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capkink2014-02-11 08:29 pm
capkinkmod) wrote in capkink2014-02-11 08:29 pm
Prompt Post 1
Remember to title your comments, use appropriate warnings (or "choose not to warn"), and be civil. Embeds are not allowed.
At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
As of May 3, 2014, the spoiler policy is no longer in effect.
Update, April 22, 2014:
For fills, please use the following format:
Fill: Title
Including the pairing, warnings/CNTW, and any other information after the fill and title in the subject line or in the first line of the comment.
Links:
Page A Mod
Fills
Discussion
Delicious Archive
At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
As of May 3, 2014, the spoiler policy is no longer in effect.
Update, April 22, 2014:
For fills, please use the following format:
Fill: Title
Including the pairing, warnings/CNTW, and any other information after the fill and title in the subject line or in the first line of the comment.
Links:
Page A Mod
Fills
Discussion
Delicious Archive
Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 05:00 am (UTC)(link)---
She does not know how old she is, or how long she has been with the Red Room. She only knows that she is the oldest of the girls left. Her original classmates are all dead. Some, have died on mission. Most, have died in training. Many, have died at her own hand.
Truth is precious in the Red Room. Like the girls who remain, it is cold and hungry as winter, hard like their training. Natalia hordes all the truth she can find, hides it from the matron and the guards and runs through the things she knows at night so she doesn’t have to sleep.
These are the things that she knows:
The Red Room carved her from ice and stone. It filled her with something dark and taught her to appear warm, how to laugh and smile and dance. It taught her how to kill and how to appear coarse, mean and resilient. The Red Room showed her how to shatter apart and use her own sharp edges to cut out the hearts of their targets. It has wrapped her in a shroud of death, and she touches up her lipstick with the same steady hands she has used to strangle their enemies. She has overcome every obstacle and excelled at every turn.
Once, there was a time before the Red Room. She had a mother, and a father, and a brother who loved her. Natalia remembers this. Sometimes. Maybe. She’s not sure anymore.
Natalia wants it to be true, though, so she tucks the memory away for safekeeping and tries desperately not to fall asleep.
---
When Natalia sleeps, she dreams of walking through a big house with empty halls and vaulted ceilings. The floors are hardwood and cold beneath her bare feet. Snow falls, catching on her hair and eyelashes. Her mother is playing the piano downstairs, and the sound jumps and tumbles up over the steps and the dark bannister like a dancer, all graceful twirls and sweeping notes. She stands in a room with mirrored walls and frosted windows and stares at the ballerinas who rise in tempo, a living crescendo honoring the glory of a dying nation.
In the dream, her father is waiting in the field outside for her to finish her lessons. Blood is caked under her nails and there is a greasy carbon residue staining her palms and fingertips when she looks down. The dance instructor tells her that when she completes her mission, they will let her go home. Her brother hands her a gun, a knife, a thin length of garroting wire.
It doesn’t matter. Natalia’s body knows how to use every weapon they give her, knows all the complicated motions they direct her through. She feels hollow and empty, a confused partner following an unseen lead as the dancers surround her. She doesn’t remember what her father looks like. The mother in her memory has no face.
“Focus,” a woman says, softly. It drowns out the sound of the piano and claws its way down Natalia’s throat in a cascade of red. The dream goes hazy, flickers falsely across the broken glass box of her mind. The dancers glimmer like gold in the harsh light reflecting off her brother’s metal arm. “Focus on the sound of my voice.”
The room cracks and falls away into concrete, bare and grey and wet. She lays down on a table made of aching bones, a sacrifice on the altar to the collective good. Her blood is ice and her eyes are wide and dry. A man in a white coat tells her to sleep. Someone will wake her when it is over, and it will all be over soon.
Natalia closes her eyes. She waits for someone to wake her, and is never certain if the dream ends or not.
---
When she graduated from training, a soldier pulled her aside. He used to be her brother, but now he is just the ghost of a man she once knew. The Red Room has unmade them all, remade and reshaped them into dangerous things, nameless and eternal.
“You are unbreakable,” he whispered from beneath a mask that punished every movement of his mouth with cuts that never scarred. His eyes were pale and blue and familiar from her dreams. Natalia had nodded. She was very strong. She knew that she had always been very strong. “Like me. But where I am made of metal, you are made of marble. And as the eldest, we must look out for our little sisters. We are not here to hurt them. We must take care of them. Do you understand, Natasha?”
She did not, but she nodded again anyway. He touched her face with a gentleness she had never known before and has never felt since, and Natalia thought of her father waiting in the fields behind the big house and her brother smiling in the snow under the golden sun of a perfect day. She wished she could remember what song her mother used to play on the piano.
---
Usually, they send her out alone on missions far away from the big house. Sometimes, her brother’s ghost and his handler will accompany her in a support capacity. This time, they send another girl with her to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Isolda has been in the Red Room nearly as long as Natalia, and while she has not yet graduated, she is the most skilled dancer they have. This makes her the obvious front for such a mission. Natalia will still be tasked with the dirty work, which is a decision she approves of.
Isolda is the prima ballerina, the delicate grace and pride of the company, and Natalia will pose as her understudy. She will be the knife that pierces their target’s heart.
This is fine. It is better, that she do it. Isolda is not used to missions that end with an assassination, and Natalia wouldn’t want her to get blood on her costume during intermission.
“Natasha,” the ghost reminds her from behind his muzzle. “We must keep our little sister safe.”
“I’ll take care of her,” Natalia says, because of course she will. She is the eldest.
Her brother’s eyes smile down at her from a dead man’s face.
---
The mission is a success. After curtain call, Natalia goes to collect her sister from backstage so they can meet the soldier and his handler at the rendezvous point.
It isn’t blood that she finds on Isolda’s costume.
They sit for a long time in silence then, their backs to the wall and legs stretched out in front of them. Isolda’s tights have been torn and her costume has been ripped up the back. She is very still and stares down at her pointe shoes, which she has not yet untied.
They are going to be late. The matron will be angry. Natalia does not care.
