HER SCREAMS FILLED THE COLD, WHITE ROOM. They echoed off every surface possible, hoarse and horrific. They spoke of a woman, bloody and broken, in so much pain she could not help but be consumed by it. Someone ripped and torn, left to die like a wounded animal in a forest of cold grey stone.

Her hands, unbound in a pitying rarity, scrabbled for something to hold so they wouldn't drown in the pain. Her fingernails had already been worn to the bone yet they still scratched at the iron bedrails around her. Blood dripped from shallow silver cuts in the metal, making her fingers slip and stumble as they tried to just hold on.

The pain seemed unimaginable. It shook through the skin-and-bone woman like a demon seeking for escape, and it offered no mercy as it tore her insides apart. She looked like she could barely manage to suck in a breath, heaving shallow gasps of precious oxygen when the torment relented, only to rear her head and choke once more when the demon resumed.

She looked like she could be pretty, in a better state. But there was nothing beautiful about the writhing form, pale and drenched in red. It was as though a painter had squeezed its misery onto a canvas and just left it, squirming and still half-alive, for unamused men in grey to observe. Strands of sweat-drenched hair clung to her temples, and beads of moisture dripped down her pallid skin, accumulating with the blood and shed tears, smearing messily as she thrashed.

Only her feet were shackled. To be expected, really. A creature in total misery was always so quick to abandon logic at a chance at freedom, and no one could say this pain-ridden being wouldn't try for the door, even with her body splitting apart.

She had an audience, of course. Men and a few scattered women, all in matching grey coats, watched the woman suffer. Some looked bored; others barely veiled their disgust for the scene; some looked a little happy at the scene. A few didn't look bothered at all, eyes glazed over like they weren't really seeing the sight before them. Hearing the howls of a girl, barely a woman, dying on the cot before them.

It took seven hours for the baby to be born. Hours of misery, of begs for death, of desperate, pitiful attempts to silence her own voice with her clammy hands around her throat. Night had fallen, unbeknownst outside the compound's walls, and only some remained to watched the pathetic figure finally grasp some sense of relief.

As the pain left the woman, she finally breathed slower, though still with heaving chest and wide, tearful eyes. She pressed idly down and stared at what her hand brought her back; more blood. It dripped to join its smeared brethren on her thin slip, and she let it be. Her head tipped back, and her eyes shut. Perhaps she thought that peace could finally come. Perhaps she only hoped it could ever be so.

No one bothered to help her. No one even touched her, or offered a cloth to wipe all the swirling red from her thighs and cheeks. It did not seem like she expected them to.

It was only as the screams of a baby finally pierced her ears, that she moved. Her eyes sprung back open wide and she flung herself up, claws scrabbling at the railing for a lifeline as she tried to grasp reality. She watched, half-conscious and delirious, as the same smattering of clean grey coats passed around a screaming child. It was the only colour amongst the wave of monochrome, pink and crying and still bloody and alive.

The woman heaved herself into a sitting position, forcing her drenched limbs to weave through the whirlpool she was barely surviving. Desperation once more filled her face and she spoke, crying out for the baby in the doctor's arms. Her throat rasped in pain; she still went on, trying to earn their attention. Trying anything, even if she could barely manage above a whisper.

They ignored her. Or maybe they didn't even notice.

She tried to get up, but the chains that bound her feet held her down. Tears streaked gently down her cheeks, glowing in the harsh hospital lighting. Pleas scratched from her throat like sandpaper. Begging for them to just let her hold the baby, touch her child, kiss its grubby hands and promise it a future she knew it would never have. She would do anything, she cried, to just have one moment with the tiny child. Could she even give it a name?

But the poor, barely a woman, Inga Kuznetsova was powerless. Just as she had been for the past eight months. Just as she had been, since the very moment her eyes opened to the concrete ceiling above. 

Her cries fell on indifferent ears, and Inga could only watch as the doctors examined the tiny baby. They scrubbed it down and swaddled it in white, like an offering to the gods. The purest of pure gifts, they could believe, like it would be the tiny baby girl's sacrifice that would absolve them of their sins.

