for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
repaying.
the red room
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
γ au γ the americans
pre-graduation: sparring | mess hall
post-graduation: hurt/comfort | a week at the dacha
present-day
post-civil war: domesticity
γ au γ 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
Training. Constant awareness. Sleeping too deeply could mean death.
From restless sleep they move the recruits in orderly lines to a delicate mess hall, old fashioned in design and even more old fashioned in its limited menu. (She's lucky, they give her more protein, more fat, if only for the ability to push her harder than the rest).
Natalia attends breakfast each day to find another slender face missing from the faceless crowd she schools with. There are no girlish gigglings in the hall, no whispers or notes passed. Those are scenes from books she's all but smuggled to read, a taste of a world she will never belong to, eventually turned to ash in the fireplace of the sitting room. Evidence eradicated, threat neutralized.
From meals she goes to dance, to etiquette, to language studies, to combat. Hand-to-hand today. Right. She moves with practiced ease, the poise of a young woman all but molded into the shape of a delicate stained-glass soldier, beautiful but for her deceptively sharp edges. She walks into the gym with a quiet, easy confidence, almost an air of arrogance that her instructors chide her for, and stands opposite the rigid man.
She knows his face. She knows the outline of him, of the Soldier, and she measures him from her spot on the mat just as surely as he measures her. She was young when she trained with him last, and she remembers how quiet the room had been as her fellow recruits watched, as other handlers gaped at the way they all but grappled viciously on the mats, each strike more deadly than the last.
In the end, she lost, of course. There's no way she would win against him then. She's not sure that winning now is what she wants, either. (She doesn't know what she wants).
"Sir."
She tucks her hands behind her back, cocks her chin up just so and studies him. He looks the same, with the wild eyes and wilder hair, the strong cut of a jaw over a dark uniform, the barest glint of metal at a cuff. She'd been struck by him when she first met him, taken aback by the emptiness of him. Natalia can read even the slyest of liars, but this man? His eyes, for how deep also seemed depthless.
"To what do I owe the pleasure?" There's a tiny quirk of her lips. She shouldn't toe the lines of propriety, she'll get lashings for it later. She wouldn't be their prize student if she didn't.
no subject
The man isn't expecting it, and so she can see that stillness as he pauses, then blinks in confusion (as if there's a faint light turning on behind his eyes, a bulb now flickering in a dark room). And his head cocks, as if he's trying to parse the question. It isn't a matter of him not understanding. The girls had wondered at first if he even understood Russian — their trainer never spoke — but when he did eventually open his mouth, his Russian was textbook-perfect. Although there's a muddled undefinable accent that hasn't gotten better even in all his years; perhaps it never will.
"Training," the Soldier says, and his gaze is hard with its curiosity, boring through her. "Did they not tell you?"
No sense of humour. He would be so very boring, this clockwork automaton of a man, if he weren't also so mysterious.
But he wasn't supposed to speak at all. They're meant to launch right into it, wordlessly falling into line and beginning their training. It's the common refrain around the facility: bruised knuckles and black eyes; the smell of powdered chalk on the girls' hands from the gymnastics lessons; the brutal impact of hitting the balance beam, the impact ricocheting through their bones. Ballet lessons and legs bent and feet arched, all their weight carried on their tiptoes. Miniscule bone fractures and pulled tendons and sprained wrists. The facility is a factory, and it is turning out perfect specimens.
All of the girls would look delicate to him, if he didn't already know how deadly they can be, too.
"No monitoring today." The other handlers and instructors (eagle-eyed beldames with names like Darya or Zoya) tended to supervise the beginners' group classes, but Natalia had been here long enough to earn that small shred of freedom. The slightest loosening of the leash.
no subject
Her name sounds strange on his tongue, and his words even more stilted, like a valenki that doesn't quite fit, keeps slipping off the heel at inopportune moments, letting the ice and snow in to nip at the sole. Curious. They shouldn't be engaging like this, in an act that to all other handlers and monitors might seem like a form of verbal warfare when they're meant to swap blows and blocks, not stilted consonants and vowels too broad.
