UN: itsybitsy

[tothefly]

[Hi, villagers. Here on your screens is one Natasha Romanoff, hair tied back from her face, still looking a little worn out but finally rested again after sleeping for nearly 24 hours.]

So. It's been about two weeks since our unexpected little hiking trip, the weather sucks, and since I don't think group therapy would go over well here, I'm offering another option for those of you looking for a little distraction.

[The video pans from Natasha's face over to a small bookshelf, where the brightly-colored spines of twelve hefty mass-market paperbacks can be seen. The titles are all fairly innocuous, and they all seem to be part of the same series, being labeled by month at the top of the spine.]

Whoever's running this place has seen fit to send me a small part of my library from back home. They aren't much, but in my experience there's very little a trashy romance novel can't cure. I'm willing to loan them out if anyone's looking for something to read that isn't an informational guidebook or how-to.

Of course, that's with an oath to bring them back in the same condition they were loaned out in.

If anyone wants descriptions or summaries, feel free to stop on by number 40 or send me a message. First come, first serve.

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[tothefly]

The house Natasha and Betty share is well-kept, neat and clean. They still don't have electricity; she's not sure what exactly it takes to get that going, maybe it's random, considering how little the village's minds have been able to decipher about the electrical grid, but it hasn't seemed to stop any of their efforts to keep the place up. The living room she leads Jacob into is warm and cozy, open doors leading back to a dining room equally neat and clean. Nodding towards the couch and chairs clearly arranged into a conversational grouping, Natasha heads that way herself.

"Since last October, so about four months," she answers his question, hardly a pause to do the math. "That I remember, anyway. What about yourself?" No reason to hide her own curiosity, especially at this point. "Can I get you anything to drink? We've got some tea, it's herbal but not terrible, especially with how cold it's been out there."

[relentlessness]

Given he's yet to settle into this place, a mixture of loss and emotions leaving him mostly just camping out on rooftops and squatting in vacant homes, he finds it both heartening and curious those that have managed to make a home of this place. Perhaps he could have as well, if he hadn't been stubborn and moody, but days do change, after all. Moving to one of the chairs, taking a seat as he nods at her time here. "December for myself, or so I've been told of those here. It wasn't December at all when I was brought here, so I have to take the word of those here and the weather for that." Though there's a sudden brightness of hope in his eyes. "Every time I'm offered tea here it gives me hope," he says with a grin. "So yes please, if you don't mind. I would be delighted for a cup."

[tothefly]

She's always been a practical person. Find a base camp, get set up, settle in, learn the terrain, know the people better than they think you do. She spends a lot of time on walks, a lot of time studying the network, and just as much making sure she knows every square inch of this house and this village, just in case. But honestly? This isn't home, and it's not going to be, and so ultimately it's just a place she's currently sleeping. Well-kept, but not personal, and it shows in the lack of decoration or personal touches, aside from the bookshelf currently being used to house her small fiction collection plus an assortment she's borrowed from the library, visible from where he's sitting.

Natasha's laugh carries as she moves on through the open dining room encasement towards the kitchen. "I wouldn't get your hopes up too high," she calls back, sounds of putting a kettle on to heat and stoking the fire in the stove underscoring the words. "It's nothing fancy. Goldbell, dandelion and chamomile. If we're still here next summer I'm going to dry some peaches, it has to be better than nothing. I'd ask who I have to murder to get some actual tea leaves around here, but I'm half worried our hosts would give me an actual answer." There's plenty of humor in the words, but honestly? If half of what she's learned from Frank is true, she might faintly consider it.