On The Run) Romanogers

Part 1

Nat P.O.V.

I knew better than to linger, I was considered by many to be one of the best spies in the world, and yet I still stopped to look. I was passing the window of a beauty store, I didn't bother to look at the name, but I bothered to look into the window and admire the hair strainer. It was the new one that I heard was released recently, not that I spent too much of my time browsing or staying up to date on beauty news, but I had been browsing around the internet back at our hovel and it came up as an ad.

The thing was a disgusting shade of green, I doubted that they would sell many of them if it weren't for the other features. It heated up in less than thirty seconds and could make even the curliest of hair look completely straight in one pass.

I wanted that flat iron so badly, I had always loved my hair straight, but it wasn't going to happen for a multiple of reasons. One, I couldn't pay in anything other than cash, and I only had a twenty in my pocket, and a few coins. The price was also way too high, we didn't have leisure money at this point. Two, going into that store would mean being on more security cameras, which meant a more likely chance of being caught by the people chasing us. Avoiding cameras was one of the biggest things on my mind, today's facial recognition software made being a fugitive way harder than it used to be... being a well known avenger made it even harder.

The store was nice, I didn't know how it stayed afloat in this area of the city given that I was currently in what was considered the sewer part of the city. I eventually sighed and walked on, it was a pipe dream that wasn't happening.

The walk back was always an intimidating one, even with my training and the knowledge that I could take anyone on these streets down with my bare hands, I just felt bare. The amount of catcalling, threats, and other disturbing sites always made me uncomfortable, no matter how many times I walked it nor how many worse situations I had been in. I always took a shower when I got home, wishing there was some way I could just wash my eyes and ears of all the shit that went down.

I reached the slum area we took residence in, climbed the ladder up two the second floor of a run down building and walked through the hallways and up to the roof. From there, I jumped two buildings that had seen better days and finally paused over the roof of our place. It might have seemed a lot of work to get into one building, but that was the easiest and probably only way into our place. The reason I climbed the ladder was because Mr. Moriortu had somehow taken over the whole first floor of that building, including the public hallways and entrance lobby, and no one was brave enough to push back on that. The last thing I needed was Moriortu's gang coming after us and causing news around our hideout. After that, the building was owned by Ms. Tulis, she somehow didn't have enough money to move to a nicer place in the city, but did have enough cash for a state of the art security system. I knew to avoid that at all costs, and the roof was the only way to do it. Staying on the roof of the last building before ours was just a convenience thing, there was no point in dropping down to the street level, walking past the one building, entering ours, and then taking the three flights of stairs back up to our place.

I walked over the trap door and pounded the secret knock. It seemed cheesy... and maybe that was why we did it, something to laugh at ourselves over, but either way, we did it. Someone came and undid the seven locks on it, and opened it for me to drop in.

"She lives," Sam announced as he took the bags off of me. I had two old tarp bags that we reused. We tried to shop exclusively at the farmers market due to its lack of security and cameras. It was two miles out of our way and like I said, not a fun walk, but we couldn't be too careful.

"Hey Nat," Bucky called, not getting off of the beanbag we had stolen last week. I started to doubt that Bucky had moved off of that thing since I had left an hour ago. He had slept on it for the past two nights as well and got mad if anyone else sat on it. He was like a dog protecting its bed, but he was getting too attached to it. I feared he was going to ask if we could take it when we had to switch locations, which was in three weeks. I didn't feel safe staying in one place for more than ten weeks, it wasn't worth the risk of getting caught, or getting attached.