𝐎𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐔𝐏𝐎𝐍 𝐀 𝐃𝐄𝐂𝐄𝐌𝐁𝐄𝐑
━━━━━━━━ 𝟏𝟗𝟏𝟖 — 𝟏𝟗𝟔𝟎.
𝐈𝐈. RUMORS NEVER END

DARKNESS.

At first, there was only darkness.

Soldiers with red stars on their sleeves marched down a secluded country road, searching for an escaped captive, the son of a Russian Imperial baron whom they had long ago executed. Their searchlights arced across heavy snowy swells, half—a—dozen torches flickering in the chilling winter night. One such Bolshevik shouted into the snowstorm, struggling through the mounds, squinting at the something in the snow—

A human corpse.

A small body sprawled there in the snow, limp and unmoving. The soldiers descended into chaos all at once, brave chatter meant to mask the presence of death.

"Gavno..." The soldier crept warily closer, "Look at him—,"

"—What?" Another sneered, "You never see a dead man before?"

"He might have froze to death, crazy durak," one carelessly nudged the limp body with the toe of his boot.

"Don't!" The first turned away in distaste, "Don't do that..."

"He's dead, you think he cares?"

"Show some respect, it was a—,"

And then, suddenly, the body moved.

In a flurry of motion, the small being was convulsing, flailing wildly in the snow and coughing up mud and grass consumed only for survival's sake. The soldiers jolted back in a horror, raising their weapons out of instinct, not taking the time to realize that this small man was of no threat to them.

Only, it wasn't a man at all.

It was a girl, and the girl began to breathe.

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Rumors of Survival

After Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on March 15, 1917, he and his family — his wife, Alexandra; son, Alexei; and four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia — were taken captive and eventually moved to a house in the Ural Mountains. In the cellar they and four of their servants were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad on July 17, 1918.

Because the discovered remains had been burned, it was hard to say which or how many Romanov daughters were absent, and the news revived speculation that Grand Duchess Anastasia had survived.

Excerpt from the article: 'The Mystery of Anastasia' by Lorna Hardy (1982), para. 5—7.

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THEY SAID SHE WAS FOUND AT THE SIDE OF A ROAD, in the darkness and cold with only the wind for company.

A girl with no name and no memories.

Her feet had been frostbitten and purpling, wrapped in tight cloths for the lack of shoes. Starving and sick, the Bolsheviks had delivered her to one of the many dark frightening orphanages of that time with broken windows and a bed with dirtied sheets.

In her fever dreams, terrifying nurses whispered overhead, "Call the child Anya."

Anya. This alone was hers to have. She was given a name and she was given a hat, and nothing more. Everything else... that was her own to gain.

The child now called Anya was despondent in those first few weeks of 1919, the head wound she had suffered taking its time in healing. And as it slowly but surely did, Anya struggled to learn how to survive. 

She lacked the innate skill that most other street kids had, that knowledge to think only of herself, to beg for scraps, to fight for a bed. 'Please' and 'thank you's did not matter in this new world. Manners were of no consequence, and she was mocked for knowing them at all — even if she couldn't at all remember why she did. There was a certain dignity in how she carried herself before she learned how to make herself small, invisible, uninteresting to the wandering eye.

In those earliest years, the girl became one of the millions of orphaned and abandoned children, another face in the crowd of besprizorniki — the unattended. Hope became thin and unattainable, a ray of impossible sunlight in the impenetrable darkness.

Her memories never came back, but the dreams did. The dreams filled with flashes of fire and echoes of screams, and a city beyond all compare. Amidst the firelight and booming in the distance, she would see a beautiful river and a bridge by a square. And on some nights, on the luckiest of nights, she would hear a voice whisper, "I'll meet you right there... in Paris."

Paris became her lifeline. The only hope she could cling to, the only thing she could believe in.

But it was a foolish thing to have faith in, a stupid thing to wish for.

The borders had long since closed, Paris became impossible reach, and what could an orphan do to stop the tide of a revolution?

"Nothing," they had spat that in her face too many times to count, "You are nothing."

If a child hears that long enough, they begin to believe it.

