It's a bitter January evening, the cold wind aching in her chest, the night sky dull and distant, but Natasha smiles faintly to herself as she steps out the door.
Perhaps the Widow is better suited to calculating slippery blood-soaked lines of chance or putting holes in a target in a way that is almost too precise to be cruel. Then again, the Widow is only wisps of a person, or maybe even too much to be a person. She is rage and fear and control and ten thousand ways to slide inside someone and wrap both of your hands around their heart until they can't even remember how it beats. Her love is like a spear to the chest. Bone-breaking.
Natasha, though. Natasha is suited to so many other things, and it took her so very long to realise it. She wonders if anyone would believe that her perfect Sunday is tying her hair up, putting on an apron, and trying cupcake recipes from Pinterest.
The Widow is steady, precise. There's something about taking that careful nature and applying it to making blue and pink icing or sculpting Halloween pumpkins from sugar that feels almost like a… reclamation. No one ever made a rule that secret assassins cannot turn their skills to something that doesn't involve bruised shaking fingers and broken glass in your hair and blood on your mouth.
Maybe one day she'll love someone and be loved enough to make something permanent, but for now it's enough to be able to make purple cupcakes and stay up until dawn sitting on the floor listening to old songs and go on long solo sightseeing trips.
Natasha pushes her hands into her coat pockets and walks until all of the thoughts that clench around her heart and echo in her head fall still and silent. There are no stars visible in New York, the only night lights the blaze of neon and the flare of headlights, and she is utterly alone in the crowds, a self-contained unit of one. Natasha has nowhere to go, no one to be. She is content.