The curiosity behind those empty eyes captures her for a moment, even if it doesn't show in her face, and her stillness matches his own, even if the curve of her lips widens just so.
"They told me."
Something deep in the core of her chastises her for her mouth, but she's been pushing boundaries lately, fighting back against the way her mind tells her to fall in line with the others. Falling in line means you get disappeared in due time, and those anonymous faces cease to exist.
"They usually reserve you for the new recruits when you're here. They must be unhappy with me." After all, a brutal, vicious beating is one way to weed out the weak, to cull the crop before they invest too much time, money, energy in something doomed to fail. "But I don't think that will come as a surprise to either of us."
Her feet stay flat on the mat; she's shown up barefoot today, bandages and blisters wrapping her toes from years of pointe shoes and heavy, steel-toed boots. She looks nothing like the uniform, clean battalion of girls moving throughout the antique halls. Her hair falls wild around her face, braid fallen from its bun and tie in errant waves, set aflame by the hot spring sun scorching her back through the fitted jumpsuit they're made to wear for training. A silent scream of a challenge, the look of a dog waiting to bare its teeth.
no subject
(Somewhere, with the distant and hazy vagueness of a dream, it stirs up an almost-memory like the silt being disturbed at the bottom of a deep, icy lake. A redhead standing on a boardwalk, laughing and leaning coquettishly against the carnival machine while he fumbles in his pockets for more money, trying to impress her. The coins in his hands are not rubles.)
"Perhaps they're measuring your improvement," he finally offers. A speculation. The Soldier uncrosses his arms and shifts his weight on the mats, leaning over to unlace his boots and then set them tidily by the side of the room. Everything in its place, regimented and orderly.
"You could win."
She likely won't, but he is curious — in a way that feels like a long-dormant machine finally humming back to life, his curiosity and interest in the outside world finally piqued again, even if it's only to see how much Natalia has improved. Which new tricks she's picked up since the last time he was thawed. What new challenges she'll throw his way during this fight.
no subject
There's something to be said for the ceremony of every class, every training session, every lesson. The orderly placement of boots along the edge of the mat warrants a sigh breathed through her nose, because those boots with their laces neatly tucked behind leather tongues means the clock has long since started. Her shoulders loosen, her posture relaxing as she raises her hands to scoop fistfuls of wild red away from her shoulders, drawing a messy ponytail at the back of her head, but her eyes never leave him.
The metal arm, she remembers, hurts. A concussion, a fractured rib, all from a series of solid punches. He's sturdy, and if her memory serves her he's whip fast, in a way a man with a build like his shouldn't be. Her eyes flicker to his and they're less empty, the spark of curiosity bringing out something similar in her. To see the tiniest hint of humanity in something bleak is a blessing, even if that humanity is found in the cogs of an old machine.
Natalia will walk away from this injured, beaten, and she'll be made to dance it off tomorrow, but she can't tame the tiny lick of something deep in her chest. He's watching her as his opponent, isn't he? And not a tool. There's a soft huff between a flash of white teeth, a tilt and bob of her head, without the poise and quiet reserve of the asset she was trained to be. The ease is the calm before the storm.
"I could. But you won't let me."
She breaks toward him suddenly, muscles giving no warning before she launches across the mat, toes sinking into the foam as she plants herself and aims a heel at the center of his chest, a blow with every intention of unseating him, rocking him back onto his heels.
"Good luck," said on a whisper, not in Russian, but in English.
no subject
He's let his guard down. With conversation, and for a fleeting moment he realises why it's so forbidden — why anything outside the lesson is discouraged — because he has been distracted, and suddenly Natalia is surging across the room like a tidal wave, crashing into him. His weight tips backward and she drives him down to the mat, one foot slamming the breath out of his lungs. Hardwired instinct takes over: the Soldier rolls with the impact, letting himself go end-over-end backwards on the padded floor, rolling backwards in order to heave her off him.
