itinere | {open} - I am a human being capable of doing terrible things ... run

(ooc: First, the trigger warning here - Natasha's past includes brainwashed assassins, and thus this post mentions a lot about that and death.
And secondly - Natasha's out for the week, yay nightmare funtimes. The nightmare portion is slightly backdated, as she had champagne at the party on the 1st. I've also added a part for the rest of September for after she wakes up if anyone would like to play with that instead.)

Nightmare (she's asleep for a week, September 2nd - 9th):

Scene 1 (nightmare)

When Natasha falls asleep sometime after midnight the morning of the 2nd, she starts having a nightmare. She's a teenager, back in the Red Room, in training. She was raised here, training from an early age to kill, fight, spy, be anything that anyone needed her to be. Even by the time she was a teenager, she was already pretty deep into it, only questioning herself very occasionally. Could she do it? Is she ready to do it?

A gun in each hand, she fires at a paper target. She hits the center every time. The paper target is replaced by a person with a bag over their head; she doesn't hesitate.

Then there's dancing. Ballet. Dancing so that she's flexible, agile, and in control of her movements. She's also just a dancer for a puppet master who is holding her strings. Being a dancer is the cover for the girls in the Red Room.

There's fighting, sometimes. The other girls around her age who are bring trained with her, sometimes they fight one another. Loser is killed by the winner. Natasha never fails, never loses. Hasn't yet, anyway.

Scene 2 (nightmare)

Her nightmare eventually shows her a slightly different scene. She's her current age, has slipped back into being who she was before, falling away from whatever path to redemption she thought she was on her way to with SHIELD. In this nightmare, she's been convinced for some reason that everyone -- especially her friends -- are a threat to her, and she's twirling a snapped arrow between her fingers while she looks down at the lifeless body of the person who had been her best friend. The same one who'd been sent by SHIELD to kill her, but instead spared her life and brought her into SHIELD to give her a second chance. She doesn't look like she regrets what she's done in the nightmare, and she drops the arrow from her fingers and lets it fall to the ground. The look on her face is one that says she'll fight pretty much anyone who approaches, to the death if she must, so come fight her. Or, if anyone wants to join the Chyornaya Vdova on her killing spree, she'll take help. This part sends her both through her world and through Itinere; her mind telling her that nowhere is safe from her. If you want to try to talk some sense into her, ha - good luck. But you're still free to try.

After she wakes up (September 10th - onward):

She'd been asleep for a week, trapped in her mind for a week. But once she's awake again, she tries to continue on with her life here as normally as possible. Getting coffee at a cafe, browsing bookstores, going for a run in the park, spending some time at the rec center.

But despite that, Natasha is quieter, among other things. Someone who usually has the look of someone who looks like she knows what she's doing, becomes someone who looks a little more unsure. Someone who isn't jumpy or tense around familiar friendly faces becomes someone who is, even if only by a little bit. She tries to hide most of this, and does a fairly good job of it, but things slip. Yes, she's trained to not show that she's shaken even when she is, but she's also still human -- even if her past likes to come back and remind her how very not human she feels a lot of the time. She's trying to quietly deal with what her mind had forced her relive.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The red room is like nothing Derek has ever seen before and also strangely familiar in that he's been on the floor with many fighters, both in his judo classes and outside of them. The setup is different. The faces are different. These are all girls, not that he has a problem going up against females, but there doesn't seem to be another male here. He looks around for anything familiar and while he's disoriented and distracted, he gets a foot to his spine.

He's pushed forward and turns around quickly to spot his attacker. He holds both hands up and backs away, the universal sign for surrender. This is not his fight even if all around him there are girls fighting each other, poetry in motion if he could have a moment to really study them without becoming a part of whatever is happening here.

"I'm not here to fight." Which sounds silly since this seems to be a room for fighting. He'll defend himself if he has to, win or lose. But he's trying not to instigate before he knows the score.

