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repaying.
the red room
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
【 au 】 the americans
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
【 au 】 the americans
no name / margaret atwood
This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him — you place it
in the chest, on the left side — and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.
He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry
but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms and cold
air flows over your threshold
from him, you have never
seen anyone so alive
as he touches, just touches your hand
with his left hand, the clean
one, and whispers Please
in any language.
This is the nightmare you now have frequently:
that a man will come to your house at evening
with a hole in him — you place it
in the chest, on the left side — and blood leaking out
onto the wooden door as he leans against it.
He is a man in the act of vanishing
one way or another.
He wants you to let him in.
He is like the soul of a dead
lover, come back to the surface of the earth
because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry
but he is far from dead. Though the hair
lifts on your arms and cold
air flows over your threshold
from him, you have never
seen anyone so alive
as he touches, just touches your hand
with his left hand, the clean
one, and whispers Please
in any language.
no subject
The words permanent failure. They sting. There's the instinctive aversion to failure that comes with the Red Room itself — the knowledge that whenever he disappoints them (as he does, always, disappoint them), he'll be wiped clean again with the electricity and the diodes pressing against his temples and the whiff of burning flesh and that scream, caught in his throat, the scream as his memories are razed out of him with fire. He obeys, he always obeys, but the sight of that chair has been carved somewhere deeper and more instinctive than memory. A kind of primal fear response.
Maybe graduation is like that for her, too. Fear.
But permanent failure, she says, and the Soldier can't define that uncomfortable lurch in his chest at the thought of it. Like someone just tightened a fist around his heart, squeezing the air out of him. Imagining this field of weeds now being less one bright red rose.
"Given the option of death or pain, Nat, wouldn't you choose pain?" he asks, his voice low and practically a whisper now, and his first use of her name aloud. It's a terrible choice, and therefore perhaps no choice at all,
but it is, after all, the only one she has.
no subject
He uses her name, a name she's only over spoken aloud once, and it had been to him. It presses into her like a knife, white-hot and sobering. She swallows thickly.
"I'd choose pain."
Because her pain can be transformed one day, when they let her off her lead, they let her out of these walls long enough for her to find the soft, fleshy part of them and tear them apart. The seeds are there, waiting in hairline fractures, waiting in the crevices the handlers think they've all but spackled over.
A measured breath, but it shudders in her throat. This is fear. This is what real fear feels like and she makes a promise to herself to remember. Her fingers flex, tinged red from the broth. I have no place in the world.
"Why are you helping me?" Something in her chest hurts, makes her throat feel thick and swollen, makes something burn at the back of her eyes. Her hair falls in waves around her face, like wildfire waiting and ready to burn.
no subject
But there's an almost panicked glint in his blue eyes at her asking that question, and so she can see right through it and into that one lonely light guttering in an empty room, and see the truth of it. As if somewhere along the way, Nat had snapped her fingers around a matchstick and lit a flame and it's still burning inside him. Maybe someday, a few years from now, it'll grow out of control.
The Soldier ducks his head and his own lank, unkempt hair tumbles into his face, too; a shield between him and the rest of this room, between him and the world. There's always something slightly haggard about the look of him, like an uncombed feral hound that came slinking in out of the woods.
He could lie again. Say something about maintaining the health and vitality of a valued asset. Ensuring that the organisation's resources haven't been put to waste, poured into a woman who'll squander her training.
But deception has not been trained into him — the soldiers are obedient living weapons, bloody knives moulded to their handlers' clean hands. The men are placid and straightforward where the ballerinas are complex, able to control their voice, their micro-expressions, wielding every delicate piece of omission or dissembling or deception. His only defense against it is that he often has no expression at all.
None of the truth is safe to admit.
In the end, though, he settles for this: "I would prefer not to see you die. You—" A hesitation. Rusty cogs grinding in his chest. "You brighten the place."
no subject
The hair framing her face hides her expression, otherwise the whole room would be able to see the widening of her eyes, the set line of her mouth; a girl caught in headlights, blindsided at the last minute. Could this be a test? Did she just show her hand, open herself up to an attack upon the one shred of humanity she has left beating in her chest?
It would be so like them. Something in her chest hardens, just so, curls in on itself like a child struck across the face. A lesson learned, and Natalia adapts. Her expression closes off neatly, becoming confident eyes and pursed, pouted lips, neutral in a way that reeks of danger, were it not for the sharp light behind blue eyes.
She can't read him, not without looking at his face, hidden behind a curtain of haggard brown. Another failure; she should be able to read him in the very movement of his fingers, in the gears that turn in his mind, in his chest, in his joints. But she tries, and turns to him, a wildfire on the verge of catching. She can see the muscle of a jaw working, the duck of his head, the very wildness of him.
He seemed empty before, vast and endless and dark, but now when she looks at him—
Rusty cogs. Something moving like a ghost through him. A light, guttering in the depths but one she can feel warmth from, even now, if she just reaches out her hand. It's faint, the spark of something someone tried to squelch, but it's there. Her eyes turn back to her own blistered hands, the broth spilled on the tray, her reflection in it warped but she sees the streak down one cheek, then the other, like invisible scars burning their way through her skin. Weakness, but it does something to protect the very tender thing locked behind her ribs.
