FILE n°888 | SUBJECT RED
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hydra facility
siberia
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july, 2008

A year. It had been a year. A year since he had returned from his mission to find out they had taken her away from him. A year since he had lost everything again.

At the facility they still managed to use Sashenka against him, they still used her as a leverage.

"Soldat, yesli vy ne budete sotrudnichat', vozmozhno, nam pridetsya prekratit' zhizn' vashego potomstva"

Soldier, if you don't cooperate, we might have to terminate your offspring's life.

So, he cooperated. He killed. He interrogated. He completed assignments. All that, to keep the little red headed child safe for another day.

The Soldier didn't know where they had taken her. But he knew they were training her, making her more like him every passing day. A notorious assassin, a killer, a lifeless machine that carries out orders.

That wasn't her. It wasn't the daughter with the curious blue eyes that never left his lips when he talked. Sashenka wasn't a killer, she was just a child, a child who didn't deserve to have this broken shell of a man for a father.

Some nights, whenever the guilt would claw at his chest, and he would feel the walls of his cell constrict around him his mind would take him somewhere else. A place where Sashenka had been allowed to grow up in a happy family. Where she could have James Barnes for a father and Natalia Romanova for a mother. They would be far away from Siberia, in a small village in Russia where they could live in a small cottage. Natalia would take Sashenka to school, where she could have a normal childhood. She could have both her parents there when she graduated and make a speech in front of her classmates. She could have a voice.

He could be there when she got her first boyfriend. He could chase him through the house while Sashenka stared at them, mortified.

But this would never happen. He was a prisoner of his own mind, a soldier locked in a cell. Sashenka was somewhere out there, losing more and more of what made her innocent every second. And Natalia...Natalia was either dead or alive.

The Soldier's mind brought back the last moments he had ever shared with the mother of his child.

The last time he saw Natalia, was at the Red Room Academy in Russia, in 2002. It was the first day of the new spring season, on one of those frisky mornings where the sky was a soft blue colour, and you could see the flowers slowly blooming on the branches of the trees that were boarding the academy. The wet green grass was barely emerging from the thin coat of leftover snow that was too stubborn to melt, giving their surroundings a canvas-perfect air.

He remembered reading about what spring symbolizes in one of the few books he had picked up during his time at the Red Room. In literature, spring is a symbol of rebirth and renewal. Spring is a promise that everything can begin again, letting go and embracing something new. It is a transitional time of year, when the cold and dark dwindle away and the rains of rebirth fall upon the Earth. The light begins to shine brightly once more, animals emerge once again, and plants and flowers spring into bloom.

From what he had seen, this season's symbol was reflected in the change that the Academy's soon to be graduates would be experiencing in a few days. During spring, things changed around the Academy, for good or for worse. The graduates, like Natalia, would be going through 'the ceremony' that was necessary for them to take their place in the world. After that, they became assassins and were sent out on missions. Once they completed their first assignment, they would return to the Academy where they would be given an individual room that was only slightly bigger than a cell. They were locked in that cell during the nights, and when they weren't on missions, they trained the ballerinas and future assassins, breaking them down, layer by layer until finally there was only a marble statue left to work with.

This what would Natalia was destined to become. This was her fate.

All this could have been prevented if their escape had been a successful one.

Last night, at the crack of dawn, the Soldier had freed Natalia from the bed she was handcuffed to, so they could slip away from this hell and never have to look back. Their plan had been ripped to shreds when one of the future graduates had woken up and sounded the alarm, causing the two lovers to run for their lives, desperate to get out of here.

They had been intercepted a few miles later, when the snow had transformed into a blizzard and they were forced to seek shelter in one of the many caves hidden deep in the woods. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the both of them, Natalia had a tracker implanted in her arm that the Red Room had forced upon every girl on the first day they arrived at the Academy when they were just babies.

Hydra had found them, not even an hour later, and had used James' trigger words against him.

They made him shoot Natalia in the leg, wounding her and making it harder for the seventeen-year-old to fight back.

That was all he remembered. Next thing he knew, he was waking up, handcuffed to his cot in the Academy.

That was a few hours ago. Since waking up, his train of thoughts had been going back and forth between Natalia's wounds and what the repercussions would be.

"Dzheyms!" Natalia's voice was muffled, but loud enough to make it known to him that she was not far from his cell. He heard her footsteps and two other pairs when he focused hard enough. It didn't take a genius for him to know that these were guards and that they were dragging Natalia out of her cell and past his. James!

"Natal'ya!" He yelled and gave him chains a harsh tug. They rattled but one of them gave a small squeak, which he immediately noticed was a sign of weakness. He gave another pull at the left chain, putting all his energy into it, resulting in the chain shattering, the handcuff leaving a purple welt on his wrist. Natalia!

He leaped for the door of the cell, cursing when the other handcuff roughly pulled him back, barely allowing him to touch the door. "Natal'ya!" Natalia!

"Lelya! Dzheyms, ty dolzhen vernut' yeye! Vy dolzhny vernut' Lelya!" He heard the woman he love's voice as they dragged her further and further away from him, only allowing him to catch a glimpse of red braids and wide green eyes through the small glass square on his cell door. Lelya! James, you have to get her back! You have to get Lelya back!