“This is foolish,” Isolda tells her, and Natalia nods slowly, feigning understanding. She wants so badly to comfort but doesn’t know how or what that might look like for girls like them. If Isolda was a target, or a passerby caught up with Natalia’s cover, she knows what she would say. But Isolda is not. She is like Natalia, except that Natalia learned a long time ago that none of the other girls are like her at all. “I have trained for this. It has happened before.”
Natalia’s stomach flips sickly and she doesn’t understand why.
“The training is hard,” she agrees.
“Yes. And it wasn’t supposed to happen this time.” Isolda looks up for a moment, then back down at her shoes. There is a smeared fleck of semen on the instep, near her heel, discoloring the satin fabric. She pauses, then says in a very small voice, “I just wanted to dance. He did it on the stage, in the crossover. I could still hear the audience applauding my performance.”
“Tell me who did this,” Natalia orders. She is the Black Widow on this mission, the senior agent until they rejoin the soldier and his handler. Isolda has to do as she is told. She has no choice but to comply.
“He ruined my costume,” she says instead, like she has not heard Natalia at all. Her breath hitches painfully, but she does not cry. “It was so beautiful, and he ruined it.”
Something dark and ugly coils under Natalia’s skin, seeping out from between the sculpted stonework of her ribcage. If she had returned sooner, she would have been there to stop it. They were supposed to be ballerinas, treasured jewels of the Bolshoi, and no one was supposed to know the Red Room had sent agents to the theater. But she could have killed the man or ordered Isolda to break her cover. Natalia puts her hand over Isolda’s on the floor.
“Focus,” she hisses, and watches Isolda’s eyes go glassy and distant as she slips beneath waves of red and gold. “Focus on the sound of my voice.”
---
These are the things Natalia knows:
At the big house, all the men are chemically or surgically altered. None of them have ever tried to use her or any of her sisters for their own pleasure. They cannot. The girls training to be Black Widows are too valuable, too precious a resource, to be squandered in such a way, and the Red Room does not take unnecessary risks.
In light of this, she had assumed the man who hurt Isolda was a sponsor or a patron or a stage hand. Perhaps even the ballet’s director. Someone organic to the theater, surely, because no one who knows about the Red Room would be stupid enough to lay a hand on her.
She also knows that a man from the theater could be killed as collateral damage.
Natalia would be punished, of course, for straying from the mission parameters and breaking protocol, but that would be fine. She is very strong, and she knows that she could bear the burden of punishment for them both without breaking. Natalia could say that the man stumbled upon her interrogation during the intermission and she had to dispose of his body after the performance, causing them to miss their pick up. No one would ever have to know what really happened.
This is something she did not know until Isolda told her:
The soldier's handler is not a eunuch, and his name is Dmitri.
This, she decides after a moment’s hesitation, will also be fine. A Black Widow is nothing if not resourceful, and none weave webs as dangerous as Natalia.
---
They are so late to the rendezvous that they have to stay the night in Moscow.
Natalia knows how to be sweet, how to be coy and desirable. Her body is sleek and hard with muscle, just beginning to curve and go soft with womanhood. The Red Room trained her well. She laughs and smiles and brushes Dmitri’s arm with teasing, lingering touches, as she has been taught. His eyes grow dark and hungry as they follow her movements.
When he comes to her later that night, she kisses him and lets him push her down onto the bed she is sharing with Isolda.
“Stop,” she says, knowing he will not.
“You’re hurting me,” she says next, and the ghost in the other room comes alive.
---
After, Isolda spends a long time looking down at where Dmitri’s broken body lay on the floor next to the bed.
“Why did you do that?” she finally asks.
“You are my sister,” Natalia explains. “I said I would take care of you. Now, he can never ruin your costume again, and you know exactly how to make it stop if anyone else tries.”
“We will get in trouble for this,” Isolda notes.
“No,” Natalia laughs, giddy on the knowledge, on the surety of truth, and flops back on the bed. “The soldier killed his handler. We have done nothing wrong.”
---
There is snow on the ground outside when they return, and overhead the sun blazes gold and perfect above a sea of blood. Her father is buried in the field behind the big house, and her mother is the sound of a piano playing in an empty room.
“Focus,” a woman orders in a soft voice that blurs and smears across her mind like the shadow-whisper of a blade being unsheathed. She can’t remember who she is supposed to be anymore.
“The training is hard,” a man in a white coat says, as she drowns in the blood she has spilt and forgets what it feels like to be clean.
“You are building the glory of a nation,” someone tells her, as her skin burns and blisters and peels back to reveal dappled rock beneath. She can’t find the scars they ought to leave behind.
"Natasha, my sweetest heart," her brother whispers, touching her damp hair, her blank face, the gaping wound of her slack mouth. She lays very still on the altar made of bone to the collective as his metal fingers, cold and steady like his pale gaze, trail over her heaving chest and stomach. He presses his muzzle against her temple, smudges a sticky wet heat across her skin, and murmurs, "You are made of marble. Unbreakable."
It will all be over soon, she remembers. She just wants to wake up.
She is terrified that she already has.
---
Natalia does not know who the first Black Widow was. She only knows that she will not be the last. For now, she is the best Black Widow the Red Room has ever seen, and she will ensure they have no choice but to use her and punish her instead of the other girls. This is fine. It is better, that she do this in their place. Because she is strong.
She is the eldest.
She is made of marble.
She.
Does.
Not.
Break.
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 05:30 am (UTC)(link)OP
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 06:21 am (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 07:42 am (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [3/?] (warning for implied rape)
(Anonymous) 2016-08-20 11:05 pm (UTC)(link)Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-23 01:08 am (UTC)(link)The rest of the girls twist in their beds, tense and wary in the dark, chain links scratching whispers across the metal frames.
“Irishka,” he says, and one of the twins sits up, her wrist suspended above her where she is cuffed to her sister across the rail of the headboard. The beds are in rows, arranged head to head for just such purpose. One girl might run if she was desperate enough, but the second rarely agrees to. “Come here.”