Throughout the new union, millions of stray children deemed enemies of the people went to sleep with bruised faces and empty bellies. But Anya was far too strong—willed, far too stubborn to ever submit to the possibility that she really was worthless. So, with nothing but the clothes on her back and dreams in her head, Anya ran, traveling the backroads, sleeping in the woods.

That was when she found the city of Leningrad.

The chains of the Romanovs were heavy; three long centuries they had been bound in them. But in revolution and by blood, they had broken them. Together, comrades planned to forge a new Russia. A fair and compassionate Russia that would be the envy of all the world. That was the promise the Bolsheviks have made. Fellow Russian to fellow Russian.

The Tsar's St. Petersburg was now the people's Leningrad.

And it was a dangerous place.

Even when competition for locations was fierce, Anya stole and sold back what she could, flowers and cigarettes, too. She carried luggage at train stations or held a place in line at the theatre. On the most desperate of nights, she — with thirty other young children — went to the back doors of restaurants in hopes of obtaining scraps. Some were kind. Some were not.

Being hungry was as natural as breathing.

New name, same empty stomachs.

Anya was still so young when she saw the effects that starvation could have on a person. When the great famine struck in 1921, five million people starved to death. The people were hungry, and the men were too. Men on the streets with grasping hands and cruel intentions, and children who had no choice but to give into it if they wished to survive.

Every day of her life, Anya fought.

Nowhere was safe to sleep. No food could be found to eat. She stole what she needed and worked when she could until the authorities found her once more and dragged her off to another shelter, another orphanage, another place of torture.

But the girl they named Anya kept up her courage, no matter how foolish it seemed, that she was still loved, still wanted, and her family was looking for her.

After the Communist pedagogy changed and the Narkompros, or the People's Commissariat of Education, took charge of the homeless children in 1923, the orphanages were inaugurated in a spirit of revolutionary idealism but just as soon were overwhelmed by the need to feed and house millions of homeless children.

Not even the Communists could cook an empty promise in an empty pot.

By the mid—1920s, the Soviet state was forced to realize that their efforts to raise these "stray children" such as Anya were inadequate. Some orphanages became night shelters and private families were called upon to provide care. Some families were kind. Some were not. There were always too many mouths to feed, not enough people who cared.

It always ended with Anya on the run, with nothing to show for it except fresh bruises.

By the time the next famine came around in 1932, Anya had no choice but to learn if she wanted to survive, if she didn't wish to be taken away by the police in the night and by the men in the shadows, she had to keep her head down and her mouth shut.

When Stalin's Great Terror began in 1936, thousands more around the USSR became orphans.

As the old Russian proverb goes: an apple never falls far from the tree, and in 1937, her name — Anya, simply always Anya — joined the masses on the list of the "socially dangerous" by the NKVD to keep her and all others like her from ever contaminating the new society.

Friends, other orphaned boys and girls that she had grown up with, were sent away in the dead of night. No one quite knew for sure where these children were being taken, but the rumors warned of colonies or even Gulag labor camps designed to re—educate them through labor regimes. These children hardly ever came back, and if they did, they never did return the same.

Being a suspected traitor to the Motherland was not something you easily came back from.

Perhaps running for so long and so many times had allowed Anya to slip beneath the radar, for no one to notice her... strangeness.

But this all changed in 1937 when her name became public record.

Another spy betrayed a friend, another rumor filled the streets, the rumors never ended. Rumors even Anya herself could barely believe. She hadn't totally noticed it. She had been so distracted with the task of surviving that she hadn't fully allowed herself to realize the most basic, most brutal truth of what was wrong with her.

She wasn't aging.

As the boys and girls grew into men and women around her, Anya wasn't growing older. In the twenty years that had passed since they found her on the side of the road, she'd barely aged more than a year. The realization was horrifying.

Her future was as much a mystery as her past was.

Her soul felt as old as time itself, but she didn't look it. She felt trapped, suspended in time, suffocated and stunted like some kind of... monster. There was terror in being what she was, in being something she couldn't control. Terrified of what she was. Terrified of what an ageless future held.

They came for her on a warm summer night, as they had with so many of her friends before. But their intentions were not the same, it was all so very wrong. They hadn't wanted to send her to the Gulag or some labor camp; they hadn't even wanted to understand or experiment on her.

