Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Melina is five when a man with a gun destroys her chance at a normal life.

She doesn’t realise this at first. It will take her a few days, but by then it will be too late.

On her last day of freedom, Melina is walking down the street with her mother, carrying her share of the grocery shopping. They turn down the alleyway that will take them back home, and a man steps out of the shadows.

“What’s in the bags? Food?” he says, and brings out a gun. “Put it on the ground, and then put all your money and valuables on the ground, too.” Melina’s mother tilts her head up defiantly.

“No. This is our food, and we don’t have much in the way of valuables anyway.”

“Put it down! I’ve got a gun!” Melina’s mother simply shakes her head, disentangling one of her arms from the bags of shopping and hugging Melina close. She begins to propel her out of the alley and back onto the main street.

The man fires, and Melina’s mother’s arm drops from it’s position around Melina’s shoulders. Melina shrieks. The man snatches one of the bags out of her arms, sending the others toppling to the pavement. The food spills out, the bag containing their bread splitting. The blood oozing from a small, round hole in her mother’s forehead begins to stain the bread bright red.

Passers-by are screaming. One woman crouches down next to Melina, putting an arm around her, and tells her that they have called an ambulance, that it will get here soon, that they will be able to make her mother better.

The ambulance arrives, and then more onlookers eager to get a bit of gossip, and then the police. Most of the paramedics kneel next to Melina’s mother. They start to put her body in a big, white bag.

They’re not supposed to do that. Not if her mother is still alive.

Melina tells this to the paramedic that sits next to her and drapes a blanket over her shoulders.

“She’s just asleep, you can’t put her in a big bag, she won’t be able to breathe!”

The paramedic shakes his head, looking sad. He’s not supposed to look sad. Not if her mother will get better.

“Your mother’s not asleep, darling. She’s dead. There wasn’t anything we could do. I’m sorry.”

Melina blinks at him.

“It’s okay, my Папа is dead, but Мама says that just means he’s gone away for a while. So she’ll come back, too.”

The paramedic opens his mouth to talk, but before he can, a burly police officer comes up and taps him on the shoulder.

“I need to take her statement,” he says.

The paramedic frowns. He suddenly looks very small next to the other man. “She’s in shock. Take it later.”

“She’ll forget,” says the police officer crossly.

“She’s only little, it’s not like she’s going to remember anything, anyway!” The paramedic flings up his hands angrily, and the two men abandon her. Melina hears them shouting at each other before they’ve even walked a few steps away.

Melina is not sure where to look: her eyes flick between the shouty police officer and the wide, shiny pool of red that yet another police officer is attempting to mop up.

She is not sure what she is supposed to do now. Go with the police officer, probably, to the big, imposing house opposite the school in the square. The orphanage. The idea isn’t appealing. The matron might be shouty, like the police officer, and the other children might pick on her, like they do at the park sometimes.

Melina stares, for a second, at the now much smaller pool of blood where her mother’s head had been. With one quick glance at the police officer and the paramedic to make sure they won’t notice her, Melina jumps up and runs back down the alley to the main street.

By the time evening has fallen, though, Melina catches herself thinking longingly of the orphanage. At least there she would have food but here, now, hunger eats at her stomach like a rabid dog and she is cold, so cold that her bones could be blocks of ice, her hair and eyelashes icicles. She wraps her arms around herself, sinking down onto the steps of a dark office block.

A man comes and settles himself next to her on the step. Melina eyes him warily, wondering if he is friends with the police officer from earlier. He doesn’t look like a police officer though - he’s short and heavyset, looking more like a suburban father than anything else.

“Are you a police officer?” Melina asks him in a whisper. She adds, as a matter-of-fact afterthought, “I don’t think I like you, if you are.”

“No, no!” the man laughs. “Of course not - I want to help you! Can I just ask you a couple of questions?” He reaches out to stroke her face reassuringly. Melina desperately wants to pull away from his touch, her stomach crawling with an unexplainable fear long after he pulls his hand away to pull a notebook from the pockets of his big coat. He doesn’t wait for her to agree to his questions, just begins to ask them, in the same soft, light voice as before.

“What’s your name?” Melina’s mother had always told her not to talk to strangers. Reflexively, she looks around for her mother’s tall, comforting presence, and then remembers the big white bag with a little stab of pain. She swallows hard to try and get rid of a sudden lump in her throat.

“I don’t think I should be talking to you.”

“Answer my questions, please.” The man reaches out and takes hold of her shoulder, entangling his hands in her hair to keep her moored on the step. “I’m going to ask again, okay? What is your name?”

Melina struggles, and the man closes his hand tightly around her hair so she’s jolted painfully when she tries to move away from him. She gulps. “I’m Melina Vostokova.”

The man untangles her hair from his hand, smiling at her softly. “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? It’s very nice to meet you, Melina. My name is General Dreykov. How old are you?”

Melina wants to ask if “General” is his real name or if she has to call him “General”, like the way she always calls Captain Avilov from next door “Captain” when his name is actually Dimitri, but she doesn’t like the way that General Dreykov is looking at her, like he knows lots of ways to kill her and would have no problem going through with it, and thinks better of asking.

“I’m five,” she says but, eager to impress him, just in case, she adds, “but next month, I’m six.” That look melts off General Dreykov’s face as if it had never been there and he nods, looking faintly satisfied.

“And what are you doing out here alone, and at night too?” he asks, putting an arm around her shoulders again. “And so cold, too. Hang on - here.” He takes off his coat, draping it around her with a smile. “Where are your parents, little one?”

Melina’s throat aches as that white body bag pops into her memory again. She shuffles her feet, eyes stinging. “I don’t think I have any.”

General Dreykov makes attentive, sympathetic cooing noises. “Well then, I have a proposition for you.”

Melina’s heart sinks. “Are you one of the orphanage people?”

“No, no,” General Dreykov says soothingly. He ducks his head close to hers, lowering his voice as if he’s trusting Melina with a special secret. “It’s just - I have a friend who has a big house in the countryside. A bit like an orphanage, I suppose, but it is so much nicer than that! She takes in little girls who haven’t got anywhere to go. And since it sounds like you don’t have anywhere to go either, I was wondering if you might like to come.” He turns her head so that she has to stare right into his dark, dead eyes, and places his hands on her shoulders, seemingly in a comforting way at first but pressing down harder when she wriggles.

Melina’s stomach twists with hunger again and she shivers. “Okay,” she whispers, letting Dreykov take her hand and lead her to a big, black car parked around the corner. He opens the passenger side door at the front and Melina sucks her thumb anxiously.

“Мама says I’m too little to sit in the front seat.”

General Dreykov tuts, shaking his head. “Well, you’re a big girl now, right?”

Melina rather likes the thought, so she climbs up into the front, taking her thumb out of her mouth resolutely, deciding that she can’t suck her thumb if she’s going to be a big girl.

They drive for a long time, out of the city, through the surrounding suburbs and out into the proper countryside, occasionally passing a sleepy village but otherwise there are no signs of life. Eventually, General Dreykov turns a corner and begins up a long driveway.

“Welcome to your new home, Melina.”

The house at the end of the driveway doesn’t look much like a home. It’s big and imposing, with a huge, elaborate front door and small windows covered with thick bars. Dreykov opens the car door for her but she cowers inside.

“I think maybe I’ve changed my mind. Can I go back now?”

“Nonsense, we’ve come all this way. Why don’t you just give it a chance? My friend is very nice, I promise, the house just looks a bit scary. Now come on, we have to get you registered.” He grabs her by the arm, his hands icy cold even through her dress, and pulls at her arm hard when she stays stubbornly inside the car.

She wriggles valiantly, but Dreykov’s grip on her is strong, as if his hands have burrowed right through her skin and curled themselves around her bones. He drags her up the slippery driveway and up to the towering front door without breaking a sweat. He turns the handle.

And then they enter the house.

It looks nothing like the friendly schools Melina has seen on the television. They stand in a long, dark hallway, with smaller corridors branching off in either direction like veins off an artery. A flight of stairs leads up to another floor in front of her, and inside the yawning black rectangle on the floor to her left she can just about make out the first few steps of a second staircase leading down to a basement. There are no toys, no teachers, no children, no indication that anyone lives in the house at all. Silence coats everything, thick as smog.

Melina begins to struggle with more desperation. Dreykov sighs at her, the soft sound almost deafening in the suffocating quiet, and tightens his grip.

“Don’t be naughty, Melina. Come on, we need to go upstairs to my friend’s office now.”

They ascend the stairs, walk down yet another grand, gloomy corridor, and turn the corner. Soft, classical piano music leaks out of a room behind them and stalks them as Dreykov pulls her towards the elaborate door at the end of the corridor. He knocks politely, the voice that answers his knock as frosty as the feeling of Dreykov’s fingers digging into her shoulders.

General Dreykov stands up straighter, pushing Melina into the room. She ducks her head so that she can’t see much of the room, save for the plush, moss green carpet and elegantly carved desk in front of her.

“A new recruit, Madame B. Her name is Melina Vostokova. She’s five.”

The owner of the cold voice walks around the desk, stopping in front of Melina so that all she can see of the woman is her dainty shoes. The woman grabs Melina by the chin, her fingers knife-sharp, and forces her head upwards. She tilts her face from side to side, gazing at her from every angle.

The woman’s face could have been carved from ice, gaunt face completely devoid of color except for her lips, carefully filled in with dark red, like the blood on the bread she’d bought with her mother that morning. Melina gulps audibly.

“She’s acceptable,” says the woman. Melina is not sure if she’s paying her a compliment or not. “Sit down, Melina.” Obediently, Melina climbs onto a big chair, padded in the same dark green as the carpet. The woman sits behind the desk, steepling her fingers.

“My name is Madame B,” she says. She cocks her head, her expression suddenly sympathetic. “I suppose you’re wondering where you are? Poor child. This is the Red Room Academy, Melina. Here you will study ballet, languages, combat and weaponry so that you can be an impeccable soldier for Mother Russia. A Black Widow. It is a big honour.” Melina frowns, struggling again. General Dreykov’s hands close around her arms again, and Madame B continues as though blind to Melina’s struggles. “Now, we must initiate you, and then we will go over the rules.” Madame B silently opens her desk drawer and produces a syringe filled with a pale blue liquid the same colour as Madame B’s overly large eyes.

“But I’ve already had all of my injections, Мама says.” Madame B ignores her, gesturing for General Dreykov to keep his hold on Melina's arm and roll up her sleeve. Melina kicks out at Madame B’s shins, trying to twist away from the bright glint of the needle. Dreykov steadies her arm, stretching it out, and turns her head so she has to watch as Madame B slides the needle into the crook of Melina’s arm. Both a sudden, intense cold and fiery hot pain flood her body at the same time, making her head spin. Tears fill Melina’s eyes and start to flood down her cheeks. Madame B resumes her seat behind the desk and watches Melina impatiently.

“Stop those tears at once, please. Crying is a sign of weakness and will be punished. Black Widows are not weak. Now, we will go over the rules and the schedule of the day, and then one of the older girls will show you where you are to sleep.”

Melina barely hears Madame B as she continues to talk, too distracted by the waves of pain throbbing up and down her arm. Her head feels both heavy and strangely empty at the same time.

She’s startled back into herself as Madame B claps her hands, nodding at a new girl standing behind the desk.

“Take Melina to the little girls’ dormitory please, Anna.” Anna doesn’t give her a withering look, like Madame B, or grab her arm and drag her, like General Dreykov, but all the same she turns and walks out of the door like she expects Melina to obediently follow.

Anna moves jerkily, her gait eerily similar to the way Melina makes her doll walk. So Melina follows, her footsteps echoing and loud compared to Anna’s silent ones. They walk up another flight of stairs, and stop at the very first room on the corridor. Anna opens the door, puts her hand on Melina’s back, and pushes her inside.

Anna’s hand is cold like a doll’s, too.

The sudden loss of light as Anna closes the door is the only clue that she’s left the room. Melina presses her back to the door, blinking slowly in the gloom. Her eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, and she sees that she’s in a room filled with small single beds, all positioned exactly the same amount of space apart, line after impossibly perfect line. On every bed except for three sits a little girl with tightly braided hair, staring at Melina with wide eyes. At the wall opposite the door, the girls sit on their beds with perfectly straight backs and blank expressions.

A girl sitting on a bed close to the door jumps off her bed and runs over to Melina. She’s small and thin, with neat blonde plaits tied so tightly that a vein throbs, bright blue like the girl’s eyes, above her eyebrow. Her footsteps aren’t as quiet as Anna’s had been and Melina is sickeningly certain that Madame B can hear them downstairs in her silent office.

“You’re new,” the blonde girl says matter-of-factly. “Aren’t you? I’m Akilina Morozova. What’s your name?”

“Melina Vostokova,” Melina whispers, struggling to keep her voice as quiet as Akilina’s. It hurts her throat.

“Hello, Melina. You’ll be sleeping in the bed next to me. You need to come and sit on it now because the guards will be in to put us to sleep soon.”

“I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

“You missed our bathroom slot. You’ll have to do it tomorrow.”

“But Мама says -” Melina starts to protest, but breaks off, because when she brings up her mother, the other girls in the room hiss like she’s said something terrible. Even Akilina stops talking, instead grabbing Melina’s hand and tugging her towards the rows of beds.

Bewildered, Melina sits on the bed next to Akilina’s trying to copy the ramrod straight posture of the other girls. Her shoulders start to ache within seconds. She turns to Akilina, feeling the need to apologise, wanting to stop the other girls from looking at her like she’s a rabid dog, but Akilina’s friendly face has shut down, expression blank.

A few seconds later, three big, muscular guards slip silently into the room and make their way up and down the rows of beds, grabbing the right hand of each girl and handcuffing them to their bed.

Akilina doesn’t struggle in the guard’s grip, so when he turns to Melina, she doesn’t either. The handcuffs, seemingly like everything and everyone else in the house, are icy cold and they dig painfully into Melina’s already aching arm when the guard orders her to lie down.

She doesn’t sleep for hours. She cries, her head buried in the pillow, until she is out of breath and the pillow is so sodden she isn’t sure it will ever be dry again.

There is a grandfather clock just down the hallway. It chimes four times before Melina finally falls asleep.

In her dreams, Melina is trapped in a loop: she is walking with her mother again, clutching her share of the shopping bags. They step into the alleyway and the man with the gun jumps out. The gun goes off with a bang and Melina’s mother falls over and over again until Melina finds herself staring down at her mother’s body and realising, with a jolt, that her mother’s face is wiped clean of her features, perfectly smooth and blank.

Chapter Text

The feel of the guard’s big, cold hands unlocking the handcuff around her wrist wakes Melina from her dreams. She sits up, the pale, bright light of dawn painting the dormitory in a shabbier, harsher way than how it appeared last night. Her wrist stings when she moves it to grab her thin blanket and she looks down to find that the handcuffs have rubbed a perfect oval of purple and red around it.

Melina hears a small voice behind her. “Just follow what I do and you won’t get into trouble.” It’s Akilina, giving her a small smile, her friendliness from last night back. The smile strains her face oddly, as though her mouth has forgotten the shape it is supposed to make. “We’re friends now,” she says decisively, stepping back as a group of older girls clad in identical white vests and black shorts arrive to herd them towards the washroom.

Melina washes in freezing water and selects a battered toothbrush, watching as the other girls undo their tight plaits with tiny sighs of relief, massaging their scalps while the older girls brush their own teeth.

They are led back into the dormitory to find the same outfit as the older girls are wearing laid out on the beds. Melina struggles into hers obediently, wriggling against the scratchy feel of the material. She is pushed down onto her hard mattress by an older girl, and without warning her head is attacked, the girl’s sharp fingers tugging at her hair, forcing it into the same painfully tight plaits that the other girls wore the night before. Melina can’t help but whine, and the older girl sighs and yanks hard on the finished plait, jerking Melina’s head back, before shoving her back into position and continuing with the other plait as though nothing had happened. Akilina widens her eyes sympathetically while the older girl fumbles for a hair tie.

“How do you deal with this? My head hurts already,” Melina whispers, falling into step next to Akilina as the older girls, moving simultaneously, herd them down to the dining hall.

Akilina rubs her arm, looking older, suddenly, more world-weary than a five-year-old has any right to look. “Pain only makes us stronger.”

Melina is not quite sure how she’s supposed to move the conversation on from that. “I’m sorry about last night,” she mumbles instead, as they are led down two flights of stairs and through a maze of shadowy corridors. “I upset the others.”

“We’re not supposed to even think about - “ Akilina hesitates, looking furtively at the other girls. “ - we’re not supposed to think about life before we got here. Or talk about it.”

“Oh.”

Akilina’s voice becomes slightly robotic. “Anyway, Madame B is our mother.”

“Oh,” Melina says again, as they reach the dining room. The older girls lead the group inside, positioning them along a perfectly straight bench. Madame B and General Dreykov enter, and the girls simultaneously dip their heads to them and sit down, Melina struggling to copy.

A small bowl of grey porridge is set in front of her. Melina stirs it with her spoon, wincing.

Akilina elbows her in the stomach. She nods meaningfully towards the porridge and starts spooning her own meal into her mouth. Melina is still starving from last night, with an odd, empty feeling in her abdomen, as if her stomach has eaten itself overnight, so she scoops up a spoonful, too hungry to care about the gluey, lumpy texture.

When everyone has finished eating, they are divided into groups by age and split up. Melina’s dormitory is led into a room rather like the classroom at the school Melina’s mother took her to see, the one she was supposed to start attending in September, with neat rows of desks and a large screen and projector at the front of the room. Madame B is stood in front of it.

She is directed to a seat right at the front, next to Akilina with two empty seats next to her. To her right, Akilina shifts, straightening her shoulders under Madame B’s watchful gaze. Melina tries to do the same but is not sure she’s quite managed it.

Madame B switches on the projector and Snow White begins to play. The other girls begin to mouth the words, chanting along to the film. Melina fumbles, tripping over the words, half a beat behind everyone else. Madame B walks over and hits Melina hard on the back of the head, bringing tears to her eyes.

Usually, Melina enjoys Snow White, but watching it today makes her feel fuzzy and gives her a headache behind her eyes, like someone is trying to yank them from their sockets.

They watch the film all the way through - Melina gets hit on the back of the head three more times - and are then led, in a little crocodile formation, to a dance studio. They are directed to the back of the room, and Melina copies the way Akilina and the others are sitting - on their knees, feet tucked between their legs, hands folded in their laps.

An older group of girls, aged about eight or nine, come in, and they start to dance, rising onto their toes, arching their arms, spinning. Again and again, until blood starts to stain the delicate pink of their ballet shoes and some of the girls wobble slightly, earning a slap and a whispered threat from Madame B, presiding over them like a queen over her army.

All of the dancing girls have bloody pointe shoes by the time they are led into lunch. Melina is ravenous, but their lunch is a small cucumber sandwich that barely fills the yawning black hole that her stomach seems to have become. The room seems to be spinning, and Melina is almost grateful when they are led into a large room full of older girls facing each other on black mats and forced back into the uncomfortable kneeling position from earlier.

Madame B blows a small silver whistle, the sharp squeal of it cutting through the silence like a hot knife through butter, and the girls on the mats start to fight. They circle each other with careful, deliberate footsteps before they gather their courage, punching and kicking, ducking and dodging. One of the girls directly in front of Melina grabs her opponent, pulling her hair and squeezing her neck tightly. Madame B nods at her, and the girl tightens her hands.

There’s a sickening crack.

It takes Melina a moment to realise that the girl is dead. When she does, nausea overwhelms her, clawing a burning path up her throat. Melina loses her lunch and breakfast from today and her meals from yesterday before the nausea recedes. When she looks up, Madame B is kneeling in front of her, looking almost sympathetic for a moment before she grabs Melina by the chin and slaps her cheek.

Akilina corners her after dinner. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Melina dithers. Her cheek still aches where Madame B slapped her and whenever she thinks about the girl’s body on the floor she’s sure she’ll start throwing up again.

“Come on. We only have twenty minutes until we have to be back in the dormitory,” Akilina whines, pulling Melina’s hand. “It’ll cheer you up. Promise!” Melina wavers, tempted, and lets Akilina drag her outside, through the big garden at the back of the house until they reach the line of sheds. She squeezes behind them, Melina following obediently. They only just fit through the gap between the sheds and the fence.

She finds herself in a little cove, sheltered from the guards’ threatening eyes by the sheds, the sunlight softened by a tree whose leaves dangle over the fence.