Irina looks back to her twin, who shrugs, and a moment later, she has slipped her hand from the cuff and joined him. He hands her the knife, and pushes little Sophia towards her.
“Get the other girls up and dressed,” he tells them. Only his mother has the key to their manacles, but Irina has been trained well and there are no locks that can withstand her nimble fingers if she puts her mind to it.
“Yes, Soldier,” she says, and takes Sophia by the hand to show her how to pick the locks. He counts them carefully, and frowns. There are only ten here, and he thinks there were more. Are more? He always has trouble remembering when he first wakes up.
“Mashunya?” he asks, and a very small girl with brown hair and pale blue eyes looks up from the bed he is standing next to. “You are one of many?”
“Yes, Soldier,” Mariya answers. “I am one of eleven.”
“Ten,” Natalia corrects her, stone-faced, from the other side of the room. Her bed mate, Yelena, blanches. “We are ten, now.”
“Oh.” Mariya pauses, and glances at the empty bed where Tatyana used to sleep. “I am one of ten, then,” she says.
The soldier nods. His heart feels heavy and his eyes are very dry.
“Is this a test?” Alina asks, rubbing at her wrist.
“Yes. Follow me.”
---
There is a light transport truck behind the big house, an old GAZ-33097 with faded paint and a canvas covered back. The soldier puts the littlest girls up front in the cramped cap with him and directs the rest into the cargo bed with the blankets from their beds. He counts them off as they go.
“Can I drive?” Ekaterina asks, leaning on the tailgate with bright eyes and a hopeful smile.
“No,” he replies, deadpan.
She scowls. He lashes the tarp flap down in her face and gets back in the cab.
“Where are we going?” Mariya asks. Sophia and Darya have been dozing since he showed them how to start the truck, leaning into one another for warmth, and Mariya immediately begins toying with the radio dial, trying to find a station that comes in clearly. He heads north.
“Yakutsk.” It’s the nearest city large enough to have an airport, but it’s still over nine hours and six hundred kilometres away. They’ll have to stop to switch out who sits up front so no one freezes.
He has decided that he is done losing little girls.
---
“What should we call you on this mission?” Alina asks when it is her turn up front. They’ve passed Aldan and refueled, and now the twins and Isolda are up front. He glances at her and then returns his attention to the road.
“What do you mean?” he asks. “I was a soldier in the Red Army a long time ago, and I have no need of a name.”
“Yes, but we are not part of the Red Army,” Alina points out. “And a soldier probably wouldn’t have a truck full of children, so. What’s our cover? What’s our objective?”
“Will we be Black Widows if the mission is successful?” Irina asks, leaning around her sister to stare at him with wide eyes. “Is that what this is? Graduation?”
Isolda, the only one of them who has been on missions before, remains silent and doesn’t tear her gaze away from where she is attentively watching the snow covered landscape pass through the dirty window.
The soldier hums thoughtfully behind his mask. He hadn’t given it much consideration before, but Alina is right. There are many things they will need once they reach Yakutsk; food, funds, identification papers, a plausible explanation for why a grown man is traveling with ten underage girls. He’s not sure where it is that he’s taking them, only that he must take them somewhere far away from his mother and the Red Room. Yakutsk has an international airport, and he knows how to fly a plane.
“We’ll say you are gymnasts, and get you matching uniforms,” he decides. “I’ll be the coach and say that we are a team traveling for a competition. You can make up your own last names.”
“And we’ll call you. . .?” Alina presses. The man who can no longer be a soldier sighs, and drums his metal fingers on the steering wheel.
“James, I guess,” he says after another minute.
“Djeymes?” Alina repeats, wrinkling up her nose. It sounds more Russian coming from her mouth than his.
“It’s short for Yevgeniy, isn’t it?” Irina asks.
“I thought that was Djeniy,” Alina says.
“Are you two gonna talk the whole time?” he asks flatly.
Alina crosses her arms over her chest with a huff and slouches down in her seat. “It’s not our fault you picked a stupid name.”
The quiet in the cab lasts for about two minutes.
“You should take that off,” Alina suggests. He gives her a very unimpressed look over his muzzle. “A coach wouldn’t wear a mask.”
“I can help!” Irina reaches over to undo the latches and pull it off while he’s driving. He has no idea what he looks like without it, but the cool air feels strange against his wet skin. The girls take one glance at him and then burst into giggles.
“What?” he asks, feeling suddenly defensive.
“You have a weird face,” Alina informs him curtly. Irina nods her agreement. “No wonder the matron made you wear it.”
He glares at them. “I’m gonna leave you both on the side of the road.”
---
“Are you sure I can’t drive?”
“Katya, if you ask me that again,” he warns, “I’m gonna make you walk to Yakutsk.”
---
“She won’t. Stop. Touching me,” Yelena complains. Natalia glares at Oksana, who makes a face.
“Oksanka, leave her alone,” he growls. There is a pounding headache starting at his temples and they’re only halfway there. Oksana mutters something he can’t make out and Natalia reaches around Yelena to hit her in the shoulder. “Natasha, no.”
“She started it,” Natalia says. “I’m just looking out for --”
“It’s not my fault Lena’s a big baby,” Oksana snaps.
“Am not,” Yelena retorts.
“Are too.”
“I swear, I will turn this truck around and take you all back to the Red Room if you don’t knock it off,” he has to shout over them to be heard.
---
“But I really want to dri--”
“What did I say? Katya, what did I say?”
Ekaterina groans like she’s dying and smooshes her face against the glass.
---
“Djeniy,” Sophia whines, “I have to pee.”
“We just stopped, like, five minutes ago, are you kidding me?”
---
“I’m not sitting with Sana,” Yelena announces, loudly, and refuses to come out of the cargo bed. She’s gonna freeze to death, and the man they’ve all dubbed Yevgeniy has just about had it with their constant antagonism of one another. He’s really starting to regret his decision not to lose any of them.
“Yelenka,” he says. “Do not make me come back there.”
---
She makes him go back there.