They had wanted to execute her.

In this time, the study of genetics was labelled "bourgeoisie science", and it was forbidden with all the rest of it. They didn't want a science experiment, a freak of nature on their hands. Her very existence threatened the natural order of things, the very essence of the USSR.

For the second time in her life, Anya had to be eliminated.

And as heavy feet trampled up the long winding staircases to the bedroom she shared with twenty other girls, Anya climbed out the window and fled into the city. 

So, to ensure her freedom and her safety, Anya vowed to keep moving. Changing her name, residence, and appearance every decade. And never to breathe a word of her fate to another living soul.

She tried to blend in, become another face in the crowd, a girl no one would remember.

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the second world war saw the excavation of most of the union's able—bodied young men. While there weren't any official restrictions on women serving in combat roles, wartime shortages meant women had to take to the collective fields and state factories to discourage them from seeing combat. But when their patriotic young men shed their blood on the battlefields alongside the Yanks, Anya was one of the 8,476 girls who joined the Red Army — but under a fake name.

This would be the first and last time she would be known as Anya Sidorov.

But this wasn't a name of hers to keep.

She didn't want it. It wasn't real.

And she wouldn't go by it ever again.

With the end of the war and her time as a tank driver, Anya still remained the same.

And no matter how much she had learned, in all her time on this cursed earth, her greatest weakness would always remain her mouth. She could never control it, control what she said or how she said it. Too clever. Too fierce. Too proud. In a time of neighbour against neighbour, no secrets could be kept and words whispered through a crack in the wall found the ears of those who doled out punishment.

With the end of the Stalinist Era in 1953, Anya and so many others were forced into performing hard labour in textile or sewing factories where violence and abuse ran rampant. Still, they were expected to become the New Soviet women — perfect wives, perfect mothers, and all the while praising Stalin for the work that he had done for women.

By the time the 50's had ended and a new decade was on the horizon, she had to accept the most horrible truth: insignificant orphan Anya would forever be immune to the ravages of time.

By the December of 1959, Anya had finally settled into the anonymity of mundanity, had decided that she was a freak of nature, and had accepted that Paris would never be anything more than a dream... 

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"Dancing bears, painted wings
Things I almost remember
And a song someone sings
Once upon a December"

Excerpt from the song: Once Upon a December by David Newman (1997).

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LONGING.

The cryostasis chamber hissed when it came to life, bringing the asset alive with it. With a low mechanical whir, the cool glass of the cylinder slowly rose to reveal a frozen shell of a man within.

RUSTED.

Yellow mist slithered through the Siberian facility, enshrouding the technicians, the doctor, and the colonel who awaited their very own killing machine.

SEVENTEEN.

The technicians pulled the wires and tubes from the asset's body, freeing him from his suspended state before yanking him from the chamber. His body went limp in their arms, collapsing into them with dazed eyes and dark hair.

DAYBREAK.

A storm raged outside, but it was nothing in comparison to the controlled chaos that would soon ensue within. With the red book in hand, Colonel Rostov paced around the wide observation room, ignoring the technicians who put the asset into place, ignoring the doctor who readied the machine.

FURNACE.

Screams echoed through the facility.

NINE.

The asset was secured in his tall metal throne, locked in place while the mechanical device on either side of his face cracked and sparked with electricity. His dark head was wrenched back, veins pulsing in his neck and forehead, white teeth bared like prey screaming in its last moments.

BENIGN.

The moment the machine disengaged, his head thrust down and he jolted forward — eyes still flashing with bright white energy, a broken cry hissing through gritted teeth.

HOMECOMING.

The asset jerked and twitched, the middle finger of his left hand spasming, breaths flowing in and out in short unsteady gasps. His eyes had grown pale and so terribly dull, as frozen as the barren wasteland that laid beyond the bunker's metal walls.

ONE.

The asset squinted into the murky darkness that was swimming with faces that he could only half remember, unable to focus. The confusion would clear up soon, it would have to, it always did. He licked cracking lips, his dry throat feeling rusted and corroding.

FREIGHT CAR.

"Soldier?" Doctor Arnim Zola's Swiss accent echoed in the grim room.

