It was a deceptively sentimental activity. Natalya sat on the low, wrap around porch of her hut, improbably sized wolf friend stretched out over the cool wood and similarly oversized snow globe in hand. She was turning it over to crank the key at the bottom and start whatever song wanted to play next, a seemingly endless, she'd found over the years, medley of Russian melodies and anthems. Then she would right it and set it on the railing to watch the snow fall on Red Square.

She felt sometimes as though her entire world could compress down to fit inside the glass, and maybe if she focused long enough, she'd wake up there instead of the island one day. The question would ultimately be, of course, if she did, would it be to a living Rodya or a dead one? Would it be to the world she'd left or the one that had existed before?

The questions weren't helpful, really, they didn't make the days less lonely or more compelling. If anything, she recognized her dependence on the maudlin little ritual as being, probably, a bad sign for her mental state. She wasn't sure she knew how to interact with people in a meaningful way, any longer, and that should have made her sadder.

Instead of letting that particular emotion bloom, though, she pulled the snow globe down and wound it again.

Natalya usually went on August 26th, the anniversary of the day the Soyuz had crashed onto the island, but she hadn't this year. She'd thought about it, toward the end of the day, but she'd had plans to see Sam and she couldn't bring herself to postpone or cancel them. It was a funny thing, to find herself with plans. And then she'd stayed away because she was afraid of facing it, she realized. After the inarguable failure that the Rapture operation had proven to be, she just... Hadn't wanted to walk up to the cemetery and look at the names, and remember the wreckage and all the people she'd let down.

But that was cowardice, so she dressed in khaki shorts and ankle boots that were good for the terrain and a black tank top, and she headed for the cemetery, Ahimsa following curiously behind.

Natalya stood in the compound kitchen, watching her tea steep and winding her still wet hair into a coil against the back of her head. She slipped three bobby pins into it to hold it there before moving to retrieve a spoon from a drawer. Her hair hadn't been so long in, probably, ten years. Until she'd been recruited, she'd worn it in a straight blond sheaf, all one length, always tucked behind her ears and falling to the small of her back. Then she'd cut it to her chin and kept it there, a sleek bob that worked as well under a helmet as at an important function.

Hair cuts. Those used to happen. She mused on the nature of how mundane her life on the island was compared to how mundane her life in Russia had been, at least in between assignments. In some ways, Russia actually won.

She turned from the drawer to lift her mug and slipped the spoon into the steaming water, metal scraping gently against the porcelain, and when the tip of the spoon hit the bottom of the mug she went blind.

Or she thought she had, for a moment. All she could see was white. She was lying in the snow on a hillside, among drifts and heavily-laden trees. There was a low concrete building half buried in the stuff in the small box canyon below her. Seven figures, barely discernible against the ground in their white snowsuits, white and grey encasements on their guns and flashbombs, moved toward it. For a moment, as her body acclimated with ready ease to the cold and the gear and her hands fitted themselves more comfortably, naturally, against the weight of the rifle that was butted up against her shoulder, that she was completely mad. And then Llyumzhinov stepped on a landmine. The white lit up even more brightly, although the spray of red and black char and the orange-hued smoke that billowed upward quickly tempered the brilliance.

This wasn't happening, this couldn't possibly happening. Two doors of the compound kicked open, and enemy combatants rushed out, the muzzles of their AKs already flashing. The forward four were dropping to their knees and returning fire. She put her eye to the scope, knowing she'd see two go down quickly, recognizing the faces of her first away team as she did. Zacharov, KIA, Demichev, KIA. Eight Spetsnaz versus a militia. There were worse odds.

It became problematic when one factored in the presence of the Special Air Services. Four mercenaries Natalya knew were going to poke their heads out any minute. Three Chechen insurgents came out of an upstairs doorway to lay down fire on her remaining teammates. She shot the first through the eye. She shot the second through his left cheekbone. She shot the third more cleanly through the forehead.

It was as easy as breathing, although breathing, at the moment, felt very, very hard.

As far as dreams went, this was one of the more horrifically vivid she could ever recall. Scanning the rest of her team to take inventory, it became immediately and immensely more so. Faces that should have belonged to two of her fellow Vympel did not. She was so startled she sat back, up into plain sight, before leaning down and refitting the rifle to her shoulder.

Yorick Brown pushed his goggles up onto his forehead, and her stomach lurched.

This absolutely could not be happening.

Natalya gasped, quietly, falling back onto the sheets- suspiciously nice, given there were no stores to readily procure them from in their present local- with one arm flung out to the side and the other curled over the top of her head. It was, doubtless, the quietest she'd been in hours. She had entertained the thought, or at least suffered its maudlin presence, over the years since Le Grand Depart that she had actually forgotten what sex felt like. It was strange, now, to know that she sort of had, sort of hadn't. More had than hadn't, really. Not that she'd be forgetting again anytime soon.

It had been a hell of a reeducation.

She closed her eyes, humming softly at the back of her throat and stretching a little, listening intently to the sound of their breathing as it began to slow and focusing as intently as she could on the sensation of sweat evaporating off her skin, leaving goosebumps in its place. There were several other lingering sensations that were vying for attention, but they could wait their turn.

Opening her eyes to the ceiling, limbs feeling heavy and warm, she shoved a hand back through her hair and blinked a few times to bring the world back into focus.

"Seks chuvstvuet sebya otlichnaym posle tridtsaty," she mused quietly. Who knew.