“My special place,” says Akilina matter-of-factly, settling herself against the shed, knees drawn up to her chest. “Most of our sisters don’t even know you can get behind the sheds if you really try.”

“Sisters,” mutters Melina dubiously, poking the toe of her boot into the dirt.

“Madame B is our mother, the other girls are our sisters,” replies Akilina, in the voice of someone trying to explain a concept that should be obvious.

“They’re not. They don’t act like mothers or sisters,” Melina says, and Akilina just blinks at her pityingly, as if to say that she’ll soon learn not to think such things.

And she does learn, soon enough: two weeks later Melina is dragged to Madame B’s office for another injection. As her arm burns with fire and ice, the doubts seem to vanish from Melina’s head. Of course Madame B is her mother and the other girls are her sisters.

A little voice in the back of her head says that Madame B doesn’t act like a mother and that sisters aren’t supposed to beat each other bloody until one of them doesn’t get up, but the voice is drowned out and tidied neatly out of sight soon enough.

The next day, the two bare beds in the dormitory are filled. Akilina, who saw General Dreykov bringing the two new girls in, does a roaring trade with their sisters, offering little tidbits of information about the new arrivals - one is brunette and tall, the other a small, underfed blonde - in exchange for their breakfasts. At breakfast the next morning, while the two new girls, Valentina and Irina, stare miserably at their small bowls of porridge, Akilina collects the bowls of at least half of the girls in the dormitory. She looks up, grinning at Melina, and splits the feast between the two of them.

And it is just as well that they both ate until they, for once, felt full, because it seems that with the arrival of the final two girls, what Madame B calls their training has begun in earnest.

They watch Snow White like usual - Melina can chant the words with the others now, but the ache behind her eyes as she does so hasn’t gone away - but instead of watching the older girls dance, they are taken to a new studio and handed their own ballet shoes. A new woman, standing with perfect posture next to Madame B, is revealed to be a dance teacher when she leads them through the five positions. She makes them spin into pirouettes, again and again, girls wobbling, blisters forming and bursting and forming again, blood squelching between Melina’s toes.

Three pirouettes in, Melina is the next to stumble. She wavers, her posture slipping. Madame B slaps her, the sound ringing through the room, and leans in close so her breath is warm on Melina’s ear.

“Don’t be breakable. The breakable ones get buried in the garden,” Madame B whispers, squeezing Melina’s shoulder in a motherly fashion, and a squeak escapes from her mouth before Melina can suppress it. Madame B gazes at her, her eyes like chips of ice, and Melina gulps, dragging her burning feet into second position, trying to get her arms to curve back into that perfect arch.

Melina used to want to be a doctor, a scientist, an astronaut, a different career every hour of every day. By the end of their first day of training, however, all she wants is to not be a breakable girl.

Later on, she squeezes herself behind the sheds with Akilina, and the dappled green light makes her feel slightly calmer. Melina’s feet are bleeding again, blisters reopened after hours practising punches and kicks, fingers and shoulders aching from holding up the gun she’d been given before dinner, from the shock of the recoil as she’d fired.

Akilina rips a leaf from one of the bushes attempting to push through the fence around the Red Room Academy. “Take off your socks.” Melina peels them off, and Akilina carefully dabs at the mess of blisters on her toes as Melina wriggles and winces.

“Akilina?”

“Hm?”

“Why are you always so nice to me?”

Akilina shrugs. “You were the first girl to come here after me. Our sisters, they weren’t very… friendly? So I wanted to be nice to you.”

“Oh.”

Akilina finishes dabbing at the blood on Melina’s toes. She pulls her socks back on, and when she’s finished, Akilina pats her toes.

“Pain only makes us stronger,” she says, her thin face serious.

“Pain only makes us stronger,” Melina echoes, and pulls another leaf from the bush to clean Akilina’s blisters. When she finishes, she tickles the bottom of Akilina’s feet until she smiles, squirming and batting at Melina’s hand. They sit together in silence for a few minutes Akilina scooping up a couple of twigs and making them dance through the mud.

“Akilina?” Melina whispers.

“What now?” says Akilina teasingly.

“Why do you always say that thing? Pain only makes us stronger?”

Akilina dithers, making the sticks do a final twirl and a bow. Melina gives them a round of applause, patting each twig on the head, waiting for the other girl to respond.

“Don’t know,” Akilina mutters eventually, tossing the sticks to the side.

Melina remembers clutching shopping bags and a woman lying on the floor, blood framing her head in a halo. The woman whose name feels like Мама in her mouth even though Melina doesn’t remember calling anybody that. “Is it from before? Before the Red Room?”

“Don’t know. Maybe. I like saying it though,” Akilina looks across at her, smiling, and they slip out from the warm green world behind the sheds and back into the cold world of the Academy.

Pain only makes us stronger. It becomes their mantra, their catchphrase, whispered in passing during training with a squeeze of the hand, squashed behind the sheds in the twenty minutes before lights out, curled together like mice in dusty corners when they grow too big to fit behind the sheds.

When they are seven, the human-shaped paper targets they use become real people for the first time. The exercise stays the same, though: assemble the gun, load the gun, put your ear defenders on, fire at the target, over and over until you’ve used all of the bullets, disassemble the gun for the next girl. If Melina closes her eyes, she can pretend that the prisoners tied to chairs in front of them are no different from the inanimate targets they usually use.

She pretends that the exercise is the same as always while she waits for her turn, while pleas for mercy and gunshots and blood splattering the floor echo through the room, ringing through her ears. Some girls throw up, and are taken out into the corridor, where the crack of a whip can be heard through the thick door.

And then Melina gets to the front of the line. She assembles the gun with practised ease, like a child putting together a favourite jigsaw puzzle. She puts the ear defenders on, and then she looks at the target.

A fatal mistake. The target is a young man, in his twenties maybe, with sweaty black hair and grey eyes, very large and pleading in his face.

“Please, I have a girlfriend, a family. Please!” he whispers, and Melina’s finger freezes on the trigger, her hand trembling.

Madame B is watching her, eyes calculating. Melina wonders what would happen if she didn’t pull the trigger. It would prove to the instructors that she’s breakable.

Melina thinks of the breakable little girls, stacked one on top of the other under the bright green lawn at the back of the Academy. She adjusts her grip on the gun, trying to stop her hands shaking.

She pulls the trigger. Over and over, a bullet to an arm, a bullet to a leg. The other arm, the other leg. The target screams. Stomach, chest, until finally Melina aims for the target’s head, and the man stops screaming. He stops making any noise at all.

Nausea claws its way up her throat, a mountaineer with a pickaxe made of fire. Melina struggles to choke it down, hands sweaty and trembling and slipping on the gun as she takes it apart for Akilina, standing behind her in the line. They clutch hands, like drowning people grasping at a lifeline, as Melina walks past her to sit with the other girls.

All afternoon, Melina feels like a loaded bomb, like all anyone has to do is breathe on her without warning and she’ll explode. Later, though, before lights out, when she and Akilina find a deserted alcove in the corridor behind the dining room, she begins to feel like she can breathe again. The tears she has been trying to hold back all day sting her eyes and begin to roll silently down her cheeks. Melina wants to run, to punish herself for such a breach of the Red Room’s rules on emotion, but if only Akilina is there to see her break then it might be okay.

“Today was horrible,” Akilina whispers. She ducks her head, pretending to clean her nails, and Melina is startled to see that her face is tear stained.

“Pain only makes us stronger.” Melina reaches out, offering an arm, and Akilina snuggles into her, free with affection in a way that neither of them have been for a while. It feels good.

“Pain only makes us stronger,” Akilina whispers back.

When they are eight, they each kill one of their sisters. Akilina is first, sparring with Alina while the class watches with bated breath, more used to fighting than observing, waiting for Madame B to pull a new challenge out of her hat.

Akilina kicks Alina’s legs out from underneath her, pinning Alina to the floor. And Madame B pulls the dreaded challenge from her hat.

“Akilina,” she says, voice ringing through the training room. “Kill Alina.”

Melina sees Akilina’s eyes widen for a moment before her mouth sets into a thin line of defiance.

“Akilina,” says Madame B again, like a warning, and the defiant set to Akilina’s face vanishes, replaced by resigned understanding. She pulls Alina into a kneeling position, putting her arms around her neck.

A muscle twitches in Akilina’s jaw, and she snaps Alina’s neck.

“Good,” says Madame B, directing the guards to take Alina’s body away as Akilina, slightly wobbly, gets to her feet. “Next, I want Melina and Dima.”

Melina’s stomach plummets, like she’s riding the downwards slope of a rollercoaster. She gets up, though, facing Dima on the mat under the burning gaze of her sisters.

Dima is small with pale brown hair, still scrawny even though most of the other girls in the class have begun to gain muscle. She was never going to win. Even so, Melina finds herself faintly surprised as she clutches Dima’s neck, waiting for Madame B to give her the order.

Dima struggles under her, limbs thrashing, as Madame B nods. Melina tightens her grip, robotically going through the motions she’s practised on dummies thousands of times.

Snap. Dima stops struggling.

“Akilina?” Melina whispers later, when they’re curled together in a damp corner of the Red Room. There’s blood under Akilina’s nails, Melina realises, Alina’s blood. Akilina seems determined not to look down at it. She looks grey under her blonde hair.

“Yes?”

Are you okay? Do you wish you were in Alina’s place? Do you wish you had refused to kill her? So many questions that Melina would like to ask. “You won’t kill me, will you?” she says instead.

“Never. Never ever.” Akilina shifts, squashing Melina against the wall. She holds out her little finger. “Pinky promise.” She smiles, and Melina locks their little fingers together.

“Melina Vostokova, I pinky promise to never kill you.”

“Akilina Morozova, I pinky promise to never kill you, too.”

Back in the dormitory, Melina tosses and turns, Dima’s dead eyes swimming above her, looking eerily real against the cobwebby darkness of the dormitory ceiling.

She thinks of the breakable little girls under the grass and what she would do to make sure she never joins them.

She wonders if Akilina was thinking about them when she promised to never kill her.

Chapter Text

Melina doesn’t know when her birthday is, of course - none of them do, until they turn sixteen and they are called up for their first mission.

There are some girls that have been on missions before, of course, as covers for the older Widows, but your mission at sixteen is the first mission where you can expect to kill. Some of the trainees wait with bated breath, eager to prove themselves, while others struggle to sleep every night that they are in the Sixteenth Class.

Melina waits with bated breath, of course, or at least she tries to, telling herself that she is not afraid. To be afraid is to be weak and breakable and Melina is not, will not be breakable.

She thinks it’s spring, when she’s called up for her mission - the leaves are blooming again, gleaming bright green, the snow melting from the grass. If you are lucky and know where to look, you can see birds building nests in the tree that hangs over the fence of the Red Room Academy.

Melina is tapped on the shoulder as she replaits her hair after ballet one afternoon, her feet aching. She pins her hair back into place and turns, feeling blood between her toes, blisters burning.

Madame B waits in ominous silence for the other girls to leave, her frosty, overly large blue eyes anchoring Melina in place.

The last girl leaves, the door swinging on its hinges, bringing relief in the form of a whoosh of cool air to Melina’s hot cheeks, and Madame B turns. She doesn’t need to prompt Melina. She will always follow Madame B.

They walk in silence, Melina careful to keep her head bowed respectfully, until they reach Madame B’s office. The door opens with a slight creak to reveal the carved desk, thick carpet and General Dreykov, looking, as usual, slightly uncomfortable in Madame B’s office. Madame B opens a drawer, produces a thick manila folder. She opens the file, spreading pictures of a smiling, blonde teenager, a serious-faced man, and a large, imposing house across the desk.

“Your mission,” she begins, tapping the picture of the serious-faced man, “is to assassinate Owen Goodwin, formerly known as Egor Solovyov. He was high up in the Red Guardian program before defecting to America.”

“It’s taken us a while to find him. He keeps moving around,” Dreykov chips in, “but we found him eventually. Of course.” He makes it sound like a threat.

Madame B raises an eyebrow at Dreykov, quelling him. She pulls the picture of the pretty, smiling teenager from the pile. “In order to get close enough to assassinate him, you will be posing as a schoolgirl named Alicia Tanner and will make friends with Goodwin’s daughter, Rachel. General Dreykov will be posing as your father. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Good. Now, come with me and we will organise your cover.” Melina gets up, obediently, and follows Madame B out of the room, General Dreykov lurking behind her, closing her in. They walk up a flight of stairs, steeper and narrower than the wide staircases downstairs. They reach a winding, dimly lit corridor, passing doors standing half-open, revealing a treasure trove of clothes, furniture and assorted clutter, before reaching the room at the end of the hall. It is filled with hair dye, shampoo, and large scissors. Melina’s heart starts to thump.

General Dreykov pushes her down into a chair in front of a wide, brightly lit mirror, moving away to fetch scissors, bleach and pale brown hair dye.

Three hours later, Melina stands in front of the mirror in the dressing room next door, brushing hanks of pale brown hair from her clothes and face. She feels slightly unreal, as though she has had a personality transplant along with the haircut that turns her into Alicia Tanner. Her face is almost unrecognisable, framed by short, straight, pale brown hair and a cropped fringe that brushes her eyebrows.

But the clothes are fascinating, although Melina is not quite sure how she is expected to fight effectively wearing them. She fingers the clothes that Madame B produced for her to pack while she debriefs General Dreykov - chunky, golden jewellery, neon t-shirts, baggy jeans in blue denim, lace-up white shoes that look like they’d squeak as she walks. Mercifully, Madame B has also given her a familiar black catsuit to hide at the bottom of her suitcase.

“Ready?” Dreykov appears again, briefcase under one arm, struggling to wheel two bulging suitcases. He takes Melina’s suitcase from her. “We’ll leave straight after breakfast tomorrow.”

She straightens her posture. “Yes, General.”

“You got called up for your mission! I knew it!” says Akilina, later that night. She tugs a strand of Melina’s hair, in that teasing way of hers that the Red Room has never quite managed to destroy. “I like the new hair.”

“I hate it. I don’t feel like me.”

“Are you scared?” Akilina asks, uncharacteristically serious.

“Yes.”

“Don’t be. You will do great!” Around them, the other girls begin to shift and emerge from their hiding places, the unspoken signal to start making their way back to the dormitory. Akilina holds out her little finger. “Quick, we need to do the promise.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I can’t kill you if I’m not even here.”

“Just do it, Lina. Please?” Akilina grabs one of Melina’s hands, freeing her little finger. “Melina Vostokova, I pinky promise to never kill you.”

Melina rolls her eyes. “Akilina Morozova, I pinky promise to never kill you.”

Leaving the Red Room is… noisy. Melina isn’t sure how else to describe it. They’ve learnt about the outside world, of course, in lessons and films, but she isn’t prepared for the way that even the leaves rustling in the wind seems to get louder as Dreykov, hand clamped firmly around her wrist, leads her through the wrought-iron gates to where a car waits, engine idling, on the muddy, thin road just outside the Academy.

Melina slides into the backseat, allowing herself a childish moment to prod the shiny, cracked material of the seat as Dreykov shuts the door behind her, walking around to the front of the car. He opens the driver’s door, clambering in, and Melina snatches her hands away from the seat like they’ve been burned, folding them demurely in her lap. Dreykov revs the engine with a roar that startles her, spinning the steering wheel, and Melina watches the shabby grandeur of the Academy fade to a dark smear in the rear-view mirror, the winding road, flanked by armies of trees, obscuring it from view within a few seconds.

Their mission will be in a suburb about an hour’s drive from New York City, General Dreykov tells her as they drive past endless fields dotted with cattle. New York. That’s probably exciting. Alicia Tanner would probably be excited, so Melina smiles and squeals obediently, getting into character, aware that at its core, this mission is not so much an urgent assignment but a test of skill and nerve.

They’ve reached busier roads now, and are passing through a town, all tall grey buildings and narrow, twisting streets, that is somehow oddly familiar and completely alien to Melina at the same time. It makes her head hurt, like someone is pressing a needle in between her eyes, and she looks away from the window, staring at her hands, neatly folded in her lap.

They reach a red traffic light, stopping with a slight jolt, and Dreykov, watching her carefully in the rear-view mirror, passes her a small backpack which he says contains details on her cover. Trying to ignore the pain in her head, Melina flicks open the file, glad of a distraction from the view of the town.

The file contains a sheaf of notes about Alicia Tanner’s personality, a birth certificate declaring her birthday as the twentieth of June, and an American passport bearing the photo of Melina that Madame B took a few hours ago, all pin-straight fringe and pale brown hair. Melina frowns, feeling slightly unreal again, like she’s fading away, and snaps the passport shut, digging out the notes. Alicia Tanner does not sound like she would survive a day in the Red Room - loud, bubbly, kind and insufferably messy. Melina resolves to finish the mission as quickly as possible.

They arrive in New York without incident, Melina’s head still aching from the brightness and chaos of the airport and the way the customs officials stared them down, like they knew every bad thing Melina had ever done.

Even though they’re an hour from the city, the buzz of traffic on the quiet suburban street outside seems to drill through Melina’s head. She hadn’t expected the world to be quite so loud.

General Dreykov hands her the suitcase she packed earlier and another, smaller one. “Unpack. Your room is the second door on the right.”

Alicia Tanner’s room is painted pale pink, darker pink curtains fluttering at the window, softening the glare of the sun. Melina unpacks her clothes quickly, hanging them up in the tall white wardrobe, and turns to unzip the smaller suitcase, finding it filled with school books, make-up and trinkets. Melina wrinkles her nose, trying to remember what a typical teenager’s bedroom looks like in movies. Alicia Tanner is messy, so Melina scatters make-up across the dressing table, smashing the powder in one compact and smearing it across the table and mirror. She bends the school books, dog-earing the pages and stacks them in a wobbling, precarious tower on the desk and adding a leaking pen and a model of a ballerina on the top. She drops the pair of white lace-up shoes, kicking them half under the bed, before standing back to admire the effect.

She hates how messy it is, so she assumes it looks about right. Even Dreykov, coming in for an inspection, grudgingly admits that she has done an acceptable job.

“Look over your school books to get ready for your first day tomorrow,” Dreykov says, and leaves her.

The next morning, Melina wakes early, out of habit. She eats breakfast and works through the exercises that mark the start of every day in the Red Room before she showers. It still feels odd to shampoo her hair only for it to end at her jaw, leaving Melina grasping at thin air.

When she’s finished, there is still an hour left before she has to even think about leaving for school, so Melina lays out all of the clothes, trying to think what outfit Alicia Tanner would wear. She ends up choosing a yellow t-shirt, so bright it hurts her eyes, dark blue jeans and a pink jacket.

“You’ll do,” General Dreykov tells her when Melina submits herself for inspection over his breakfast. He dumps his bowl in the sink. “Let’s go and get you registered at this school. I’ve made sure you’re in many of the same classes as Goodwin’s daughter.”

The registration process is quick, the school not bothering to probe too deeply, and soon enough the secretary is dragging Melina through a crush of teenagers towards something called ‘homeroom’.

The classroom is large and bright, a million miles away from the dark, shabby grandeur of the Red Room’s classrooms, filled to the brim with noisy teenagers. Melina spots Rachel Goodwin at the far end of the room, outlining her lips in bright pink and looking vaguely disinterested in the chaos around her.

“This is Alicia Tanner, Mr. Rayward. Alicia, this is Mr. Rayward, your homecoming teacher.”

Mr. Rayward is tall, with greying, mousy brown hair and laugh lines etched into his face. He gives Melina a friendly grin.

“Hello, Alicia. Let’s find you a seat, shall we?”

“Hello, Mr. Rayward,” says Melina politely, making sure to use Alicia Tanner’s Southern drawl. “Nice to meet you! That would be lovely, thank you.” Mr. Rayward leads her to a seat next to a tall boy with dark curly hair, who smiles at her politely but doesn’t bother to engage her in a conversation. Melina notices with a twinge of displeasure that Rachel Goodwin’s seat is about as far away from Melina’s as it’s possible to be.

In the end, though, Melina doesn’t need to seek Rachel out. In a cruel twist of irony, Rachel Goodwin seems eager to make friends with the girl who will kill her father.

She corners Melina as she is leaving homeroom, scrabbling for the map of the school that the secretary gave her so she can attempt to find the Chemistry laboratories.

“Hi!” she says brightly. “I’m Rachel. You’re new, right?”

“Yeah,” Melina replies. “Alicia Tanner.”

