"My history is fuzzy," she admits quietly, not entirely meeting his eyes as he asks her where she was trained. Maybe she shouldn't tell him this much, but the more he says, the less he seems like a threat. And she understands that feeling so well it aches in her chest. "They-- they wiped me," she admits, her voice thin and quiet, like it hurts to admit it. "I know I was trained in the Red Room. In Russia, but the specifics are hard. 2001, maybe?" She struggles, trying to remember, but it still hurts, burns as she tries to force her way through the cracks in her memories that still remain, that pinch of pain at the corners of her eyes. "They moved me from Widow Ops into some experimental science program. That's where she rescued me from."
She shakes her head and there's a sound that's bitter, almost a laugh but humorless. "I can tell you more about her than about myself," she admits. It's not duplicitous, but just the effect of what they'd done to her. "Ava's a diminutive. I don't even know my real name." She sighs, moving over to her makeshift bed and setting her duffle down on the sleeping bag on a fake boxspring made from plywood on cinderblocks. She never turns her back on him, and there's still caution in how she moves, the way she keeps her hands in close range of her waist to minimize draw distance, but she's less tight-strung than initially.
She skulks around Brooklyn trying to work up the courage to go see Sana instead of just texting her lies on a burner phone. But she feels like a different person, like being two streetrat Brooklyn orphans against the world that complained about fishsticks and made soup of potatoes and whatever nearly-spoiled vegetables the grocer at the corner would offer for free while dreaming about cupcakes was a lifetime ago, even if it had only been three years. Would Sana even recognize her? It's easier to pretend to be nobody, just a face in the crowd. Safer.
"Natasha was decades before me. Top of her class. The best the Black Widow program ever produced," she murmurs with a curve of her lips.
no subject
She shakes her head and there's a sound that's bitter, almost a laugh but humorless. "I can tell you more about her than about myself," she admits. It's not duplicitous, but just the effect of what they'd done to her. "Ava's a diminutive. I don't even know my real name." She sighs, moving over to her makeshift bed and setting her duffle down on the sleeping bag on a fake boxspring made from plywood on cinderblocks. She never turns her back on him, and there's still caution in how she moves, the way she keeps her hands in close range of her waist to minimize draw distance, but she's less tight-strung than initially.
She skulks around Brooklyn trying to work up the courage to go see Sana instead of just texting her lies on a burner phone. But she feels like a different person, like being two streetrat Brooklyn orphans against the world that complained about fishsticks and made soup of potatoes and whatever nearly-spoiled vegetables the grocer at the corner would offer for free while dreaming about cupcakes was a lifetime ago, even if it had only been three years. Would Sana even recognize her? It's easier to pretend to be nobody, just a face in the crowd. Safer.
"Natasha was decades before me. Top of her class. The best the Black Widow program ever produced," she murmurs with a curve of her lips.