No one is happy with the results.
---
“What are we going to be doing in Yakutsk?” Alina asks, for the nine hundredth time when she gets back up into the cab. Yevgeniy thumps his forehead against the steering wheel and tries to remind himself that he loves his little sisters very, very much.
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-23 02:09 am (UTC)(link)OP
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-23 03:54 am (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-23 05:57 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-23 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [4/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-27 07:42 pm (UTC)(link)Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-30 08:21 pm (UTC)(link)It's summer, she thinks, and is surprised that it has been so long since the last test.
She ducks back in and lets the tarp fall into place when she hears Yevgeniy open the driver side door. Natalia quirks a brow at her in the dark, nudging her gently with one shoulder.
Yelena nudges Natalia back, and shares a small, secret smile with her. She doesn't know what angle Natalia is working, looking out for her the way she has been since they lost Tatyana, but she knows better than to throw away an opportunity to get ahead.
Yevgeniy pulls back the canvas and drops the truck's tailgate, counting the girls off as they exit, ensuring he still has all ten. She makes sure to stay close to Natalia as they await further direction.
---
There is a safe house here that they will have to occupy by force. Yevgeniy splits the girls into two teams, and makes it very clear to them that in order for the mission to be successful, they must all come back undetected and uninjured.
Yelena isn't sure how the rankings work across different classes, or if their placement on the teams means something important or not. Ekaterina and Natalia are with the twins, tasked to acquire uniforms for them all from one of the city's more prestigious gymnastics academies, while the rest go with Yevgeniy to secure the safe house.
This is a test. And to pass, Yevgeniy says they have to take the safe house without sustaining any injury, but Yelena knows that an injury that goes undetected by an instructor is – in practice – the same as one that has not occurred.
Oksana gives her look that is all teeth and the muted promise violence behind their brother's back, and Yelena sets her jaw resolutely and pretends to ignore her.
She has become very good at not giving away when she is hurt, or when she is going to hurt someone.
---
Yelena has a simple relationship with the Red Room's ranking system. She had been one of fifteen when she first joined the program, in the same class as Tatyana and Oksana. The matron promoted competition among the younger girls, and had told them often that Natalia was the best Black Widow the Red Room had ever seen. She was the hand of the collective, and was helping their parents build a warm future for the glory of Soviet supremacy.
Only the best, the matron had said, would be allowed to graduate. It didn't take the girls long at all to learn that the strong ones at the top of the class received more food and better medical attention than anyone else, and weak girls died.
It was very simple. There were a lot of girls who were weak. They all died and were buried in the field behind the big house.
This is where it gets complicated:
Yelena knows she isn't strong. She has been fighting to hold onto second place for most of her life and the girl in second place cannot afford to be seen struggling. Second place is, arguably, the most dangerous rank to hold in the Red Room. It has none of the benefits of being first and all of the brutality and vulnerability associated with being thrust into the spotlight. No one rises unseen from second place, and whoever is in third is always ready for the perfect moment to strike.
Maybe she would have been a good agent elsewhere in the Red Room or some other part of Department X, but a Black Widow is more than just a good agent, and no matter how hard she tries, Yelena can't seem to meet those exacting standards. She knows that she isn't particularly adept at any of the tasks they trained on. She has to try so much harder than the other girls to make it all look effortless and not let anyone know that this is the best that she can do.
She is like Tatyana was, and Tatyana is already dead.
So Yelena has to rely on being clever instead of good if she wants to survive. And she does. She wants to graduate and be a Black Widow and keep all her secret inadequacies hidden and safe. Her best, she knows, won't always be enough, but it doesn't have to be. She just has to fake it long enough to make it out of training, and then she doesn't have to worry about the other girls in the program anymore. If even the careful gazes in the Red Room can't expose Yelena as the fraud she truly is, then no one can.
---
The assault on the safe house doesn't go as planned.
Or maybe it does. Yelena's not sure what this mission is supposed to be testing, after all.
---
“Longing,” a man says, and Yevgeniy hits his knees with a gasp, metal fingers twitching. He grits his teeth as the man goes on, in a flat, calm voice, “Rusted.”
“No.” Her brother tries to stand, but his body refuses to cooperate. Darya is shaking behind him, her mouth open and no sound coming out. They were supposed to do this undetected, but they've already failed, so Oksana doesn't draw her knife and Yelena doesn't reach for the pistol Yevgeniy gave her. A guard approaches from the kitchen. He has a rifle, and they are not supposed to fight the guards. That only ever makes it worse.
“Seventeen.” The guard takes Sophia's hand and leads her away. Isolda reaches for her, but the man, who Yelena is starting to think might be Yevgeniy's handler, grabs her by the wrist. “Daybreak.”
“Run,” Yevgeniy begs as he starts to slip under the conditioning. Yelena's never heard her brother beg before, not even when the doctors cut him open in the basement at the big house. It's weird to see so much of his face; she knows it hurts, knows that it has always hurt, but normally she doesn't have to see it.
Mariya breaks away and dashes for the stairs up to the second floor.
“Daybreak.” Sophia disappears with the guard into the kitchen. Isolda is staring at the handler's fingers. She is breathing very fast. Oksana has turned her head to watch Yelena with dead, icy eyes. “Furnace.”
“Stop,” Isolda whispers. Yelena doesn't know how she's even capable of speech right now. Her own heart has jumped up into her throat and she's thinking about punishments and their failing grades and how Oksana is going to overtake her in the rankings and then kill her while no one is looking.
“Nine.” Yevgeniy goes blank and still, the plates of his metal arm shifting, the machinery humming as his handler looks down at him. The man is standing in front of their brother's complacent ghost, a mocking smile on his lips as he says, “Benign.”
“You're hurting me!” Isolda's voice is shrill and piercing and terrified, and her eyes are wet and she's crying and Yelena can't remember ever seeing any of the girls cry.
