#another call

But now she hesitated.  There were three possible choices.  What she was told, what she wanted and the compromise.

The day she first saw you she was with her handler.  He took her to a park.  It was the first time she had been to America and she wasn’t even exactly sure where she’d been taken.  She wanted to look around and take everything in.  Try the food.  See some tourist things.  Instead, she stayed focused.  Walked like a local.  Drew no attention to herself.  She sat with her handler as he pointed you out.

She watched as you sat down under a tree and ate.  Yo kept trying to encourage a squirrel to come over and take food from your hand.  It would dash forward not quite within your reach and yell at you.  Your face lit up and you laughed every time it happened.  You seemed so beautiful and carefree to Natalia.  So unlike her.  While she took all this in, she was told her mission.  Befriend or seduce you.  Steal your research.  Destroy all records of it.  No witnesses.

So that’s what she did.  She spent two weeks tailing you.  Learning your routine.  You were so unlike anyone she had been sent after before.  In the past, it was always powerful men who posed a threat.  Men who knew how much power they had and wielded it like a weapon, causing pain to anyone within their reach.  Men who liked girls who were young and innocent.  Who they could humiliate and dominate.  They were always worse than the Red Room.  She had come to believe that this was the world. Horrible people taking out worse people. There was nowhere better than the Red Room.  It was either the controlled hell within or the chaotic hell without.

Following you for two weeks and Natalia started to see a new world.  One where there was actually good.  Where people weren’t always out for their own wants and desires.  Where they took time to enjoy the little things.  They stopped to pet dogs.  They gave money to homeless people.  They stopped and listened to street performers and left them tips.  Where when they smiled it didn’t look predatory.  When they laughed and it reached their eyes.  Where when they wanted to do something to entertain themselves it didn’t involve hurting other people.

When Natalia organized your first encounter it was at a bookstore.  She had watched you for a while as you browsed the aisles, picking up books and looking them over, before putting them back again.  She set herself up so as you came around the shelves, you bumped into her knocking the stack of books from her hands.  The books were selected specifically because she knew you liked them.  Not your favorites.  Those she’d already read.  These were the second tier.  The ones you recommend but didn’t go back to.

When you had slammed into her it has gone exactly as expected.  You’d apologized profusely, helping her to her feet.  As you’d started gathering her books up, you had commented on first how many there were.  Natalia had laughed and said that she had a book addiction problem.  When you had commented on how great her choices were she had started talking about her favorites.  Which were, of course, yours too.  You had engaged even better than she had expected.  Normally her targets expected other people to come for them.  You were so innocent and naive.  You spoke so animatedly and with such joy that when Natalia asked if you’d like to get coffee you hadn’t even thought about why this beautiful woman would do such a thing.  All you thought was this was just like in a book and how lucky you were that you had found someone who had all the characteristics of being the one.

As you had excitedly talked about yourself over coffee and then lunch, Natalia didn’t feel so much like she was taking out a dangerous predator as she was leading a lamb to the slaughter.

After that, you started dating.  You had trusted so quickly and loved so easily that Natalia’s will had started to falter.  It was the first time she had ever faltered in her resolve to carry out a mission.  She kept telling herself over and over this was about your job.  You may seem like a nice person.  A kind person.  You might act like a person falling in love but whatever you did for a living was obviously counter to that which just made you a liar.  She could take out a liar.  They were no better than anyone else.  To be able to go about your day to day life acting like you were so sweet and innocent when you were doing something heinous to earn money was worse even.  At least her other targets didn’t try to pretend.

Only it wasn’t that either.  When she’d asked what you did you told her willingly.  She thought it would take much more, but you happily talked about your work.  How you had developed an HIV vaccine.  How it was in its final testing phases.  How you had been approaching big business with the idea of funding it to be freely distributed in third world countries.

Natalia had started to question everything about herself.  This mission.  You.  But the programming was strong.  No bonds.  No bonds.  She was a widow, and she would be again.

The night you had invited her into your home was the night she planned to strike.  You had cooked for her.  Her favorite meal.  Something your mother had taught you.  So good was Natalia’s backstory that you believed to have even these things in common.  She had eaten it and you knew things were off, but you comforted her.  When she said she wasn’t sure if she had what it took to do her job, you had said you knew she could do anything she put her mind to.

That night you had made love.

Natalia didn’t know that was a thing that could happen.  She knew what it was like to be forced.  She knew what it was like to act the innocent girl while men attempted to defile her.  She knew the pain.  Humiliation.  She knew how to dominate.  To make men beg her.  To have them call her mistress.  To have them grovel at her feet.

Now as she lay watching you sleep, your chest slowly rising and falling as you breathed, all she could think about was last night.  How tenderly you kissed her.  How softly you had touched her skin.  The way your hands felt as you cupped her breasts and teased her nipples until they formed hardened peaks and started aching for more of you.  More and more, which you gave it to her willingly.  She came for you again and again under your hands and mouth.  Her mind kept drifting back to your mouth.  The way you used it expertly on you.  To kiss her.  To suckle on her breasts.   To suck on her clit and lick her pussy.

She had done the same for you, using the things she already knew and adapting them to your desires.  Only your desires were for connection with her.  So she looked up at you as he went down on you and as the taste of your sex filled her mouth she watched as you came apart.  When you came she drank it up willingly wanting more.

You had fallen asleep tangled in her arms and Natalia had gotten up and gone to your computer and stolen everything.  She had looked at you sleeping as she considered how she now had to kill you, but instead, she had climbed back into bed with you.  Now the time had come and if she didn’t act soon you would wake and the mission would be a failure.

She wondered for a moment if this hesitation was a sign of love.  Was that what you did when you loved another person?  You spared them?

She got up and pulled on her clothes.  If that was what love was she would do it.  She would spare you your life, but she would also spare you knowing what she was.  She grabbed the memory card and slipped it into her pocket before retreating outside.  She closed the front door to the building and was about to start walking when an arrow whizzed through the air and pierced her right through the shoulder.

She screamed and grabbed at it, but her muscles started to seize up thanks to the neurotoxin on the arrowhead.  She fought through.  That was what Natasha always did.  She pulled at the arrow and when someone landed on the ground beside her she turned on them aggressively even as her body stopped obeying her.

There was a slightly scruffy, bruised man with sandy hair and wearing a purple coat pointing a bow and arrow at her.  “Why didn’t you kill her?”  He asked.

“Who are you?”  She asked.

“Agent Clint Barton.  I’m with the strategic homeland intervention enforcement and logistics division.”  He said the arrow held steady on her.  “Now answer my question.”

“Didn’t seem right.  She hasn’t done anything wrong.”  Natalia answered.  “Why haven’t you killed me?”