ataraxion ★ maybe erasure is necessary

[lostsoldier]

[ cw: graphic violence, death, medical horror, experimentation ]


Raisa

The rifle looks heavy in hand. It is heavy; you know, objectively, that it has weight and mass, that the grip requires pressure to keep level, that you can see the leather of a glove wrinkling where it’s gripped to steady the barrel, and when you think those fingers should tighten—they do. But you can’t feel it.

It doesn’t give you pause. You’re calm. You lean forward. Your vision goes black, then red. Crosshairs. A man with a mustache coming down a half flight of stairs. One step, two. You exhale.

Bobbed black hair jumps into your sights. A little girl.

Your bullet slices over her part and through her father’s shoulder. "Dammit—"

What happens next happens all at once. Rifle dropped, concrete gripped, boots launching over roof’s edge. Fire escape, awning, brick, asphalt. A redhead in black, a sidearm pulled from its holster, a thinner man in a suit with a gun and his brains puffing into the air like blown egg through the hole in the back of his head. Hurry, Raisa— A crowd, shrieking, a sharp corner, an alley, Poppa I’m scared!

A dead end. The redhead drops in from the opposite end. Your steps slow. Every bump of disintegrating asphalt and bend of trash beneath you boot seems to etch lines in your memory the way sound does a record. The man with the mustache is crouching, fumbling to wrap her small body in his arms like a few more inches of meat could shield her from what’s coming. The whites of her eyes show through his fingers, and she trembles as if that narrow strip of wall is worse than any monster that ever hid under her bed.

"Do you really want your daughter to witness this, Ivanovich?"

"Don’t hurt her," he pleads. The girl’s breath comes in little choking gasps.

"She’s in no danger," you lie. You aren’t going to kill her, is what you mean, although that might be kinder. "Widow, take her."

The redhead pulls the girl into her arms. She holds her close and tight and whispers something soothing into her hair, while you drop to one knee and press a blade up between her father’s ribs.

Dmitri

"You’re distracted," you say as you step back to let your opponent pick himself back up. He’s taller than you, brawnier in the build, but while a few of the aches in your ribs are probably his fault, you did just put him to the mat.

"It is nothing." His jaw is square and set, and there’s something painfully young about that assertion, as if either of you couldn’t tell nothing from not nothing, but he comes at you again without hesitation. You move with ease, meeting blow for blow, blocking with an arc of steel and kicking low only for him to flip back out of range. He’s good, and you’re not very much better, it seems, until a feint sends him blocking in the wrong direction and you sweep a foot behind his heel. His back hits the mat.

You arch an eyebrow as you let him up again. It’s nothing, huh?

"I am to see Professor Rodchenko after we finish today." Casual, but his hands have come together, rubbing absently at the callus on his palm — and stop abruptly, separating. "A 'check-up,'" he tries, with just a hint of a smile at getting the English slang right.

You nod approval, but tension strings up your spine. More, in his. His eyes drop with it, shamed.

"Fear is not weakness, Dmitri." Your voice is almost gentle. "Letting it control you is weakness."

"I am not a coward," he throws back, harsh. "You have prepared us well. I will serve my country, I will protect the homeland, I will safeguard our people."

"You won’t remember any of them when you wake up," you answer. You don’t know how you know that, but you do. You both know you weren't supposed to say it. Dmitri looks back at you as if from the bottom of a filling well.

It’s the last time you see him.

Tesla

It looks like something out of a fairytale. Pine trees line the skirts of vast mountains, wind sweeps snow down from peaks and through winding ravines, and in the center of a sea of white, a path cuts clean to the steps of a cabin. It’s small and squat, its roof heavy with snow. Smoke rises gently from its chimney. The porch rail is criss-crossed wood, the walls rough-hewn logs, and the windows quaint little diamonds cut into either side of the door. Cute. Inconveniently small.