She doesn't remember seeing Yevgeniy wake or move, but he's suddenly on his feet with his metal hand at the juncture of the handler's throat and jaw. She hears the bones crunch, the bloody gurgle of pain, the man's last, wheezing breath over shattered teeth. Her brother is snarling and forcing the man to stumble back clumsily as he is half-carried across the room. They slam into the wall hard enough to dent the plaster.
Yevgeniy drops the handler's limp body, and storms into the kitchen after the guard.
There's a gunshot, and Sophia finally screams.
---
Yevgeniy seems shaken when he returns from clearing the rest of the safe house. It was minimally staffed, and now that the guards have been dispatched, he instructs Isolda to take the younger girls upstairs and find Mariya. Darya has peed her pants and still won't speak, and needs a bath and new clothes. Sophia has blood in her hair again and won't stop biting her lip.
There is a bruise forming on the delicate skin of Isolda's wrist and Yevgeniy is fussing over a bullet hole in his side, but otherwise no one has sustained any injuries.
“Ksyusha, Lenochka,” he calls to them. He has stripped off his jacket and shirt and is standing at the kitchen sink, a thin blade in his hand as he starts to pry the round out of his body. “There should be passports we can use in one of these rooms. Find them.”
There's an uncomfortable moment of silence.
“Aren't you going to tell the matron we failed?” Yelena asks. He looks up from his task with a start. “When you take us back to the Red Room, I mean.”
“No. No, of course not. You didn't fail, and I'm not taking you back.”
Oksana frowns and shoots Yelena a questioning look. “We're still. . . proceeding with the mission, then?”
“Yes. Now, be good girls and listen to your brother.”
The girls glare at each other but do as they have been told.
---
They find passports in what looks like the handler's office on the other side of the safe house. Yelena also finds a dull red book with a black star embossed on the cover. Inside, the pages are worn and fading and filled with jargon and code and strange things she doesn't understand.
She turns the pages slowly, frowning. Oksana looks up from the desk. Her eyes catch on the words Homecoming and Freight car.
“What is that?” she asks mildly, and Yelena knows that she isn't stupid but she can't help the dumb way she answers:
“I think it's. . . I think it's the soldier's manual.”
They both freeze, the implication clear. Yelena is looking at the trigger phrases and control procedures for their brother. It will give her the advantage in future tests. She can tell that Oksana comes to the same conclusion in roughly the same moment that she has about what this whole disastrous scenario has been preparing them for.
Which is precisely why Oksana tries to stab her.
Yelena blocks with the book and snaps forward to strike her in the face with the heel of one palm. It quickly dissolves into a grapple, Yelena attempting to disarm Oksana and Oksana trying to get the book out of Yelena's hand. A leg sweeps Yelena's feet out from under her, and she goes down to the floor hard with Oksana's body on top of her, pinning her in place.
She twists, jackknifing her body, and breaks the hold. Oksana's blade clatters away under the desk.
They wrestle for a moment, quiet grunts and panted breaths because they don't want their brother to overhear this fight. Yelena manages to get behind Oksana with an arm locked around her neck. She squeezes, and Oksana elbows her in the gut, but she doesn't let up.
“Focus,” she grits the word out through clenched teeth. “Focus on the sound of my voice.”
“The training is hard,” Oksana spits back. One of them will trigger first and Yelena knows that whoever does will win and come out on top. “And you have to focus.”
“You are one of ten,” she says, desperately. She can't afford to lose now. She needs this more. Yelena keeps squeezing, trying to cut off Oksana's airway. “Black –”
“Widow agents with the Red Room,” Oksana finishes for her. Her face is red and her struggling is starting to get frantic with adrenaline and too little oxygen. Yelena wraps her legs around Oksana's torso, clenching down hard on her ribcage.
“You are building the glory of a nation,” she says.
“And the warmth of your parents will make up for –”
“I'm not dying in the Red Room with you,” Yelena hisses, and Oksana tries to cough. Her eyelids flutter closed for a moment, the tension in her body starting to go slack. Yelena holds on for almost a full minute after Oksana passes out before she scrambles to her feet and picks up the book. She tucks it into her waistband and makes sure that its slight bulk doesn't show under her shirt and jacket before grabbing the documents off the desk on her way out of the office.
---
“Where's your sister?” Yevgeniy asks when Yelena re-enters the kitchen. There's a field dressing over his wound and he's pulling his shirt back on. Yelena hands him the passports.
“Oksanka is checking for hidden compartments,” she says. The book feels heavy and cold against the small of her back. He nods, and smiles at her.
“You've done well,” he notes. A small bubble of pride and guilt and panic swells in her chest. “Help Isolda with the little ones.”
“Yes, Djenya,” she says, and manages not to choke on her own fear or give anything away. She stuffs her shaking hands into her jacket pockets so no one can tell she doesn't really feel calm.
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-30 09:51 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-08-30 10:21 pm (UTC)(link)OP
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-09-01 04:53 am (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-09-02 05:50 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [5/?]
(Anonymous) 2016-09-05 12:01 am (UTC)(link)Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [6/?]
(Anonymous) 2017-02-21 06:16 pm (UTC)(link)The girl huffs and looks at her twin, who offers up a small, helpless smile in reply. After a silent pause, they both shrug, the second only slightly delayed after the first. This always happens. They are mirror images, little blonde reflections of each other that no one can quite tell apart. It makes her blood boil every time. “Why don’t you do it, Alya?” the girl Natalia had spoken to suggests. The other girl, who must be Alina because she was not called Irina, nods and pulls the necessary tools out of her left pocket.
“I’ve got it,” she says, and crouches down in front of the door to pick the lock. Irina watches as a grimace flickers across Natalia’s face before she can regain control of her features. Natalia glares down the empty street for a moment before lightly nudging Irina with her shoulder.
“I’ll get it right next time,” she promises. The other girl jerks back with a startled expression.
