla to visit Peggy for years; and, after losing all of her own family, the girl welcomed any new relationships that came her way.

The world was a little dimmer without Peggy Carter in it. 

Pushing herself across the room, Calla stumbled over to her closet and sorted through a large mound of clothes that had been piling up over the past week or so. Laundry had never been her forte, but she did have a knack for collecting, apparently. The teen pulled out the first black item of clothing that she saw, and stifled a groan upon realizing it was a dress.

Calla quickly tore off her shorts and tank top and added it to the ever growing pile, then dove face-first into the dress as she attempted to wriggle it over her head. In her defense, she had worn approximately four dresses in her lifetime, three of which were during her early childhood years. 

She didn't like to talk about the fourth, as, ironically, it was under similar circumstances to these. Life seemed to enjoy taking a spinning wheel and taunting her in whatever way it landed it. The Wheel of Un-Fortune, perhaps. 

Her arms flailed as she tried to pull it down, but such a task was a little difficult when said limbs were being restricted.

A sudden knock at her door sent her already foggy mind into a frenzy, as the blindness and partial paralysis of her upper half were occupying most of her attention. "A little busy in here," Calla shouted out, voice slightly muffled by the fabric.

"It's Natasha. The Quinjet's leaving in half an hour - I wanted to make sure you were up. I also have something I wanted to talk to you about. Can I come in?" the woman spoke up from behind the teen's bedroom door.

With an inward groan, Calla stopped wrestling with her dress, letting her arms stick up like a six-year-old who landed the part of a tree in their school musical. "Help," her defeated voice replied.

Calla could almost feel Natasha's confusion as the door opened, revealing a lanky teenager who had fought beside the Avengers on countless occasions with nothing but her bare hands, and who was now trapped inside of her own dress. Though Calla couldn't exactly see what was going on due to the damn thing being stuck over her head, she could, however, hear Natasha struggling to hold back laughter. 

"What . . . the hell is going on?" the redheaded inquired amusedly, and presumably with her arms crossed over her chest, as usual. "Do I even want to know?"

With a chuckle purely from frustration, Calla turned around so that her back was facing Natasha. "Doesn't matter. Just help me get this thing on, please," the girl practically begged.

"Okay, alright, just stop fussing, unless you want to walk into a wall." With one swift movement, Natasha unzipped the back of the dress and slid it down the teen's shoulders before zipping it up again, chuckling as Calla dramatically inhaled a breath of air. "There."

"I can't believe I'm wearing this thing. I look like an emo version of an elf, Nat - and I love Christmas, but this is wrong on so many levels. If you see an incinerator in your Amazon cart, don't worry about it."

Natasha nodded along to the girl's enthusiastic rant, relieved (but unsurprised) to see her in such normal spirits. It had been four years since her mother's and twin sister's funeral, and the redhead rarely, if ever, heard her speak of it. She only hoped Calla had grieved in her own, odd, little way - not that Natasha was by any means an expert at emotional intelligence. That didn't stop her from worrying about the kid, though. "Noted."

As Calla slipped on a pair of flats, her attention suddenly turned toward the woman, who had taken a seat on the teen's bed. "Oh - did you want to talk to me about something? Sorry, my monologuing got the better of me."

Natasha let a small half-grin appear on her face as she waited a moment to respond, wanting to choose her words carefully. Calla seemed to understand and remained seated on the floor, head patiently propped up against the wall as she rubbed the last remnants of sleep off of her eyes.

It was an undeniably melancholy day outside of the Compound walls. Though thick, grey clouds had settled over upstate New York, the sun shined persistently from behind them, and beams of bright light reflected off of the tall windowpanes that were scattered across the building. If they were about to head to a funeral, Calla would have said it was a nice day. 

"So, I managed to get in contact with Fury about where you fell in terms of the Accords, if he would force your signature, all of that," Natasha started, and Calla's focus immediately traveled to her, her breath hitching from anticipation. "After the fall of SHIELD, anyone who knew his name, now thinks he's six feet underground - so if he wants to maintain that, he can't sign any documents as your legal guardian. He has a whole new identity and has been moving around with the few loyal SHIELD agents that were left. I asked him why he never transferred your guardianship to someone else beforehand, but he laughed and asked me if I 'really thought he was that stupid.' Apparently, he transferred all guardianship to, uh . . . me, two weeks before his supposed death," Natasha sputtered out, almost not believing the words she was saying. "He left it in his will, so it wouldn't leave a paper trail behind."

Calla's lips parted ever so slightly, eyes widening in astonishment. She could have shouted out seventeen different sentences with different clauses and grammatical intricacies that Steve enjoyed lecturing her about; but only one word seemed to force its way out of her lungs. "Wow . . ."

She was, quite honestly, a bit at a loss for words. The girl liked to think that she and Natasha were friends, after the hundreds of several-hour-long training sessions and many late-night philosophical chats. The woman knew a surface level picture of Calla's life story, and that's usually as far as they ventured into their personal lives. Natasha was far from a sharer, though she never objected to listening to Calla ramble on about trivial fun-facts and random thoughts that made her absolutely bounce off the walls with rare enthusiasm. 

"Obviously it doesn't carry any real weight, other than signing my name on any forms and legalities that involve you, but I just thought I should let you know before we fly out to London, since I'm heading off to Vienna directly afterwards for the signing of the Accords. You still have a few hours to decide what you want to do. I'll, of course, be signing for you, but I can't force you to abide by them. That's all you."

With a pat on the girl's leg, Natasha stood up and moved to walk out of the ajar door, heels clacking against the hardwood floor and resonating with Calla's ears like a steady heartbeat would. 

"Calla Wolfe-Romanoff has a cool ring to it; even if it doesn't carry any real weight," the teen spoke up, the corner of her mouth twitching upwards into a faint grin; and Natasha couldn't deny that it made her heart thump a few extra times - though she quickly composed herself, pushing down the fact that her chest could have exploded right then and there at the mention of those three conjoined monikers. 

Sure, they didn't know much about each other - but for two awfully private people, they were the closest kind of 'friends' that each other had.

The woman's green eyes looked back at Calla for a short moment, watching as she continued to pull at the tight seams of her dress and roll her shoulders uncomfortably with an aura of awkward, childlike annoyance. Natasha inwardly chuckled.

Maybe Fury - that conniving, arrogant, deceiving bastard - knew what he was doing after all. 

"Quinjet leaves in fifteen minutes. Please do not get stuck in another dress."

-•-•-

a/n;
the relationship b/w cal &
nat is so important, but it'll
only get more angsty as the
story progresses-- uH oOPS.

ya'll don't even want to know
what i have planned for endgame
oh god oh fuck

but yeah, next chap is the funeral