“Cool! What class do you have next? I’ll show you around.”

“I have Chemistry.”

“So do I!” Rachel leans over, snatching Melina’s timetable. Melina has to force herself not to flinch. “Ooh, we have the same teacher. Come with me, I’ll show you the way.” And Rachel hooks her arm through Melina’s, oddly free with affection in the way all of the people Melina has met so far seem to be, free in a way Melina doesn’t think she remembers how to be.

Melina is standing in front of her locker at the end of the school day, attempting to stuff all of the homework she has to work on in her backpack, when Rachel Goodwin pops up. Again.

“I’m giving you the grand tour of the town! You’re free tonight, right?”

“Sure!” says Melina, fishing the bright pink purse that Dreykov had given her from her locker. “Shall we go now?” She is rewarded with an impossibly bright grin from Rachel, and the other girl grabs her hand and leads her out of the school.

The downtown area of town is beautiful, filled with old statues and coffee shops. Rachel drags her into a café filled with plants. There are so many choices. Melina dithers while Rachel orders a latte with the easy grace of someone who’s done it thousands of times, eventually settling on a cup of tea and a slice of chocolate cake with thick buttercream. She collects her food and settles herself at the table where Rachel is already sitting, stirring sugar into her coffee. Melina busies herself adding milk and sugar to her tea and removing the tea bag.

And then she takes a bite of the cake. It’s the most disgustingly soft, sweet thing she’s ever tasted, the icing covering her teeth in chocolate flavoured slime. Melina didn’t know it was possible for something to taste so sugary, but she loves it nonetheless.

“Look at your face!” Rachel teases. “Anyone would think you’ve never eaten cake before!”

“This is really good,” says Melina breathlessly, taking another large bite. She resolves to buy a slice every day for the duration of the mission.

“I mean, it’s just chocolate cake.” Rachel steals a lick of icing from Melina’s plate. “Pretty dry, actually. The way you talk, it sounds like you’ve never tried it before! Don’t you guys have chocolate cake in… Wait, where did you say you were from?”

“I didn’t. I’m from Texas.”

“Cool. Dad and I lived in Texas for a bit. Dallas.”

“Oh, nice. I thought you’d lived here all your life?” Melina asks, careful to keep her voice soft and friendly, waiting for Rachel to crack open like a nut and spill her secrets.

“No, we’ve moved around a lot. I’ve lived pretty much everywhere in the USA, I swear. But we did live in Russia for a bit, when I was a baby. Dad has pictures.”

“Must be nice, travelling around so much.”

“Not really. I can’t get used to anywhere before we move again, and in every school the kids are nice, but they’ve all already made their friends and I don’t have any siblings, so…” Rachel trails off, looking sad for a second before she grins at Melina again, showing her dimples. “Do you have any siblings?”

Melina thinks of blonde hair, bright, clever eyes and promising, little fingers linked, to never kill each other. “I have a sister. She’s away at university now, though.”

“Aw, that sucks. I bet you miss her a lot.”

Melina scoops up the last of her cake. She’s not sure the heavy feeling in her chest when she thinks of Akilina and what they might have to do to each other in the future counts as missing her, but it’ll do.

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Yeah, I do miss her.”

General Dreykov is waiting for her in the shadows of the hallway when Melina gets back to the safe house, feeling oddly full of energy, like she’s a fizzy drink that someone’s shaken.

“Where have you been?” he demands, before schooling his face into the kinder, worried expression of a father. “Dinner’s ready.”

“I was with Goodwin’s daughter,” Melina says as Dreykov pours her a bowl of stew. “We just went downtown.”

“Quick work.”

“She’s lonely. She hasn’t really got any friends. It’s going to be easy to get close.”

“Any ideas on how to eliminate the target yet?”

“Stage a suicide or a robbery, maybe?”

Dreykov nods and gets up from the table, collecting a sheaf of notes from a side table and arranging them in front of Melina. “Suicide could work. I’ve been doing my own research, and Goodwin’s company is going bankrupt. He hired a bankruptcy lawyer three months ago.”

“I’ll make it look like a suicide, then,” says Melina, feeling ill at the thought. She finishes her stew and rinses out her bowl, suddenly desperate to get away from Dreykov and the thoughts of killing Goodwin. “I have homework to do.”

The next two weeks drift by, Melina completely absorbed in the bright, shiny bubble of Alicia Tanner’s life during school hours and jolted back into the shadowy world of the Red Room when she gets back to the safe house she shares with Dreykov. The juxtaposition of it all, acting like Rachel’s new best friend when she’s planning her father’s murder behind closed doors, sets her teeth on edge.

“So, I have an idea for the weekend!” Rachel declares on Friday, two weeks into the mission. “There’s this new film coming out. Back to the Future. Wanna go see it tomorrow? You could come over my house first and have food and then we can get the bus to the cinema.”

“Okay, sounds great! I’ll let my dad know.”

Rachel squeals delightedly and flings her arms around Melina. “I’m so excited!”

“Me, too!” Melina agrees, privately unsure if the feeling bubbling up in her chest is excitement or dread. Without the rigid rules of the Red Room, she feels off-kilter in this chaotic outside world, like a balloon floating aimlessly without a child to cling to it. In the Red Room, she knows where she stands, knows who she is supposed to be, but in this new world, she could be whoever she wants, a new person every day. Melina’s not sure if she loves or hates the feeling.

“I’m going over to Rachel’s house tomorrow, and then to the cinema to watch a movie. I’ll kill him then,” she whispers to Dreykov, later, and is not sure if the pang in her chest is sadness or relief.

“Good girl,” General Dreykov says, hand curling tightly around her wrist, his nails digging into her flesh. He manages to make the praise sound like a threat.

On Saturday, Melina arrives at Rachel’s large, looming house at three o’clock. They make themselves sandwiches in the big, open kitchen, and when they are done, Rachel slips into the garage with a grin and returns holding a cake box. She flips it open to reveal a large chocolate cake topped with cherries.

“I made it myself! Since you like the shit one from that café so much,” Rachel says, and Melina’s heart shatters into shards that dig into her chest, sending spikes of pain and nausea through her whole body.

“Thank you so much,” she whispers, feeling dizzy as Rachel cuts them both large slices. Melina forces herself to eat hers, even running her finger across the plate to capture the stray crumbs and icing, even though every bite tastes of shame.

“Shall we go? We might miss the bus if we hang around much longer,” asks Rachel when they’ve finished eating.

“I just need to go to the bathroom. I’ll meet you by the bus stop.”

“Okay, it’s just down the street. Bathroom’s upstairs, opposite my room.”

Melina nods, going to the bathroom and locking the door for show. She waits until she hears the click of the front door and then she pulls on a pair of gloves and a long, dark coat to cover any blood splatters, digging around in her bag for the gun. She finds it, and clips on the silencer. She takes a deep breath, swallowing down the nausea that she has never quite managed to get rid of when she’s killing, and opens the bathroom door, heading silently down the hallway to the door that Rachel said led to her father’s office. She knocks politely.

“Yes?” calls Goodwin, and Melina hides the gun behind her back as she slips into the office. It’s smaller than she expected, with a large desk that takes up the majority of the room. Goodwin is sat behind it, dwarfed by the tall bookcases behind him. He suddenly seems very far away.

“Ah, Alicia, wasn’t it? Is everything okay?”

Melina pinches her hand behind her back and blinks hard, forcing tears. “I don’t feel very well. I told Rachel she should go to the cinema anyway, but I was wondering if you could call my dad?”

“Of course, of course.” Goodwin holds out the telephone receiver. “Come and dial his number.”

Melina crosses over to the desk, leaning over to take the handset from him and pull the telephone towards her.

And then she pulls the gun out from behind her back, presses it to his forehead and shoots him before he has time to say anything. She places the gun in his hand, moves the telephone back to its place on the desk, puts her coat and gloves back in her bag, and goes to the cinema with Rachel.

“Done?” says Dreykov softly, when she gets back to the house at half past six.

“Done.”

Chapter Text

Akilina is a constant in Melina’s life. She sometimes thinks, treasonously, that the other girls aren’t her sisters, that they don’t act like sisters should, but she never has to doubt Akilina. They are sisters, always.

They are sisters, and they are the best in their class. The others falter once, twice, too many times, prove themselves breakable and are buried in the garden, but not Melina and not Akilina.

Their friendship can’t last, of course, but it helps to pretend it can and to promise - “Pinky promise, Melina or it doesn’t count,” Akilina says - every night to never kill each other, to never even think of killing each other.

They grow older. The pale brown dye grows out of Melina’s hair, her natural dark brown taking over again, like an invasive species, and they turn eighteen, graduating into the next class. The world begins to shift on its axis, so slowly that, at first, it slips past Melina without her even noticing, despite the fact that she has spent years watching what happens when you grow older in the Red Room, when your classes grow smaller and your hands grow bloodier.

In the world outside the Red Room, when you hit milestones like sixteen, eighteen, twenty one, the world opens up and new opportunities present themselves.

In the Red Room, the opportunities that present themselves are more twisted than passing a driver’s test or being able to drink. And really, they are not opportunities at all, more like tests and orders disguised as a choice, wolves in sheep’s clothing. At sixteen, you are taken on your first mission. At twenty one, it is the final test, followed by sterilisation and graduation if you pass, but Melina is trying hard not to think about that.

When Melina is eighteen, the portions that her class eat at meal times are reduced.

“You would have more food if there were less of you. Times are hard, you know,” Madame B reminds them all, softly, on her weekly visits to supervise their training.

The girls eye each other more warily than ever as they walk the corridors, dancing around each other, simultaneously playing the parts of the frightened mouse and the starving cat. But Melina likes to pretend, so she walks to the training room, to the dining room, to the classroom with Akilina, the same as they always have. Akilina steals cigarettes from the less experienced, more lenient guards and they smoke them together in the windowless corridor before lights out, each silently daring the other to snap and attack, to break the promise they’ve made every night since they were eight.

And they still make it, every night without fail. “Melina Vostokova, I pinky promise to never kill you,” Akilina murmurs, little finger hooked tightly around Melina’s as though to stop her from fleeing.

“Akilina Morozova, I pinky promise to never kill you, too,” Melina parrots, and the promise chokes her, clutching her around the throat and threatening to consume her completely.

One day that winter, while the snow still suffocates everything, Valentina stabs Darina in the neck with her butter knife at dinner, and the world is thrown from its orbit, spinning right off its axis and into the sun. Darina collapses, her blood splattering Melina’s food, Aleksandra’s face, Lyudmila’s clothes. The guard standing at the head of their table barely twitches, just silently drags Darina’s body away.

That night, they all crowd around the small window of their dormitory to watch as the guards, directed by Madame B and General Dreykov, bury Darina in the garden behind the house.

“She was breakable. You know what happens to breakable girls,” Madame B tells them the next morning, and Valentina turns away, rigid and expressionless as a doll, lost to the world.

Two more of their sisters die in the next three months. Katrina and Nadya. Melina and Akilina still promise, little fingers linked, every night, to never kill each other. And every night, the promise feels like poison, making Melina’s stomach twist as Akilina, eyes calculating and accusing, grips Melina’s finger so tightly that they’re both regularly left with bruises.

Melina grows paranoid. Sleeping next to Akilina has always been comforting, but now Melina wakes up every morning feeling faintly surprised that she is still alive, that Akilina hadn’t simply leaned over and smothered her with her free hand. Melina knows that it’s possible, has even grabbed her pillow with her free hand and leaned over, straining against the handcuffs, pillow hovering over Akilina’s face before she snaps back into herself and realises what she’s almost done.

In her heart of hearts, Melina knows Akilina, and Akilina alone, poses a legitimate threat to her. The others, even the other girls in the top five, are afraid of them, scattering like ants from a boot when Akilina and Melina consistently come top in every ranking.

Maybe it was always supposed to be this way, a string of events set in motion the second Akilina introduced herself all those years ago. It’s poetic in a way that makes Melina so afraid she feels like a cold fist is clutching her heart, so afraid that it comes up as bile every night.

Melina’s opportunity comes one day in training. Akilina is selected to spar with the girl who’s been frequently ranking in third place, Irina Kuznetsova. Whether Akilina is just off her game or if they’ve all underestimated Irina, Melina doesn’t know. Either way, the fight is longer, more brutal than it should have been, and ends with Irina catching Akilina around the neck in a tight headlock, both of them gazing at the instructor, waiting for her to give the nod that will end Akilina’s life.

The instructor pauses for a second, debating, eyes calculating, before shaking her head, gaze flickering to Melina. The instructor’s decision is clear: Akilina will be saved for Melina. The best in the class against the best in the class. Irina releases her hold on Akilina, frustrated at missing a chance to rid herself of one of the biggest threats, and Akilina rolls to the side, gasping, before regaining her balance and walking quickly, almost running, towards the showers.

Melina is picked to fight next. She sees the potential opportunity to take out the threat that is Akilina for good, and like any Widow would do, she takes it, even though everything in her is screaming at her to stop.

Her opponent is Maria Balakireva, who is average, really, close enough to the top of the class to not be an immediate target for the weaklings at the bottom, but still low enough in the rankings that every fight could easily be her last.

Melina doesn’t immediately mess up the fight. She performs as well as she always does for a while, delivering enough blows to her opponent that Maria starts to get desperate, so desperate that it shows in her increasingly messy punches and then, when Melina has the opportunity to catch Maria in a headlock, she allows the other girl to dodge past her like a frightened animal and put Melina in a headlock instead.

For a moment, even though Melina is sure the instructor will spare her, she can’t help but feel a twist of fear in her stomach. But the instructor gives the expected shake of the head and the knot in Melina’s stomach unravels as Maria releases her. She walks the same path as Akilina had just a few minutes before, allowing herself to bow her head in a fakery of shame.

Melina’s footsteps are perfectly silent, as always, but she walks on her tiptoes all the same, trying to stifle any possible sound as she approaches the shower room. She hears the steady drip of running water and, barely audible above the sound of water hitting the sink, small snuffling sobs.

Only Akilina can’t be crying. Widows don’t cry, so trainees don’t cry either. Melina isn’t even sure if her brain remembers how to cry when it’s not for show.

She steps into the shower room. Akilina is standing in front of the big, chipped communal sink, washing the blood from her hands, blonde plaits messy, her teary blue eyes reflected in the mirror hanging above the sink. She looks so vulnerable, so forlorn, that for a moment, Melina almost loses her nerve. It would be so easy to just walk back to the training room and pretend she hadn’t been planning to murder her sister.

But Melina takes another step instead, so that her reflection shows in the mirror, staring back at her with accusing eyes. She leans against the door to one of the shower cubicles, waiting for Akilina to look up and spot her. All of Melina’s training screams that it would be more efficient to eliminate the target by sneaking up on her, but the twisted part of Melina wants a fight, wants to see if Akilina really means their promise or if she would throw it out of the window when given an opportunity.

A part of her wants Akilina to win the fight and kill her, instead.

Akilina looks up, the lost, haunted expression vanishing from her face as she spots Melina in the mirror, replaced by a raised eyebrow.

“So, you lost a fight? It’s about time. I was thinking you might start to get cocky,” she says, in the teasing tone she uses only for Melina, the tone that is the sound of Melina’s childhood. Just hearing her speak almost makes Melina lose her nerve again.

But she keeps going, taking another step forward despite everything in her screaming at her to stop. An ache settles deep in Melina’s bones, as if her body is rebelling, trying to stop her.

Akilina knows what’s going to happen, Melina can tell she does in the way her hands close into fists and her expression flickers into betrayal for a second.

“Melina,” she whispers, staring at Melina in the mirror as if she’s seeing her for the first time. Melina falls into a fighting stance, a perfect mirror of Akilina’s, the familiarity of it reassuring.

And then Akilina spins around, aiming a punch at Melina’s left shoulder. Melina dodges, grabbing Akilina’s fists and using the other girl’s momentum to throw her into the door of a shower cubicle. The door slams into the wall, the resulting crunch ringing through Melina’s ears, so loud that she’s sure the other girls can hear it in the training room.

Akilina snarls, a broken, betrayed look in her eyes, and shoves at Melina’s shoulders so they tumble into the communal sink. Melina’s back screams from the impact but she tries to ignore it, aiming her blows for the bright red soon-to-be bruises from Akilina’s fight with Irina, barely dodging the slaps and punches and kicks that Akilina rains down on her in retaliation.

The other girl grabs Melina’s face and slams her head into the mirror, hard enough that fine little cracks spread across it and bright stars flash in front of Melina’s eyes. She stumbles, dazed, her vision gone for a moment, and Akilina gets the upper hand, forcing Melina down and onto the floor, hands tight around her neck. She squeezes hard, tears running down her face again, and Melina scrabbles desperately at Akilina’s feet and legs, failing to pull her off as spots of black appear across her vision again. Part of her wants to stop struggling, to let Akilina choke the life out of her.

But the other part of her, the part where her Red Room training has taken hold like a parasite, is bigger. Melina forces herself to stop struggling, letting her blinks get slower until her eyes flutter shut. She makes herself go limp, forcing her breaths to stutter and then stop. She holds her breath as long as she can, lungs screaming, waiting for Akilina to shift, loosening her hold, cautiously reaching for Melina’s pulse point with a trembling hand.

She grabs Akilina’s wrist, pushing it back until it cracks, and then kicks Akilina’s legs out from underneath her and grabs her in a headlock, squeezing her neck tight as the other girl struggles.

Melina works quickly, before she can talk herself out of it. She tightens her hold, choking back the tears and nausea as the crack of Akilina’s neck breaking bounces off the shower room walls. Melina drops Akilina’s body like it’s burning her and scrambles back, leaning against the sinks, pressing her fist into her mouth and biting down hard to stop the tears spilling down her cheeks.

She can’t stop looking at Akilina’s body. The other girl’s blank eyes seem to stare at her accusingly, her hand flung out, landing close to Melina as if asking her to make their promise to never, ever kill each other.

Melina gives up, stops trying to suppress the nausea. It burns trails of shame up her throat and Melina has to turn to the sinks, throwing up once, twice, three times, losing her breakfast and her lunch until she’s just throwing up acid that sets her nose and mouth on fire.

Melina wipes her mouth, turns resolutely and leaves Akilina’s body on the floor.

Chapter Text

Melina relives her final fight with Akilina over and over in her dreams. She takes to sleeping with her left hand, the one not handcuffed to her bed, pressed to her neck, so that she will wake if one of the others moves her hand aside to kill her. When she wakes, she sees Akilina’s broken body with each blink, hears the sound of her neck snapping even in the silence that coats everything in the Red Room.

It’s funny how Akilina is dead and yet she taunts Melina so constantly she seems more alive than ever.

The bruises that Akilina left on her neck might as well have been the word ‘guilty’ tattooed in bold, black letters. Like Valentina, she is not punished, but the sick, hot feeling constantly weighing down on her chest, not lessening even though the bruises start to fade from red to purple to yellowey green, is punishment enough.

The only thing that drives Melina to the laboratories, at first, is the decent cover that the cupboard at the back of the room provides. Those twenty minutes before lights out that she used to spend with Akilina stretch out, agonising, and Melina takes to wandering the corridors, looking for a hidden corner to squirrel away in, wary of the way the girls in the next class up have started to look at her, all shark’s teeth and calculating eyes, when they think she is not looking.

And so one night, she ends up in the laboratories they use for science classes, because the storage cupboard at the back is quite large, with a small window that lets in slits of moonlight, so at least she won’t be in the dark, and the lab is big and the corridors ensnaring it carry the noise, so she can listen for people sneaking up on her with relative ease.

The laboratories are nice, probably one of the nicest rooms in the Academy. The room is large and the moonlight provided by the big windows on the right hand wall paints the rickety, dull brown desks and chairs in soothing silver.

And anyway, she likes science, likes the objectivity of it, likes plugging numbers into equations or mixing together chemicals and knowing, always, what the result will be.

Melina pulls one of the big textbooks they use in class from the bookshelf, flicking through the pages until she gets to one describing how to make salts. She fetches sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid from the storage cupboard and mixes them together to make saltwater. She pours it into a bottle and hides it in the storeroom.

The next day, Melina evaporates off the water to reveal perfect little crystals of salt, glinting in the moonlight. Even though making salt is such an inconsequential, odd violation of the Red Room’s rigid rules that there’s probably not even a punishment for it, each lump of salt feels like a tiny rebellion.

