The even heat of Dorado’s sundown was a stifling, a skin-prickling humidity than ran just a few degrees short of comfort. Widow remained mostly numb to temperature, but the dense texture of the heat seemed to crawl inside her clothes, thick and suffocating. She swept off her hat as she entered the tiny hotel, grimacing.
She hated to pose as a civilian - as if she didn’t have the strangest, most bizarre pallor to give her away - but she did as she was bid. Her next mission required more than a few day’s preparation, and she was told to keep things mostly clandestine while Talon managed a bit more reconnaissance before she could be put to use.
When she received her room key, thanking the receptionist in polite, but stilted Spanish, Widow didn’t waste time in going into hiding. She hung the bent plastic Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, locked her door, shaded the windows, and began to strip.
It was frankly better to be naked than to wear a tourist’s costume. She noted with some distaste as she pushed her stockings down her thighs, the cheap nylon material had already begun to run. Even in another life, she’d never wear something of such inferior make.
As she unbuttoned her cotton blouse, a loose button came off at her fingertips and rolled onto the carpeted floor.
A faint touch-memory pricked at her - the feeling of a needle stinging against her thumb as she clumsily sewed a button back onto a shirt. A man’s laughter, and her own voice rippling as if it were underwater: Ce n’est pas si facile, aide-moi, chéri . . .
Widow exhaled sharply, yanking off the blouse as if it burned her. It was repugnant, somehow. Distracting. Like wearing something else’s skin. She finished undressing to her underclothes and left the rest, unsure if she’d spend the rest of the night in.
Just ahead of her, she had the whole of two days to waste her time with nothing. Ever since her brush with an old face in the warehouses alongside Route 66, she’d been on edge for days. Not even executing a handful of guards on her way out of the facility had been satisfying.
She could hear the sound of Jesse McCree on the ground, boots sliding across the dusty floor, choking on his own breath and looking up at her with a terror in his eyes. The feel of her gun in her arms, weighted and smooth.
And a promise hanging over her head, black as death himself. This one, this one’s mine, in a whisper pitched so low it thrummed at her bones.
Widow sighed. It was no good to fantasize over something that did not belong to her. But she wanted it. She perched on the edge of the bed’s comforter for a moment before returning listlessly to her bags, retrieving the Widow’s Kiss from its case and carried it to the bed, settling in between the pillows.
Widow stayed there a while, a lip caught between her teeth, disassembling the rifle part by part and putting it back together, slower each time. A methodical, mindless thing, almost meditative in its familiarity. What to do? She had no instruction but wait. If she was lucky, maybe the walls would close in on her before the memories could swallow her up - the lightning-quick, tactile things that came to her every so often. Words, faces, splashes of color.
And if she let herself dwell, they started to gain voices, names: unwelcome guests, past lovers, enemies, old and new.
