Welcome home, Natashka.
It was the dumpling moon that brought it all back now.
She climbed higher as she remembered the words, but even
Natasha Romanoff, newly minted agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.,
former daughter of Mother Russia, couldn’t escape Ivan
Somodorov. Not any more than she could escape the snipers
positioned on every neighboring rooftop or the barbed wire
on the perimeter fence.
“See that moon?” Ivan had said when she was younger.
“See that pale pierogi, hanging so low and heavy in the sky it
wants to fall back into the boiling pot of salted water on your
baba’s stove?” Natasha had nodded, though as an orphan of
the war she remembered little about her baba—or for that
matter, even her parents. “With a moon like that, your targets
can see you as easily as you see them. Not a good night for
hunting, or a clean kill. Not a good night for disappearing.”
It was Ivan she remembered.
Ivan who had taught her how to shoot a Russian sniper rifle
and to never use anything but a German pistol, preferably an