She would like to say that her idea for an exoskeleton to protect her is a gradual, natural evolution from textbook experiments that turn into tentative engineering, but it is more of a desperate evolution, born out of a student from the class above her following Melina to the laboratories and attempting to put her in a chokehold.

Five minutes later, when the other girl’s body is lying on the floor and Melina’s cheek is bleeding, bruises forming across her stomach, the idea pops into her head. Carefully avoiding the other trainee’s dead eyes, Melina grabs a sheet of paper from the cupboard at the back of the room.

Slowly, over a few weeks, the plans take shape, drawn on a mishmash of paper stolen from classrooms across the Academy. And even though Melina knows she will never be able to get the materials to finish it, will never be able to wear the suit and feel safe, while she’s planning it out, her problems seem to dissolve in a whirl of ink as she sketches out the next component.

General Dreykov grabs her by the hair as she walks out of the dining hall one evening after dinner.

“Come to my office,” he says, as the other trainees watch, eyes bright with interest, waiting to see her fall from grace. Melina will not let them see the fear in her face. Instead, she straightens her back and follows Dreykov to his office.

Melina does not like his office. It is all panelled wood with the same cold grandeur as Madame B’s office, but the big display on the far wall where General Dreykov tracks the Widows paints the whole room in a bright, blinding red that reminds Melina uncomfortably of blood.

“Sit,” says Dreykov, pulling out a chair for her. Melina sits, obediently, and General Dreykov settles himself in the wheeled chair behind his desk, opening a drawer with an ominous creak. He produces a sheaf of paper, a haphazard mixture of lined paper, graph paper, plain paper, and slaps it down on the desk in front of her.

With a sick wave of shock that she is careful to keep off her face, Melina recognises her exoskeleton plans.

“Do you recognise this?” Dreykov asks.

Melina swallows. “Yes, General.”

“And you made these plans all by yourself?”

“Yes, General.”

“And you could make the suit? If you had the right materials?”

“I think so.”

General Dreykov’s eyes gleam with greed. “What else could you make?”

Melina is divided on whether she is going to be punished, or if Dreykov is playing a twisted joke on her, tricking her into incriminating herself. But he is staring at her expectantly, waiting for an answer. She bows her head demurely, deciding to play along with his game. “I don’t know, General.”

“Weapons? Poisons? Bombs?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” From under her eyelashes, Melina sees Dreykov frown and sigh, and knows she’s said the wrong thing, has failed his little test. She backtracks hastily. “I can try.”

The fear wrapping around her chest loosens slightly when he nods, smiling. He leans forward. “Well then, I have an offer for you. If I get you the materials for this -” Dreykov taps the sketch of her armour’s faceplate “- then you’ll do some lab work for me in return. Okay?”

Melina hates how he always presents his ‘ideas’ like she has a choice in the matter. “That works. Thank you.”

He leans back in his chair, satisfied. “You may go.”

Melina is still slightly in shock that she won’t be punished, but she’s not about to question it. She mumbles another thank you and stands, dipping her head to Dreykov, before leaving the room at as quick a walk as she can without actually running.

And General Dreykov is as good as his word. He contacts a friend, he says, from a program that works in tandem with the Red Room, and the friend produces, seemingly out of thin air, blocks of metal, wires, everything Melina could need.

Dreykov even gives her her own laboratory to work on her suit. It's just a tiny, windowless rectangle of a room, sandwiched in between the white-tiled laboratories in the basement, but it is hers. It feels almost too good to be true, but Melina refuses to think too hard on her sudden windfall of good fortune, and instead throws herself into working on her suit, stealing five minutes to add a wire in between lessons, working as quickly as she can in the twenty minutes before lights-out, while Dreykov and assorted curious scientists hover over her, murmuring thinly veiled threats in her ear. Melina solders wires, shapes the metal - a reassuringly unyielding steel-titanium alloy - into a mask, chest plates, leg plates, and slowly the armour starts to take shape under her hands.

It takes her six months, working flat-out whenever she can, but one day she screws the last plate of metal into place and the armour is finished, looking eerily like a metallic, shiny corpse as it lies on the table.

She tries it on the next day while Dreykov lurks in the corner like a hungry wolf.

“Punch him,” Dreykov tells her, pointing at one of the Red Room scientists. The man backs away like a terrified mouse running from a cat, but Melina catches him and punches him in the jaw. She uses her full strength, like she does in training, but unlike her fellow trainees, the man flies across the room, hits the wall with a dull crunch and slides down to the floor.

Melina knows she should be horrified at what her suit can do, and she is, but in a twisted, horrible way the knowledge makes her feel safer than she has in years. Beside her, General Dreykov laughs and claps, his eyes gleaming.

He sends her on missions in the new suit, and with every successful mission Melina feels his approval of her grow. She likes it, being his special favourite. She likes it so much that she can even ignore the crawling feeling of her skin when he sits her in his office and calls her good, the best, a credit to the Red Room, a credit to him. Melina hates herself for feeling sick at his words and yet hoarding them carefully, like they are trophies, brightly painted signs warning her sisters to stay back.

He calls her the Iron Maiden, and the name creeps inside her, as cold as its metallic namesake, making itself at home in her head, next to Widow and Alicia Tanner and a dozen personalities from missions past until Melina isn’t sure which is which any more. Iron Maiden seems to have taken over, seems to be replacing her nerves with wires and skin with steel until Melina feels like she will wake up one day to find that someone has played a trick on her and she was never really human at all.

She finds someone who can relate in an unexpected place. General Dreykov tells her that they want to test the strength that her suit gives her, and when all the scientists eye her nervously and take several steps back, he frowns and rolls his eyes and calls the friend that he got the suit’s materials from instead.

The Winter Soldier arrives the next day. Melina has heard of him, of course - the Fist of Hydra, famed for his brutality, a scary story often used by the older trainees, whispered in the night to frighten the younger ones. She’s even seen him around the Academy once or twice, training a select few of the best Widows.

But all the same, he’s not quite how she expected him to be. Melina expected him to be cold, emotionless, like a robot pretending to be human, and he is all of those things but behind his eyes there’s something else, a feral danger that keeps the scientists and his handler, Colonel Karpov at arm’s length.

When Melina fights him, she finds that the stories told by the older girls were all true. The Soldier fights with a brutal efficiency, taking the most effective blows without fear of harming himself, fast in a way that Melina knows she will never be capable of. Her suit seems to give her strength similar to his, but that advantage vanishes almost as soon as they begin to spar, slipping through her fingers like sand.

She’s flat on her back, the wind knocked out of her, within a minute or so. To her surprise, though, General Dreykov doesn’t look particularly angry. Quite the opposite, actually: he’s talking intently with Colonel Karpov, both looking like they have won the lottery.

There’s a knock at the door and two Widows come in, dipping their heads politely at Dreykov and Karpov. Melina recognises them - Viktoriya and Emiliya, two of the shining jewels in the crown of the Red Room, often trained by the Winter Soldier himself.

“Fight with the Soldat, this time, not against him,” says Dreykov. “We want to see if together you can beat Viktoriya and Emiliya.” Obediently, Melina and the Soldier position themselves next to each other, settling into fighting stances as easily as hugging an old friend. Across from her, Emiliya and Viktoriya give her cool, appraising looks, and Melina knows that their encounter will be all over the Academy by dinner time, a heavily edited picture designed to turn the other girls against her - Melina the upstart trainee, Dreykov’s special scientist pet.

Good.

Melina flicks down her faceplate and Colonel Karpov blows his whistle. There’s a lull before punches are thrown, where the Widows opposite them think where best to hit. Viktoriya’s eyes fix on Melina’s left leg and Melina shifts her position slightly, trying to decide if Viktoriya is tricking her or not.

The Winter Soldier has no such qualms. He, thankfully, tackles Viktoriya, abandoning Melina to deal with Emiliya. The Widow throws herself at her, lightning fast, aiming a kick at her throat. Melina just about manages to dodge, throwing a flurry of her own punches that Emiliya twists away from. Melina gets a kick from the Widow in her side and retaliates by grabbing Emiliya’s arm and twisting it, pulling it back. She punches her in the face, trying not to wince when she gets a kick to the ribs.

Beside her, the Soldier has beaten Viktoriya. He throws her to the floor like she’s nothing but a doll, and turns to advance on Emiliya. Melina ducks at the warning in his eyes and just about manages to get out of the way of the Soldier’s punch. It connects with the Widow’s forehead and Emiliya collapses to the floor, not moving.

“Good,” says Karpov, smiling. “Good. We can work with this.”

General Dreykov and Colonel Karpov send them on missions together, one after another, kill, kill, kill until Melina is so used to always having blood on her hands that she is surprised whenever she looks down and finds them clean. Her life becomes a blur of metal on metal and tense, silent evenings spent fine-tuning the Soldier’s arm in rundown safe houses as they work their way across the globe.

It is oddly companionable, killing with him. It's a surprisingly nice feeling knowing there is someone there watching her back, Melina decides one night, as they sit in a shabby motel room in New York City, her tools on her lap, her fingers buried in one of the many tangles of wires that make up the Soldier’s metal arm.

The handler has gone to the bar down the street. The Winter Soldier is trying to play casual, gazing out of the window, eyes on the concrete towers of the city, but the little red notebook sat on the side table next to Melina keeps drawing his eyes like a magnet.

The Soldier’s handler for the night, one of Colonel Karpov’s minions, had given it to Melina before he left, with a conspiratorial wink that made her feel sick and instructions to read out the words on the first page if the Soldier got bothersome.

“I’m not going to use it,” Melina tells him now, remembering the handler’s wink. “So you don’t have to keep staring at it.”

The Soldier looks at her, all of the feral danger gone from his eyes, replaced by a glassy, distant look as though he’s waking from a particularly realistic dream. “I remember this city,” he says, accent suddenly different, no longer Russian but American, with the elongated vowels of the New Yorkers Melina has heard all day.

“Maybe you just came here on a previous mission. Stay still.”

“No,” he insists. “I know it.” The Soldier shifts, leaning closer to the window, making Melina yank her hands out of his arm. The wires she was in the middle of replacing spark angrily but he doesn’t even seem to notice. “Like, that alley there, me and Steve, we -” he breaks off, face contorting into a frown - “who’s Steve?”

“I don’t know,” Melina says. She eyes the little red notebook anxiously to reassure herself that it is still there, hating herself for even thinking of using it.

“Please don’t use it. It hurts.” The Soldier’s eyes are filled with fear, panicked, so different from the emotionless features Melina has become used to seeing. She swallows, reaching for his metal arm again.

“Let me finish working on your arm,” she tells him, pleadingly, and surprisingly, he lets her. They drown in thick silence again.

“Do you remember who you were?” The Soldier’s eyes are on her again, big and wide like a child’s. “Before this?”

Melina thinks of gunshots and blood on bread and a faceless woman with dark hair like hers. It makes her head hurt and her throat close up. “No,” she tells him, after a pause, and behind the Spldier's eyes something seems to crumble, like he is a child being denied a cookie. It feels odd to see his eyes, usually so empty, look like that. Melina is quick to remedy the situation, hoping that she can talk him into acting normal again. “But there are… I don’t know. Flashes.”

He turns to look out of the window again. “I get that too," the Soldier says, and when he looks at Melina his eyes are suddenly kind. "What are you doing to my arm?”

Melina blinks, disconcerted by his quick change of subject. “Just fine-tuning it. Replacing frayed wires, adding extra solder to keep everything in place. Stuff like that.”

“Interesting,” says the Soldier, and he seems to come alive before his eyes go glassy and distant again, the New York accent coating his words getting thicker. “I like science. I saw a flying car at the Stark Expo, once. Only it didn’t quite work. But it was interesting all the same.”

Melina hums agreeably, and they settle into a much more comfortable silence than before. They could be friends, given time, she thinks, and is not sure how to feel about the possibility. Melina remembers Akilina's hands, scrabbling against hers as she tried to free herself, and isn't sure that she would trust herself with the Soldier.

But all the same, Melina can't help but wonder, sickeningly, if any of the weapons that General Dreykov is going to make her develop will be used on him.

Chapter Text

The five almost-Widows sit in complete silence, Melina and Valentina on one side of the truck and Elena, Lyudmila and Irina on the other side as it weaves through the forest, turning left and right and left again. Melina doesn’t want to look at the others, still hanging onto the childish belief that if she doesn’t look at her sisters, doesn’t acknowledge what is about to happen, then it simply won’t happen.

The truck shudders to a stop, and the driver jumps out and unlocks the gate that leads into the testing area.

Not long now. Within a few days, the other girls will be dead, and Melina will be back at the Red Room Academy, waiting for her graduation ceremony, and that will be that. She will make sure of it.

The truck crunches over a stray cluster of pebbles, and one of the guards sitting in the back with them springs into action, handing out rucksacks. Lyudmila’s contains a map, Elena’s a compass, Irina’s a fire starting kit, Valentina’s a torch and Melina’s a water purification kit and a small metal bottle.

Irina smirks down at her fire starting kit, basking in the jealous gazes of the others. Next to her, Lyudmila hugs her map close as though afraid someone will steal it.

Mentally, Melina sighs, feeling divided. She would rather have a fire starting kit or a map, but she can work with the metal bottle and water purification kit. She supposes she could always use the bottle to knock one of the others unconscious if it came down to it.

Next, the guard sitting next to Lyudmila hands them each a knife and meagre rations, three protein bars each. Melina shoves the food to the bottom of her backpack and turns the knife over and over in her hands. It’s large, fitting snugly into the holster at her hip, with the sharp-edged hourglass of the Black Widow program carbed elaborately on the handle. It would almost be pretty if not for the wickedly sharp blade shining above the handle.

There’s the rusty brown stain of long-ago blood, from forgotten graduation tests, embedded in the carvings of the handle. Melina lets herself pick at it, as though she’s fidgeting nervously, as the guard sitting at Valentina’s left recites the rules of the test. Elena fusses over her rucksack as the guard talks, her knee bumping against Lyudmila’s leg.

None of them need to listen, really. They all know the rules intimately from hours at night spent picking them over in their minds as the test drew closer, desperate to think of a winning strategy. Not that there is much room for originality: the final five trainees are driven out into a fenced-off area of the woods behind the Academy and abandoned with a map, compass and enough matches and food to last one girl a week. The final girl standing, the girl who arrives back at the Academy with the blood of four more of her sisters on her hands, becomes the latest Black Widow.

The truck shudders, swaying, screaming to a halt, and the guards stand as one, each grabbing a girl by the arm and throwing them out into the cold of a small clearing. Melina rolls, landing neatly on her feet, an odd sense of calm descending over her.

She will win, whatever the cost. Winning is drummed into her, at her core, the essence that makes up her very being. It almost feels like she is betraying her own mind to fail at the final hurdle.

The five of them stand in a misshapen circle, eyeing each other warily, nobody wanting to make the first move. The crunch of wheels against snow and rock signals the guards driving away, growing more and more distant until finally, the sound of doors slamming as the guards settle themselves in the little house by the gate is barely audible.

And still the five of them stand in a circle, knives in hands, crouched into defensive stances.

Elena and Lyudmila exchange looks, a silent agreement passing between them. Elena raises her eyebrows at the rest of them and as one, they all lower their knives, stepping back towards the shadow of the trees, each girl staking her claim on a slice of forest. The branches of the trees seem to be reaching for Melina, ready to sweep her into a shadowy embrace.

Irina nods at each of them in turn, a promise that if they run into each other again, the meeting will be a lot bloodier. Melina nods back, curling her lip, and then turns and runs for the trees, not looking back to see if anyone follows.

She doesn’t have to run for long before she reaches the fence that marks the edge of the test area. Just above her, a camera blinks at her, threateningly red.

Melina knows she won’t run, is not even sure that her body would let her leap the fence and envelop herself in the forest, but just for a moment she lets herself entertain the idea before she pushes the thought away into the distant depths of her brain. To run from the Red Room would be weak, would prove Melina to be breakable, and she is not breakable. Even now, so many years since she first heard Madame B’s whispered threat, the thought of becoming a breakable little girl under the grass haunts her thoughts constantly, wrapping around her brain like a snake slowly suffocating its prey.

The sun is still high in the sky, so Melina ducks into the shadows of the trees and starts to head to the left, keeping her head low, painfully aware that her dark hair marks her out in the snow as clear as day. She thinks of the long-ago pale brown bob of Alicia Tanner and wants it back, for a moment, as though with a haircut she can become that girl again. Alicia Tanner who is friends with Rachel Goodwin and eats chocolate cake every day and would never be in a cold Russian forest hunting down her sisters.

“I don’t want to kill you.” Lyudmila’s voice drifts through the trees, a warning for Melina to slink further into the shadows like a fox.

“You’re being silly, Lyuda. You won’t have to kill me.” Elena’s voice is exasperated, the voice of someone who has repeated the same thing over and over, only to have it fall on deaf ears.

“But what if we’re the last ones left?” Lyudmila says, and her voice breaks. “I won’t kill you, Lena. I can’t.”

“You won’t have to kill me. I’ll kill myself before you kill me. You’ve come this far, I’m not letting you fail now, okay?” Elena’s voice has gone from exasperated to loving, and the pieces fall into place. Elena and Lyudmila, who sneak off together in the twenty minutes before lights out and come back to the dormitory grinning at some joke that nobody else understands.

Sisters. Sisters in the way that Akilina and Melina were sisters, before Melina snapped her neck. Of course they would stick together, even in the forest that has ripped apart so many sisters in the past. Melina feels a pang of jealousy that they never caved to the rules of the Red Room, never stooped as low as she had. The jealousy is quickly swept away by the other part of Melina, the Red-Room-rational part of her, whispering that Lyudmila and Elena are weak and breakable for forming their bond.

Sometimes it feels like there are two parts to her, sliding against one another like tectonic plates, the part of her that the Red Room has embedded itself into like a parasite holding the softer, weaker, breakable part of her hostage.

Melina shrugs away the thought and creeps closer to the voices, reaching for her knife. Elena’s gleaming black hair comes into view, plaited and twisted into a ballerina bun. She’s standing next to Lyudmila, an arm around the other girl. Lyudmila’s head is bowed in defeat. Melina sees Elena’s hand curl around the knife in her holster for a second, before her hand goes stiff with horror and is hurriedly withdrawn.

She takes another step forward, until she could reach out and set Elena’s plaits free from her bun. But Melina reaches out and shoves her knife up and under Elena’s ribs instead. She twists the knife and then yanks it out, her stomach burning with nausea as if she’s the one who has been stabbed. Elena makes a small, surprised noise and falls to the ground.

Melina barely has enough time to turn before Lyudmila, knife at the ready, pins her against a tree, stabbing at her stomach. She twists out of the way just in time, elbowing the other girl in the chest and wriggling free while Lyudmila stumbles, trying to suck air back into her lungs, tripping over Elena’s body.

Elena groans, her hands twitching towards her holster. Her fingers close around her knife and she pulls it free, holding it up for Lyudmila to take before her hand drops.

Melina backs away, trees closing around her in all directions, their twiggy fingers caressing her face and snatching at her hair. She ducks as Lyudmila makes a wild slash for Melina’s throat, barely getting out of the way in time. She hits the scratchy bark of a tree and climbs up a few branches, kicking out at one of the knives in Lyudmila’s hand. Her foot connects and the knife slips from the other girl’s hand like sand through a child’s fingers.

Lyudmila abandons it and starts to climb up after Melina, who hastily starts to climb again, stopping every now and again to try and stamp on Lyudmila’s face, painfully aware of the way the branches are beginning to thin.

The next branch Melina reaches for creaks ominously and she snatches her hand back, wondering if she could jump to another tree. She abandons the thought and continues to flail her feet, hoping to hit Lyudmila as she continues to close in on her.

The other girl clings to a branch just beneath her, and Melina hugs her branch close, letting go with her legs and stamping on Lyudmila’s face. There’s a sickening crunch when her foot connects. Melina takes a deep breath and stamps on Lyudmila’s face again, going for her forehead. The other girl loses her grip on the branches, eyes glassy, and falls back down to the ground, where she doesn’t move.

Melina climbs down and approaches Lyudmila gingerly, feeling for her pulse. She finds one, weak under her fingertips, and slits the other girl’s throat, her breakfast curdling in her stomach until Melina is sure she’s going to throw up.

Elena is dead, too, so Melina collects their knives and packs, turning resolutely from their bodies. She walks on for a while, trying to choke down the nausea. She hasn’t thrown up after killing someone since she was sixteen and she is determined not to be sick now, under the accusing red gaze of the cameras perched on the fence.

