Widow & Winter

Natasha Romanoff: the One Woman Army

She sat across from me, eyes glinting like steel. She was making me wait. I didn't remember much about her, but one thing I remember vividly is that she never did anything accidentally, and the quiet was completely intentional. She had questions and answers and wasn't quite ready to put either to words.
Instead we just sat there, Natasha finding out everything what she needed to know by just looking into my mind, and leaving me clueless, completely in the dark.
I had been waiting for her to move, but when she did it took me completely by surprise.
"It's different." she said, referring to the robotic arm that had been built when I lost my left one back in the 1940s. She was right. The silver arm was gone, replaced by the Wakandans, made of dark grey metal, and a marble like material, black as obsidian. The red star of the Winter Soldier was gone, and the new arm had no markings. It felt right. I wasn't the killer they made me anymore, so why should I wear the mark of one?
I reached for my jacket and put it on. It was generally not good to be seen with an extremely technologically advanced Wakandan metal arm, especially when you look like the terrorist, psycho, prison escapee, 100 year old assassin for Hydra known as the Winter Soldier, who also has an arm like that. It's even worse if the you are him, accompanied by debatably the greatest spy of all time, the actual face of espionage, in her prime, but wanted for going rogue and working to undermine the government. Even if that part wasn't actually true, the effect was the same.
I slid my gloves on and stared around the empty food court, and apparently my anticipation showed on my face, because Natasha laughed and told me to relax. I couldn't remember ever having heard her laugh, and it was a happy sound, different from her intense personality. It felt like she had let me in on a secret part of her life that she kept hidden away. It was nice.
Still smiling, she said "Comon, get up! We have to go."
"What? Why?"
She was pulling me down a hallway of gift shops and athletic stores, toward a door. "If you hadn't been so distracted, you'd have noticed they just announced over the intercom they are evacuating the mall."
I looked back at the pizza place we had ordered from. A man, was looking at us out of the corner of his eye. He was on the phone.
Once we got to the doors, other people were crowding around them. I pushed through them, Natasha following me, but once we were through, she held the doors wide open for people to exit.
I grinned at her. "What was that for?"
"I don't know?" She replied, "I guess it's still part of my job."