Let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised;

[grimvisaged]

She's good.

This had been the sum total of his report on Natalia Romanova, teenage prodigy and assassin-in-training. From anyone else it was a scant accounting, but from him, notoriously skilled and still taciturn, those two words contained volumes.

In truth, Romanova was better than he'd anticipated. She was far from the first student he'd had, but she'd been the first to come close to holding her own. When playtime had finished and he'd stopped pulling punches, she'd refused to back down. He'd given her bruises for her trouble, but she'd earned his respect—Something none of the others had managed.

Also unlike all the others, he found himself actually looking forward to their sessions together.

Today, he was waiting for her in the rafters. Cloaked in shadow and perfectly still, he kept a sharp eye on the door and his muscles poised to spring.

Comments

[regimes_fall]

She doesn't know his name, but she carries his bruises. He isn't merciful or talkative or especially kind, but Natalia wouldn't know what to do with any of those things if they were offered to her. What he was was something she understood, something she aspired to be, something she would allow him to chisel out of her for the sake of knowing no greater want than that of being the very best. Of being like him.

He is silent, always. There are no lectures in her lesson, no allowance for questions. He shows her the way with his body, the leading of which is something she would have to assume would be close to dance, if she'd ever done anything such as that, except far more brutal. It hurts, but it never breaks her, and she knows instinctively that it is his choice not to do so. She can look down at her nude body and map where he's been in a kaleidoscope of purple and blue and sickly green, but she is getting better, and that is all she is truly concerned with.

Natalia Romanova is changing shape, from girl to agent to weapon, and he is the maestro of her change. She knows nothing of him, and as she steps into the shadowed room and immediately turns her eyes to the darkness to look for the glint of metal, she thinks of the little, shallow facts she has collected.

He is young, mid-late twenties at most, with a stern face and soft, ethereal blue eyes. 'Beauty' was a word she had a basic working knowledge of, but he was the first person she'd ever looked at and thought the word may very well apply. It was a stupid, weak thing, but the more she attempted to shove the thought from her mind, the more it took roots and grew. She'd began to notice that their bodies had fit together in surprising moments of clarity, become utterly aware of the moments when he offered her the warmth of his flesh and blood hand to help her up instead of the brutality and coldness of the metal. To show such things would mean her certain death, but her feelings, so surprising and genuine in nature, she could do no other than hoard like a chest of gold.

Even that much was stupid, and she realizes that she's entered the room unprepared, far more interested in thinking of or looking at him than bracing herself for what she knew had to come. There was a noise, but the acoustics of the room were tricky at best, and she braced herself for the attack, knowing it was to come, but unsure as to how he would spring it upon her.