Fulminata V

Hours later, exhausted and still thinking in half a dozen various languages, I finished all of the tests.
“How did it go?” Agent Romanoff asked.
“Excusez-moi?” I replied.
She blinked, taken aback, and I suddenly realized that I’d spoken to her in French.
“Uh, fine,” I said, cracking a nervous grin. “As you can tell.”
She gave me a rare grin in response. “Excellent.” Something sounded in her ear, and I watched her bow her head slightly before placing her first two fingers over the piece in her ear, listening for a second before straightening and turning to me.
“I’ll walk you back to your room, but then I’ve got somewhere I have to go,” Agent Romanoff said.
“Alright,” I responded.
Soon I got to the little dorm to which they’d assigned me, and with the key card I’d gotten I went inside.
“Thanks, Agent Romanoff,” I said, pausing in the doorway.
“Any time,” she responded simply with a hint of a shrug.
I shut the door and pulled back the thicker grey blanket and then the white sheets beneath it. Sliding underneath them, I pulled them up to my chin and tried to fall asleep despite all of the cold and unfriendliness surrounding me.

There was a curt knock on the door at exactly 7:30 the next morning. Fortunately, I’d plugged in my phone and set an alarm for 7:00 so I’d have some time to get dressed. Opening the door, I saw an asian woman that was probably in her late 20’s.
“You’re Agent May, right?” I asked. She nodded, face even more impassive than Agent Romanoff’s had been, and I took a breath.
“Where are we going to?” I asked her as I shut the door gently behind me.
“Training room,” she replied succinctly, “I’m going to teach you hand-to-hand.”
I looked down at myself, suddenly glad I’d worn my Converse as well as a pair of stretchy leggings and a sweater. The sweater wouldn’t feel too great once I warmed up, but the leggings and Converse would serve me just fine.
“So how much do you know?” she asked when we finally arrived to a room like a boxing gym, this one with padded squares of mats for sparring.
“A little,” I said, shrugging.
She pulled something from her hip, and in a jolt of panic I realized it was a sleek black pistol.
My shoulders went up immediately, and my breath hitching, I raised my hands in front of me defensively. Gun defense, Natalie, what do you do when a gun’s pointed at you?
My hands gripped hers, one around her wrist and another popping the gun out of her hands. I tensed, expecting the gun to go off, but instead it just clicked when it landed against the hard ground.
Agent May, however, grabbed my wrists and twisted them behind me faster than I would’ve thought possible. I gave a cry of pain and jerked in her hold, her hands only tightening around my wrists until every movement I made caused her hands to burn my wrists with friction.
I’d never learned how to defend against this situation, so instead I crouched, jerking my arms into an uncomfortable position, but then throwing my weight into a forward roll.
She rolled with me nimbly, not letting go of my wrists, and I felt a spark start in my wrists before she cried out and let go.
“Sorry,” I said, truly feeling bad. Agent May, however, grabbed my wrists again, which I felt heat up.
Thinking of a live flame, I watched as my hands were suddenly surrounded by fire. Crying out again, Agent May let go of me for good this time, watching me with wild eyes.
“How…” she began, then seemed to shake her head. Charging me, she reached out to grab me around the waist, and somehow I dodged to the side so she managed only to throw me to the floor and knock the wind out of me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a foot coming my way and rolled further away from her, pushing up from the ground and ducking a kick. I threw my weight into a kick of my own and she grabbed my ankle, but not before the heel of my shoe connected with her torso, straight in the solar plexus. Somehow, out of instinct, she twisted my ankle and I fell as she recovered. I tried to stand up and get to my feet, but then there was a black foot over my sternum.
“Not bad,” she said. “You just need to learn how to strike to kill.”
Releasing her foot, Agent May offered her hand to me, which I took to stand up.
“Okay,” she sighed, walking over to a boxing dummy. “It seems you know some self defense. My question is, why didn’t you use it against your dad?”
My eyes sank to the floor. “He had a belt.”
She nodded, and I saw the motion out of my periphery. “You know how to block a punch though, right?” She swung a fist towards me and slowly I remembered the “X” the instructor had told us to make with our arms.
“Right,” she said. “Though in combat it might just be faster to grab their fist.”
I looked at her as though she were insane. Which, at this point, she might have been.
“Like this,” she said simply as the extended her fist. “Now, grab my fist.”
“Okay,” I replied, wrapping my hand around her extended fist.
“Now I’m actually going to punch, and you’re going to grab my fist and resist me punching you.”
“What?! No-” I said, but I had little time to panic as she threw a punch (albeit a light one) at my face. Hy hand shot up to cover hers, my arm engaging in pushing hers away.
“Of course, to develop the instinct you’ll need to practice,” she added, seguing into a beginning of martial arts, of which I assumed she was a master based on her fighting style.
A couple of hours later, I settled down to a table in the mess hall, a ring of black-purple developing around my eye as time wore on. Even though Agent May had told me not to do so, my fingers kept finding the edge of my eye socket and I would hiss in pain as the dull ache of the bruise registered in my brain.
“I thought I told you to stop touching that,” Agent May intoned flatly as she slid in opposite me, attracting the attention of some of the agents around us. I thought I heard snippets of “horse” and “only one gun”, but chose to ignore them as I focused on her and what she was saying. “I will order them to tape an ice pack onto your face, and I will make you train with it on.”
“How’d the training go?” asked Agent Romanoff, and as I looked at her she cringed in a rare display of emotion. “Ouch.”
“She’s doing well,” Agent May answered for me. “We started martial arts.”
“So we’ve got a ninja on our hands,” Agent Barton grinned, his eyes unreadable behind his usual sunglasses.
“Barton, that is not an excuse to get her working with a bow,” May shot back, and Agent Barton looked disappointed for a second.
“And if I said I wanted to learn how to shoot a bow and arrows…?” I suggested hopefully.
“No.” Agent May answered.
“I wouldn’t allow you near one,” Agent Romanoff deadpanned.
“Absolutely,” Agent Barton answered simultaneously. The other two women shot him sharp looks, and he shrugged. “She’s going to get to the weaponry part of her training sooner or later, I might as well.”
I stabbed at a leaf of my Caesar salad, thinking about the fact that I would be learning how to shoot a gun and possibly how to throw a knife in the not-so-distant future. Only days ago had I been sitting at home, sedentarily composing whatever stories my mind had come up with, and then it had all changed the next time my father would beat me.
“You okay, kid? You look kinda… sad,” Agent Barton intoned. I pushed my tray away and looked up at him.
“I’m just realizing how I got here,” I said. “I never thought I’d be shooting guns or learning phonetic alphabets in case I get stuck in, like, Siberia and I’m being chased by ex-Soviet spies.”
“That’s a good point,” Agent Barton agreed. “Though when I’ve gotten stuck, it’s never been Siberia. Burma, yes. And Moscow, and Berlin, and Budapest, and Paris- that was a funny story, remind me to tell you some time…”