𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒅𝒐𝒐𝒓 ✘ 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐅𝐅

{6⁶} {COMFORT IN COINCIDENCE}

∆ {6⁶} {COMFORT IN COINCIDENCE} ∆

Two Months Later

ROXI ONCE AGAIN sat on her hill at the States' memorial. She didn't come here nearly as often now, since she'd finished writing down the names. There had been days that she wished she hadn't locked it in that box, had almost hated herself for depriving her the opportunity to run her fingers over the ink-stained pages, to memorise the names as obsessively as she'd written them.

A gust of wind blew past, and she shivered, despite the several layers of clothes that included one of Natasha's hoodies. She'd taken to wearing baggy clothes to hide the way her bones stuck out against her skin almost jauntily. She wasn't pale though, because exercise and fresh air were among the few things she hadn't begun to neglect these past few years. Despite her lack of appetite and inclination to eat, her training had meant that any bulk she had retained was almost pure muscle, and she'd taught herself how to fight and function with almost no energy. It had been a gruelling process, but one she had deemed necessary in the end.

She'd been here for hours, enjoying the lack of noise that reached her here as she scanned the slabs, counting them over and over to give her mind something to do. The grass was soft to the touch, and she had plans to go to Tony and Pepper's for dinner, to visit Morgan, their two-year-old who Roxi had barely met, what with all the time she'd spent away or locked in her darkness.

She brought her hand up from the gentle tickle of the blades of grass and ants' legs as they scurried across her fingers, and instead traced the raised skin beneath her sleeve, the familiar pattern that was wrapped around her arm. She stilled, however, when a vaguely familiar figure sat down next to her.

A figure with her brown hair half-dyed a faded blue, her face sharp and pretty beneath a nastily pointed scowl. This was the woman who normally had her fingers wrapped around the neck of a bottle, who usually sat further down the hill, where Roxi could stew in her distaste for alcohol in silence. But she didn't have a bottle, though her face was screwed up in some kind of loathing as she surveyed the scene before her. After a moment, she simply fell backwards, her back hitting the earth with a soft thump as Roxi watched her with a blank look.

She didn't know this woman. She didn't know anything about her at all, except for the fact that she came here almost as often as Roxi did, possibly more often.

"God, this sucks, doesn't it?" An accented voice, Spanish, came from the woman as she gazed up at the canopy of browning leaves below a sky that was shrouded in grey. Roxi didn't reply, still examining the woman without a word.

"Sure, it's nice to know that they are remembered somewhere, but they could've done a bit better than just a name in some stone, no?" Oh. The woman recognised her, too. Roxi considered whether she should say anything at all before she replied, taking her gaze off of the woman and resting it back on the slabs as she began to count again.

"I guess." An image of a name in stone in Sokovia, and then that same name written in red ink, surrounded by a map of stars she knew the intended audience would never get to see.

"Hey, what happened to the book?" The woman propped herself up on her elbows, her face squinting inquisitively at Roxi, who gave her the short, sharp response she felt was owed to that question.

"Where's the bottle?" The scowl flickered across her face again, a bitter sneer twisting her features until she seemed to think better of it, and also turned her attention back to the memorial. They stayed in that silence for a while, and Roxi realised that this woman was the first person she'd spoken to that she didn't know since the Snap. Natasha had been encouraging her just that morning to branch out, to find other people to talk to in hopes that she might find some diversity in her life. Stray from her normal patterns, those deadly habits that she'd become so stuck in. A sigh, a moment's hesitation.