Double-Edged Sword ─ age of ultron ✓

seventeen

The semester is over! I have returned!

★★★

WHEN Nat and Sasha moved out of D.C. after S.H.I.E.L.D. fell, the only things Natasha packed up were their clothing and some of Sasha's soccer crap she didn't want to pay for again. Sasha was in the hospital for that part, but she would have done the same thing. There was nothing else worth taking.

Moving out of New York City, they weren't sure what to take. They'd lived more of a real life in the past year than they had in the four years before. Their stuff actually had meaning. The real hard part, though, was having to leave the furniture behind. They ate together on the bar stools in front of the kitchen counter most days. They hung around on the couch watching TV together or each doing their own thing. When there was a bad day, they slumped onto the floor with their backs against Sasha's bed frame and their shoulders pressed together. Everything in this place had a memory attached to it, and now it all had to be left behind. This apartment was rented fully furnished, so they didn't own any of it. Even if they had, they traveled light. If it didn't fit in a small car, it wouldn't be coming with them.

"Since when do we have so many goddamn containers?" Sasha muttered, sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by an array of plastic and glass containers. "We're two people. We don't need eight containers."

She wrapped two glass containers in packing paper and placed them inside a cardboard moving box, then tossed two of the plastic ones in after them. Sasha thought to herself how wild it was that five years ago, she was a Russian assassin who was chained to her bed every night to prevent escape, and now she was a free woman with a life whose current greatest worry in life was having too many containers.

Where the hell was Natasha? She dipped out to grab something from the store twenty minutes ago, not elaborating on what. Sasha didn't know what they needed, because they were moving out shortly and already had enough moving boxes. They'd already dealt with replacing their electronics for new ones for the new identities they had yet to devise. What was left?

Not a minute later, the front door opened. Natasha came into the kitchen.

"Catch," she said, tossing something to Sasha. Sasha caught it and examined the box. Permanent hair dye remover. "I don't know how good this stuff is, but you can give it a shot. I figured it was time for you to go back to your roots. I know your hair's important to you."

"Really?" She looked up and grinned widely. She didn't give that kind of smile often, so when she did, it lit up the room better than a lightbulb. Natasha couldn't help but smile back.

"Yeah, kid."

Previously, Sasha's hair was tied heavily to her identity. In the Red Room, she was never allowed to keep it long. According to them, too-long hair was a weakness, easy to be yanked in a fight. As an act of rebellion, when she escaped, she decided to grow it out as long as possible. It went all the way down to her waist last year. Unfortunately, the long red hair made her easy to identify, which was not ideal immediately after all of the intel S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra had on her was leaked. When she became Alina Reilly on a daily basis and abandoned the old alias S.H.I.E.L.D. had on file for her—Sasha Rushman, which Sasha considered her real name outside of school life—she cut her hair to just below her shoulders and dyed it brown. By now, she was much less of a target, but that hairdo went with the alias. She supposed she could return to her roots a little for her next alias now that the bounty over her head was presumably less expensive.

"Thank you." She stood up and put the hair dye remover on the counter. "So where are we going? I know we're leaving, but where are we going? And do we have aliases yet?"