FILE n°888 | SUBJECT RED
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ex-army military base
new jersey
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march 16th 2014
evening

It was dark outside by the time they reached their destination. Sashka had been woken up by Natasha a few minutes before arrival, the almost-teenager had been sleeping soundly for the past five hours and was groggy when the woman gently stirred her from sleep. They pulled up to the front gate that was rusty and broken down in some places. The stop signs were faded, and no longer readable due to the absence of people from this place since World War II.

Natasha stepped out of the car, holding the tracking device up high while Sashka tiredly trailed behind her, yawning and rubbing away the tiredness from her eyes.

"This is it." Steve said. The man looked like he was a million miles away as he looked at whatever was left of the place where he had met the love of his life.

"The file came from these coordinates." Natasha put the tracking device in her back pocket.

"So did I." Steve breathed out. Sashka followed his gaze and found him staring at a broken down sign that read : CAMP LEIGH : US ARMY RESTRICTED AREA

Sashka frowned, Steve had been in the US army? She didn't push her questions, not wanting to overstep. She'd learnt the hard way that sometimes it was best to leave the adults to their own and stay in her own lane, a subject's lane. They easily slipped through the gate, which wasn't hard given that it was over a hundred years old, and started walking through the courtyard. "This camp is where I was trained." Steve said once they made their way past what was left of the security checkpoint.

Sashka looked back at him while Natasha didn't, only saying the words. "Change much?"

She noticed Steve slowing to a stop in front of a tall pole where you'd expect the American Flag to be hanging from. He had this faraway look in his eyes like he was remembering better days when he was younger. Now, Sashenka didn't enjoy dealing too much with emotions, so the next thing she said, surprised both Steve and herself.

"Are you okay?" Steve looked at the girl with a surprised expression. Truthfully, Steve was proud at how far the kid had come ever since he first met her on that highway a few days ago. She was more open, more comfortable to talk to them and joke around, something he suspected she would have been killed for at HYDRA. Not only that, but Sashka had shed the cold, dead eyes that made her an assassin, now, she could almost resemble a normal teenage girl.

Almost.

"Yeah," He put his hand against her back and starting walking with her to where Natasha was standing. "I'm okay."

"This place is a dead end." Natasha spoke up. "Zero heat signatures, zero waves, not even radio."

She looked around to make sure she was right. "Whoever wrote the files must have used a router to throw people off." The woman looked back at Steve for his next move, only to find him staring past her. "What is it?"

Steve led Sashka and Natasha towards a bunker that looked half buried in the ground. "Army regulations forbid storing munitions within five hundred yards of the barracks." He explained as they reached the building. "This building is in the wrong place."

Sashka was slightly held back by Natasha while Steve used his shield to break the door open. He swung the door open, waiting for something to jump out at them, only to be met with a groan coming from Sashka behind him. "Ugh, stairs."

Natasha rolled her eyes at the young girl's antics but smile nonetheless as the three of them walked down the staircase, Steve hitting the lights button on halfway down. The lights flickered for a while but still turned on, revealing a vast room, with desks and papers sprawled across them. In the back, on the wall, a red SHIELD logo was painted. "This is SHIELD." Natasha confirmed as they made their way past rows of desks and chairs.

"Maybe where it started." Steve frowned, watching Sashka stray away from them slightly towards what looked like an office door. They follow the girl, pushing the door open, Steve stepping in front of the young red head in case someone was inside.

The room they walked into looked like a massive secret office, with rows and rows of personal documents stashed away in the shelves. On the wall, three old photography's had been framed and hung to the wall. Two men and a woman.

"There's Stark's father." Natasha nodded towards the picture of a dark haired man sporting a black moustache on his upper lip.

"Howard." Steve spoke.

"Who is Stark?" Sashka asked the two adults in the room.

"A very rich man that flies a metal suit that looks like a tin can." Natasha smirked at Steve who wasn't paying attention to the conversation, his eyes locked onto the portrait of a beautiful young woman with short curly brown hair and big brown doe-like eyes.

"Who's the girl?" Natasha asked before Sashka could.

Steve didn't reply, as if the mere thought of speaking her name would bring a floodgate of memories crashing down on him. He tore his gaze away from her portrait and kept walking. Natasha and Sash looked back at the woman one last time before following Steve.

They walked alongside shelves that were either overflowing with files, or void of any. One in particular caught their eyes, it was empty and Sashka could feel a soft breeze coming through it, like a door.

Steve understood what she was thinking immediately. "If you're already working in a secret office..." He pulled the shelf to the side and it slid open like a door, revealing a hallway and another door. It took Sashka a few seconds before she realized that the second door wasn't a door but an elevator.

"Why do you need to hide the elevator?" Steve finished.

It took Natasha less than a minutes to gather the code they needed from the elevator and for it to open.

"Ladies first." The woman smirked at Steve who rolled his eyes but nevertheless climbed in follow by Sashka and Natasha. During the elevator ride a few floors down, the thirty year old spy noticed Sashka's shoulders tensing up. "You alright?"

