for repaying.

[armeyets]

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

---

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.

Comments

[armeyets]

The bread unexpectedly fills his vision, a projectile deposited onto his tray. There's a tension taut in the man's shoulders as he hunches over his food — does he ever relax? — but out of the corner of her eye, just at the corner of his mouth and half-averted profile, she can see a flicker of a muscle. Something that might've been a smile, once upon a time.

"It's edible if you dip it in the stew," the Soldier says. His own bowl is heartier than hers: more chunks of meat, less watered-down. There's the faintest hesitation as he looks down at the piece of stale bread, considers her jokey proposition, and then goes ahead and takes it entirely seriously.

"Fine," he says (which seems to be one of his favourite words, confirmation and agreement and disgruntlement all at once), and with a swift movement of his hands and a flash of metal fingers, he takes their two bowls and swaps them. Quick and businesslike sleight-of-hand, like a pair of orphans ducking the view of a stern matron. (In a way, that is exactly what they are.) It's likely still dangerous in case anyone starts to wonder why one of the soldiers is swapping food with a widow — but it is still less dangerous than what she's been doing.

"But I don't mean that." He isn't looking at her; his gaze is roaming everywhere but, making sure there's still a no-man's land around them. That no one can eavesdrop easily. "I mean your examinations."

Nat, he thinks, but doesn't say aloud.

[repaying]

Any other soldier would swat her across the face for her mouth. Any other soldier would drag her by the arm to her handlers and give a report of her behavior, rote and lifeless, as though the men with empty eyes were nothing but a mobile security network. Eyes unseeing but documenting every detail. But something in her gut tells her he won't.

Another smart remark waits at the tip of her tongue but it dies when a flash of hands swaps their bowls, seamless and subtle. No one bats an eye, save for Nat, who stares down at the warm broth and chunks of meat with wide, curious eyes. Curling her hands around it, she cradles it close for its warmth, like a flame in a bitter Russian winter. She hasn't had anything warm like this in weeks.

Why would he do this for someone like her?

"What about them?" There's an imperceptible softness to her words, awed briefly by the simple swap of bowls across metal trays. There are no kindnesses here, no notes or food shared under table tops, only competitors and assets and soldiers. Machines. Machines don't need kindness to operate. The gesture is so simple, but she takes the boon for what it is and begins to eat, spooning up the meat first. Savoring. Follow routine and no one knows any different. The other assets aren't as sharp-eyed or keen, and for once she's grateful for it.

"Succeeding will do nothing for me. I fail? They beat me. I do well? They beat me. It's a simple equation."

[armeyets]

He hadn't taken bread for himself, so he enjoys the one she gave him (and tells himself that, of course, this was merely a transaction). The Soldier rips it automatically into pieces, soaks the hardened piece of loaf in the watery stew before eating it.

The girls have been trained in etiquette — formal cutlery, which spoons to use for dessert, which glasses for which drink, the delicate dab of handkerchief to mouth — but there's nothing refined about the way they eat in the mess hall. It's brute efficiency, wolfing down the food before that harsh bell rings and they're summoned to their next training. He speaks between bites, too.

"But fail enough, then you fail permanently," the Soldier points out. A curt explanation. And surely she knows this. They all know this: their handlers have them tiptoeing along that knife's edge, like dancing bears earning their keep — and tearing out each others' throats when they need to. He's watched those particular fights when two girls are plucked from the line and set on each other. When they know it's no longer a test or an examination or an assessment; it's a fight to the death, a battle for the right to live.

He's been awake long enough now to be bitterly grateful that they've poured enough resources into him and his arm, and that it's rare enough to find people compatible with the serum, that they can't wash him out. Won't wash him out, thanks to that sunk cost fallacy. And yet he remains obedient, still. Dutiful. (He has no choice but to be.)

He does what he can, however, like straying a foot just ever-so-slightly over the line. Sometimes a rebellion is as small as a bowl of food; an offered hand.

"Recalibrate," he says, and it's vague enough that anyone else might have wondered what it meant. "You pushed it too far, too quickly. You are better than that and they know it."

They might know about her ploy already. Perhaps they knew the Soldier was about to talk to her about it, too. Perhaps all of this is predictable and planned and manipulated, and they're all just rats running in the maze and there's no purpose to any of it.