“You got it right this time,” Irina says. Because she did. Natalia is the Black Widow, the senior agent on the mission until they return to the safehouse and rendezvous with the soldier; whatever she decides is true simply is. That’s how it works and there’s no point in arguing, even if Irina wants to anyway. She’s. . . contrary like that. They haven’t yet conditioned that out of her, she supposes. Maybe the matron keeps grabbing Alina for the retraining on accident. Natalia rolls her eyes but doesn’t press further. The whole exchange makes annoyance settle low and hot in Irina’s gut.
Alina finishes with the lock and pops up to her feet to open the door with a small flourish. “Look at that; I’m almost as good at this as Irishka.”
“Don’t brag, Alichka!” Irina teases, then adds, “We know you’re really only any good for shooting.”
Alina gasps in mock-offense. “Not true! Besides, you won’t be good for anything at all when I break your fingers.”
Irina nods somberly. “Yes, I’ll be no good then,” she agrees. Alina makes a small, hurt sound, eyes wide and mouth trembling. There is an uncomfortable moment where it feels like the earth is sliding out from beneath Irina’s feet, because this is wrong, all wrong. Alina is tougher than that. She shouldn’t make that sound, or that face, or —
Natalia scolds them for getting off-track. “Focus,” she orders on her way past into the building, and the world shifts back into place with a shudder. Natalia gestures for the girls to follow her, and Ekaterina checks the street one last time before securing the door behind them. The academy is not empty at this hour. They can hear the athletes practicing in the other rooms, the sounds of bodies hitting mats and coaches shouting instructions. It smells like sweat and chalk and cleaning fluids, sunk deep into the wall paint and the cracks in the flooring, wafting up to the ceiling.
“You weren’t supposed to play along,” Alina whispers to her twin and it feels like drowning, like she’s choking on red and gold and the taste of her own fear. That sounds like something she should be saying, because Irina is the sensitive one. Irina is the nice one, but she doesn’t feel nice at all. And isn’t she supposed to? She. . . She. . .
She has a ridiculous thought — what if she isn’t Irina? What if she has never been Irina? — that makes her laugh, loud and pitched too high, breathy and bordering on hysteric, until the other girls stop to shush her so they don’t get caught.
----
In the Red Room, they respond to many names. She goes by Alina, Ana, Alexsandra. They call her Alisa and Alyona. She responds to all of them, and is attached to none. The matron can’t tell the difference between the twins, and calls her Irina sometimes. Sometimes, they switch places on purpose, because they are good at different things now. They are not the same anymore, and that is wrong, because they are expected to be the same girl. They are trained together and tested together and punished together. They are chained to one another at night. They eat together and shower together and have all the same injuries, even if they don’t get them the same way.
It is dangerous to disappoint the matron, and they do their best to bury the differences and cover for one another. But it is hard. She forgets which one she is now, and which one she is supposed to be. Is she Irina today? Is she Alina? Does the name matter, or only the differences in their skill sets? She doesn’t know anymore.
----
“Katya, Alichka,” the man they call Yevgeniy, the soldier who is not a soldier anymore, who she is supposed to think of as her brother but has never quite been able to, says when they return from the gymnastics academy. She doesn’t think of the other girls as her sisters, either. Not even Alina, who is more her shadow than a girl of her own. The team pauses at the base of the stairs. “Come here.”
Natalia takes the box of uniforms upstairs to make sure they fit the other girls, and Irina follows Ekaterina over to the kitchen entrance with Alina at their heels. Yevgeniy has lain out tarps to cover the tile and is in the process of stripping gear from several bodies near the back door, which is open. They look like guards. She watches him remove the first man’s clothing and equipment and toss it onto the small, scuffed table that has been pushed into the corner of the room. He glances up and gestures for them to enter. The tarp crinkles under their shoes.
“Help me with these,” he says, and gives Ekaterina one of his knives. “Tattoos.” Irina is given a pair of slightly rusted pruning shears, probably from the shed she spots in the yard through the doorway. “Fingers.”
“Yes, Soldier,” Ekaterina says, and crouches by the dead man to begin cutting away the star tattoo on his shoulder.
“I don’t want to,” Irina complains, and Alina blanches, but reaches forward to take the shears from her with trembling hands.
“I can —” she begins, but Yevgeniy interrupts her with a stern shake of his head.
“No. Alichka is doing it. I want you to get Ksyusha and show Mashunya how to clean up the main room.”
“I. . . I-I am Alina,” the girl says uncertainly, and the man stares at her. His silence is like a physical force, like the corrective procedures in the basement of the big house. It is an assault, a brutal surgery without anesthesia. Her eyes water, and the other girl’s breath hitches dangerously; their vision blurs and smears and goes hazy all around the edges. The world shifts again, tilting on an uneven axis and spinning too fast, because they are wrong and he is right. He is the Winter Soldier, and whatever he says is the truth simply is.
“No, Irishka.” Alina, the real Alina, can see the guilty relief that flashes across her twin’s face before Irina can shutter it. Of the two of them, she knows that she has the stronger stomach. Yevgeniy must know this, too. It makes sense, then, that she is Alina and is the one being tasked with this. She feels bad that they got it wrong today, but it isn’t her fault. She doesn’t know who she is unless she has a gun in her hand, and Yevgeniy didn’t give them any guns for this mission. Irina squeezes her arm in apology and quickly backpedals out of the room to locate Oksana.
“This is stupid,” Alina announces to no one in particular. Because it is. Why do they have to do anything with the bodies? Clearly, the test requires them to leave Yakutsk in short order; can’t they just leave the guards where they are? They will all be long gone, either onto the next part of the exam or back in the Red Room, before the authorities manage to find them here. Yevgeniy lets out an exasperated sigh and rubs a bloody hand over his face. The action leaves a red smear across his mouth and chin, a streak from his index finger curving up his cheek toward his eye, before it drops back to his side.
