Slipping open the grimy window to the apartment, Diana slinkered into her old home. The apartment was on the fourth floor. A walk up. She'd moved in after college and poured hours into making the apartment hers shortly after moving in. Obsessing over every detail of where the couch would go and why she should choose one painting to hang next to the TV over another. 

To be back in her home was a perforating feeling, Her sharp hair stood on edge and the more she stared at the walls and into her old world, the less she recognized it. Small details persisted, the marks in the wall where she had hung pieces of art that were no longer there or the crack in the floor that she'd called her landlord about a million times but he never fixed.

The new tenants had switched the living room and the office. There was an electric kettle where she'd kept her coffee machine. Mainly it still looked the same, there was a stain on the floor from when she'd tried to make curry for the first time and dropped it on the ground.

Diana looked across the room into the small living room.

There was a bookshelf in the same place that hers had been. Theirs was sparse with non fiction books, arranged in no certain order. Diana's had been full with books and dictionaries of the foreign languages that had enraptured her personal life all those years ago.

She stood with a straight back in front of the bookshelf, her mind wandering as her eyes sat blurring on the covers. When Diana was a child she believed very little in this world was impossible. She had watched her mother teach in front of a thousand young adults and seen her father stand tall, loud and strong before his subordinates. Diana had never seen them be scared.

Diana had seen men on the moon and ventured to the tallest peaks of mountains in foreign places. They hadn't been scared either. But language had left her both stupefied and enraptured as a child. Sure, she had grown up speaking both Mandarin and English while eating bao and hamburgers but there was a world beyond the China she felt with her mother and there was a world beyond the America she became beside her father.

She still remembered the first time she heard Russian - her first truly foreign language-. The news was on in the living room as always when her mother cooked. The local news was playing a Russian documentary about the fall of the Soviet Union, as it so often did back then. The man's soft guttural tone was what caught her attention, it pulled her from the edges of her age crinkled novel. She'd been ten.

The library at her elementary school had barely been updated and some of the books were still dust covered, but Diana didn't care. The man's voice still played in her head like a melody she couldn't forget. So, she scoured for every piece of a Russian resembling book, and when she couldn't find Russian she found Indonesian, Polish, Spanish, Arabic.

And so, at the young age of eighteen Diana decided to live in the world of languages and never leave. A few years later she met Amanda Barlow.

Diana Winters had joined the CIA in the freezing hours of December later that year.

Running her fingers over the pin pricking orange decor, Diana moved to her old room.

Replacing her white metal bed frame and covers was a large velvet orange bed frame and covers. Diana sneered, it was ugly. Luckily, the location of the beds didn't differ, meaning there was only a minute chance they'd found her stash.

Her fingertips pressed against the wood of the floor, sliding it out of place. Beneath the ground was a small box, it wasn't large but the outside of it was a buff-colour.

All her personal files from the Chechen investigation. Papers upon papers. Her gun. Knives. A few different papers concerning research and characterization on deep cover identities. Everything that had given her a sense of identity in a world that stripped her of one sat with a dusted top inches beneath the floor of a home that was not hers anymore. 

The sight of them made pinpricks burst on her skin.

Reaching over the side of the bedroom, Diana grabbed a nearby peach backpack. She haphazardly shoved all the things from her stash beneath the floor into it. The bag bulged at the bottom.

She exited just as the tenants returned, the door lock clicking open as she returned to the shadows beyond her old apartment.