But she gets back to her feet faster than he does. Part of his brain keeps ticking, filing away those notes on her performance: she's flexible, more than he is. He's strong and fast but by way of brute machine: the man starts advancing forward, right fist snapping outwards and then his left (even faster and stronger), that whiplash movement of whining metal and hinges humming in his shoulder. She ducks and weaves, but he's indomitable; whenever her scattering of blows collide, he just takes it and keeps going. A particularly solid hit (that left hook, he knew he had to look out for it) has his jaw cracking and head snapping slightly to the side, his shoulders tight as he bears down—
And then the Soldier's closed the distance, his mind shutting off in favour of old habits taking over. One arm around her like a lover's embrace, the pair of them grappling; bare feet sliding on the mat before he gets his balance again, an elbow against her throat. Wrestling Natalia is like trying to wrestle water. She keeps sliding out of his grasp.
But his strikes have weight. That metal fist can crack through walls.
In another time and another place, he would have been mindful of that; would have pulled his punches. The Winter Soldier, however, has not been taught to relent, and so she has to keep dancing on tiptoes, knowing that she can take a blow from his right hand more easily, but not the left.
no subject
That's what she needs in this fight. Distance. Time to dodge the weight of his blows and use her speed and flexibility to her advantage. The Soldier barely grunts at the impact, it doesn't buy her time at all. The blink of an eye and he's on her, all but wrapped around her like they're performing some intricate dance instead of fighting and it takes everything in her to twist out of his hold any time his arm lashes round her, but they fit in a way that makes this fight harder.
Their bodies read one another's, two practiced soldiers, two machines using all the information their disposal to neutralize the threat.
The elbow to the throat takes her by surprise. She can't avoid it, what with the swing coming from the right arm in rhythm with the left. The right hand catches her once, twice, knuckles skirting her jawline, grazing the rise of her rib cage as she manages to twist enough to avoid a blow to the vulnerable soft of her gut. She grunts, teeth bared as she blocks the punch, but he has her tangled up in him, her range of motion limited. She uses his weight against him instead, letting her feet slide on the mat, her knees buckling so that the very weight of the arm at his throat knocks them off kilter. She wraps her free arm around his waist and pulls as she falls backward, buckling her knees up between them and all but bucking him over her as her back slams down to the mat.
He's heavy, all tailored muscle and bones made stronger by the serum, but she's got the lower body strength for it, the speed, the technique. She comes up rasping, rolling back to her feet and launches herself at his back, much like she had years ago but with more finesse; legs wrapping his chest, arms curling around his throat and applying pressure.
Itβs a mistake, letting him close again, but she has no other option.
no subject
Natalia flips him, and that scramble up his spine is exactly like he suspected she might do— scurrying up the tall man like he's a tree, latched onto him and strangling him. He tries to jab his elbow into her sides and tries to grab at her, but he can't reach that far behind; his metal fingers dig into her thighs hard enough to bruise the next day, his handprints all over her, but her grip just tightens harder through the pain.
He's choking, and can feel the air caught in his windpipe. The Winter Soldier is enhanced, strong, fast, but he does still need to breathe. He's going to pass out if she keeps this up.
So he drops. Again. Just tumbles back and lets them both crash to the floor, all his weight landing on her; he's still wheezing as he rolls away from the young woman and back to his feet. A little slower than before. His human hand rubs at his aching Adam's apple, almost contemplative, as he scrutinises her again. Some of his automatic unthinking routine has been interrupted again, like a train derailed off its tracks. When he speaks again, his voice is cracked and hoarse, disheveled hair falling into his face:
"Good."
no subject
(Weak, something sinister snarls in the back of her head, holding him by the throat on the fall could have done major damage to his spine, after all). She doesn't want to kill him.
The air rushes out of her lungs in a hot stab of pain, his weight oppressive, her head a sick crack against the mat and the concrete beneath. Her vision swims as she rolls onto all fours, dazed, but keenly aware of the fact that he's back up and on his feet. It would be easier if he kicked her, if he picked up the fight, but the downtime makes her feel the bruises rising under the skin of her thighs, the angry throb of pain along her jaw from the graze of a metal fist, the way her breath catches in her throat in a desperate wheeze with every flex of rib and muscle.
