OOM: 2011: Florida, USA

Annina Rolanovna Nevzorova goes by Nina in the US. Sometimes Annie, but mostly it's Nina. She paints dark lines around her eyes before she straps on her gun, and has a reputation for honesty and being a good businesswoman.

When Nina walks through the door of Roman's café in Orlando, the ex-KGB operative-turned-gangster brightens. He's an old man who likes to think that he misses home, and she's a gunrunner who speaks Russian with a Volga Region accent; what's not to like?

“Sit, sit,” Roman says, all generosity. “Coffee? On the house, my dear. Have you been watching the news?”

Nina smiles at him, a niece to a favourite great-uncle. “Was it the monsters or the robots that caught your attention?”

“Robots!”

Robots are controllable; robots have a price; things that have prices have markets. Markets are things very, very dear to Roman's heart.

It still takes three cups of coffee for her to get the intel, and the deal, that she needs. Robots and monsters, and armies shooting at their own universities, and the mess that Iron Man has made of made of several depots.

It's enough to make anyone jumpy.

That jumpy extends to the feds watching Roman's door, and it only takes Nina-Natasha block to realise that she's got a tail.

Great.

She heads towards the crowds, weaving in and out of people almost leisurely, walking into shops and taking their second exist. It's in one of those shops, a quirky little tourist trap, that Natasha busies herself with a keyring rack.

Dolphins feature heavily, but the one she picks up has an orca arching into the air across.

It also has SeaWorld scrawled across it.

Natasha smiles.

“This one, thanks.”

– –

Sometime later, an envelope arrives in a post office box belonging to Jason Brandt. In it is the keyring, and a letter that says simply,

I haven't forgotten

H.


(Natasha always did like signing her messages with her Cyrillic initial, and this hardly the only touristy knick-knack she's sent to Clint over the years.)