Inga slumped in her cot. She had given everything in her seven-hour fight for her life; even her fear for the child couldn't bring back the blood she had lost in the hospital sheets. She could only watch through half-lidded eyes as they muttered and paced over the child. One hand clutched still to the railing, though, holding on. She couldn't let go yet.

One of the doctors left the group and made his way to her side. Without hesitance or remorse, he forced her on her back and her blood-splattered thighs apart. Inga wept as he pulled her apart. His gloved fingers didn't linger on her flesh as it had the newborn; they clenched down, hard enough to feel shallow bone, and warned her of worse consequences for her poor behaviour. He peeled her apart, jabbed at her broken insides, stuck her with needles and slapped her when she howled. He watched her squirm in pain, and Inga could almost see a smile, on the doctor's face. 

Inga wasn't a human being anymore. She was barely a shell of a being and she was still crumbling into shards on that tiny hospital bed. And he couldn't care. Her sin had cost her the essential vulnerability any person walking on the earth received and ripped her of any sympathy she could use for herself. She deserved this, him shattering her to the most pitiful of creatures.

She knew it was her fault. That's what they had been telling her for months. They had originally wanted to terminate the baby, rip its life away altogether, but it had been changed and she was allowed to birth the child before being sterilized, properly that time. But even her sacrifice (unwilling as it was) barely saved her life. She was branded; she was the Red Room's greatest failure, and she would carry that cross until death finally kissed her goodnight.

To think, she had once danced with the dreams of being a great. The greatest. That her younger self, still somehow unbroken of hope, thought she would be the one to bear the Black Widow title.

She had almost done it. She could have tasted her hard-won victory, could have been the trophy of the blood, sweat and tears that had unwittingly poured from her poor sad soul. If she hadn't failed the Red Room, she could have been.

"пожалуйста," Inga mumbled, grimacing as her parched lips cracked and bled into her tongue. "Let me see her. I need...to see her..."

No one answered. Only one even looked her way, but it was through annoyed eyes that she was reaffirmed her fate, not with sympathy or even pity. They all thought of her worse than the dirt on their shoes; a stain on their glorious legacy. Why should they stoop so low to offer her anything? Why should they help a insubordinate when she had already earned her life? 

Inga clenched her eyes shut and whimpered as another needle pierced her skin. The procedure was already beginning. They were already erasing their mistakes and she would lose it all, as fast as she had never grasped it. 

Her fingers uncurled from the railing and reached out. Weakly, they hovered, a million miles away from their biggest mistake. Still they waited. Like the child would come to them. She could have a miracle, just one streak of hope before she had to succumb to the grey again. She just wanted to touch her, to graze her reddened skin, to take in the eyes and toothless mouth and smile down at a babe that would probably never know a grin again. She craved the child like a monster keened for blood; desperate hunger tore through her fractured system, begging for a slip of a dream of that life she childishly wept for.

Something was making her brain fog up. She could see right anymore; flashes of grey and white and red echoed in her vision, but she couldn't tell what was real and what was wrong. A child laughed from somewhere far away; footsteps followed, but the peals of innocent joy bounced around the room and dizzied Inga more. 

Her hand fell limp again.

Her eyes hurt. They craved rest.

The darkness cooed for them, offered a pillow to rest their head upon. She wished so desperately for its comfort.

"F..." Inga had to say it. She had to tell her baby, before they were gone forever. "Freya," She mumbled to the concrete ceiling. "Her name is Freya...please..."

A Norse god. The only happy thing Inga could recall anymore; a glimpse of something she had learned about in class once. A mythological figure of love and beauty, someone who warmed the mortals with her happy glow. Pink cheeks and an eternal smile, that was what Freya had been gifted with. 

She could promise the child anything, but she could give her a name. Something of wistful dreams and happiness the baby would probably never know. Warm cheeks and a full belly and someone to hold them when the night pressed too close. Happiness. 

"P...please...give her...Freya..."

As the darkness swallowed Inga whole, she thought she heard someone say the name back. But she would never know for sure.

I rewrote this randomly. If only I could rewrite the book, haha. Apologises for rough writing, I did this in an hour and it's the most I've done in a month, so...I'm a tad rusty. But I wanted to do this a bit more justice, and just went for it. 

Thank you for reading. x