Not a single muscle in her face moves at his words. No twitch of an eyebrow, or lips, just a cold, hard, stare from a teenage assassin-in-training. Her hands are still in fists, and a knife is tucked away at her ankle. "Then you're in a really bad place for you to have gotten lost in." That's a statement of the obvious, spoken in a natural accent that hasn't had time to become much of anything else other than Russian. "What are you here for?" She's not believing him, but she'll listen to whatever he's going to say for himself before taking further action, at least for now. Her guard is way up, like it always is. If it's not, she gets herself super dead. Trust no one from the outside (and not really on the inside either), be prepared for anything, that's the basic way of operating here.

It's pretty obvious that he's in the wrong place. He knows something is going on here because he's been dream-hopping (or nightmare-hopping as it seems) the whole damn night. Nothing about it has been fun. And now here he is in this unfamiliar place. When she speaks, he recognizes her for who she is. Natasha. That flaming red hair. The accent is thicker, different, but it's her. She's said some small things in Russian to him before.

"I don't know." He has no reason for being here. Someone is playing games. And this one, as he looks around the room, looks like it could get him killed. He knows self defense. He knows judo. He can be a brawler, a street fighter. But this? This is on a whole other level. This place reeks of death.

He looks back to Natasha. She doesn't seem to recognize him. She's younger than the Natasha he knows. "Why are you fighting?"

"Training. Mental, physical, so we can take our place in the world." Which is, according to this brand of doctrine, no place.

"Most people, I think, would try to fight their way out of a place like this. Especially when they don't know what's going on. You're not. You're standing around asking questions, and that either makes you the dumbest person in the room or the smartest." She isn't sure which. Her hands release from the fists they were in, and she removes the knife from her ankle and tosses it to him. She doesn't need it, so she'll give the weapon advantage to him, even with their height difference, since she's probably something like 5'1'' at this point in her life. "Now I want to find out which that is." She often has questions about her own self in this, but not so much about other people. Other people didn't matter. As long as she survives this place, that's all she cared about -- not whether other people survived with her. Now she has a question about another person and she wants it answered. She gets back in a fighting stance, and that would be her challenge to spar. Never mind he said he wasn't here to fight, and he still doesn't have to, but she's ready if he wants to try.

"Hope you don't mind me leaning toward playing it smart." He has no control over this room or the dream he's now infiltrating. She's in control. But her initial answer speaks toward some kind of cult-like indoctrination, which Derek has had experience with before on multiple occasions. How to deal with this, how to think his way through it and survive (or not) is still up in the air. He doesn't know enough yet.

Derek catches the knife with ease by the hilt in the same way that a person would instinctively try to catch anything thrown at them.

Should he try to fight her? If this is a spar then he has nothing to worry about. If this is to the death, then he has everything to worry about. Because she has a look in her eyes that says she'll take no prisoners. He decides to play along for now and hunkers down as well after a dip of his head. "What place in the world is it you're trying to take?"

"Your choice." She says simply, with a very slight shrug accompanied with the verbal reply. "I'm not the one invested in what you do or don't do." Everyone for themselves, basically.

She starts out with something that's probably more simple than expected, just aiming at him with an attempt at a punch -- not even a kick, or an elbow to start off with. Though she continues to talk while she makes the first attempt. "None. It makes things easier. If you don't fit into one role, one niche, you don't have much to lose." Though she's not using the words exactly, what she's saying is pretty easily translated into the fact that identities don't matter because they don't exist. No one gets 'tied down' by the 'restrictions' of a life in a nice job in a nice office, a family, whatever. There's no one around to miss or to miss you. Whatever false ties are planted for the sake of an identity for some mission can be just as easily cut when its over and moving on to the next thing can be done.

Derek ducks and swerves out of the way of the punch. Somehow, he knows that she's taking it easy on him right here to begin with. He isn't yet going to go on offense though, rather than play defense and try to bide his time until he can find a way out of here. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way out.

He's watching her warily now though, waiting for the next attempt.

"Okay. Lone warrior. Got it." He says, moving around her in a slow circle, hands up in defense of his face, watching her for her net move. "But what are they training you for?"

{open} - I am a human being capable of doing terrible things ... run

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