Her knee meets his beneath the table, subtle, the alignment of muscles and sinew away from the light. Contact not brought by combat, but something else. She doesn't have a name for it. She wants to live, if it means she might be able to kindle that tiny, distant flame.
"James," quiet, careful, nigh a whisper. "That's what you were called. It's all I know."
A gift for a gift. Thank you.
no subject
Every single part of him desperately wants to reach out with his right hand, run a warm thumb over the planes of her cheeks, brush away that subtle streak of tears, and it's only after he swallows the urge and smothers it in its cradle that the question occurs to him: where did that urge come from?
Because that instinct hasn't been trained into him. It isn't part of the curriculum, isn't part of the skillset that he needs as a brute-force assassin. So he bites down on it, focuses on his hands against the table instead, the splay of tightened tendons and metal, the clenched fist.
Her voice is so quiet that one could almost think you've imagined her whisper; so the soldier finds himself tilting slightly to the side like a tree leaning in the wind, head cocked to hear her better. And her words sink into him, that offering ebbing through all the nooks and crannies and crevices of his armour, like liquid fire settling into his veins. It sears through him, the familiarity of that name, the shape of it in his memory and the way it sounds on her lips. It doesn't spark any other recognition, but it doesn't have to: it's rare enough. He hasn't had this before.
And so James' knee nudges back in return.
"Thank you," he says, head still ducked, so it's like those two rough words are being addressed to his tray rather than her. His voice is hoarse, catching in his throat, as if he hasn't spoken in ages.
Gratitude. He hasn't felt that in so long, either. He's never had a reason to.
no subject
Too bad they failed.
With practiced ease she tosses her head, waves of hair falling over her shoulders, hands reaching to gather wild waves between her palms. It's subtle, the way she swipes at the tears with her sleeve, in the guise of carefully braiding the hair that should have been tidy when she arrived.
Here she is, neatly plaiting her hair, carefully twisting every frayed attempt at rebellion back into it's dutiful knot. I would prefer not to see you die. Never mind the blisters on one hand, the pinkening skin on the other, her fingers move nimbly, practiced and numb to the hurt.
"I'll get more."
There's a defiant set to her jaw, the upturn of her face to the warm lighting of the mess hall. Maybe she can't avoid the graduation without death, but she will pluck them apart, thread by thread. Like a spider crawls through cracks to build its web, she'll lay delicate leylines, choke them when their backs are turned.
Braid finished, she pushes up to stand, though the closeness of her knee means she rises on the brush of a shoulder, an arm, a side, her fingers closed around the half-eaten tray on the table. She can't stomach it, however precious his gift had been.
"Next week. The observatory. 03:00."
A promise, something to look forward to. And maybe it will only be an exchange of information, but with the threat of her future looming so close, Nat needs something good to hold onto. Something sacred.
"Thank you," quietly, as she carefully slides her chair back to cover the noise of her lips. "For the stew."
For the kindness.
end or yours to wrap!
They might not be escaping this facility, but they're digging their way out in another way entirely. Together.
"Be careful," he mouths. There's a strange strangling sensation in his chest, tangled around his lungs like a vine, and he eventually realises what it is, like recognising a poisonous plant that's grown where it shouldn't, a weed overrunning the ample soil of his heart: fear. The emotion is fear.
Because if they find Natalia snooping around where she shouldn't be, digging up their layers of secrecy, then the punishment won't be starvation or a beating or black eyes to mar her porcelain skin; he suspects it'll be her on her knees in the snow, and a single bullet to her temple. Their handlers are thrifty and efficient.
(I don't know if I'm worth all this, a small voice murmurs in the back of his head, and it isn't speaking Russian.)
But in the end, James lets her go. Telling her not to do a thing will be about as effective as one expects, i.e. not very. The soldier (not the Soldier any longer) turns his attention back to his own food and finishes the rest of his meal, although it tastes like ash, although he's already thinking of next week.
And next week, he'll be waiting for her at three o'clock, long past curfew: a shadowy figure standing in the gloom inside the observatory, hands buried in his pockets. He's timely and punctual, and he makes it there for this appointment, and the next, and the next. The spider doesn't always have information to hand him, and so she often comes empty-handed. The gifts that she does bring are small: Your birthday is in March, and I think you're a Pisces. Meaningless trinkets, but meaningful to him. They never find out his surname or where he's from, although with that accent, America is such a good guess.
After a while, it's no longer simply an exchange of information. It's just an excuse to walk around the grounds, along the exterior wall where they both know one of the CCTV cameras is broken. Nothing technically happens between them, except that everything happens between them. Except perhaps the brush of his knuckles against hers as he gestures to the treeline, pointing out where a rabbit goes bolting across the field and vanishes in a silvery gleam of movement and the kick of its downy feet. Prey, but at least it's free. Unlike them, it can leave this place.
But they're slowly digging their way out. Together.