But it's worth a try anyway.

[repaying]

Everything about her life is a show of marionettes, the strings invisible as they pull and manipulate. Nat has carefully, skillfully cut a few of them loose but it's not enough. His being here now feels like a loose string, but she knows better. Why else would their finest Soldier be here alongside their star pupil?

But maybe they don't anticipate this: the warm bowl of stew, the flicker of humanity behind pale eyes, the flutter of something dangerous in her chest. Strange, that a man made to be a soldier, reminds her of what it's like to feel alive. To feel human. Is that what it is? That strange twisting feeling? A glimpse into the world she might have been part of had she not been brought here?

Her fingers close around the bowl again and she draws it close to her chest, blowing on it to sooth some of the heat before she takes another bite. The meat doesn't have much flavor but it's filling. She's not sure she can finish it all, but she will regardless. Gifts aren't given in a place like this, and she's been taught to take every opportunity she can, when she can.

"A permanent failure would definitely surprise them," she murmurs, dry and not at all the delicately trained assassin she should be. Her mouth goes loose around him, around everyone these days, but that's exactly how she needles her way in. She spins a web and presses the sinews into the finest little cracks in the shells of those around her, expertly laying out her trap until its time to ensnare her mark. But with him, she huffs a derisive snort at the end, no webs to press, no cracks to cleave open.

A moment of silence, another few bites of the stew, hearty and warm and bland, but hers. "I don't have any other options. I've done the math a dozen times."

There's no other way out of this place, away from the graduation ceremony. (She's heard the screams of the girls before her who graduated, heard stories of how they bled for weeks after, how some don't survive the procedure at all. Weak, Madame B says. They're weak). Her fingers grip the bowl, her knuckles white from the tension.

I'm afraid. I'm weak.

[armeyets]

Seated beside her and listening to her explanation, the Soldier goes motionless for a moment, that machine-like shoveling of food into his mouth stilling as he listens and considers. It's like the temporary failure of a motor, something breaking down between head and arm and hand: a wrench in the gears, grinding the machinery to a halt. Until he starts moving again with another spoonful of stew, another mouthful of sustenance to keep him alive and ticking one more day.

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.

[repaying]

The bowl, made of some brittle, flimsy plastic snaps under her palms, the sound dull and muted in the din of the mess hall. The hot broth spills between her fingers, onto the tray beneath, but her hands don't move, her body does not react to the shock of it. No one can know what they whisper between bites of old stew, like children with their heads tucked under the blankets, avoiding sleep.

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.

[armeyets]

"Am I?" he asks, coolly neutral. As if there's nothing happening, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Perhaps this, too, is a test: maybe she'll wake up one day handcuffed to a chair and discover that this is the labyrinthine maze, the nesting dolls of traps within traps within traps, the handlers predicting their moves and accounting for it and applying the screws accordingly. Dangling him as bait. This is how we measure your loyalty. This is how we check for a traitor's heart. You were meant to bite the hand that feeds.

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."

[repaying]

Am I?

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.

[armeyets]

Her knee bumps into his, where no one can see it, that silent little bump of pressure. Physical contact. One that hasn't anything to do with bruised knuckles or the pummeling of muscle or running her through her drills in the sparring room. When the Soldier shoots a sidelong glance at her, he can just barely see that faint glistening on the woman's cheek and he's caught off-guard by the sight of it — like finding the sun suddenly setting in the east instead, the whole world twisting and turning on its head, the foundation shifting under his feet. Nat's composure crumples at a kindness. Something no one in this room could have predicted.

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.

[repaying]

Their knees knock beneath the table and Natasha has to focus on her breathing. Her body doesn't know friendly touch, doesn't know the feeling of companionship after so many years of carefully poised muscles and vicious beatings. They've cast her out of stone, chipped away at the soft spots they could find.

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!

[armeyets]

I'll get more, Nat says, and for a moment he thinks she simply means the spilled stew — until the realisation dawns over him, and she sees that one slow blink of surprise, a startled understanding. Information. She means obtaining more information, chipping away at their locked doors and filing cabinets and classified files and dossiers. A woman staring down a wall with nothing but a spoon to dig into the mortar, loosening the bricks surrounding the mystery of this man.

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.