"Kto takaya Lelya?! Natal'ya!" He screamed his throat raw as he threw his fist at the wall, the metal hand barely scratching the metal of the cell door.

"Dzheyms!" She screamed again, and just like that, she was gone. He could hear her screams getting more and more muffled as he lost her, leaving him alone once again, this time screaming at her ghost. James!

"Kto takaya Lelya ?!" Who is Lelya?

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Lelya Romanova
2002-2002

«Etot malen'kiy siyayet, kak zvezda na nebesakh»
This little one shines like a star in the heavens.

The twenty-two-year-old young woman tugged harshly at the weeds and grass that had grown around the tombstone she was visiting, barely wincing when the plants left red welts and bleeding cuts on her pale hands. Her jaw was locked as she read over the marble stone dedicated to Lelya Romanova. The child that was born without a heartbeat.

Her child. The little red headed angel that haunted her dreams. The baby she had held in her arms for mere seconds before they ripped her away, declaring she was useless and dead.

The Black Widow was merciless, she was beautiful, graceful and let no emotion break her marble facade. That's what she was always taught, it's what was engraved in her brain after hours and hours of inflicting pain. Yet, here she was, the Black Widow, kneeling at her deceased child's grave in the small town in Russia where she had found her parents' graves a few years ago.

She promised herself she would be strong, that it was ridiculous to mourn a child she had held for a few seconds. But she was tired. She was alone. She had no one. So, Natalia Romanova or Natasha Romanoff now, allowed for a single tear to trace down the side of her face, falling in the snow she was sitting in.

"Who is she?"

Natasha's head abruptly turned in the direction the voice came from, her hand automatically going to the gun that was hidden under her coat. She let her hand hover halfway towards the firearm when she realized the voice belonged to Clint Barton, the man that had ripped from the Red Room's clutches and forced her into SHIELD. He raised his hands in mock surrender when he saw that she was about to reach for her gun.

"I told you to stay in the car." She spoke as she turned back towards her child's grave, her blood red hair falling in soft ringlets to frame her delicate face.

Barton knelt in the snow next to her. "Yeah, but I never listen to you." He gave his partner a cocky grin, dropping it once he realized, she was clearly not in the mood. He leaned forward so he could read the marble headstone where the name Lelya Romanova was sloppily engraved in Russian and English. His hand reached out to wipe some snow off Lelya's birth and death date but Natasha's hand shot forward, out of instinct, to grab his wrist.

He gave her a look and she seemed to be brought back to reality, dropping his arm, muttering a quick, "Sorry." without looking at him.

"It's fine, we're all works in progress." He waved off, more interested with who Natasha Romanoff was mourning.

The young agent was a closed off crime scene. Everyone knew there was something more to her than a set of pretty eyes and deathly assassin skills, but no one ever managed to make it further than the Red Room when it came to figuring her out. Barton had brought her to SHIELD because he somehow felt like this young adult who was still practically a teenager deserved to wipe the red out of the ledger she was dragging with her. He didn't judge people on their worst mistakes, even when they were KGB assassins whom he was sent to kill.

He didn't want to push her, but he yearned to get to know the young girl who was shut off from him and the rest of SHIELD. So, he accepted the punch to the throat he was about to receive and opened his mouth.

"You know this whole 'second chance' thing doesn't work if you don't let me in, right?"

She glared at him but didn't punch him. It's progress, he thought as she longingly stared at the headstone. It wasn't just any stare. It was a stare that conveyed the fact that Natasha yearned for whoever Lelya Romanoff was to her. It was a stare he had once seen on young women who looked at children running around in the park.

Something so close, but unattainable.

"Lelya is, was" Natasha corrected bitterly. "My daughter. I had her in the Red Room six years ago when I was seventeen."

Clint's lips parted in shock. He had expected a sister or a distant cousin, but he never would have imagined that Natasha would be a mother. He felt like he was reading a totally different chapter to her life than the one she was currently on.

"I gave birth to her before the graduation ceremony." She continued; her voice shaky as she was brought back to the day she had birthed Lelya. "For six months, I had imagined what it would feel like to hold her in my arms, to feel her fingers touch my cheek, to have her heart beating against mine, I had even come up with a name for her."

"Lelya." Clint finished, looking away from his friend when he saw the tears brimming in her pale green eyes.

"It means light in Russian." Natasha explained. "When I graduated, I was sent on my first mission in China. When I returned, I took a detour and went back here," she gestured to the graveyard they were in. "I wanted to find my parents and ended up in a graveyard. I pulled some weeds and left some flowers. But for some reason, I wasn't finished. So, I bought a headstone, carved her name myself and laid it down next to my parents' graves. I left some leylas, the flowers that are the closest to her name, and I left."

Her voice caught at the end of her phrase and Clint looked back at Lelya's headstone. He could imagine her. A child with Natasha's red hair, freckles and green eyes. The vision was seared in his mind now. That small child running across the very snow they were sitting on in a white dress, stopping behind her mother and reaching out for comfort, only to realize her mother was out of her reach.