The teenager nodded. "I don't like small spaces." The elevator jostled them sharply and Sashka's hand automatically flew out to grab Natasha's. The woman didn't say anything, but Steve knew that their conversation in the car hadn't been for nothing.

The elevator suddenly halted to a stop and the doors slid open revealing a room plunged in utter darkness. Steve stepped forward first and just as Natasha was about to follow, a small tug pulled her back and she realized Sashka was still holding onto her. She turned towards the girl who looked frozen in her steps. "Come on Sash, I promise no one is going to hurt you here on my watch, you understand?"

Bless those eyes that look exactly like James'. She thought when Sashka looked up at her with her big doe-like eyes that brought her back to hours ago when she had been staring into her daughter's eyes like this, as she assured her that no one here would hurt her.

Sashka's grip on Natasha loosened and she nodded, following the woman who had managed to gain her trust in a day.

The closer the three of them got to the centre of the room, the more the lights started flickering on. The heart of the room was an immense control pad, with multiple devices such as screens and radios hooked to it. There was an entire desk covered in buttons and control switches. All around the room, ventilation systems, data collectors, wires hooked to chairs surrounded the central control pad. Natasha looked around before saying. "This can't be the data collection point. The technology here is ancient."

"Like Steve." Sashka snickered causing Natasha to smirk and Steve to glare at her. "Low blow, Sash."

Leaving the two alone for a minute, Natasha pulled out the disk from her jacket pocket and started making her way towards the USB port that was plugged to one of the computers. It was one of the only devices in this room that looked ready to function. She plugged it in and immediately, the machines around them wired to life, some lights that hadn't been on before started turning on.

One of the rusty cameras moved in their direction causing the computer on the desk to turn on. The letter Initiate system? were automatically tapped out across the screen, an automated German voice reading the sentence aloud. Natasha's eyebrows raised, interested, and she started typing across the keyboard from the 1940s.

"Y-E-S, spells yes." She narrated. The woman looked to see the words typed out across the screen before smirking. "Shall we play a game?" She quoted.

When she got no response she stepped back to look at Steve and Sashka. "It's from a movie that was really popu-"

"I know, Piper showed me after New York."

At the name, Sashka perked up. "Piper?"

"Piper Potts. Or is it Stark now? Stark's eighteen year old kid whom he adopted a few years ago. She's his CEO's daughter." Sashka nodded at the explanation, even more curious about who these "Starks" were than before.

She didn't get to ask more questions though, because the screen buzzed to life, the automated face of a deformed shell of a man was barely visible on the screen. "Rogers Steven." It spoke in a heavy German accent. "Born 1918."

The camera turned towards Natasha and Sashka. "Romanoff." It spoke. "Natalia Alianovna. Born 1984."

Sashka turned to look at Natasha who looked like she'd seen a ghost. The German man then spoke again. "Subject RED." Both Steve and Nat turned to look at the young girl. "Born 2002."

Sashka did not know when she was born. She never knew what day, what month or what year. Neither did her Papa. All she knew now was that she was born in 2002.

"It's some kind of recording." Natasha made sure to step in front of Sashka in case something were to jump out of the screen at her.

"I am not a recording Fraulein." The voice spoke again. "I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945. But I am," A photo of a ugly, bald man with almost no hair on his head, sporting round glasses too small for his deformed head flashed on the screen next to the other.

"You know this thing?" Natasha looked at Steve who seemed to be piecing together the man's identity.

He nodded. "Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull." Steve started making his way towards the opposite end of the device, trying to figure out where it was plugged into. "He's been dead for years."

"First correction, I am Swiss." The voice drilled sharply.

"We don't care." The words were out of Sashka's mouth in a moment of impulse.

"Second," Arnim Zola's voice didn't acknowledge Sashka's little comment, much to Natasha's relief. "Look around you. I have never been more alive."

Natasha tried to meet Steve's eyes but the man was busy circling the devices, looking for switches or buttons that might give them the upper hand. Arnim Zola wasn't finished. "In 1972, I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body." Steve circled back to Nat and Sashka.

"My mind however," He continued. "That was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of databanks. You are standing in my brain."

"It's pretty empty in here." Sashka remarked. Arnim Zola was about to say something before Steve interrupted. "How did you get here?"

"Invited." Zola's voice held a sentiment of victory.

"It was Operation Paperclip after World War II," Natasha started explaining where she thought Zola was going with this. "SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic values."

"They thought I could help their cause." Zola took over the woman's retelling of the events. "I also helped my own."

This time, Steve spoke up. "HYDRA died with the Red Skull."

"Cut off one head, two more take it's place." The HYDRA logo flashed across the screen. It was a logo Sashenka knew all too well. The skull in the centre with six tentacles surrounding it's head.

"Prove it." Steve challenged Arnim Zola's conscience. A flash of files flashed across the screen and a German army soldier's photo flashed across the screen.

"HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with it's own freedom." Zola explained. Both adults and Sashka leaned forward to get a better look at the video of the German army chanting for their leader. The clip then showed said soldiers being deployed on a beach to fight the enemy.