A spider curls in on itself when its hit when it cannot run, legs a spindly fortress against the outside world, the master at playing dead. And like the spider she uncurls, but keeps her body low to the ground even as she climbs to her feet. Her head spins sickly on the climb up.
"Finish it." Through gritted teeth, frustrated, petulantly demanding in a way that would never be tolerated from an asset. The frustration doesn't grace her eyes, where her brow furrows, blue eyes a cloud of confusion, curiosity. She wipes at her mouth with the back of her sleeve, the charcoal fabric coming back wet with a hint of blood, the taste of copper acrid on her tongue.
no subject
(And his handlers would, after all, punish him if he started slipping.)
"Fine," the Soldier says. Taking orders comes naturally to him, even if those orders are snarled by his trainee. He might be an inhuman metal statue, but something inside him is still pliant, moulded to obedience, carved into compliance.
When she takes one last exhausted punch at him, he ducks her and starts to swing.
—but then, at the very last moment, there's stutter of hesitation — reconsideration — and he abruptly stops and switches sides, his right arm flying into a solid punch instead. He doesn't use the left. Instead it's his flesh-and-bone fist to Natalia's cheek, a ringing blow that brings her down to the ground again, that'll ruin her pretty face (does she have a pretty face? he's forgotten how to tell) with a black eye tomorrow.
But it's not the metal arm. Not the one could have shattered her ribs, pulverised them until her own jagged bones punctured her lungs. Not the one that could have killed her.
When Natalia's vision clears and when she next looks up at him, he's standing there with a calloused hand extended, offering to tug her back up to her feet.
no subject
It's a peaceful moment where she exhales the air from her lungs, lets her muscles relax, knowing that any undue tension will only make for more injuries. This way, she might be able to avoid the whiplash from the impact. Might. She tries, still, arm raised to skirt his. No impact.
She's on the ground a moment later, struck from the unassuming side, her vision a mess of black and white, mouth hot with blood. She sputters from the mat, hands braced on the old, weathered vinyl topper. Natalia feels the Soldier close before she sees him, the pad of his feet on the floor as familiar to her now as her own breathing.
Know your enemy, they say, and yet she's learned nothing of the empty man with the conflicted eyes. It's proven in the hand offered to her and at first she stares at it, dizzy-eyed and baffled. Handlers don't offer help. If the asset can't pick themselves from the battlefield even upon the brink of death, then what use are they?
Blue eyes travel the line of his flesh arm, to the shoulder she all but sunk her claws into, to the face framed by sweaty, shaggy hair. The flesh hand whose knuckles sunk into the meat of her cheek, and not the flash of metal she'd seen before. When did he work his way through the dented chinks of her armor? How did the Soldier pinpoint the fragment of human being she leaves on her sleeve as a reminder to herself that maybe, just maybe, Natalia Alianovna Romanoff, might have a place out in the light, away from the webbed shadows.
She takes his hand, pulls, and needs more assistance than she likes getting to her feet. Her hand lingers in his, stabilizing, her center of gravity off, her mind still reeling from the blow.
"You didn't kill me."
A whisper, the words as confused as the roiling ocean of her eyes.
"Why?"
no subject
Helping her up had been an unnecessary gesture in so many ways. Sympathy is not in the curriculum. Sympathy and tenderness has been burned out of them, over and over and over, surgically excised every time it grew back like a tumour. Perhaps he's grown ragged around the edges again; perhaps he's been awake too long.
Another man might have reached out to check on her injuries, grazing his fingertips over the already-swelling heat in her cheek that she'll need to ice down.
But he is no longer that man. This one lets go of Natalia's hand and withdraws back into his own personal space, re-establishing that distance between them even if it feels like something's already been incorrigibly breached; a brick in the wall loosening, the mortar crumbling, compromised. He's grown unaccustomed to skin-to-skin touch that has nothing to do with a brutal beatdown or with inflicting pain. He had not realised how unaccustomed until just this moment. His fingertips feel like they're burning.
