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Natalie Rushman cycles towards the dormitory she's currently calling home, stinking of alcohol and drenched despite her raincoat. She makes it, too, which is something she hadn't been sure about. Not because of the traffic - after six months of living in Tokyo she's used to the streets - but because of something far more dangerous.

Far more galling.

She locks her bike up without incident, manages to get all the way to her room without incident. Her room-mate is there, but fortunately, the girl is wearing earphones, clearly writing an essay that was due yesterday. Natalie nods at her, grabs her towel, fresh clothes, hair-dryer, and stalks her way to the bathroom.

Again, fortunately, it's free, and she's able to lock the door without exchanging a word to anyone. What she wants to do is dump her things, jump straight into the shower; what she does is carefully place her things down on a counter, and start to remove her make-up.

Slowly, Natalie Rushman is wiped away while Natasha emerges, looking tired and angry around the edges. She braces herself against the counter, and sighs.

Natasha looks at her reflection and, because Natalie is American, says, “God fucking damnit.”

That had all been...mundanely humiliating.

Natasha lets herself indulge in precisely one minute of imagined violence as she lathers up her hair, picturing exactly what she would do to her former boss, her former co-workers, the customers who'd grab her ass, and every single sleazy photographer she could find before S.H.I.E.L.D. put a bullet in her head. By the time she's up to scrubbing the smell of her former place of employ out of her skin, she's moved onto just concentrating on the hot water, the feeling of the sponge on her body.

By the time she's twisting her hair and wringing the excess water out, she's already formulating her next move.

It is, objectively, a stupid move, and she can acknowledge that.

She's also the wrong side of pissed off to really care.

Natalie Rushman firmly back in place, she slips out of the bathroom and into the house itself. She'd hum on her way back to her room, but that would draw attention to herself. She is not, after all, pissed off enough to be careless.

“Natalie!” Valeria says, actually taking out her earphones and looking apologetic. “I'm sorry, I know you have work tomorrow, but I really need to finish this essay, so I'm probably going to be up all night...” The girl (and she is a girl, nineteen and sparkling new in a way that sometimes makes Natasha grit her teeth) is speaking Italian, as is their habit.

Natalie smiles, a little, and shrugs. “It's fine, Val,” she says, her Italian sliding smoothly off her tongue. “I don't have actually have work tomorrow, so I'll probably up all night drowning my sorrows on the internet.”

“Sorry to hear it. But I'm sure you'll find a job soon,” Valeria adds with a bright yet absent smile.

Natalie's smile very carefully doesn't widen at all. “I'm sure I will. Good luck.”

“You, too,” Valeria says, putting her earphones back on.

Natalie draws her laptop out of its bag, plugs it in, and gets comfortable on her bed. She's got a long night ahead of her; as the geekier Westerners would say, one simply does not walk into Mordor, and one does not easily hack into S.H.I.E.L.D.

Well.

Maybe they don't say that last bit.

– –

Twenty-one hours, five cups of coffee, two bowls of noodles, and one serving of the cheap sushi from down the road later, Natasha quickly jots down a phone number on a single sheet of paper and carefully exits S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database. Then she turns off her laptop and allows herself two minutes to lie face down on her bed in victory. Mission accomplished. Granting herself another full minute to contemplate when to use the number is pure indulgence, because she decided when to call within about fifteen seconds.

It's ten past one in the morning in San Diego, US, but Agent Clint(on Francis) Barton is a former military man, according to his records. He can survive.

Sitting up on her bed, Natasha leans over to grab Natalie's phone (it's pink, with some fake diamonds hanging off a cord; it's so very Natalie Rushman) and quickly dials.

If Barton is on a mission, she is going to kill him.