"What you did not realize was that if you try to take that freedom." A picture of the Red Skull. "They resist." A video of Captain America leading the US army into battle against the Germans, another of the Red Skull making a German leader sign an executive order. Buildings burning, soldiers raising their arms in surrender. "After the war, SHIELD was founded." A picture of Steve's love and Howard Stark. "And I was recruited."

"The new HYDRA grew," A newspaper clipping of a retailing of the events. "A beautiful parasite inside of SHIELD." Natasha and Steve glanced at each other, horror evident on both their faces. "For 70 years, HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, building war. And when history did not cooperate," The picture of a canon. "History was changed."

A masked man with a metal arm flashed across the screen holding a gun. "Papa." Sashka breathed out, her hand outstretched desperate to touch her father.

"That's impossible." Natasha stepped forward. "SHIELD would've stopped you."

"Accidents," A report of Howard and Maria Stark's death. One of Nick Fury's. "happen. HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice it's freedom, to gain it's security." Spaceships hovering over Earth, locations of Targets in Washington DC, police running for safety. "Once a purification process is complete," The SHIELD hellicarriers set to launch the next morning appeared on the screen fully armed and ready to commit a mass genocide. "HYDRA's new world order will arise."

"We won, Captain."

Steve's jaw was clenched, his chest was heaving.

"Your death amounts to the same as your life."

Natasha looked at Steve warningly.

"A zero sum."

Before he could say anything, the screen was shattered by the sheer force of Steve's fist. Another screen wired to life, the man's face appearing on it. "As I was saying-"

"What's on this drive?" Steve pushed, walking towards the disk, ready to yank it out at any given moment.

"Project Insight requires insight. So I wrote an algorithm."

Nat was the one to speak next. "What kind of algorithm, what does it do?"

"The answer to your question is fascinating." Zola's voice took a turn. "Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it."

The doors to the room suddenly slid shut, Steve's shield going nothing to stop them, only flying back into his hand. Natasha pulled out the device from her pocket that was going crazy and flashing red lights. "Steve, we got a bogey." Steve turned around sharply towards the two girls. "Short range ballistic. 30 seconds top."

"Who fired it?"

"SHIELD." Sashka looked him dead in the eyes, her blue and green eyes blown wide open with terror at dying in this underground bunker.

"I am afraid, I have been stalling Captain." Arnim Zola spoke up from the device.

Natasha grabbed the disk and pulled Sashka with her, making her way down the stairs.

"It's better this way."

Steve ran towards the air vents and yanked the plaque upwards, beckoning Sashka and Natasha towards him.

"We are, both of us,"

Steve grabbed Sashka and pulled her into the ground, Natasha following in suit.

"Out of time."

The building exploded and Steve jumped down in the ground holding Natasha and Sashka as close as he could to him, his SHIELD above them trying to keep them from dying under the weight of the bunker collapsing above them. All of a sudden he felt Nat's arm tear from his grasp and heard a shrill cry leave Sashka's mouth in a moment of pure terror. "Mama!"

With the building collapsing on top of them Steve had to wrestle with Sashka to keep her under the shield and stop her from leaving his grasp just like her mother had.

"Mama!"

* * * *

The bunker had collapsed on itself, no ordinary human could have survived something like what had just happened moments ago. Still, under piles of rubble, Steve Rogers managed to push the large pieces of concrete off their passage so they could leave this wretched place. In his arm,s an unconscious Natasha Romanoff had been knocked out by the force of the building coming down on them. Behind him, Sashka, the small twelve year old's face was covered in ashes and she was heaving and coughing due to the ashes that were clogging her airways. She wheezed and stumbled but never once stopped walking, her eyes wide open with terror as she held on to Steve's arm, mumbling to him in broken Russian. He still couldn't understand if the girl had realized Natasha was her mother or if she had just been so traumatized by the explosion that she was on a crazed loop.

"Ona mertva? Stiv - mama mertva?" She heaved and coughed, stumbling against a boulder and leaning over to violently retch whatever was left in her stomach. Ever since Steve had woken her up after the explosion the girl was stuck in a loophole of terror and panic, her head not clear enough to speak anything other than the same Russian phrases over and over again. Is she dead? Steve, is Mama dead?

Laying Natasha down for a moment, Steve approached the panicking child. "Sash, look at me." Her eyes reluctantly met his. "You're both going to survive this, no one is going to die on my watch."

He could have cried at how relieved he was when she slowly nodded. He took her by the hand, hoisting Natasha up with the other as he guided the coughing girl to the car they had stolen, which thankfully had only been mildly burnt in the explosion.

"Come on, we gotta go!" He ushered Sashka in when he heard the roar of the SHIELD bogeys' engines coming back to check if they were dead. He laid Natasha in the back seat and quickly climbed in the driver's seat besides Sashka.

"Where," the girl heaved and had to restart her sentence. "Where are we going?"

"I know a guy."

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AAAAH, short chapter but Sash finally called Natasha, mama! Now, does she really think Natasha is her mother or is she just so traumatized that she can't tell the difference anymore? I guess you'll find out in the next chapter. Either way, the next chapter should be out next Sunday or maybe earlier if I manage to be productive....

edit 01/01/2021 : why was this chapter so short oml