At least she has collected the map and the compass. The thought gives her the confidence to finally regain control over her nausea and Melina walks on, putting the food and items taken from Elena and Lyudmila into her backpack and discarding the others.

She’s so close that she can almost smell the dust of the Red Room Academy again. Just Valentina and Irina stand between her and graduation.

Melina, Valentina and Irina, the last three recruits of their class. It’s fitting that they should be the last three of their class standing, too.

And then she stumbles across Valentina’s body, lying in the clearing where they had been dropped off. Melina checks the map she stole from Lyudmila and sees that the clearing is exactly in the middle of the test area. She spins in a slow circle, trying to decide which line of footprints to follow, before she spots a trail that is accompanied by the occasional drop of blood and that wavers slightly, as though whoever made the footprints was dizzy.

Melina takes her knife from her holster and pulls one of the knives she took from Lyudmila and Elena from her bag, and follows the trail.

The sun is beginning to set, staining the snow around her orange, by the time Melina finds Irina. The girl is leaning against a tree, bleeding from a large cut on her forehead but otherwise looking very pleased with herself.

Melina coughs and Irina looks up, grabbing her own two knives with a smirk. The two of them begin to circle, daring each other to make the first move.

Irina takes the plunge and strikes, running for Melina with her knife outstretched. Melina deflects, ducking away from a sudden flurry of stabs. One of Irina’s knives catches her on the arm, opening a thin cut before Melina can spin away, aiming her own slash at Irina’s throat. She misses, hitting her in the shoulder instead, the bright red startling against the white of Irina’s regulation coat.

They’ve both lost a knife each at this point, both barely able to move an arm. The place where Irina cut her arm burns, the limb dangling uselessly at her side. Irina is backing away, hissing, clutching her shoulder, and Melina allows herself the precious few seconds before the other girl regains her composure to close her eyes and attempt to block out the pain.

Her moment of peace is over: Irina is advancing on her again, sweat beading at her hairline, looking as bad as Melina feels. Melina clutches her knives determinedly.

Irina swings for her, missing by a mile, looking dizzy. The other girl sways, and it’s fairly easy for Melina to yank one of the knives from her hand before she even notices. Irina snarls and kicks out at her. Melina stumbles back, as though unbalanced, and aims a kick at Irina, hitting her in the chest. She wheezes and topples over.

Melina pounces on her immediately, tugging her other knife from her hand and stabbing her in the neck. Irina is dead by the time Melina has transferred the food, torch and fire starting kit in Irina’s backpack into her own.

When Melina reaches the guards stationed at the gate, night is falling. They turn to her questioningly, shining their torches in her face, and she wordlessly spreads out the compass, the map, the metal water bottle, the torch, the fire starting kit. The guard checking her over nods, looking impressed, and unlocks the gate.

Melina escapes out into the forest, picking a bush close to the fence to sleep under for the night.

It takes her five days to get back to the Academy. General Dreykov and Madame B greet her at the door, each taking one of her arms and pulling her down the stairs to the basement. They pass the little door to Melina’s own laboratory, walking on and on through the dark corridors until they reach the door at the very end.

Inside, the room is tiled in blinding white, large but empty except for a gurney, a tray of scalpels and a cluster of heart monitors, their wires twisted together like strands of rope plaited into a noose.

Melina doesn’t struggle when General Dreykov and Madame B push her down onto the gurney. They turn and leave, the door swinging shut behind them with a creak, and one of the scientists pushes a rubbery mask over her face, and Melina slides into sleep.

Chapter Text

Melina’s first mission as a Black Widow is in France, just a few days after she wakes from the graduation ceremony. The place where the Red Room scientists cut her open and picked over her organs stings, the stitches like the jagged scribble of a furious child. She aches, all over, bone deep.

But she still completes the mission to a high standard. Melina does her makeup in the smeared mirror of the safehouse, putting her hair up into a twist and securing it with a hairpin carved with ivy and flowers. She wonders, childishly, if the Red Room might let her keep it. She’s not sure she has the nerve to attempt to sneak it back into the Academy but it is so pretty that she can’t help but want to keep it.

She puts on a dress as green as spring time grass, hides a knife in her little bag and goes to a bar and smiles, saccharine sweet, for the target, her hands on his thighs.

Melina leans forward and whispers honeyed words of approval in his ears and he takes her outside and pushes her up against the wall, kissing her neck. His breath is hot and sour against her ear as Melina plucks the CD disk from his coat pocket as easily as picking a flower.

She pulls the knife from her bag and stabs him in the side of the neck.

She isn’t allowed to keep the hairpin, of course, but she isn’t sure why that matters so much.

After a while, Melina finds that most of her missions as a Widow are similar to her first, missions that end in bruises shaped like mouths on her neck and hours spent itching, trying to scratch the feel of the target’s hands from her body.

But other than that, the life of a Black Widow is not so different from the life of a trainee, in the end. Melina has always held onto the hope that, when she graduated, the tests would stop and she wouldn’t have to feel quite so afraid all the time.

If anything, she is more afraid than ever. General Dreykov gives her a bedroom all to herself, a tiny, generic box room halfway down the Black Widows’ corridor on the very top floor of the Academy and the guards don’t come in at night to handcuff her to the bed. That’s probably a test.

For weeks, Melina snatches only a few hours of uneasy sleep a night, unable to get used to sleeping without the reassuring press of the handcuffs against her wrist. She spends a lot of those first long nights by her window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass, squinting through the rusting bars to see the grass below. The place where the breakable little girls get buried.

Melina thinks that, inside, she is really just a breakable little girl playing the charade of a flawless Widow. She is so afraid that any day now someone will point a finger at her and declare her breakable and she will be buried under the grass with her sisters, where she belongs.

She thinks she should have just let Akilina kill her in the shower room when they were eighteen.

She has science, at least. It turns out that Widows actually have a lot more free time than trainees, gaping black holes in their day when the trainees are in the classrooms chanting along to the cartoons played on the flickering old projector.

The Widows are expected to use their free time in an acceptable way, practicing ballet or sparring in the corridors or a free training room. Melina creeps down to her lab instead, painfully aware that she is the outsider in a pack of hungry wolves, wary of the way the other Widows move in packs, clustered together with their allies.

Teenagers often go through phases, listening to new music, trying out new hobbies, falling passionately in love with first one thing and then something new the very next day. Melina feels a little like this, except that all of her obsessions are scientific.

She smiles prettily for Dreykov, twisting wires into detonators into bombs, and he calls her his best girl, his cleverest girl, in that way of his that makes the other Widows hit her harder in training and then dart away from her in the shower room later, like frightened fish fleeing from a net. He gives her books from the shelves in his office, equipment from allies working in other programs, and lets her explore the world outside of engineering like she is a timid chick venturing outside of the nest.

Melina still goes back to engineering often, of course. It is her first love, like a soothing balm to a wound when her day has been especially stressful, and she always has new ideas for her suit that just beg to be realised with the sort of scope that a plan put to paper doesn’t give her, in that satisfying way that is sparking wires and red-hot metal and fingers stained black with oil.

But she finds new loves. Melina doesn’t think she will ever come across a branch of science she doesn’t fall in love with.

Dreykov gives her books about botany and Melina’s lab becomes a burst of bright green leaves clustered under UV lights. She reads about how plants can be used to kill and heal, to bring pain and soothe it, devouring the books the way a starving person eats a full meal.

She rediscovers chemistry, thinking of the spark of rebellion that was her secret crystals of salt shining in the moonlight, reading up on bonding and the atoms that make up everything and how to mix compounds and elements and manipulate them into everything you need them to be. Her lab becomes sterile, clean, lit with the multicoloured flames of a dozen different compounds and clinking with test tubes.

Melina falls in love with space, next, with the space race and stars and incomprehensible distances and grainy images of the planets that lurk in the icy depths of the solar system. She reads an entire book about the Sun in a two-hour chunk of free time, reading so quickly she barely digests the words, like a child bolting their food. It is all about how the Sun makes life possible and yet could end it all in a heartbeat if it so desired, and it makes her think uneasily of Dreykov.

Dreykov. He is always watching, of course, like a predator stalking its weakling prey. He’s always there to take her latest project, a bright spot of happiness in her life, and bend it out of shape, into something deadly. He catches Melina reading a book about the Milky Way galaxy and orders her to try creating a vacuum. He walks in on her preparing a petri dish of bacteria destined for her microscope and commands her to grow diseases and parasites instead.

And yet whenever Melina buries herself in creating Dreykov’s latest weapon, it’s painfully easy for her to forget that she’s creating killers, that her work will wreak havoc and bring death. The rest of the world seems to dissolve, until the only thing that exists is the project, her plans spread out on the bench in front of her and all of her equipment gleaming.

Until General Dreykov brings up the Widow Serum, that is.

He barges into her room one evening, when Melina is carefully unravelling her complicated plaits of the day, giving her scalp a brief moment of relief before she plaits her hair back into the simpler style she wears at night.

“I need your brain,” Dreykov demands before he is even fully in the room, the hinges on the door protesting with a small, hissing creak. Obediently, Melina turns to the bed as Dreykov slaps a sheaf of notes onto her blanket. “You know of the group who tried to escape yesterday?”

Melina nods. Three girls, eight and ten and eleven years old. She watched the guards bury them.

“Good,” says Dreykov, when he sees her nodding. He digs through the papers on the bed, selecting a few and pointing at the heading. “Take a look at these. The serum we give to you girls when we first bring you in. It makes you stronger, faster. More impressionable. More obedient. Have you ever felt as though your body doesn’t know how to disobey?”

Melina remembers the serum, remembers being pinned down in Madame B’s office, hot and cold waves of pain throbbing through her entire body. Have you ever felt as though your body doesn’t know how to disobey? Dreykov is watching her carefully, with clever shark’s eyes, testing her.

Melina shrugs, instead of attempting to lie to him, because she is his best girl, he says, and Dreykov’s best girl would never dream of disobeying him. Only breakable girls want to disobey the Red Room.

It seems to work because Dreykov continues talking. “Well,” he says. “It can be a little… faulty. Madame B and I have had enough. I want you to improve it. You can have a sample tomorrow to study. Oh - and here.” Halfway to the door, Dreykov turns and drops a thick, leather-bound stack of books on the bed. They fall with a soft thunk. Just the sound of them hitting the bed, slapping against each other, makes Melina hungry to read.

Dreykov nods at her and leaves. The door creaks shut behind him and Melina scoops the books from her bed.

There are three, crackling with hundreds of pages, their spines and pages smooth and unwrinkled with newness. They are about behavioural psychology. Melina reads all three of them that night, crouched in the chair by the window, squinting to make out the words in the moonlight. She reads about operant conditioning and Skinner’s rats, classical conditioning and Pavolv’s dogs, morbidly fascinated. It makes Melina feel rather like someone has picked over her brain, unravelling its secrets and laying them bare on the page, and yet she can’t look away.

Maybe it is the lack of sleep, maybe it is the paranoid thoughts bouncing around her head like rats - Skinner’s rats - chasing each other around a cage, but the lengthy task of decoding the Widow Serum doesn’t engulf Melina the way all of her other projects have. She’s easily distracted, glancing up from her work every so often and expecting to find the Soldier watching her accusingly, fear written all over his face. The same way he looks at his handlers, at the little red notebook containing words that turn him into a puppet.

Melina is sent on a mission with him a month after she’s started working on the Widow Serum. Not that she’s got very far. The serum is endlessly complicated, elements reacting and compounds being split in half before her very eyes, almost as if it is trying to block her out.

Melina can’t help but hope she never discovers the serum’s secrets. Even just attempting to decode it for General Dreykov makes guilt burrow into her chest when she settles down to work.

It feels like that same guilt is sitting like a brick wall between her and the Soldier as he picks the lock of the target’s back door. It makes Melina feel nauseous, the same nausea that made her push away her breakfast this morning.

He’d asked her what she’s been working on lately, when they’d left the handler at the hotel to walk to the target’s house, and she’d shrugged and told him it was nothing very interesting, the lie like barbed wire against her throat.

They went on a mission, a few years ago, in Hong Kong, and the Soldier posed as her brother. Sometimes, Melina thinks that the Soldier might have forgotten that it’s not the truth, and that makes her remember Akilina’s body on the floor of the shower room and the Widow Serum under her microscope and how she is proving, once again, that she shouldn’t be trusted with a sibling.

“Done,” the Soldier announces as the lock clicks and he turns the handle of the door. He pulls a gun from the holster at his hip and Melina follows suit. They walk down the darkened hallway, footsteps light, and Melina almost forgets to feel guilty because it has been months and it feels so right, to be tracking a target with him, like a fundamental part of her has slid into place.

The mission brief had said security detail of unknown size and power. This turns out to be six burly men standing in a tight cluster around the target as she reads a book in her living room.

The Soldier nods at Melina, and she retreats back down the corridor, following its winding path through the house until she ends up at a door opposite where she’d started, one that opens out into the living room. Melina nudges at it with her gun until she can see the Soldier crouching behind the door opposite her. He holds up three fingers, slowly counting down.

When he puts down all three fingers, Melina fires, aiming first at the security guard nearest to her. He goes down immediately, a small, round hole marring his forehead, and his colleague lunges at Melina. She hits him in the head with the gun, ducking out of the way of his punches, and then fires three shots in quick succession. Heart, lungs, head.

The man falls to the ground and Melina looks up to find two more security guards dead and the Soldier fighting with the ones remaining, Melina’s path to the target cleared of obstructions.

One shot, close range. Her silenced gun makes a soft noise, the recoil pushing against her hand like the playful punch of an old friend, and the target topples, face down, onto the floor.

The Soldier shoves a knife up and in between the ribs of the last guard standing, and when the woman gurgles and goes silent, eyes glazed over, he looks up at her.

“Good work,” he says, his lips twitching a little in that stiff way of his that makes Melina wonder if he’s just wire and code under his skin.

“You too. But I don’t like this. It feels too easy,” Melina replies, kicking the target so that she rolls onto her back and bending down to check for a pulse. There’s nothing. “She is dead, though.”

“Okay. Well done,” says the Soldier, as they head back through the house and into the target’s back garden and change into the civilian clothes that they’d left, in a little bundle, in one of the trees.

Melina checks her watch when she’s changed. They still have an hour and a half before the Soldier’s handler will be expecting them back.

The Soldier glances at his own watch. “Do you want to go back to the hotel now, or…?” he says, trailing off. Melina has never heard him sound quite so uncertain.

Her stomach rumbles and she thinks of the bowl of porridge she pushed away at breakfast. Melina is bitterly regretting that now.

“Can we get food first? We can be really quick and then we can go back.”

It’s probably pure force of habit, born from a life spent agreeing without question, that makes the Soldier nod. “What do you want to eat?”

Melina remembers ridiculously sweet cake and feeling like all of the sugar in the world must have gone into this one slice and Rachel Goodwin laughing at her. “Chocolate cake. Please.”

The Winter Soldier steals a wallet from the back pocket of an unsuspecting old man’s jeans. They open it to find that they are lucky and the wallet is full of cash, so when they find a supermarket Melina makes a beeline for the big, expensive boxes of cake.

The Soldier hovers behind her as Melina runs her finger along the brightly coloured shelf of boxes. There are so many choices: strawberry, vanilla, caramel, apple. Melina dithers for a second, torn between the safe familiarity of chocolate and the desire to try all of the flavours, before turning resolutely to the chocolate cakes.

The box informs them, in blocky white letters, that the cake will feed twenty-four people, so when they pay for the cake and settle themselves on a bench, the Soldier slices it into twenty-four carefully equal slices with an unused knife found in his backpack.

Melina has two slices and the Soldier has the rest. They get icing all over their hands and faces and crumbs all over the neatly pressed blue denim of their jeans. They give the cake crumbs to the pigeons clustered around their bench and even though neither of them could ever dream of being free, have never even known what it is to be free, Melina knows, with complete certainty, that this is what it must feel like.

The Soldier’s eyes are more of a constant in her head than ever when Melina gets back to the Red Room, so much so that she isn’t sure she has it in her to finish Dreykov’s serum.

Natalia and Yelena, rather indirectly, help her with that.

She meets them quite by accident.

Melina is walking to the laboratories used for science classes, on the ground floor of the Academy, and she is walking quickly, so she can collect the extra paper that she needs for tomorrow before she has to be back in her room. She’s so wrapped up in her thoughts that she almost doesn’t hear the two little voices drifting out of the laboratory until her hand is on the doorknob.

“Yelena, no, you need to kick like this!”

Melina quietly turns the handle and the door swings open to reveal two girls, one blonde and one with bright red hair, circling each other with their fists raised. For a moment, Melina thinks they’re seriously fighting, and is about to leave them to it and let them slaughter each other, before she gets a closer look at their faces.

The redhead is all fond exasperation and the blonde’s expression is playful, endlessly curious, and it’s so Akilina that Melina almost forgets how to breathe.

“You need to kick like this, actually,” she says, instead of leaving them.

When she hears Melina’s voice, the redhead, who is clearly a few years older than the other girl, pushes the blonde behind her, fists up. The younger girl cowers behind her.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Melina says hastily. “You’re not doing anything against the rules. But if you kicked like this, you would do far more damage.” She demonstrates, and the younger girl mimics her, looking delighted with herself.

“Natalia, look! I can do it!” she whispers, and the older girl - Natalia - softens slightly, even trying a timid kick herself.

“Good,” Melina praises, the word unfamiliar, sticking in her mouth, and she forgets all about getting paper.

Natalia is eight, she learns later, and the younger girl, Yelena, is six, scrawny in that way the youngest girls are in the first months of their training, before they start to gain muscle.

Melina starts to smuggle them into her lab, in the twenty minutes before lights out where Dreykov is safely out of the way, stalking through the corridors like a fox after a rabbit.

The whole thing is so risky that it makes the breath catch in her throat whenever she thinks about it, and yet Melina keeps them close regardless. They seem to ignite something good, something caring inside of her that Melina didn’t think was still there. She is so afraid that if she doesn’t cling onto the girls, that small, fragile spark of softness in her might be extinguished.

Sometimes, she trains them in hand-to-hand combat, dedicating a couple of nights a week to a specific kick or punch until they have it right. Mostly, though, the girls are content to lean against her legs while she works on the serum, and the sharp points of their chins digging into her thighs helps to banish the Soldier’s face from her brain. Melina finds that she can finally throw herself into the project and forget the world. She’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

And then, two months after Melina first stumbled across the two of them, Natalia kills one of the other girls in her class for the first time.

She is already in her lab when the two of them arrive, rereading notes dating back months, her bones aching from hours spent hunched in the same position, and Melina is almost ready to accept defeat and pursue a different hypothesis when Natalia and Yelena rush in.

It only takes Melina a few seconds to notice that something is wrong. Natalia is not crying, exactly, but she is blinking very rapidly, her nose and cheeks red. Yelena fusses over her, patting her face in the clumsy, inexperienced way of a young child attempting to be comforting.

“What’s the matter?” Melina asks softly, taking a step towards them, and Natalia runs to her and buries her face in Melina’s shoulder, clinging to her vest like a little monkey. It’s like a dam has been opened: Natalia finally caves and a quiet sob escapes her.

Melina blinks for a second, startled by the sudden, unexpected hug and by the easy rightness that floods her body when she hugs Natalia, like whoever designed the girl’s body designed her specifically for hugging Melina.

“What happened?” she says to Yelena, over Natalia’s head. Yelena shrugs, looking lost, like a boat set adrift in a storm. “Natalia?”

“Anastasia,” Natalia sobs. “We were paired together in training and -”

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Melina has to close her eyes, for a second, trying to ward off the memory of Dima’s dead eyes staring and staring and staring at her, as vivid as they had appeared all those years ago.

“Oh,” Melina murmurs, when she can trust herself to speak. A sudden rush of fierce, protective bravery overwhelms her and she presses a soft, shy kiss to Natalia’s hair. “You didn’t have a choice, okay? You didn’t have a choice,” she whispers, and it feels like she is talking to eight-year-old Melina as well as Natalia.

“But I still did it,” Natalia says into Melina’s shoulder. “But it’s still my fault.”

Melina rubs small circles into her back, the motion almost automatic. She has nothing to say to that, nothing that can banish the guilt from Natalia’s voice. So instead, she says, “Are you hurt? Show me.”