“You gotta complain about everything, don’t you?” Yevgeniy says without heat, the question clearly rhetorical. Alina shrugs and kneels next Ekaterina. She begins removing the man’s fingers at the first knuckle. When the distinguishing marks are removed, the soldier takes the bodies apart piece by piece and she helps him roll them all up in the bloody tarps. There is an old car parked near the shed behind the safehouse, and Ekaterina opens the trunk for him while he carries the guards out. The teeth and fingers and ragged scraps of skin go in a plastic bucket Alina sets on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
All four of the men fit in the trunk. Ekaterina smiles at their work and Alina scowls at her good mood. Yevgeniy playfully ruffles both their hair on the way back inside. They remove their own stained clothing and add them to the pile on the table when it is done; the soldier will probably burn it all before driving the bodies down to the river to dump. He instructs the girls to wash in the sink and the cold water runs pink while she scrubs diligently to remove the red caked under her nails. Yevgeniy flicks water off his metal fingers at her face, and she shrieks. She counters by throwing a handful of water at him, but he elbows her lightly and she misses, dousing Ekaterina instead. The other girl gasps and turns to retaliate. Alina runs for the relative safety of the main room, but Ekaterina tackles her, and they both fall to the floor on the other side of the doorway. Yevgeniy joins them a moment later, tickling them both until they are screaming for reinforcements and scrambling for the stairs.
It only dissolves further into chaos. Irina trips over Mariya as she tries to rush to her twin’s aid, and Mariya grabs onto her leg so she can’t get back up. Oksana lets out a whoop as she pounces on Ekaterina, hitting her repeatedly with a wet sponge. They roll off Alina to wrestle and end up overturning the container of soapy water they’d been using to clean the blood from the floor in front of the dented wall. Sophia and Darya peek down from the second floor with Isolda while Natalia vaults over the stair railing onto Yevgeniy’s back. She pulls his hair, which sets him cursing, and Alina laughs until her chest hurts and her lungs burn.
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [6/?]
(Anonymous) 2017-02-22 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)I love it so much!
Re: Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [6/?]
(Anonymous) 2017-02-23 03:32 am (UTC)(link)Fill: Blades, Braids, & Ballet [7/?]
(Anonymous) 2018-07-07 05:23 pm (UTC)(link)“Look after your sisters until I return,” he tells her. Darya did not know that Natalia was her sister. She is not sure if that is something she was supposed to know or not. Natalia doesn’t say anything in reply. She simply nods.
And then he is gone.
He is gone for a very, very long time.
“Stop it,” Oksana says. They are in the kitchen, and Sophia is tugging on her sleeve and complaining that she is hungry. Darya is, too, but she is much more scared of the bigger girls than she is of going hungry. Despite the warning, Sophia does it again.
This time her eyes well up with tears, because while Sophia might technically have passed the test to be moved up to the next class and is older than Darya, she is still very little. Their training is still new, and sometimes they make mistakes and do stupid things. Like cry. Oksana takes one look at Sophia’s face, with its red cheeks and watery eyes, and hits her.
Hard.
The slap is forceful enough to twist Sophia’s head to the side and bounce her temple off the nearby wall where she was standing too closely. She crumbles to the floor but doesn’t stop crying, even through the shock of the blow.
Darya doesn’t move. She is pretty sure that she is not supposed to see this but cannot make herself close her eyes. She is very scared for Sophia.
In the same breath that Sophia goes down, Natalia appears like a ghost from where she and Ekaterina had been cataloguing supplies in the pantry to grab Oksana by the hair. There is a brief struggle that ends with Natalia elbowing Oksana in the mouth and then slamming her face off the table, snarling, “Stop it, we’re not here to hurt them!”
Oksana tongues at her split lip and then spits blood onto the tiled floor. “What are we here for?” she asks, annoyed, and Natalia hits her again instead of answering.
Darya thinks it is because she doesn’t know either.
Slowly, carefully, Darya crawls across the floor on her hands and knees to Sophia. She is stunned, but otherwise seems okay. They hide under the kitchen table together after that, holding hands, until their brother gets back.
When the soldier finally returns, he is on foot and he is not awake. Darya can always tell when he is her brother and when he is just another man at the big house, even though he never scares her like the guards do. He walks through the safe house now like he did then, automatically and with a heavy kind of deliberation so that no energy is wasted. His eyes are grey-blue and cloudy, empty of the usual fond recognition when he scans over the assembled girls and listens to their reports.
Natalia and Ekaterina have a supply list that includes food and weapons, and recommendations on how they should be distributed, but they need to know how long the mission will be and whether or not there is a plan for resupply before anyone can eat.
The man does not respond to their questions. He stands motionless in the main room, staring blankly at the dent in the wall. There is no blood, and only minimal scraping on the floorboards to denote where something might have once occurred. Mariya told Darya that the older girls said there was a way to fix that, too, so that there would be no evidence at all that they had been there, but they didn’t have plaster or paint to patch it.
“He’s broken,” one of the older girls complains to another. “How are we supposed to get through the airport with him like this?”
“He’s not broken,” Natalia assures them. “He just needs time. He’ll be back within test parameters by morning.”
With a huff and a sigh, the twins gather up the identification papers, passports and birth certificates to be altered for their needs, along with a fancy printing kit that Darya hasn’t seen in her training yet, and plant themselves at the man’s unmoving feet. Oksana is sitting on the bottom step watching Yelena and Natalia with a dark expression where they are laying out the safe house weapons for assignment across the room. Ekaterina is showing Mariya how to operate the camera they’ll be using, and Isolda is converting the storage closet off the main room into a darkroom so they can develop the pictures for the passports.
Darya isn’t sure where she is supposed to go. She is the youngest and the smallest and, unlike Sophia, she didn’t even pass the last test. They stay out of the way and peer into the room from the relative safety of the kitchen.
“He said we could pick our own names for this mission,” one of the twins informs the rest of the girls. The other nods, quick and desperately trying to appear helpful.
“Yes, and they shouldn’t all be the same,” she says. “Nothing memorable, we want—”
“Romanova,” Natalia calls out, interrupting her. One of the twins drops her mouth open in mortified shock and the other scowls at the blatant disregard of instructions. “I want to be a Romanov.”
