Ekaterina wandered into the kitchen at six a.m. sharp only to find no one else awake. Figuring that it would make a good impression, she decided to make breakfast and started to grab food out of the pantry and the fridge. Thirty minutes later, everyone else started making their way into the kitchen following the sent of food. "You can cook?" Benji asked as she sat a plate down in front of him.
"Well obviously she can cook, Benji." Jane grumbled, "She just make you breakfast."
"Well thank goodness she can cook because no one else here can." Clint mumbled. In truth, Clint was a great cook; Willam Brandt was not.
"Thank you for making breakfast, Briar." Ethan said in a tone that hinted to his teammates to offer their own thanks which they did with varying levels of sincerity.
After finishing breakfast, the team made their way into the gym and began to stretch. Jane, though she would never admit it, was intimidated by Briar. While the rest of them did relatively normal warm-ups and stretches, the younger girl easily bent herself into hyper-extended splits and backbends. The rest of the team, except for Clint of course, had no idea why she needed such crazy stretches for sparring; but they were soon to find out.
After around twenty minutes of warming up, Ethan called everyone to the mat. "Alright. Briar, I'm going to have you pair with Benji first because he's still a newer agent and you two should be fairly evenly matched. If you beat him, we'll pair you with someone else and if you loose we can drill some skill that we think you need to improve on."
Briar nodded, "Sounds good!"
Jane was very excited to see this girl get her ass handed to her. Even the most basic analysation told Jane that she wasn't fit for combat. Briar couldn't have been more than five foot two and she was thin and long and didn't show much muscle mass. She was the complete wrong build for a fighter. Jane was not prepared to be proven very wrong. As soon as Ethan yelled "Go!" and stepped back from the mat, Briar pounced on Benji like a lioness on her prey. Jane quickly saw how the thin physique helped the girl and that she knew how to work with it; in an areal flurry of punches and kicks, Benji was on the ground and Briar hadn't even broken a sweat.
"Where did you learn to fight like that?" Jane asked.
"My mother."
"Was she an agent?" Ethan questioned.
Briar just shrugged. "Well if she was dead she couldn't teach you to fight." Jane retorted; happy to be able to call this girl's bluff.
"I never said she was dead. She would disappear randomly and come back hours, days, or weeks later, usually covered in blood, her own or someone else's, and we'd be off to the next dumpy apartment or motel room. I assumed that an agent would have a more stable salary so I figured she was a hit woman. She left me six years ago; said that if I wasn't going to help her I could just learn to fend for myself." Ekaterina let her voice crack the smallest bit at the end of the fake story and pretended to be lost in a memory for just the perfect fraction of a second before pulling her face back into a smile. "Who's next?"