Part I: She's Been Everybody Else's Girl, Maybe Someday She'll Be Her Own

Clutching Her Faded Photograph

The plane landed without incident, and Isabel was glad to entrust her client to waiting family. All of them thanked her warmly once Sra. Alvarez explained who she was, and Natasha was uncomfortable with the praise. She should have spotted the tail, should have noticed the SUV getting close to them. Sure, the job had been an overall success, but it wasn't her best work.

After the family had offered a great deal of hospitality, which Natasha refused politely, she walked over to the board displaying flights and considered where to go next. She hadn't had a chance to line up another job yet – or, at any rate, had found none to her liking that required immediate attention. So she decided to change her location. Perhaps South America wasn't ideal – her Spanish acceptable but not the best, and her Portuguese barely passable. Returning to Russia would be too... predictable a thing for her to do. And she had mixed feelings about going back there. Thus, she settled on Eastern Europe – she knew most of the languages and a pale redhead wouldn't stick out particularly there.

The flight to Budapest took a long time, with a number of connecting flights and layovers in various places. She felt it wise to avoid entering the States entirely, which did nothing to ease the journey. It was probably paranoia – she was no more likely to be recognized at an airport there than one in any other country. New York might be avoidable, but nowhere else would pose much of a problem.

And it wasn't as though the United States government was all that directly responsible for what had happened. Not in the way the Soviet government had been involved with her upbringing. So she didn't have the same uncomfortable feelings about stepping back on U.S. soil that she did about going home to Russia. She was technically a citizen and returning might give her some good insight into what had happened after she'd left Tony at the hospital.

Whatever the reason, her gut instinct was to steer clear for a while, so she followed a circuitous route to Europe. She did not think about how her last trip here had been on a private jet, as opposed to being slightly crushed in economy class. She did not think about how unsustainable her current lifestyle was – it paid, but she would have to lower her standards to afford upkeep on her web and the airfare to attend to it. She did not think about how she was more alone now than she had ever been, and that it was unlikely to change.

What she did think about was when she and Clint had been in Budapest before, and that was a much more pleasant memory.

Finally, she was in the Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport. It was familiar to her, and she only half paid attention as she made her way through it. A taxi took her toward her safe house, though a direct route would be unwise. She paid the man and walked half a kilometer before finding another cab to get her within a couple blocks of her destination.

It was a pain sometimes, having to be so thorough. It hadn't been as necessary in recent years. What she could offer the team was more often her instincts and training than her physical presence and assets, for obvious reasons. No matter how hard she worked, she would never be able to compete with a man in a metal suit or a super soldier. And no one could compete with the god or the Hulk. So she and Clint had offered a different perspective on situations, as well as significantly more field experience.

Her life hadn't depended on her ability to shake a tail in a few years, though, so she was being extra careful. Maybe Ross's people would find her, in which case she might be facing jail time. But, while that was an unpleasant notion, there were other people who would be interested in finding her now that she was no longer under the protection of the Avengers. SHIELD had always protected her, and she'd felt relatively safe then – but she was also making enemies while she worked for them.

One of the potential problems with keeping track of a web of safe houses was making sure you could get in all of them. It wasn't as though she could carry over a dozen keys with her where ever she went. And most of them were in locations where anything more high-tech would be considered suspicious. Hiding a key somewhere nearby was not reliable, since it could be years between visits.

So how did the overly paranoid get into all those safe houses? Simple – she was adept at lock picking. And she kept spare keys hidden inside, so staying in one residence for a while didn't require her to pick her way back in just because she went out for groceries. Certainly there were more efficient modern things she could use, but she tended to trust older methods. Perhaps because they weren't so easily hacked by someone potentially far away.

Not that she trusted her system implicitly – if she could get in, so could anyone else. A small piece of tape was affixed to the top of the doorframe, and it was unbroken. Therefore, no one had been inside since she was last home. Well, at least, no one had gone through the front door. There were windows, which someone might use despite it being the fifth floor of the building.

It was late at night, and the hallway was deserted, so Natasha did not feel rushed as she worked on the lock. After a few moments – the lock was familiar, after all – she was granted access. A quick but thorough search showed that it was, indeed, empty. And the layer of dust indicated that no one had disturbed it in a while.

She tried to think of the last time she was here while she pulled out a snack she'd gotten from the airport, checking on the supply levels in the pantry and refrigerator. Very low. She would have to go to the store tomorrow. For now, she plugged in her various electronic devices to charge and took care of at least some of the dust. Then she headed to the bathroom to brush her teeth and shower quickly. Finally, she climbed into bed and was very grateful to be sleeping on a horizontal surface.

Sloppy, pretending to fail. – Madame B's voice echoed in her brain as she watched the girls practice, a terrible fear in her belly.

They vanished and she heard something else: Is there anything real about you? ... It must be real hard to shake the double-agent thing.

Tony. After all these years... How could he have still thought that of her? Did he not know her at all? "They're coming for you," he'd said.

Running – people following. She picked up speed – how had she gotten so careless? But it wasn't people – it was a person. Clint. Maybe I can offer you something else, he'd said when he caught her. Maybe something besides death was what he meant. And she'd believed him.

She held him at bay, asking him if they were still friends. He'd smiled, told her it depended on how hard she hit him. And she had hit him hard – but Wanda was a hard hitter and she'd gone down. It had been a shock to feel the energy, or whatever it was, on her ankle as a former ally knocked the breath out of her.

Striking a luggage car, she lay there gasping in pain. Until a metal hand wrapped around her neck and a familiar face stared down at her, unrecognizing.

Natasha sat up with a start. It was bad enough that her sleep was plagued by old failures – did she really have to be reminded of things she couldn't control? Dragging herself out of bed, she was relieved to see that it was morning. Not that there was much in the way of breakfast waiting, but she wanted out of her room. So she headed toward the kitchen. Then stopped in her tracks.

"You're out of coffee," Clint told her conversationally.

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