“You can’t be a Romanov!” the first twin yells back. “Weren’t you listening? It needs to be bland. Generic.” Natalia shrugs, pulling back the slide of a handgun to check that a round was chambered before engaging the safety and setting it back down with the rest of the weapons. “It can be your patronym, if you’re really set on it.”
“No. You said we could choose. That’s what I’m choosing.”
“What do you want for your patronym then?” the second twin asks. The first girl shoots her a disgusted look, and she just looks back helplessly. “What? If Natalia is a Romanova, we could be Urusovas. It’ll be fun.”
“Sure, everyone can be the lost daughter of an ancient Tsar. Why not? That won’t be suspicious at all.”
“Alianovna,” Natalia answers, and the first twin throws up her hands in outrage.
“That’s not even a real name! Djenya!” She hits his knee with a sheaf of papers while the other girl starts forging Natalia’s new identity. “You’ll pick a reasonable name, right?”
The man is quiet for a long time before his mouth falls open on instinct to rasp out, “Barnes.”
“No!” The girl hits him in the knee again.
“Djeyms Barnes.” Darya thinks it should be said in a teasing tone, that his voice should be soft and rolling in that strange, foreign way he sometimes gets after waking. But it isn’t. He is cold and empty and unaware. His voice is flat, ground out raw and throaty, oddly clear without the muzzle to muffle it.
“That is obviously fake!” The girl hollers, and swats him once more, this time in the thigh. He twitches, blinks hard for a few moments like he is struggling to wake, and then resettles into quiet apathy.
“Barinov is a real name, though. Maybe that’s what he means,” the other twin says, nodding confidently as she makes a note. “Patronym?”
“Ivanovich,” the first suggests.
“Alexeyev,” Natalia proposes.
“Buchanan,” he says, and they all scowl.
“That’s stupid,” the grumpy twin complains. “Buchanan isn’t a real name, either.”
“Bukharin?” The helpful twin offers. No one seems impressed by the imaginative stretch.
“Right, because the daughter of a Tsar and a Bolshevik revolutionary on the same gymnastics team won’t seem like too much of a coincidence,” the grumpy twin sneers.
“Maybe part of the test is that we have to come up with them all on our own, without his help?” Yelena pipes up. Natalia nods her agreement, which just makes the grumpy twin roll her eyes.
“If they’re all going to sound as fake as Natalia Alianovna Romanova, then we won’t get far,” she says. The other girls stifle giggles and Natalia throws an extra magazine at the twins.
They end up compromising on the man’s name, but not on Natalia’s. The twins become Kovalyovas, Yelena a Belova. Oksana takes her name from a district in Moscow none of them have ever been to, while Ekaterina’s is linked to her perceived rank in this strange, integrated class they’ve all found themselves in. Isolda settles on Morozova. Mariya asks them to make hers Khilyeva. Sophia quietly requests to be a Belyakova. Their fake fathers are Ivan and Ilya and Georgi, Alexei and Boris. Sergei and Viktor. Someone suggests ‘Dmitri,’ and Natalia bares her teeth and vetos it so fast Darya is sure she must have missed something.
The whole process makes her head spin, leaves her confused and struggling to keep up. Darya can’t keep track of all the changes. They ask her to pick a name and she can’t. There are too many. She’ll never remember what to call everyone.
She sticks her finger in her mouth and pokes at the inside of her cheek instead of responding.
“I’ll make her coach’s daughter, then,” the helpful twin says, not looking up from where she is surveying the first of the finished passports. She handles it carefully because the adhesive has only just set. “Darya, try not to talk, but if you have to, call the soldier ‘Papa’ from now on, okay?”
But he is not. Darya’s heart is beginning to pound frantically in her tiny chest, her breath coming too quick. There are tears starting to well up in her eyes. He is not her father. He is her brother. She just wants her brother right now.
“We should smuggle them on board,” Oksana says, nodding toward the youngest girls. “They’re too little to be trusted with a mission. They’ll compromise us.”
“No. I’m not putting them in bags or making them travel in cargo. They’re small. They’ll break. Focus on the sound of my voice, and do as I tell you,” Natalia orders.
Isolda leans over the helpful twin’s shoulder, squinting at the passport, and then frowns. She taps the girl gently on the arm to get her attention and then points to the page. “You need to redo this. The type is slanted, and you misspelled ‘Adygeysk.’”
The room goes very quiet for a moment, and then the other twin says, “Ira can’t.” She gestures to the assorted supplies between them as she clarifies. “There isn’t enough to start over. I don’t think all of us were supposed to make it this far.”
“Or maybe we’re just supposed to smuggle Darya and Sophia on board as equipment,” Oksana suggests, raising her voice and staring pointedly at their eldest sister.
“No,” Natalia repeats.
The helpful twin takes the passport back with shaking hands. “Maybe. . . Maybe no one will notice?”
The grumpy twin snorts a laugh. “Yeah, let’s hinge mission success on the hope that everyone we meet tomorrow will be stupid and bad at their jobs. That won’t end badly.”
They spend the night at the safe house. The man binds their wrists together with strips of cloth when the girls become restless; there aren’t enough beds, so the little ones get the beds and the others pair up to sleep on the floor. He starts to wake by the end, singing Sophia a lullaby and braiding Isolda’s hair. He presses his lips to their foreheads and tells them that he will be just outside.
It’s strange, Darya thinks, to actually feel his mouth on her face instead of the hard material of the mask. But his stubble scratches and gives the gesture texture, however unfamiliar, which helps. Yelena, who had been dallying in the bathroom, fidgets by the door when he goes to leave.
She whispers something to him, and he crouches down to her level to listen. He touches her blonde hair then, coiling a lock loosely around his finger for a moment before he gently bumps her chin up so she meets his eyes. He glances back to Oksana, who has been sulking and glaring at Yelena in silence since they came upstairs, and then motions for Yelena to follow him into the hallway.
Natalia frowns as they leave. She sits up as though she wants to go after them, but her wrist is bound to one of the bed legs. After a moment of staring at the empty space in the doorway, she lays back down stiffly. Darya can hear her breathing in the dark, deep and steady, until she falls asleep.