Clint's mind took a sharp turn back to reality and the vision of Lelya Romanoff waved sadly at him as she faded from his thoughts.

Natasha reached out and grabbed one of the weeds covering her angel's headstone and yanked it with all her strength. Her lips were quivering as she bit down hard on them to stop them from letting on any emotions she might be feeling.

Barton sighed and got up, walking to the nearest graves and grabbing a few flowers. He walked back towards his friend and slowly laid the flowers on Lelya's grave.

"Did you write that?" He gestured to the beautiful phrase written on the headstone. Natasha shook her head. "The man who sold me the headstone carved it for me."

He nodded. "Lelya is shining bright, Nat."

His friend stared numbly at the headstone, as if she wasn't so sure, but still nodded.

"Come on, we've got a mission to complete."

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Sashenka dreamed of a small village hidden deep In Russia. The village was covered in a thick layer of powdery snow and the street near the lake she was on the verge of was warmly lit with fairy lights. She had ice skates on her feet and started slowly gliding on the frozen lake. She wore mittens and a black knitted cap below which her red hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the streets packed with snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.

She watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight that was at the entrance of the graveyard. The warm light drew her in, dragging her across the ice, closer and closer to the place where the dead rested.

Snow was falling on every part of the dark central plain and on the treeless hills. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely graveyard on the hill next to the lake she had just skated on. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. Sashenka's red brows furrowed out of curiosity as she started to make her way towards the big imposing gates of the graveyard.

Just as she was about to go in, she heard voices. They were soft and scratchy. The voice belonged to a man and a woman. The woman's voice was thick with emotion. She leaned forward, trying to get a clear view of who was speaking, but they came out of the graveyard. Spooked, Sashenka hid further behind the brick wall, slowly starting to inch closer to get a good look at them.

She was too late, because all she saw was a flash of red hair disappearing in a car.

Then, she woke up.

The first thing she noticed was that she was strapped down to a bench and tied to the walls of the moving van. It was dark, but she could make out the heavy prodders that the two guards in the van with her were carrying.

The first guard noticed she was awake and kicked her harshly in her already bruised leg.

"Prosnis', tema!" He barked at her, causing her to jolt fully awake, hitting her head against the metal wall of the truck. Wake up, subject!

The other guard chuckled at the sight and stood up while the van they were currently locked in was at a stop. He walked in front of her and kneeled down to Sashenka's level.

"Doktor Antonov skazal nam, chto teper' ty mozhesh' ispol'zovat' svoy krasivyy golos." His gloved hand caressed her face as Sashenka tried to inch away from him. His face was marred with numerous scars and one of them cut through his left eye, leaving Sashenka assuming he was blind in his left eye. Dr. Antonov told us you could use that pretty voice of yours now.

Sashenka didn't want to think of what he meant by that. She couldn't speak, she had never been able too. How could she use a voice she never had?

"YA khochu uslyshat', kak ty krichish', Malen'kaya Lisa." I want to hear you scream, Little Fox.

And with that, he pushed the cow prodder into her neck, sending waves of shock into the six-year old's system. At first, she tried to keep quiet. But that was a lot easier when she actually had no choice but to keep quiet. She managed to keep quiet for maybe a total of one minute before a shrill scream tore its way from her newly repaired vocal cords, high pitched and pained.

"Net! Net! Prekrati!" Her voice was breathy from all the time she had not been able to use it. It was airy from all the times she had to listen. No! No! Stop it!

She was tired of listening.

The second he pulled the cow prodder away from her neck she surged forward, wrapping her small legs around the man's left one, pulling him close using core strength just like they had taught her at the Sokovia Facility. Caught off guard, the man surged forward and opened his eyes just in time for Sashenka to ram her head into his forehead, causing him to scream in pain and fall backwards into the bench as the van took a sharp left.

"Ty dolzhen perestat' govorit'." Sashenka spoke again, raising one single brow at him. You should stop talking.

The guard growled and stood up to jump at Sashenka, but his partner kicked his foot under him, making him lose his balance and fall back into his seat. "Ne nado! My pribyvayem!" Don't! We are arriving!

Just like he said, the vehicle slowed to a stop and the metal doors were unlocked, the pale winter light blinding Sashenka.

"Privet, sub"yekt RED, ya zhdal, chtoby poluchit' tebya zdes' s togo dnya, kak ty rodilsya." The woman speaking must have been in her early fifties, with her graying black hair pulled back into a tight bun, her face seemed pulled backwards by enhancements and she was wearing a green pencil dress. Hello Subject RED, I have been waiting to get you here since the day you were born.

The guards behind the woman moved forward to undo Sashenka's chains and pull her out of the vehicle. Sashenka was still having trouble reading but she was able to make out the letters on the golden name tag on the woman's dress that read, 'Madame B."

"Dobro pozhalovat' v Krasnuyu komnatu, malen'kaya lisa." Madame B. said as she walked back into the windowless brick building that looked like a heavily guarded fortress surrounded by barbed wires and electric fences.

Welcome to the Red Room, Little Fox.

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edit 17/12/21 : re-writing this after watching hawkeye hits different...