Reluctantly, Natalia emerges from her hiding place in the crook of Melina’s neck, face streaked with tears, and presents her arms, covered in scratches and bruises. Melina fetches the first-aid kit from underneath the main workbench and enlists Yelena for help, making her hold bandages as she cleans Natalia’s cuts.

“There,” Melina whispers. “It’s okay. Pain only makes us stronger.” Akilina’s favourite phrase slips out of her mouth, burning her throat, before her brain can catch up and stop it. Her breath stutters. “So you’re both going to be strong, yes?”

“Yes!” says Yelena, clapping her hands and dropping the bandages she’s holding.

“Lina?” Natalia whispers. “You look sad. That’s okay though. It means you can be strong too!”

Melina doubts it, but she likes the way Natalia looks at her when she says it, like Melina could do anything, so she shrugs and smiles and scoops up Yelena’s abandoned pile of bandages from the floor. She packs them away into the first-aid kit and checks her watch, slightly relieved to see that it’s nearly lights out.

“Come on, we need to get going. Nearly time to go to bed,” she says, herding first Yelena and then, after a few moments, Natalia, out of the door. “Sleep well.”

“You too,” Natalia says. When she’s halfway down the corridor, she turns and waves, almost shyly. Melina waves back.

That night, Melina dreams of Dima struggling in her grip. Dima turns into Akilina when she snaps her neck and when Melina pushes away Akilina’s body, she finds that Akilina was actually Yelena and Natalia all along.

She wakes up screaming.

Chapter Text

Melina is twenty-two when General Dreykov, after weeks of threatening, shouting, punishing her for her difficulties with the Widow Serum, starts to prepare for his mutterings about an intel-gathering mission to become a reality.

And so, when Madame B announces that a Widow will be marrying the best result of the Red Guardian program and will be conducting a mission with him, Melina thinks it will probably be her.

Her suspicions are confirmed when, at dinner the evening before the wedding is scheduled to take place, Alexei Shostakov’s file is dropped onto the table in front of her, dangerously close to landing on her tray and sending food flying everywhere. The file draws the envious gaze of the other Widows like it’s a magnet, their eyes burning Melina’s skin, but she takes her time, not changing the speed of her chewing, methodically working her way through her meal and taking her tray to the sinks before she picks up the file.

Melina doesn’t open it in front of the other Widows. She carries it back to her room instead. It’s surprisingly heavy with her anticipation.

When she shuts the door behind her, it’s that odd, shadowy time of day when evening has only just begun and you don’t quite notice how dark a room has become until you put on the light, so Melina clicks on the overhead light and pulls the chair over to the window to read.

Alexei Shostakov. She’s heard of him, she thinks. One of Russia’s best pilots on top of being the crowning glory of the Red Guardian program, consistent enough, good enough to catch and keep Dreykov’s attention. A fitting husband, all things considered. She supposes she could do worse.

Melina flicks open his file and is greeted by a picture of his face. Strong jaw, broad shoulders, blue eyes bright under a blonde fringe, six foot two according to the file. She flicks through the mission accounts, patriotic triumphs for the benefit of the public overshadowed by kill mission after kill mission, and pauses at the section about the procedure that turned him into a super soldier. The file calls the procedure a miracle, but Melina thinks of how the Winter Soldier crushed a target’s head with a blow from his flesh hand once, when they were on a mission in London, and doubts that Shostakov’s survival was a miracle.

Melina sighs, barely audible, buries the file in her wardrobe under a heap of notes about the Widow serum and leaves for her lab and the warmth of Natalia and Yelena.

She wakes at the mandatory time of five o’clock and dresses in her everyday clothes, white vest, black shorts, the same as every Widow and trainee.

Getting married is supposed to be momentous, but the day doesn’t feel like an especially momentous one.

Melina remembers the American movies from the classrooms of her childhood, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, and wonders if she will get a white dress like theirs, all delicate lace and flowers and hope.

She is a little surprised that Madame B, while she is giving Melina instructions to be outside the main hall at six o’clock, actually gives her a wedding dress.

Close up, the dress is slightly shabby, with a frayed hem and a couple of holes in the seams, the sort of damage that comes from being taken up, down, in, out to fit Widow after Widow, but it is real and it is beautiful, embroidered with lace flowers on the sleeves and around the neckline. There’s even a veil.

Melina puts it on late that afternoon when she’s back in her room, the material silky against her skin, and she doesn’t feel like herself. She feels as though someone who is getting married properly, not as part of a Red Room ruse, has put on her face for a moment. She undoes her plaits and brushes her hair out, replaiting the front and working the rest into a bun. Melina puts the veil on and when she looks in the mirror, she twirls giddily before she can stop herself.

When she glances at the clock on the table, it is ten to six, so Melina checks her hair one last time and forces her face back into bored neutrality, straightening her posture.

She arrives at the ornate doors guarding the main hall at five to six and waits in meek, respectful silence with General Dreykov and Madame B, until Shostakov and his handler arrive at fifty-nine minutes to six.

Dreykov smirks and shakes the handler’s hand and gives Shostakov a clap on the back, like a proud father. It’s odd to watch the man who trains little girls to maim and murder pulling Shostakov into a hug, as if Melina has stepped into a new universe where something in Dreykov’s brain has been subtly rewired.

Shostakov, blonder and softer-looking than the picture in his file and wearing a tuxedo, gives her the briefest twitch of his lips that could, in a different life, have been a smile. General Dreykov and Shostakov’s handler don’t seem to notice, but Madame B does, of course. She turns to watch Melina, gaze cold and searching, like she can see the secret breakable part of Melina buried under the marble mask of a good Widow. That treasonous part of her wants to make the best of things, to smile back at Shostakov, but when Madame B looks at Melina like that, all she can think of is the breakable little girls under the grass.

She gazes blankly at Shostakov instead. His expression flickers, almost as if he’s disappointed.

The wedding is not the important part. It’s over quickly, impersonally, with none of the emotion of the weddings in the movies of Melina’s training. Vows are said, rings are slid onto fingers, all of the paperwork is signed.

The important part is the photographs. General Dreykov, Madame B and Shostakov’s handler throw confetti while one of the guards takes frantic photographs. Shostakov hugging her, kissing her, his arm around her waist.

It is easy, by now, to smile for the camera and look happy and to tell herself that he is just a target, over and over, until Melina feels nothing. She’s good at feeling nothing when targets paw at her, by now. There’s no reason Shostakov should be any different.

Until he slides his hand into hers. Melina liked his hands as he slid the wedding band onto her finger. Large and square, rough and criss-crossed with calluses and scars like Melina’s own.

And warm, so warm against the cold of her own hands that she can’t help but stare at them for a second.

He is just a target, someone to seduce as part of the mission, like leaving a trail of kisses along the throat of a security guard as she slips him a sedative, so she should be feeling nothing.

She feels nothing. She feels a little bit of everything. There’s something about this man that could rip her in half holding her hand as if she’s something precious that makes Melina feel warm all over.

He squeezes her hand, very lightly, while they smile and pose for the camera, the young, hopeful, suburban American couple, and then the photographs are finished.

“Show the Red Guardian to your room, Melina,” Madame B orders. General Dreykov and Shostakov’s handler smirk at them.

“Have fun,” Dreykov grins, raising an eyebrow suggestively.

Melina swallows down a sudden wave of nausea, nods stiffly and mercifully, the assorted handlers leave, talking quietly with their heads close together.

She jerks her head down the hallway, indicating that Shostakov should follow her, and together they walk in uncomfortable silence down the corridor and up the main staircase. He keeps giving her puzzled looks that Melina can see out of the corner of her eye, and for the first time in a long time she is desperate to fidget or worse, to break the awkward silence with empty pleasantries.

At long last, they reach her room - their room, now - and Melina sits on the bed in silence while Shostakov folds his clothes, tucking them away into the wardrobe. He finishes and shuts the wardrobe door with a long, echoing clunk.

“I can sleep in the chair,” he says awkwardly, hovering near the window.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Melina replies stiffly, moving up on the bed to give him room. “Sit down.” When a few moments have passed and he is still standing by the window, twisting his fingers together, she says again, “Sit down.” He does, flopping down on the other side of the bed, warm back pressed against Melina’s, and begins to remove his jacket.

“We don’t have to act like a married couple right away. Colonel Turgenov says we have a few months to prepare for the mission, so. We have time.”

Melina didn’t think such a decorated agent would be so naive. She wants to shake him.

“We’re supposed to have sex tonight,” she tells him pointedly, hoping he’ll take the hint and just do what they’re supposed to.

She thinks he does take the hint, at first, since he gets up off the bed and walks around to her side, sitting next to her. Melian takes a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. She’s prepared for sex. She is not prepared for what he does instead.

“Do you want to have sex?” he says, eyes boring into her. The way he says it feels like a challenge, so Melina forces herself to turn and look at him and stare unblinkingly into his eyes.

“That doesn’t matter,” she says, and thinks of the breakable girls buried under the lush green grass behind the Academy. It feels like a bullet has lodged itself in her throat. “Just get on with it.”

Gingerly, like Melina is a cornered, feral dog, Shostakov leans over and places those warm hands on her knee. “We don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to,” he tells her, his voice soft.

Melina moves, jerking her knee so that his hands fall away from her leg. “My handlers will be angry if we don’t have sex.”

“So will mine. But I won’t tell him we didn’t, and I don’t think you’d tell your handlers if we didn’t, either.”

“Just get it over with. Please,” Melina says, looking anywhere but at him. She ends up staring at her hands, neatly folded in her lap.

“Wow. All business. And they say romance is dead,” Shostakov mutters. “Our handlers went off to discuss the mission, so they’re not exactly around to check that we’re doing what they want, are they? And they won’t be for a while. Colonel Turgenov rambles. So, I’ll ask again, do you want to have sex? Not your handlers. You.”

Melina struggles. It’s funny how she can defuse a bomb in her sleep and put numbers into any formula and have the answer be right, every time, yet when Shostakov says You in that voice, like he doesn’t care what the answer is as long as it’s hers, it feels like the three little letters that make up the world morph into a roadblock in her brain.

You. Melina thinks that she is wires sparking and the fizz of metal in water and wrapping her hands around Akilina’s neck and twisting until the bones snap. And cold, always: the cold of a knife pressed to a throat, of handcuffs around a wrist at night, of hands and hair and limbs pressed against a target.

She is an endothermic reaction. Not compatible with Shostakov’s warmth.

She wonders if the rest of him is as warm as his hands. She almost wants to find out.

“No,” Melina says, the word alien in her mouth. She’s not sure if she hates or loves the way her tongue twists around the denial. “I don’t want it.”

“Okay,” says Shostakov, and when Melina looks up, she’s not sure what she’s expecting to see. She’s half ready to throw her arms over her head for protection, should it come to that.

It doesn’t come to that, because when Melina looks up at him, she finds that he’s grinning at her. He has a dimple in his right cheek. “Let’s try something different. Hello, I’m Alexei Shostakov. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Shostakov says, and holds out his hand like he’s expecting her to shake it.

“I already know your name.”

“No. You don’t. We are complete strangers,” he tells her solemnly, and there’s a beat of silence. “You’re supposed to tell me your name, now.”

“You’re an idiot, Shostakov,” Melina mumbles, ducking her head and staring at their feet. He is wearing carefully polished lace-ups. She is still wearing her combat boots, very dark against the bright white of her dress, as though there has been a mix up and she’s been given someone else’s feet.

She looks up, and he is staring at her, eyes surprisingly soft, hand still held out for her to shake. The part of Melina’s brain where the Red Room has embedded itself like roots in soil seems to have retreated, like a plant being uprooted.

So Melina takes his hand. It’s warm again, like someone has put fire into a human’s body. And that means nothing. That means everything.

“Hello, Alexei Shostakov. I’m Melina Vostokova,” she says, and he smiles at her. It makes the skin around his eyes crinkle up, like he is someone who smiles a lot.

“You can call me Alexei, if you want.”

“Alexei,” Melina says, experimentally. She likes the way his name feels in her mouth.

They shake hands, and it feels a little like hope. Like a promise.

Chapter Text

The next few months are a blur of American pop culture and mornings spent holed up in General Dreykov's office poring over endless sheets of notes and afternoons spent in her laboratory with Alexei, attempting to teach him everything he’ll need to know to successfully infiltrate the North Institute.

The whole thing is more enjoyable than Melina expected. She starts to like coming into her lab to find Shostakov perched on the table like a child, swinging his legs.

“So, Miss Vostokova, what are you teaching me today?” he says, every afternoon when Melina gets in from training, and his voice quickly gets into the habit of filling up a void in her chest that she didn’t quite notice needed filling.

For the first few weeks, she doesn’t say anything in return, just stares at him blankly until he jumps off the table to sit in the chair, looking sheepish.

They know that the North Institute deals in biology, in hacking brains like an assassin breaking into a security system, in taking organs, cells, bones and twisting them slightly out of shape, warping their proportions like a fairground mirror, so that is what Melina teaches him. She starts small, basic, with sugars and proteins and carbohydrates, building up to organelles, genetics, tissues.

“So, Miss Vostokova, what are you teaching me today?”

“Stop cluttering up my desk and maybe you’ll find out,” Melina replies, the words slipping out of her mouth before her brain catches up. She grips the notebook she’s holding tightly, knuckles white, and stares at the floor. There’s a faint ink stain on one of the tiles from where Yelena knocked Melina’s pen off the table the other day.

After a moment passes without the feeling of cold fingers clenching her arm hard enough to leave bruises and a whispered threat in her ear, Melina glances up.

Shostakov blinks at her, looking faintly confused, like Melina is a puzzle that he can’t solve. He shrugs and smiles at her.

“Fire away then!” he says, sitting down in one of the chairs with a heavy thump.

It becomes their routine, like a well-trodden path, as simple as getting up and dressing and brushing your teeth.

“So, Miss Vostokova, what are you teaching me today?”

“Stop cluttering up my table and maybe you’ll find out.”

Melina’s not sure when So, Miss Vostokova became So, Melina, or when she started thinking of him as Alexei in her head. Somewhere around their lessons on DNA structure.

Adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine. The familiarity of it all is reassuring.

“So, Miss Vostokova, what are you teaching me today?”

“Stop cluttering up my table and maybe you’ll find out,” she says one afternoon, and it comes out bone-weary and scratchy with pain.

Alexei glances up and freezes. “No offence, but you look awful. What happened?”

“Just training. It’s nothing. Let’s get started,” Melina replies. She can feel blood trickling down her cheek and her leg is twinging where Oksana landed on it.

“Doesn’t look like nothing. Sit down - here,” Alexei says, and he gets up and gently takes her elbow and leads her to a chair. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Where’s the first aid kit, Melina?” he replies, exasperated.

“Underneath the main workbench,” Melina says. When Alexei has ducked away from her to hunt down the first aid kit, she mumbles an awkward, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he answers, emerging from under the bench with the bag in his hands. “Now. What hurts?”

“Head and leg.”

Alexei makes her prop up her aching leg and gets to work on cleaning the cuts on her face. Melina stares straight ahead while he does it, not quite trusting herself to look at him. She suddenly feels very much like crying. He carefully places plasters on each cut and turns to her leg. Melina pulls up her shorts obediently and finds that her leg is peppered with red marks destined to become bruises.

“I don’t think there’s much I can do for bruises. Sorry,” he says, and he looks so genuinely concerned that Melina feels warm and shivery at the same time.

“You’ve done more than enough,” she tells him, suddenly very interested in her boots. “Thanks again. Shall we start work?”

“What? No, you should have the afternoon off! Looks like you need it.”

“We need to get to work. We have so much left to cover before the mission starts.”

“You work too much. The world will not implode because we missed a few hours of studying! Besides, I just realised I haven’t told you this story about the time my father took me ice fishing and I need to tell you it as soon as possible!” Alexei declares, settling himself in the chair next to her and looking at her hopefully. Melina sighs and he starts off on a tangent about the weather being cold, even for Russia, and getting frostbite on his hands.

His hand is still resting on Melina’s leg, and for the whole afternoon the only thing she can think about is the warm weight of it.

“So, Melina, what are you teaching me today?”

“Stop cluttering up my table and maybe you’ll find out.”

Thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex.

The weeks pass, and Melina becomes Lina, Lana, Melichka.

Alexei turns into Alyosha, Lyoshka, Crimson Dynamo, and the nicknames feel so good in Melina’s mouth. She looks at him across the table, his nose buried dutifully in a book about creating bacteria cultures, and she tells him to hurry up, Crimson Dynamo, finish that chapter before lights out and he huffs at her good-naturedly, the dimple in his right cheek showing when he glances up from his book.

“Didn’t have you down as such a slave-driver,” Alexei says, and it makes bubbles of laughter form in Melina’s chest, forcing their way up her throat like water through a pipe.

She lets herself laugh, almost, the sound like a sigh caught before it had the chance to become something more, an experiment interrupted, and Alexei smiles like he’s won the lottery.

“So, Lina, what are you teaching me today?”

“Stop cluttering up my table and maybe you’ll find out,” Melina says, kicking his feet off the chair and writing out a question for him to answer.

Which area of the brain controls voluntary movement? she writes, and almost before she has put down her pencil, Alexei snatches the paper from her and starts to scribble.

Melina gives him a look, all blank eyes and slightly raised eyebrows, and he grins, saying, “What? I know this one!”

Alexei hands it back and he’s written the hypothalamus :) in his scrawly handwriting, underlining it with three triumphant, black ink lines and adding a smiley face.

He writes like he talks, like he is, untidy and hasty and with an exclamation point after almost every sentence, full of scribbled-out sections as though the words trip over each other in his haste to get them down on the page.

“It’s the cerebral cortex, actually,” says Melina awkwardly, crossing out the hypothalamus :) and adding the cerebral cortex underneath. Alexei steals back the paper and adds another smiley face next to her writing.

“Wrong? Really?” he says, looking like a kicked puppy.

“Yes. The hypothalamus regulates hunger and thirst, so... Incorrect.”

“Ugh. I’m never going to get this. I keep getting them all confused,” Alexei says, flopping back in his chair and dramatically throwing his hands in the air.

“You’ll get it eventually,” Melina says, trying to be encouraging. “You understood protein synthesis quickly. I was impressed.”

“This is not like protein synthesis,” he groans. “I think whoever named the parts of the brain did it just to spite me.”

“I don’t think that’s the case.”

“It is! It’s a conspiracy, Lana, I’m telling you!” Alexei says, but he is laughing now and when Melina looks at him, sitting opposite her, the stark fluorescent lighting of the lab carves his face into something beautiful.

She stares determinedly at the table, shuffling through a pile of books so she doesn’t have to look at him. Madame B always says that love is for children, for the breakable, for weak and killable civilians.

Love is Disney movies played on scratchy projectors in the cold classroom and the headache Melina used to get behind her eyes after a morning of chanting along to Snow White. Love sets you on the path that leads to a bullet between the eyes and being buried under the grass behind the Academy.

“Let’s go through them again,” says Melina, and if Alexei notices her voice shaking slightly, he doesn’t say so.

The day before they’re scheduled to fly out to America for the mission, Melina sits with Alexei in General Dreykov’s office, a sheaf of manila files sitting like a shield between them and him. Their knees brush every now and again, when Alexei shifts in his seat.

Which doesn’t mean anything.

“So, how long is this mission even going to last?” asks Alexei, his leg bumping against Melina’s knee again.

“As long as is necessary. Might I remind you that you’re supposed to be picking the girls who will accompany you?” replies Dreykov, pushing the files closer. Melina starts leafing through them. All of the girls are aged six and eight. All of the eight year olds have killed at least two people.

“But how long? We don’t have a time limit, anything?” says Alexei persistently. Melina sees Dreykov’s eyes narrow slightly from underneath her lashes and it makes her want to say something, do something, deflect Dreykov’s attention away from Alexei and onto her.

She doesn’t, though. She keeps reading Vasilia Yegorova’s file over and over. The girl has dark hair like Melina’s and the same square jawline as Alexei. She could be a contender. Melina sets the folder to the side and picks up the next.

Dreykov sighs. “Two years, minimum. You’ll need at least a year to establish a foolproof cover,” he says. Melina tosses the file in her lap into the not a contender pile and picks up the next.

It’s Natalia’s. Melina already knows that she’s going to put her in the contender pile and will probably end up picking her, but just for show she flicks through the file, pretending to read, as Alexei protests at Dreykov’s words.

“Two years? But I am the Red Guardian! I should be in the field! Helping people, like you said I could!”

