capkink | Prompt Post 1

Prompt Post 1

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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As of May 3, 2014, the spoiler policy is no longer in effect.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:
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“Ira,” Natalia calls, turning to one of the twins outside the academy’s rear entrance. “Get the door.”

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.

This fic...IT RETURNS!!! I had given up hope. T_T

I love it so much!

You have no idea the noises I made when I saw this in my inbox!!!!!!

Their brother leaves with the bodies of the guards hidden away in the vehicle out back. Before he goes, Darya watches him put on a jacket far too heavy for the weather and drop his metal hand onto Natalia’s shoulder.

“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.

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