Something moves inside. Your limbs ache with the cold, and with the tell-tail stiffness of having sat too still for too long, but adrenaline flushes the life back into your system. The circle of the scope comes into focus and you see them, a man and a woman. Pacing. Tipped off. The woman is digging through something you can’t see, pulling something else from it, bringing hands together and coming to sit, mouth flat and eyes hard, on a bench against the back wall.

A bullet goes through her forehead. The man runs for her — a mistake, but a predictable one, and it’s why your finger hasn’t let up from the trigger. Four, five rounds pierce the cabin walls, and the sixth catches him in the head. He drops out of view. A hawk flies overhead.

Nothing else moves.

You sweep the shells out of the snow with one hand, let mother nature cover your tracks. Visual confirmation, Winter Soldier, comes the static in your ear, and you sass back, "He needs proof I can kill?" but you sling the rifle over your back and trudge on through the snowdrift anyway. Your legs are heavy with it by the time you get to the porch, where you knock the wet from your boots and elbow open the door.

Two dead bodies. One live girl.

She’s three, maybe four, with her overgrown bangs pulled back in barrettes from her round face, in her little black shoes and her little green corduroy jumper soaked through with red. A crayon snaps under foot, and you look down at her drawings, her neat green houses and red-and-blue circles and what looks like a couple of those American heroes from the comics, and you look right back up.

It's half an hour before the extraction team reaches you. She doesn't say anything. Her eyes won’t stop leaking like something's broken, but she doesn’t talk, so you don’t either. You get her a jacket, buttoned all the way to the top. You put her hood up. You sit her on the porch. You find a couple of crayons that don't have as much blood on them as the others, and some fresh paper from a trunk in the back, and you sit beside her until they come for her.

The man that leads them doesn’t look surprised to see her. "Ah, just look at her." He brings a gloved hand to her cheek. Something in your gut twists. "Is she not a snowflake?"

Your gloves buckle under clenched fists. He doesn’t seem to notice. He’s not even talking to you anymore.

"Such a charming relic, isn’t he, Tesla?" he says as he places a hand at her back, leading the girl to the helicopter. "Truly a man out of time. Still, if not for him we would never have found you. We owe him that much."

You start to step after him. At your eight and four o’clock, your "extraction team" closes in from behind, the snow crunching in slow motion under their cautious steps, and the man turns back to you.

"Mother Russia is dying," he says. "Only the thorns in her withered paw remain of any use."

The first of his men jump at your back; within the space of a breath they’re all on you, clambering to disarm and restrain, getting elbows in the face for their trouble, but like any good comic book villain, their leader just raises his voice, so you can hear him over the scuffle of limbs and the beating of helicopter blades.

"This girl’s father was a genius, her mother a Widow... and she is the future."

You fight. Of course you fight. But then, that’s never done much good.

———

It’s cold. It burns. It’s cold, but it burns from the ends of your fingers to the tips of your toes, and your limbs feel heavy, pins and needles, clumsy and slipping on the wet floor. Rubber gloves catch you under the arms and drag you, too fast, stumbling, sliding across the tile. A chill hits from your tailbone up your spine, and the gloves push you back firm, still wet and shivering, into a chair before leather buckles tighten around your arms and a hand pushes your forehead back until the back of your head finds something hard.

Light. Dark. Light. Follow my finger. Left. Right. Up. Down.

Light. Dark.

There’s a pinch at the inside of your elbow. Rubber slides from your arm, heat spreads through veins. You force out a breath.

Something heavy drops over your head, over your eyes and ears, and then there’s just

Black.

Black.

Black black black—your heartbeat spikes, your already shuddering breaths quicken, you can hear the beep beep beep through the insulation but the sound is train horn speeding away from you, and then there’s nothing. For so, so long there’s nothing. The water dries from your skin. It doesn’t even feel like your skin anymore.

Then light. A picture. A moving picture. Sight. An old woman speaking to you in warm tones, a soothing anthem playing on the radio, duty, honor, muzzle flashes of sunlight through curtains and the sizzle of a griddle, pan— sirniki so close you can almost taste it, and in that yawning void you cling to what must be and can only be home.