Unexpected

First Day on the Job

It was a simple recipe, zucchini boat wrecks. In the summers of my childhood, my grandma had used to make zucchini boats which were halved zucchinis gutted of their seeds and stuffed instead with a mixture of diced tomatoes, spicy sausage, and chopped white onion with mozzarella sprinkled over them. When I was older she made 'ship wrecks' instead, chopping up zucchini in a pan and mixing it with the other ingredients with the mozzarella melting on top of the concoction. The meal was whipped up in less than half an hour and Steve and I ate it with garlic toast on my balcony as we made plans for how we were going to catch him up on the last seventy or so years.

It was decided that we'd meet up in my apartment on Friday evenings and go over each decade, looking at the fashion, music, people, and significant happenings of those years. We'd watch movies from that time period and, so that we'd get used to our new city, we'd get food from a different place each time. Soon our planning turned into me explaining text talk like 'lol', 'tbh', and 'brb' and how to make different smiley faces out of parentheses, colons, semicolons, and the like as we dug into the plate of chocolate chip cookies Zita and her girls had brought me earlier. After I explained that these were sort of slang for the texting world it got us into a conversation about modern day slang and things that people used to say back in the Forties. We both got confused and laughed over the strange phrases and words until we noticed that it had gotten pretty dark. Since tomorrow was my first day of training, Steve excused himself, thanking me for dinner, so that I could get some rest before I was in the hands of Natasha Romanoff.

He might as well have stayed until midnight considering how little sleep I managed to get with my nerves keeping me up until the wee hours of the morning. Having received a quick text from an unknown number that turned out to be Natasha's the night before with instructions, I dressed appropriately in a pair of black workout shorts with white edging, a purple workout tank top made of a lightweight material, and sneakers after I had bound up my ankle for support and protection. I didn't bother with makeup today knowing that I'd probably sweat it off anyways and tied my hair up into a high ponytail to keep the blonde strands out of my eyes. Yawning, I gathered up my things and set out, arriving at the Triskelion building with plenty of time.

At the front desk, I grabbed my security card as I had been told to last time I was here then made my way to the training area after getting lost for a quick minute. Natasha was waiting there already when I got there. Catching sight of me, she ended the call she'd been having and smiled at me. "Right on time. Let's see what you can do."

She didn't waste any time getting me started. After some time doing some basic warm ups, she had me start working on my arms and core since I couldn't do too much on my ankle to see what she had to work with. Needless to say, she wasn't impressed by how little arm strength I had or with how weak my core was. She soon realized that I had very little balance, poor hand eye coordination, limited flexibility, and my endurance wasn't anything special. By the time the actual exercise was done I was drenched in sweat, panting like a dog, and discouraged beyond belief.

"Okay." Natasha sighed, rubbing her face tiredly, "We've got a lot of work ahead of us."

"No kidding." I groaned, gulping down water. It was almost noon and I was feeling the burn everywhere, even my legs though I hadn't done too much on my poor ankle. "I must seem pretty pathetic."

"Not at all." Natasha dropped down to sit on the ground, motioning me to follow as she started doing some cool down stretches with me.

I furrowed my eyebrows as I copied her movements, "Seriously? I could hardly do anything you told me to do."

"True, you're not anywhere near athletic, but that's okay. I didn't expect you to be agent material straight away." She made a point to look directly in my eyes, "But you will be."