𝑩𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝑴𝒐𝒐𝒏 ✘ 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐅𝐅

{2¹⁴} {EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD}

∆ {2¹⁴} {EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD} ∆

Triskelion, November 2011

CIGARETTE SMOKE WRAPPED itself around Venus as she sat on the balcony down the hall from her room, the stars glaring down on her as if flashing warnings about the habit she had found herself in the last few months. It was past midnight, coming up 1am, and Venus couldn't find it in herself to care.

Late nights were something that she'd ever found abnormal until she had been forced to start infiltrating the real world on her missions, ones that had carried promise of the slick assignments like the one she'd carried out in Vienna, not the brutal reality that they hadn't quite been prepared for anything, and that perhaps, awful as they were, the Red Room were right about some things. Budapest had told her that. She still had every detail of the place they'd been kept overnight engrained in her memory, though memories such as that one seemed to become clearer in times like this, where Venus could allow at least some of her thoughts to drift away on the wind with the grey fumes that furled away from her.

She'd got out of Budapest just in time, however, as only a day and a half later, a large, important building only a couple of streets had been blown up. There had been no survivors, and Venus felt as though there was very little chance that Clint and Natalia hadn't been involved with it. She wasn't quite sure what had happened, why they'd risked such a large explosion; Budapest had been very hard to leave for days afterwards, so she figured that it must've been something important.

Venus breathed out, and watched the smoke furl and tumble in the night air, allowing her features to change, because even Natasha was normally shut in her room at this time. Her lips curled down with something of a mocking sneer - something that felt foreign on her usually blank face, but somehow infinitely satisfying.

Even the smoke, the thing that she used to escape from the reality that she'd never wanted, seemed to be taunting her, carrying the fanciful hope of some miracle that might make her somewhat normal away with it. It would lie somewhere on the ground later, shattered into dew drops that reminded her far too much of the mirror for her liking, and maybe some random innocent would stumble upon it, cutting themself on the glass that still held flashes of naive golden eyes, a frightened expression, and a whisper of tainted english. But again, Venus couldn't bring herself to care. That was how she'd been raised after all, to care for nothing but the mission, and that whatever she had to do to those that got in the way didn't matter.

That was why she couldn't find it in herself to feel guilty whenever she saw the scar in Clint's shoulder, where her blade had pierced skin and muscle and allowed her to catch up to her target. And Venus finally let her features split into a wild, crazed grin. It was brimmed with nothing more than poisonous ambition and apathy, so that when she chuckled quietly at her own stupidity for believing a man like Tony Stark would help a person even though it didn't benefit him in any way, and took another drag of the cigarette that glowed a dangerous amber in the dark, she was deaf to the almost-silent footsteps that had appeared behind her. Normally she would've heard, because she would recognise that walk in an instant; it was how she moved when she approached an unpredictable target.

And so Natalia sank down in the other seat on the balcony, and all of a sudden, the almost frightening smile had vanished from herself and she sat silent once more, only moving to take another drag of her cigarette. She didn't need to look at Natalia to know that the red-head was holding herself back from feeling pity, because that was something that neither of them had ever had the time or patience for. She only watched the stars and city lights for a few seconds, before directing her attention to Venus, and gesturing for the cigarette, which Venus handed over without a second thought.

That itself was a signal, Venus noted, as Natalia gained a look of slight surprise, because she had trusted the other woman with her coping mechanism without so much as a thought. She watched through peripheral vision as Natasha took a drag herself, before coughing and pulling the cigarette out of her mouth and stubbing it on the ashtray.

"I don't really know how you can do that," she supplied quietly, though all Venus deigned to give her was a jerk of her chin and shrug of her shoulders, still quietly scolding herself for automatically handing over the cigarette like a dog with its master's command.

"Simple. You just need something to forget." Venus' tone was slightly bitter, and her voice had gained a slightly harsher edge, a whisper of the damage she was doing to herself. Venus could feel Natalia's gaze on the side of her face, as if trying to figure out which small things out of a mound that Venus was trying to burn away in that moment.

It wasn't a comfortable silence. It was awkward, and cold, and somehow stiff, and wasn't what either of them was used to feeling in the company of the other. Normally, it was comfortable, warm, welcoming, because that's what Natalia had felt like all those years ago. That was what she'd tried to feel like, because she could see that Venus was going to lose herself, and if Venus lost herself, then Natalia would've held all the pity in the world for her, despite how much they both despised it, because Venus would've never been able to find her way back without her help.

The cycle that they were stuck in was vicious, Venus could recognise that, but something in her recognised that calmly, as something similar to itself. Because hadn't she - they - been raised in such a way; ruthlessly, with no regard for emotion by people who only knew apathy?

A sudden movement from Natalia, and Venus found her attention snapping to the redhead, who had brought out her phone, its artificial light shining starkly out in a way that made the way the cigarette glowed ember seem like something that Venus should miss. She did manage to catch the way that the redhead's eyes widened and the quick glance that Natalia sent her.

"Venus, it's Stark. He uh- he found something."

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Idk how long its been since I updated this but i remembered I had this written and figured why not, also I didn't read through this so sorry for any errors

JABBERJAY_011

WRITTEN [I DON'T KNOW]

WORD COUNT [1125]

PUBLISHED [26.10.2021]