"They have invested in you," the Soldier says stiffly. "Too many years of training. Too much time. You are close to graduating. It would be a waste of resources to cut you down so close to the finish line."
It's more words than he's said to her in so very long, a justification and a perfectly rational explanation to cover his tracks. (It could be that he's trying to convince himself at the same time.)
no subject
She focuses instead on the timbre of his voice, a sound still unfamiliar to her hears, but she absently checks its cadence, the broadening of his vowels and the softer edges of his consonants. Russian by name, but practice? She doesn't know. But he's speaking at length for a man who speaks only with the empty threat of his eyes and the cold cut of a fist.
Measuring the distance between them now, she forces herself to stand a little straighter, chin a little higher even though the motion makes her see stars. But the word 'graduation' makes the light rush out of her eyes, the very ocean itself crawling far from the shore. It veils her expression in something dark, her jaw setting, a muscle flexing. Anger, perhaps, is what it looks like, but she can feel fear that creeps from the pit of her gut up the back of her throat.
She could turn her fear, her ire, on him, but what good would it do? A tin soldier in human guise, a machine meant to break them, with cloudy, curious eyes that make her doubt. (Doubt is dangerous in a world like this, doubt creates questions that need answers. The Red Room doesn't like giving answers).
Her lips pull to one side, her bruised face producing a half smile that's both warm and confident in a way she shouldn't be. Not after the beating she's taken, but this is what makes her exceptional in their eyes.
"Thank you." A pause, a curiosity in her eyes as she measures him against the man from years and years ago. "Am I dismissed?"
no subject
So he decides.
"Dismissed," the Soldier finally says. His right hand clenches at his side and then the fingers unfurl. Everything feels like it's on pins and needles, like parts of his body are waking up after a slumber. It reminds him of his resuscitations, each one a painful but miraculous resurrection: first coming to slowly, and then all at once, a drowning man clawing his way up from a frozen lake. Everything feels too awake and too alive, humming in his body. It might be the adrenaline, his heartbeat, the impact buzzing from their fight.
But his expression doesn't change. Apart from that faint light in his gaze, that empty stare, his face remains a desolate landscape as he watches her.
no subject
The tiniest lick of disappointment washes through her at being dismissed so soon, but she knows it's foolish to expect little else. And while this interaction isn't altogether different from all of her other countless combat sessions, something about it leaves her rattled. But he dismisses her and she gives a careful nod of her head, in case she disturbs the way her vision has settled around the throbbing in her cheek, in the back of her skull.
"Nat, by the way," she says after she has turned her back to him, unwilling to see the empty void of his face as she dares to peel back that tiny chink of armor he'd found before, revealing something soft and vulnerable underneath. "Natalia is who they want me to be. I want to be something better."
The shrug of a slender shoulder, the careful toss of her ponytail so it falls off her shoulder, and she slips away out the door as quiet as she came.
end
"Nat," he repeats after she's already gone. His mouth forming the unfamiliar syllable, trying it out on his tongue, the short clipped sound of it. The diminutive isn't Nata, Natasha, Tasha — the stress of it isn't in the right place for Russian. The choice feels more English.
And when he says it aloud, his own accent wavers and slips, like an old snakeskin sloughing off.
For just a moment there, he sounds American.
And then it's gone again, almost as quickly as it came. The Soldier goes to drink some water and re-wrap his palms and knuckles, with a glance at the old weary clock above the door carving out the minutes like a school gymnasium, and he waits for the next asset to file in (with a handler this time; this one has not earned the breathing room in her leash yet). Another anonymous girl to train, to run through her paces far more easily than he did the previous one. More sparring sessions sliding one into the next into the next, until the clock's hands turn around and the sun sets and it's time to end for the day, as if his own gears are winding down. He sleeps in a cold dormitory, and wakes up the next morning to do it all again.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
(Her name is still ringing in his ears.)