“At least two years. And after this mission, you can go back into the field. That was the deal,” says Dreykov, all false patience with a slight edge to his voice that makes Melina turn to the pile of six-year-olds’ files and look through them frantically, wanting nothing more than to get out of his office.

Yelena’s file is there.

Out of the corner of her eye, Melina sees Alexei frown and open his mouth to protest again, so she jumps in before him.

“I’ve picked our daughters, General,” she says, sliding Natalia and Yelena’s files across to him. “Natalia Romanova and Yelena Belova.”

“Good choices,” Dreykov replies, studying Yelena’s file. “You agree, Alexei?”

Alexei fidgets, clearly desperate to continue arguing his point, but reluctantly agrees, and Dreykov lets them escape.

The next day, they wake early and head to Dreykov’s office after breakfast. Alexei looks sullen, no trace of his usual grin on his face.

“This is going to be so boring,” he mumbles as they walk. “Um… No offence.”

“You’re the one who’ll be doing most of the actual intel gathering,” Melina reminds him, trying not to feel offended. “So… Maybe not so boring?”

“I suppose. And at least it’ll be with you, huh?” he says, grinning at her. Melina gives him a small smile in return, and then they reach the corridor that leads to Dreykov’s office and she schools her face back into blank obedience.

General Dreykov is waiting for them outside his office.

“This way,” he says, leading them down the hallway and into a wide, bright room at the end. One corner of the room is set up with a Christmas scene, one with a backdrop of stunningly blue sea, one with eye-achingly bright Easter eggs, and one with a table groaning with food.

“Madame B is just fetching Belova and Romanova, and then we can start. Put these on,” Dreykov tells them, throwing bundles of clothes their way. “We will start with Christmas.” Melina obediently slips behind the beach backdrop to change into a pair of skinny jeans and a vile green jumper patterned with reindeers.

When she emerges, Alexei is bending over a pile of toys next to the Christmas tree, dressed in a jumper patterned with neon fairy lights, thankfully just as cringe-inducing as hers.

“Attractive,” he drawls, grinning, looking her up and down. “So, listen, I had this idea -” he breaks off and produces two stuffed toys from behind his back. A bright yellow bear with a sun on its stomach and a pink unicorn with a purple and white mane. “- That we could give the girls a toy each to pose with for the pictures. Maybe they could keep them. You know how children have that one toy they take everywhere, right?”

Melina nods, even though she has never quite understood why civilian children like to cart around soft toys and she doubts that Madame B would let the girls keep them anyway.

“Good idea,” she says, and Alexei walks over to Dreykov and talks in his ear. Melina watches Dreykov’s eyebrows rise slightly and then sees him nod. Alexei gives her a quick, victorious thumbs-up behind his back when General Dreykov turns to greet Madame B.

Natalia and Yelena are dressed in matching pink dresses, looking angelic, and Natalia’s hair has been dyed blonde. They really could be sisters.

Alexei smiles at them, his dimple coming out in full force, and kneels down on their level, the toys hidden behind his back.

“Daddy!” Yelena lisps obediently, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet.

“Now, you’re Yelena, right? And you’re Natalia,” Alexei says, gently poking first Yelena and then Natalia on the nose. He winks at them conspiratorially. “Or I guess it’s Emily and Nicole now. Hey -” he pulls the toys out from behind his back. “- These are for you. One each. General Dreykov says you can keep them. Go on, choose.”

The girls look unsure and slightly afraid, so Melina swoops in and rescues them.

“You really can have one,” she says, and watches Natalia’s eyes light up. Yelena, looking hesitant, reaches for the pink pony.

“Excellent choice,” Alexei tells her solemnly. “Well done. Her name is Twilight.” Yelena pulls the pony to her chest and hugs it tightly, rubbing her nose against the soft material. “And this is Funshine Bear,” he continues, offering the yellow bear to Natalia.

“Melina,” Natalia whispers. “Do we really get to keep them? Not just for today?”

“You really get to keep them,” Melina confirms, and Natalia beams, finally taking the bear from Alexei.

After that, the girls seem to slip into their roles with ease, fidgeting impatiently with the brightly wrapped boxes under the Christmas tree.

“Melina!” Natalia hisses, eyes bright with a hope that Melina has never seen on her face before. “Can we open one?”

“I think they’re just empty boxes, Talya.”

“We should check anyway, just in case.” Natalia reaches for a box, a look of pure excitement on her face, and Yelena follows suit, looking fascinated. Dimly, Melina hears the camera clicking and shifts her face into a look of happiness. Alexei comes up behind her, a smile plastered on his face, and cautiously slides an arm around her shoulder. He presses a kiss to her cheek, his breath tickling her face. Melina is hyper aware of every point where their bodies touch.

They switch to the beach backdrop, wearing swimming costumes and clutching beach balls. Melina dabs makeup over the jagged slash of a scar on her lower abdomen and holds a bucket and spade at a slight angle to hide the slight bump of it. She sees Alexei’s eyes widen slightly when he catches sight of the scar before she can cover it, but he doesn’t ask about it and she doesn’t bring it up.

They finish the last set, Thanksgiving, and Madame B develops the rolls of film while they wait in silence, Yelena running her fingers through the toy unicorn’s mane every now and then.

Madame B flicks through the pictures, sliding some into the windows of a photo album and securing the five best ones into picture frames. She hands them to Melina.

“You will find clothes and furniture already at the house when you arrive. Take Plane Five and land it here.” Madame B pulls out a map, pointing to an airstrip marked with a neat cross, not far from their new neighbourhood. “Your first information drop will be at the local library in one month.”

“Yes, Madame.” Melina dips her head respectfully to Madame B and General Dreykov, turning to leave.

Dreykov hands her two cartons of juice. “Give these to Romanova and Belova before you take off.” He wraps his hands around her arm, and it feels like he is digging right through flesh and curling his fingers around her bones. “Don’t fail.”

Melina dips her head again, takes the juice and is allowed to escape. She straps the girls into the plane and gives them the juice and watches as their blinks become longer and their eyelids finally flutter closed. It feels like a shard of glass has lodged itself in her throat.

“Asleep already?” Alexei asks, and Melina wonders again how such a capable soldier can be so blind to what goes on in the shadowy corners of the Red Room. She nods tensely, and he gives her a slight smile, pressing buttons on the plane’s dashboard and coaxing it to life.

They’re soaring above the clouds by the time she finds her voice. “You’re good with them,” Melina whispers. “The girls, I mean.”

“So are you,” Alexei replies, glancing at her. His eyes are the exact same shade of bright, clear blue as the sky. There’s a soft, comfortable silence. “Why did you pick them?”

“What?”

“Why did you pick Natalia and Yelena?”

“Because they’re good. Natalia has the best marks in her class for English.”

Alexei hums, his eyes on the clouds in front of them. “That’s true. But you’re familiar with them.” He presses a button on the console. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Obviously. We live in the same house, remember?”

“I mean that you’re close. You use nicknames. I’m not that oblivious, Melina.”

“Stop it,” Melina mutters, curling her hands into fists.

“I’m just saying. I think it’s cute. Seems like you’ll be a good mother.”

Melina snorts, pressing her head against the plane window. The clouds are so bright that it makes her eyes ache. Alexei taps her hand, and when she turns to look at him, his face is uncharacteristically serious. Melina almost doesn’t recognise his face without his slightly crooked smile.

“I’m serious,” he says. “You’re going to be awesome at this.”

“Awesome?” she repeats dubiously.

“What, you don’t like it? I’m just practicing my American slang.”

“Please never say ‘awesome’ within earshot of me ever again.”

“I’m making no promises. ‘Awesome’ is my new favourite word!”

“You’ll be a good parent, too,” Melina murmurs, so quietly she’s not even sure he heard. But he reaches across the dashboard and squeezes her hand tightly.

“No,” Alexei tells her matter-of-factly. “I’m going to be awesome.”

Their house is big, filled with orange light from the setting sun. Carefully, Melina places the photo album on a bookshelf in the living room and spins in a slow circle, trying to decide where to put the five picture frames.

She places a Christmas one of the girls on the mantelpiece, along with a snap of all four of them at Thanksgiving dinner. She puts another two pictures of the girls in the dining room and stands with the last picture, one of her and Alexei in front of the summery backdrop, for a long time, debating where to put it.

Melina decides to put it on their bedside table. That’s normal. Married couples keep photographs of each other in their bedroom.

But she still takes a moment to position it at exactly the right angle, so she can see it when she’s lying on the bed.

Alexei is putting their files about the North Institute in the safe lodged in the coffee table when she gets back. The girls are draped on the sofas, not quite out of their sedative-induced haze. Yelena is dreamily stroking the toy pony in her lap.

“Shall we just put them straight to bed?” says Alexei when he notices her. “They seem very tired.”

“Okay,” Melina replies, and they scoop up a girl each and cart them up the stairs.

Yelena and Natalia’s bedroom is adorable, a cliche children’s bedroom, all bright colours and scattered toys. Alexei leans on the doorframe as Melina smooths down their duvets and sits on Natalia’s bed to read them the first chapter of The Borrowers.

When Melina is halfway down the first page, Natalia grabs her by the wrist and pulls her close to whisper in her ear, “No cuffs. I won’t be able to sleep.”

Melina puts the book on the table between the two beds and scoops up a couple of hair ribbons, gently trying first Natalia’s, then Yelena’s wrists to the bedpost. Natalia smiles up at her, looking relieved, and then almost immediately falls asleep.

Melina smiles back, even though Natalia is too sleepy to notice, and kisses each girl on the forehead, abandoning The Borrowers for the night. Alexei switches off the light and she leaves the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“Told you that you’d be good at this,” he murmurs. In the half-light filtering up from downstairs he looks almost ethereal. Melina feels off balance, like a ship stranded in stormy waters with no light house to guide her.

She is not supposed to think of Alexei like this. She is not supposed to think of Alexei unless it is mission related at all.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, and her voice cracks and her eyes are blurry and wet.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Melina mutters, wiping her eyes. She sniffs, and Alexei carefully puts his hands on her waist and pulls her against his chest, into a hug. She presses her face into his neck without quite thinking about it and she can feel his pulse beating softly against her forehead.

“I’m scared,” she whispers, the words no more than a hiss of breath against his neck.

“Of what?” he says, his voice low, and the dim light and their quiet voices makes Melina feel like she could tell him anything, tell him everything, and it wouldn’t have to end in her under the grass with the rest of the breakable girls.

“Don’t tell Dreykov,” she says instead, and curls her fingers into his t-shirt. Melina can feel his heart beating quickly under her hand.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Alexei says, rubbing small circles on her back. “Okay? Nothing to tell. Come on. Sit.” He presses his hand into the small of her back and pushes her into a sitting position on the stairs. He flops down next to her, and it feels a little like there is nothing in the world except for them and the blue carpet of the stairs and the light hitting his face.

“I’m not a very good fake wife, am I?” Melina mutters, hugging her knees like a child. She feels cold all over. Except for the place where Alexei’s shoulder touches her own.

“I don’t know, you’re pretty good.” His tone turns playful. “I mean, as far as fake wives go, you’re the best one I’ve ever had.”

Melina hums and it comes out strangled and jumpy with tears. Alexei offers her his hand, a pale smear on the shadowy staircase, and in the secret half-dark it is simultaneously so easy and so hard for Melina to reach over and take his hand.

They sit in silence for a while, Alexei idly tracing the outline of her fingers, the bump of her knuckles, every curve and dip and line of her palm.

“You can trust me, Melichka,” he says softly. “Promise.”

When Melina finds his reports the next week and decodes them while he’s at work, there is nothing negative about her in them. So maybe she can trust him.

She’s not sure why that knowledge is so exhilarating.

Chapter Text

Settling in is easier than Melina imagined. Their names are Molly and Alex and Emily and Nicole Smith, reassuring in their obscurity, and Melina has to admit that she enjoys playing the part of this bland suburban wife. Their neighbours are both nice and naive, easily fooled by the way Alexei kisses her cheek on the porch step every morning before he sets off to work, like members of an audience seeing only the brightly lit stage and not the chaos behind the curtain.

They settle into a routine quickly. Melina finds that for those first few months, the girls work best when their day is meticulously blocked out in the planner stuck to the fridge. Every morning, she pins the North Institute nametag to Alexei’s shirt, running her fingers across his chest and straightening his collar. The girls hug him goodbye and go to get ready for school, and when they leave he ducks his head close, lips hovering in the air just above her cheek, and drives to work.

Just like the rest of their life, their morning kisses are nothing more than a carefully planned pantomime of a happy relationship.

Melina dabs makeup over the scars on her wrist, on the girls’ wrists, like a magician distracting you with a clever tale so you don’t notice the moment they slide a card from a deck. She packs lunches into brightly coloured little backpacks and holds Yelena and Natalia’s hands as they walk to the elementary school down the road.

Melina likes the familiarity of the routine, despite the fact that it’s peppered with monthly Red Room check-ins, passing information into hands worn rough by a lifetime of holding weapons, under the table at a diner, halfway through a movie at the cinema, between the pages of a book at the library.

It’s worth it, she thinks, because without the Red Room hanging over Yelena and Natalia like a cold they can’t quite shake, the girls start to relax. Yelena softens first, bouncing back from the Red Room, a rubber ball bouncing off the floorboards, and Natalia follows not long after. The process is slow, sometimes, little smiles and jokes and undiscovered quirks popping out once in a blue moon, and despite the snail’s pace of the process, Melina thinks it’s beautiful that she gets to see them, really see them, to find out what they like on their toast and their favourite subjects at school and the people they could grow into without the Red Room haunting their lives.

Yelena is pure energy, unstoppable, unpredictable, a hurricane personified. She is endlessly curious, forever sticking her head under Melina’s arm and demanding to know everything, in that wildly excited voice of a child still young enough to tell anyone who will listen that the sky is blue because someone dropped paint on it. No flower or ornament is safe from her. Melina has glued three little china heads back onto their little china bodies already, but with animals Yelena is so careful. It’s a painful kind of ironic to see the girl who will one day grow into a fearsome assassin attempting to climb trees to give the birds extra food.

Natalia is so different, the chalk to Yelena’s cheese, and yet they are the sort of siblings who are inseparable. She discovers sports, soccer after school on Thursdays, gymnastics on a Saturday morning, dance classes on Monday evenings, all of the deadly energy that sent her Red Room classmates scurrying thrown into scoring a goal, into holding a handstand for longer than Ella Mobbs down the street, into getting a perfectly average score at her dance recital. She cradles the ornaments like a mother with a baby and never does more than frown at the lie when Melina tells Yelena that Dad bought me this one on our honeymoon, isn’t it pretty?

Melina thinks they are completely and utterly perfect.

“Mommy?” asks Yelena one day, barrelling into the living room like a bullet from a gun and throwing herself onto the couch. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always, sweetheart,” Melina says, pulling Yelena into a hug. “What is it?”

“Where did we live before here?” Yelena whispers, and when she looks up at Melina her eyes are uncharacteristically serious.

“Columbus, remember? We moved here because Dad got a new job. Why do you ask?”

“Did we live in a big house?” Yelena persists. “With a big backyard? In the snow?”

“No, of course not. What makes you think that?”

“I dream about it sometimes -” Yelena trails off and swings her legs contemplatively “- and it feels super real.”

Melina tries to keep her expression appropriately interested instead of horrified and pulls Yelena closer, running her fingers through blonde hair tangled from a day spent on the swing set, as if wrapping Yelena’s hair around her finger can bind the girl to Melina forever. “What else is in the dreams?”

“A big scary forest. And big scary men. And girls, but they weren’t big. They were scary, though. They hit me lots. Did I get my red wrist from there?” Yelena says, resting her elbows on Melina’s thighs and scrubbing at her wrist, trying to rub away the makeup to show the weals underneath.

“That sounds like a very bad dream, Em. But it’s just that - a dream. Okay? Nothing to be afraid of,” Melina murmurs, wanting desperately for that to be true. “And that’s just a birthmark on your wrist. Mommy and Nicole both have one, too. It’s genetics!”

“Gem-etics?”

“Genetics, yes!” Melina begins in a dramatic stage whisper. “Genetics is the study of genes, and genes are like little presents you get from your parents and they make up all of you. Your hair colour, your eye colour… everything!”

“Everything?” Yelena repeats, her eyes wide.

“Everything!” Melina agrees. She tilts her head to the side as if contemplating something important. “Now, little miss. Would you like a snack?”

Yelena nods eagerly, and if she was still thinking of the Red Room, it is swept away in her delight at Melina fetching a book to show her what a double helix looks like and in getting not one, but two cookies.

Melina wishes that two cookies and a diagram coloured blue and red and green and purple were enough to really get rid of the Red Room.

Parenting the girls isn’t as terrifying as she thought it might be. Melina worries, of course, that she’ll end up twisting them into something monstrous, but in the end it feels natural and easy and it makes her think that she could have had this, really had this, had it not been for Dreykov.

Alexei, on the other hand, is an entirely different board game. He should feel like a target, like someone to seduce, but he doesn’t. He feels like a friend, a teammate, mixed up with something else entirely, and that is more terrifying than any tantrum or scraped elbow or playground tussle.

It’s not that being with him is difficult, exactly. They settle into a routine of their own. Every evening, they put the girls to bed and they lock the front door and they sit on the sofa. Alexei puts on the radio, messing around until the living room is filled with the white noise of some annoying pop song, and he tells her everything he has gathered from that day at work.

Melina painstakingly writes out his words, and when she has written the last line, he says, “So, Lana, what are you teaching me today?” and they go over everything he’s unsure about.

For the first few months, however, there’s nothing much for him to report, and so by half past ten every night, Melina has usually copied up all of the intel and clarified everything for him.

She worries that she won’t know what to say to him, but one of the things she’s learned about Alexei is that he can’t bear silence, so Melina is kept very up-to-date on all of the workplace gossip. After a few days, she’s more invested than she’d like to admit in Bob’s affair with James’ wife Hannah and Nancy’s boyfriend breaking up with her and Mike grounding his son Matthew for sneaking out at night.

The clock on the wall reads eleven o’clock when they go and get ready for bed. Melina thinks that it is probably her favourite part of the whole day. She likes the way Alexei coaxes her into telling him about her day while she brushes and plaits her hair and the way he always finds an excuse to be in the bathroom or downstairs checking the locks so she can have some privacy when she gets changed.

They do the crossword in the daily paper if they’re not tired enough to sleep just yet. It’s domestic in a way Melina didn’t think she would ever have and she likes him best, like this, in the dimmed glow of the overhead light with the crossword splayed across his lap.

It’s easier to pretend that the soft, careful way he traces the scar on her wrist, the lines of her fingers, the path of the veins on her forearm, might be real.

“I’m stuck on seven down,” Alexei says, tapping the pen against his chin thoughtfully. “Twelve letters. ‘The variety of life in a particular area’. The third letter’s an ‘o’.”

“Biodiversity. Obviously,” Melina replies, snatching the pen from him and writing it in.

“Maybe it’s obvious for a mad scientist like you,” Alexei smiles. He nudges his foot against her’s under the duvet, tangling their legs together, and Melina thinks she’s compromised.

Yet when they wake up the next morning and her head is on his chest and their legs are still pressed against each other, she doesn’t pull away.

“So, I was thinking…” says Alexei when Melina slides into bed next to him one night.

“Yes?” she prompts, when ten, twenty, thirty seconds pass and he doesn’t reply. He looks almost shy, which is not an expression Melina has ever seen on his face before. She didn’t think that someone as loud and relentlessly cheerful as Alexei could even feel shy.

“So, I was thinking that… we should go on a date. The guys at work were telling me about their plans with their partners this weekend, and I realised: we have never been on a date before! So, I thought it would be a good idea -” Alexei pauses, and then adds hastily “- for the mission.”

He’s getting good at that, at making his mouth say For the mission, at making himself say Dreykov-approved words, the words he knows will put her at ease, while the slant of his smile and the shy, hopeful look in his eyes tell a different story.

“It sounds good, but… what about the girls?” Melina says.

“I have it all figured out! Mike at work gave me the phone number of the babysitter he used to use when Matthew was younger. It would be good, right? Let someone else deal with getting Yelena to brush her teeth for once?”

Melina can agree that the thought of not having to go through the ordeal of putting Yelena to bed is appealing.

“Okay, then,” she says. “For the mission. Of course.”

Alexei beams. “Friday?”

“It’s a date.”