"Ready to comply," their machine recited dutifully.

Doctor Zola shared a look with the colonel, the small man with circular glasses giving a sharp nod.

The Winter Soldier was ready for combat.

And Doctor Zola was ready for his next experiment.

"I have a new mission for you, Soldat." Colonel Rostov snapped the red book closed, folding his hands behind his back, "Locate and extract. No witnesses."

The asset's face remained perfectly blank; a cold statue of a man lacking feeling, lacking humanity, lacking a mind of his own.

The colonel motioned a thick arm across the room, "Comrade Popov will serve as our liaison for this mission, will you not, Comrade?"

With wide skittering eyes, a tall greyed man was shoved roughly forward — Vladimir Popov. He tripped but quickly regained his composure, straightening out his tailored suit coat. Popov cleared his throat and smoothed down the hair on either side of his head. He took great pride in himself, this was clear by how he puffed his chest and raised his chin to look dignified, look important.

The asset was unimpressed.

Once again clearing his throat, Popov began, "The girl in question may have—,"

"Target, Comrade Popov." The colonel sat back in a chair, a cigar set between his thick lips, "It does not serve the asset to recognize her as anything but that."

Startled, their liaison glanced around with wide eyes. His eyes briefly landed on the asset before they hurriedly skittered away, frightened to linger for too long.

"Eh, yes—yes, of course." Vladimir Popov swallowed hard, wiped the sweat from his forehead, "The, uh, target may go by the name of Anya. Height: 1.73 m. Weight: 53 kg. Last known location: Leningrad."

The asset's cold unwavering gaze slipped swiftly from Popov to Colonel Rokov, waiting for confirmation, waiting for instruction on how to live, how to think, how to breathe.

"It's time, Soldat," said the colonel, "Complete the mission. By any means necessary."

And then, all throughout the room, rang the same hollow battlecry, "Hail HYDRA."

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"Battle—tested, Captain America and his Howling Commandos quickly earned their stripes. Their mission: taking down HYDRA, the Nazi Rogue Science Division."

The Smithsonian's Captain America Exhibit (2014). Washington DC.

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LOCATING THE TARGET CALLED ANYA WAS NOT AN EASY FEAT.

The NKVD kept extremely limited records that eventually had transferred hands to the KGB, but even then, only a singular name to go by wasn't much to go by at all. But the Winter Soldier was experienced. He was an expert. And while the target had done well at covering her tracks as she moved from place to place, the asset managed to trace her to a dingy tenement deep in the middle of Leningrad.

The rickety city bus grinded to a stop, and people in thick coats and scratchy scarves trundled off into an ashy sludgy snow. Nothing but simple working people at the end of their day. The long slim redheaded target trudged through a man—made wasteland, shoulders slumped and head ducked as she approached the multicolored Leningrad tenements. The ugly housing towers filled the grey horizon, blocking out the dim white sun.

It became grimmer the closer the asset tailed her; rusted steel mesh over the windows, drunk teenagers, a thick haze of cigarette smoke. The target who called herself Anya pushed through, not talking to anyone, passing a junkie here, a flickering light there.

On the rooftop of the tenement across, the asset watched through his scope when the target entered the small apartment shared with two dozen total strangers, ignoring the domestic disturbance in the room next to hers before disappearing behind her thin wooden door.

The Winter Soldier watched Anya for days.

The redhead looked barely twenty—three. Every single day, she wore the same holey green jacket that went past her ankles, a black cap pulled down her ears, and boots that were much too big for her feet. She kept her chin held high but her shoulders drooped low, eyes on the ground and the smallest bit of a skip to her step.

A proud little waif.

Sad eyes. Tired and cold. Locked into some deadbeat job at a sweaty mechanic's garage.

For the best extractions, one had to understand the target — learn their patterns, memorize their routines, understand their behaviors.

It took less than a day for the asset to conclude that the target was harmless. Though he did not question his mission. Questioning targets was not only dangerous, it was even more unthinkable. It wasn't in his protocol, it wasn't in his programming.

