<div class="floatleft">(http://i.imgur.com/6VJ3T.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Natasha Romanoff<br/><strong>Title:</strong>Black Widow<br/><strong>Locale:</strong>Streets around Stark Tower<br/><strong>Time:</strong>7:19 pm, Eastern<br/><strong>Tags:</strong>Steve, Clint (both briefly mentioned)<br/><hr/><br/>Normally, a good little run on a brisk evening did wonders to make Natasha feel re-energized and to help her clear her head, but tonight it was just not working out. Everywhere she went there was some bumbling idiot getting in her way, walking as if the whole sidewalk belonged to him. The tag on the back of her top kept making her itch and her underwear kept obstinately riding up. Even her skin felt weird, as if the air was somehow clinging to it, crawling over it...but there was clearly nothing.<br/><br/>She'd tried to shrug everything off at first, picking up the pace a bit to distract herself, but no matter what it just didn't feel right. At some point Natasha started to feel as if she had a pair of spurs painfully digging into her sides, causing her to accelerate more and more until pretty soon she was sprinting ahead as fast as she could. Anyone who was unlucky enough to get in her way was shoved aside roughly, a couple of them taking some pretty nasty spills, but by then Natasha was already too far ahead to notice or care.<br/><br/>She carried on at that desperate pace for several hundred feet until her body finally gave out, her legs burning and cramping up while she doubled over, gasping for air as she placed her hands right above her knees. Feeling like she might throw up, Natasha rushed into the Starbucks that she'd happened to stop in front of and made a bee line for the ladies' room. Lowering her face into the nearest sink, she turned the handle to the left and used one hand to splash cold water into her face while holding on to the side of the counter with the other.<br/><br/>She finally pulled away with a gasp, her mouth partially agape as she continued to breathe through it heavily, although at least it didn't seem like she was going to be sick anymore. Natasha was met with her own reflection when she looked ahead. Her face was flushed and covered with beads of water, her hair unevenly wet and matted.<em>What the hell are you even doing in New York? You're not one of them, you never will be. What, did you think that you could just play the selfless hero and suddenly erase your past and transform into a while new person?</em><br/><br/><em>Come on, Natasha, leave the naive bullshit to fools like Rogers and wake up to reality. You're not a hero or a soldier or an Avenger, you're a killer, pure and simple. You made your name off of murdering strangers for money. You have no allies, much less friends. They just want to control you and change you to serve their own goals; to tear you away from your very nature. But they can't, no more than you can do it yourself by keeping up this charade of turning over a new leaf. You've been broken for a long time. Don't give up the small fraction of your true self that you still possess, or else then what will you be?</em><br/><br/>Natasha wiped her face with her forearm and shook her head, avoiding to look back into the mirror after that. She'd just seen a ghost, and she wasn't sure whether she was more frightened or tempted, but it was definitely a combination of the two. Lost in the middle of an extremely uncharacteristic meltdown, Natasha practically shoved another woman into the wall as she stormed out of the bathroom and through the narrow hallway leading away from it.<br/><br/>She wasn't sure why it had taken her so long to see clearly, but she saw the invisible cage that surrounded her now. If she tried to run, SHIELD would hunt her down to the ends of the Earth, and this time they wouldn't make the mistake of sending a weakling like Clint who couldn't finish the job. No, running wasn't a viable option at the present time, but Natasha promised herself that she'd find some way of putting an end to her imprisonment as she made her way back to Stark Tower,<em>no matter the cost</em>.