The target was a creature of habit, which was a dangerous thing to be in the USSR. She left her tenement before sunrise, waited in lines for bread, worked all day in a grim sweatshop, swept streets in the evenings, returned after dark on the city bus, ate her small portions of borscht and khleb, and then disappeared behind her thin wooden door once more.

Her life was simple but at all easy.

It was on the sixth day of this surveillance that the asset decided to make his move.

It was past dark. The asset rolled his shoulders back, a low steadying breath hissing between clenched teeth as he found her within the glowing red light of his scope. The target had missed the bus on her way back to the tenement. Now, she was waltzing along the grimey side streets and alleyways, hands stuffed into her pockets, quietly whistling to herself.

Watching her in her environment, watching her go about her business, it brought out something... strange in the asset. Something foreign. Something against protocol. Watching her dance while she sang, spinning in circles, bobbing her head to music only she imagined, it made the asset nearly want to... he wasn't sure.

He had to make it stop.

It was time to put a stop to it.

The asset was preparing to stand, preparing to meet the target just outside her building, grab her before she had the chance to scream.

But then someone beat him to it.

Four hands reached out from a dark alley.

And then she disappeared.

The Winter Soldier jerked back from his scope, eyes behind a dark mask going wide, what used to be a heart tightening in his chest. Without another thought, the asset burst up from his position and launched into a run. He sprinted over the tops of buildings, gravel crunching beneath his heavy footsteps as he leapt across rooftops before dropping seamlessly and soundlessly to the fire escape fifty—one metres down below.

Before he'd even landed, the asset could hear the target screaming, one man held her arms behind her back while another was trying and failing to grab hold of her legs. The target was putting up a good fight, shouting curses and all types of vehemence like the asset had never before heard.

Form his perch, he could see that a black van had parked at the end of the alleyway, the door pulled open and a pair of hands belonging to an invisible face reaching out.

These weren't just regular street thugs; these were professionals.

They were beating the target as they dragged her further and further down the alley, one smacking her across the face so hard that her vision blacked out. And that would be the last thing this thug would ever remember because the Winter Soldier was suddenly in motion, dropping down from above like some dark fallen angel.

With a single turn, spinning, the asset drove the heel of his metal hand into the man's throat, immediately crushing every bone in his windpipe. Caught completely off guard, the second man panickedly wrenched the target's head back, trying to reach for his holster when the asset, still turning, like a machine, so terribly and unbelievably fast, landed three jackhammer punches down, down, and down again.

The man's grip gave way and the target toppled back, head smacking against the hard cement of the nearby building.

Tires squealed, the black van peeling away from the edge of the alleyway.

As his partner still gasped desperately on the ground, the man grasped for his pistol and the asset slammed a clenched fist onto the man's arm, shattering the bone. The man just started to scream but was just as quickly silenced when the asset shot a bullet through his forehead.

The target shrieked as blood sprayed onto her face, and she cowered down with her hands over her ears.

The first struggled on the ground, gasping for air, scrambling to press the target against his front like a shield. The redhead yelled as she thrust her head back and stomped her heel into his foot. Her attacker yelped while she ripped free, spinning seamlessly away just in time for the asset to raise his rifle and put two slugs into the man's chest.

In the grisly aftermath, the asset merely stood there. In the inevitable silence. Two dead men at his feet. Blood on his pants, on his hands, on his mind.

The target trembled not a foot away, gaping up at him in horror.

The Winter Soldier met her eyes and then he extended his bloody metal hand, "Come."

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━━━━━━ annie speaks ━━━━━━

oooo we have officially started! now this was a bit of a catch up chapter to fill you in on, you know, the past fifty years! ya'll, the amount of research i did on russian history, whew, hopefully i did it justice! i tried to portray things as accurately as i could with taking a little literary license here and there. in any case, incorporating little quotes and such from the musical and movies is literally one of my new favorite things, i'm dead. i hope you caught at least some of them! in ANY case, please do tell me what you thought about this chapter? was it too confusing? was it a good introduction to these babes?

ALSO, our lil babies anya and bucky have officially met! not actually a meet—cute, but hey, murder and gore and saving one half of the otp is cute, right?

pls leave a comment and don't forget to voice? i'd love to hear from you!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL & TO ALL A GOODNIGHT!