So, it’s settled. They meet Mike’s babysitter, a college student who looks far too innocent to be capable of controlling Yelena, and break the news to the girls at dinner on Wednesday.

“So, kiddos,” says Alexei cheerfully. “Guess what?”

Natalia stiffens, coiling into watchful readiness like a rabbit about to run from a fox, and glances anxiously across the table at Melina. Melina’s heart twists and she gives a small shake of the head. Natalia relaxes a little, returning her attention to her plate.

Yelena clearly has no such Red-Room-themed worries on her mind. “Umm… I don’t know. Are we going to Disneyland?” she says hopefully.

“No! You and Nicole are going to have a babysitter on Friday, because Mom and I are going out.”

“Oh,” Yelena says, deflating. “I would rather go to Disneyland.”

“Maybe next year,” replies Alexei, meeting Melina’s eyes across the table and widening his eyes pleadingly. Melina raises an eyebrow at him.

“Are you going out on a date?” Natalia says, a ghost of a grin on her face. “Where are you going?”

“Yes, Alex, where are you taking me?” Melina asks, resting her chin on her hand.

“I was trying to keep it as a surprise! But if you insist… drum roll please, girls!” Alexei pats his thighs, glancing at the girls, and Natalia clinks her spoon against her glass obediently. Yelena slams her spoon against the table, against her plate, against Melina’s arm, against everything within her reach. “Okay, thank you for the drum roll, Emily. Molly, I am taking you…” Alexei pauses dramatically, sucking in a deep breath. “To see Jurassic Park! At a drive-in movie theatre, don’t worry, so you can lecture me on the finer aspects of genetic engineering as much as you like. And I’m taking you for food beforehand!” He flings out his arms dramatically and nearly knocks over Natalia’s glass of milk, looking at Melina expectantly.

She has to admit he’s chosen well. “A drive-in theatre? Bit of an American cliche, isn’t it?” she says. His smile dims a little, and Melina nudges him with her foot under the table and adds, “But I like it, don’t worry. I hope you’re ready for two hours of science talk.” Alexei’s smile grows again and he nudges her back.

“A drive-in theatre? Like in Grease?” Natalia asks. Yelena hears the magic word and starts singing Grease Lightning loudly and off-key, banging her spoon on the table again in emphasis.

“Exactly! But I hope you’re not expecting me to gel my hair like Danny, Mol.” Alexei brushes a hand through his hair experimentally, using his glasses to push it back. “Like what you see?”

“Maybe you should stick to the fringe,” Melina smirks, ducking when Yelena, still singing the chorus of Grease Lightning on repeat, drops her spoon in her bowl, splashing soup everywhere. Melina wrestles the spoon away from her and enlists Alexei’s help in holding Yelena down while Melina attempts to wipe tomato soup from the girl’s hair.

“Maybe we should put her in the bath?” says Alexei doubtfully, when most of the soup is out of Yelena’s hair but she still smells vaguely of tomato and garlic. Yelena shrieks at the idea, stamping her foot.

“Well… It is your turn to give her a bath, so go ahead!” At Melina’s words, Alexei fixes her with a long-suffering look and starts hauling Yelena up the stairs.

Melina’s not entirely sure what to wear, so late on Friday afternoon she ends up dumping the entire contents of her wardrobe on the bedroom floor and picking through the clothes, eventually settling on a dress patterned with blue and white stripes.

Natalia comes in, holding Funshine Bear by the paw, and sits cross-legged on the bed to watch with fascination as Melina does her makeup, adding lip gloss and blue eyeshadow to go with the dress. She even leaves her hair loose, rather than keeping it in the basic ponytail she’s started to wear instead of her usual complicated plaits.

“You look so pretty, Мама,” Natalia whispers behind her.

Мама. Not Mommy or Mom, said in a lisping American accent, but Мама. It feels special, like a treasured secret that Natalia has chosen to entrust her with. Melina turns around and finds Natalia still sitting on the bed, shuffling her feet slightly and playing with the soft ears of her toy.

“Thank you, солнышко,” Melina murmurs, sitting down next to Natalia on the bed and muffling the Russian in her hair. The blonde of it is starting to grow out a little, the red bleeding back in, and Melina’s glad. “Would you like to help me pick out my jewellery?”

Natalia nods eagerly, so Melina lifts her big jewellery box down from the top shelf.

“I’ll be careful. Promise,” she says solemnly, and Melina settles the jewellery box in her lap. Natalia flips it upside down, winding it up, and then opens it to watch the little ballerina inside spin in slow circles. Her expression is unreadable.

“I know you will. You’re not like Lena.”

Natalia smiles slightly, tearing her gaze away from the ballerina to run her fingers through the necklaces in the box, carefully unknotting them.

“That’s true. I didn’t expect Yelena to be so…” Natalia hesitates, searching for the right word.

“Hyperactive?”

“Yes. But I don’t really mind it.”

“Me neither. When she’s not breaking ornaments, it’s cute,” says Melina. Natalia frowns slightly, letting a tangle of necklaces run through her fingers.

“They’ll punish her for it, when we go back to… when we go back there,” she mumbles, swallowing nervously. She picks out a necklace, one of those impossibly fragile silver chains with an intricate, swallow-shaped pendant, and hands it to Melina.

“Good choice, Talya,” Melina says, taking the necklace and fastening it around her neck.

“They will punish her for it, won’t they?” says Natalia. When Melina doesn’t reply, she adds a desperate, “Мама.”

Natalia sounds so much like a girl about to be sent to the gallows that Melina can’t help but put a gentle arm around her shoulders and pull her close again.

“I wish I could promise they won’t,” Melina says, untying Natalia’s ponytail and brushing her hair with her fingers. “But we both know they probably will.”

“I can’t even tell her what’s gonna happen.” Natalia’s voice is muffled against Melina’s shoulder. “She doesn’t remember.”

“I know, I know. It has to be our secret, okay?”

“Okay,” Natalia replies, curling further into Melina and pressing her face in her sleeve so that her next words are barely audible.

“Мамулечка, I wish it was real,” she says, and for a moment Melina thinks she might have misheard, until Natalia mumbles Мамулечка again and her tears start to make Melina’s shoulder wet.

Мамулечка. The word shouldn’t have such an effect on her, and yet it makes Melina feel like she’s being ripped in half. She isn’t sure if she trusts herself to speak, so she rubs Natalia’s back, shushing her softly, hoping that the soft rhythm of her hand can say what she can’t.

“I want to dye my hair.” Natalia pulls away, her eyes red, her face a maze of tear tracks.

“What?”

“Before we go back. I want to dye my hair.”

Melina’s not sure she has it in her to refuse Natalia when she’s looking at her like this. “Okay,” she sighs. “What colour?”

Natalia grins like the Cheshire Cat. “You know that highlighter Yelena likes to draw with? That blue one?”

“God, Natka.”

Alexei chooses that moment to put his head in the room and announce that the babysitter has arrived. Melina can hear Yelena downstairs, loudly telling the poor girl that I’m a big girl, see, so I don’t really need a babysitter. But if you let us have chocolate for dinner, I suppose you can stay.

“We’ll go to the shops next week,” Melina whispers in Natalia’s ear, as they put the jewellery box back on the top shelf. Natalia smiles from ear to ear, and Melina thinks she might do anything if it would make her smile like that again.

After prying Yelena away from the babysitter and giving the now slightly terrified looking girl instructions about dinners and bed times, Melina and Alexei escape into the car.

Alexei holds the door open for her when she gets in. He’s wearing a shirt that Melina’s never seen him wear before, pale green and carefully ironed.

“You look lovely,” Alexei tells her, flicking on the radio and reversing out of their driveway. “Really lovely.” It makes Melina feel warm all over and she knows, with absolute certainty, that she’s compromised.

“Alexei,” she says, because the combination of Alexei humming along to the song on the radio and the soft hiss of the air conditioning and the golden-orange light of the sunset makes her feel safe.

Safe. She really has gone soft.

“Yes?” Alexei says, nodding his head to the song. The instrumental ends and he starts to sing along to the lyrics:

You’ve been running away from what you don’t understand.
Love.

“I’m compromised,” she says, her eyes on the road. Alexei jumps in his seat and swerves for a second, blinking at her in alarm.

“What?! I… hang on,” he says, and they sit in thick, anxious silence for a few minutes until they reach the turning for a supermarket. Alexei pulls into a parking space there and turns to face her, the big, brightly lit neon sign casting his face in shadows. “Compromised, Lina? By who? We need to go back for the girls, get the plane…” He takes a deep breath, his hands trembling slightly.

“No! No, I don’t mean… I’m not compromised like that. Nobody knows about the mission.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I just like this. The house and the children and the peace. And you. I like you,” Melina says, the words tumbling out of her mouth in a rush. She turns to stare at the towering front of the supermarket. A middle aged couple pushing a trolley loaded with shopping bags come out and start lugging the bags towards their car.

“That’s not a bad thing, Melichka.” Alexei takes her chin and gently turns her around to face him. “That’s a good thing. It means you can enjoy it.”

“It’s not a good thing. I shouldn’t enjoy it because it’s going to end and if General Dreykov finds out that I’m soft when we get back, he will -” Melina breaks off. She’s not sure she has the words to describe what Dreykov has the guards do to the breakable Widows, let alone to Alexei, who is still under the delusion that Dreykov is good.

“But if it’s going to end, you should enjoy it, right?”

“It’s not real, though.”

“Isn’t it?” Alexei asks. He’s carefully tracing the curve of her jaw, the slant of her nose, his fingers hot against Melina’s skin.

Before she can forcefully remind herself that touching Alexei is dangerous unless the neighbours are watching, Melina leans forward and kisses him.

It’s nothing like kissing targets. Looking back, it feels idiotic that she ever thought kissing him would be anything close to kissing a target. Alexei’s hands are tangled in her hair and Melina has one hand on his neck and the other pressed against the seat to keep her balance. It’s soft and slow and he’s so careful about it, like Melina is someone worth being careful with.

“Melina,” says Alexei breathlessly, pulling away and pressing his forehead to hers. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to, though.” Suddenly, Melina is worried that she misread the look on his face. But then Alexei’s concerned face softens, his dimple coming out in full force.

“Good.” He kisses her neck experimentally, like a question.

They’re late for their reservation, in the end, but neither of them really mind.

Chapter Text

Their last week in Ohio is idyllic, as though the neighbourhood is presenting itself at its best in a last-ditch attempt to convince them to stay.

Although maybe it’s just that since Alexei told her how close he was to finishing the mission, Melina has fallen into the habit of noticing everything, trying to commit every detail of this unremarkable life to memory before it’s gone.

She’s doing exactly that now, sitting on the garden bench and reading while the girls and Alexei soak each other with hosepipes. Noticing the way the soft breeze makes the pages of her book crackle. Yelena’s war cry as she snatches the hosepipe from Alexei and sprays him full in the face. The spider spinning a lazy web between two flowerpots.

And the book. A Murder Is Announced. The book she has only just started. The book she might never finish.

Yelena shrieks from across the garden as Alexei and Natalia spray her in the chest.

“Betrayal!” Natalia squeals, sounding mortally offended, as Alexei steals the hosepipe and drenches her. He dodges out of the way of Natalia’s vengeful strike and grabs a towel, walking over to Melina.

“Hi,” he says, kissing her cheek.

“You’re getting my book wet,” Melina complains as Alexei settles himself next to her, tracing the outline of the scar on her abdomen, the slash of it rough even through her t-shirt.

“Melichka,” he whispers, the Russian nickname nothing more than a breath against her ear. “After we… You know. After we go back.”

“Yes?”

“I want to keep seeing you. After we go back.”

Melina keeps her eyes on her book. Page nine. Rudi Scherz has just died.

“Melina.”

She can’t look at him. “You really think Dreykov will just… let us carry on like this?” Melina says, gesturing with her book at the girls, still screaming and dodging sprays of water. “You think he’ll let them carry on like this?”

“Maybe if I ask him.”

“I thought suburbia bored you. I thought you wanted to be the Red Guardian again.”

“I do. But…”

Melina interrupts him before he can finish. “But you want both.”

“Well. Yes.”

“Just focus on the mission so we can go back. I know that’s what you want,” she says, and gets up to make dinner, abandoning him on the bench.

When they get into bed that night, Melina feels awkward, unsure if she should break the silence sitting between them like a boulder.

Alexei does instead. Of course.

“I’m sorry,” he says, eyes puppy-dog wide. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“That’s true,” Melina replies, keeping her attention focused on the book. She’s been reading avidly all night, desperate to finish it before they leave. She’s on page one hundred and fifteen. Miss Murgatroyd is dead. Melina thinks she knows who the murderer is.

“I’m sorry,” repeats Alexei.

“It’s fine.” Melina forces a smile, letting her hand skim over the smooth skin of his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”

Alexei smiles, relaxing. He clicks off the lamp on his bedside table and they lie down, curled against each other, his arm a reassuring weight where it’s draped over Melina’s waist. After a while, Alexei’s breath on the back of her neck turns into snores. The clock on the bedside table ticks and ticks and ticks.

Melina should really be able to sleep. She can normally fall asleep without her hand raised to the headboard, these days, but tonight she can’t sleep, unable to stop looking at the photo of her and Alexei on the bedside table, even though their faces are just pale blurs in the darkness.

She wonders if he would say yes if she asked him to run, despite the fact that she knows full well that such treasonous actions would only result in a bloody, violent end for all four of them.

Melina huffs softly, her eyes burning. And then she wriggles resolutely away from Alexei and rolls onto her back, lifting her right arm above her head so it rests against the headboard.

Melina finishes A Murder Is Announced the next day. She reads the final hundred or so pages in that balmy, sleepy hour of the afternoon when the girls like to play outside. She’s ridiculously pleased to find that she’d guessed the murderer correctly.

Melina sets the book aside and busies herself with making dinner: burgers and corn and salad tossed in the ranch dressing that Alexei has, mystifyingly, become obsessed with. She hears the clatter of Natalia tossing her bike to the floor and the whistle of their greeting.

There’s giggles, and then Yelena is crying, the sound slightly muffled like she’s trying to stifle it, but Melina hears her through the open window as she sets the burgers aside to cool. She abandons them on the kitchen counter and rushes outside.

Yelena is sitting on the grass, knees grubby, while Natalia hovers over her anxiously, pulling her into a protective hug when Melina gets closer.

“What happened?” asks Melina frantically, and Yelena throws herself at her, burying her face in Melina’s cardigan, her tears turning the pale blue wool dark.

“She tripped!” says Natalia worriedly. “On her knee!”

“Oh, you hurt your knee?” Melina coos, brushing the dirt off Yelena’s knee with the hem of her cardigan to reveal a tiny scrape. She kisses it gently, pulling Yelena to her feet as Natalia, reassured, runs back to the swings. “There, all better. What a brave girl you are! Pain only makes us stronger, remember? Come on, now, dinner’s ready.”

Yelena slips her hand into Melina’s, clutching it tightly, pulling her towards the house, but Natalia isn’t following. Melina turns around to find her swinging aimlessly, her eyes wide with wonder.

She points up at the fireflies fluttering in the trees. “Forest stars, Mom!”

“Fireflies,” Melina corrects her, leaning on the wooden support of the swing. “They glow because of a chemical reaction called…” she pauses dramatically, letting her voice rise into a gasp. “Bioluminescence!”

“Cool,” Natalia breathes, throwing her head back to stare at them. Yelena copies her, spinning in a circle.

“Bio-goomin-pheasants,” she echoes.

“Bioluminescence, yes!” replies Melina, ruffling Yelena’s hair and turning to call Natalia over. “Come on, big girl. Dinner time!”

Natalia turns away from the trees reluctantly, running to catch up with Melina and Yelena. Melina puts her arms around them both as they walk back to the house.

Natalia snuggles into her, squeezing her tightly. “Love you, mommy.”

“I love you, too.”

“What are we having for dinner?” Yelena asks, opening the back door and bouncing into the kitchen. “I want macaroni cheese!”

“Really? Well then, I want champagne. And I also want…” Melina breaks off, scooping the corn onto a platter and handing it to Yelena. “You to set the table.” She ruffles Yelena’s hair again, pressing a kiss to the blonde curls.

The front door clicks, announcing Alexei’s arrival, as they’re setting the table. “Can you get the ranch dressing for Dad?” Melina asks Natalia, who runs off obediently, trailed by Yelena.

Melina’s heart is beating rapidly as she turns to face Alexei, afraid of what she will find on his face.

For the past few days, she hasn’t found anything out of the ordinary, and has felt a little silly for being so afraid. Today, however, is different. Alexei looks exhausted, resigned, like a man walking to the firing squad, about to be executed.

He’s finished the mission. It feels like she’s been stabbed in the stomach.

“Hey, Dad,” Natalia says brightly from where she’s stood next to the fridge. Alexei reaches over and pulls her into a tight hug, burying his fingers in her hair as though he can protect her from what is coming.

Melina sits down at the table, forcing a smile onto her face for the girls, dishing out corn and green beans and salad. She looks up at Alexei, standing by the window, peering through the blinds anxiously.

“Everything okay?” she asks, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. He looks at her, eyes sad, raising an eyebrow. The knife in Melina’s stomach feels like it’s being twisted, her assailant pushing the blade in deeper, and she ducks her head, feigning interest in her burger as the girls tuck in, chatting.

She lasts about twenty seconds before she can’t wait any longer. Melina stands, giving Alexei a meaningful look, and he follows her out into the darkened hallway as Yelena babbles about bioluminescence and the scratch on her knee.

“It’s done?” she murmurs, taking hold of his hand, the Red Room part of her brain reawakening and digging its roots in further. Alexei nods.

“We have to leave within the hour.”

Melina thought that knowing they’d have to go back eventually, the knowledge that the longer the mission dragged on the more likely it was for Alexei to come home like this, would make the ending easier. It doesn’t.

Alexei pulls her into a bone-crushing hug, his fingers in her hair. She’s left it long and loose today, instead of pulling it up into the messy ponytail of a suburban mother, and that feels like a good choice now, standing here as Alexei brushes the day’s tangles from her hair.

Melina kisses him then, taking him by surprise. He recovers quickly, though, pulling her tightly against his chest, arms around her as though he’s trying to shield her from the world, like he had three years ago as they stood on the landing outside Yelena and Natalia’s bedroom.

It feels like a dam inside of her has broken and the tears roll down her cheeks. Melina imagines that if fear was a living, breathing thing, it would be perceived as this, as the tears salty on her face and the feeling of Alexei’s chest rising and falling against hers as his breath hitches.

“I don’t want to go,” she whispers, her voice shaking.

“Don’t, Lana. Don’t say that.” There are tears in his eyes too, shining in the light filtering in from the dining room.

Melina closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. “I love you,” she murmurs, and it’s funny how such a short sentence makes her feel like she’s being hollowed out. It’s so wrong, an error of the universe, that the first time she tells him that she loves him is right before the Red Room slinks back into her life.

Alexei kisses her again, quickly, fingers tracing her jawline as though he’s committing her to memory. “I love you too. So much.” He dabs at her eyes, poking her in the nose in an unsuccessful attempt at making her smile, pulling her back into the dining room. They sit down heavily, Alexei at the head of the table, Melina next to Yelena.

“Girls,” Alexei says. “Do you remember we told you that one day, we’d have a big adventure?” He smiles, trying for brightness, fooling nobody but Yelena. “Well, today’s the day!” Out of the corner of her eye, Melina sees Natalia’s hands freeze around her fork, her expression as blank as that of a china doll. Yelena cheers, the smile splitting her face a stark contrast to the betrayal written all over Natalia’s.

Alexei swallows hard, slapping his hands onto the table in a business-like manner. “Okay, let’s go!” Yelena jumps up, with only one regretful glance back at her meal, and skips obediently after Alexei. Melina doesn’t get up for a moment. She ducks her head instead, allowing herself a final moment to mourn their life.

She looks up and Natalia is still sitting at the table, staring at her with wide eyes, begging to stay. Melina wants nothing more than to let the girls sit back down and finish their dinner before she tucks them up in their ridiculously messy little bedroom, away from Dreykov’s greedy hands.

She voices none of this. Looking back, she wonders if things would have been different if she had.

“I’m sorry, Talya,” Melina says instead, getting up from the table to avoid Natalia’s pleading gaze. She runs around the house, grabbing guns and knives from the tops of cupboards and under beds, collecting their research from the safe in the coffee table, room after room until she reaches the bedroom she shares with Alexei.

Melina collects the knives from the top of the wardrobe and hovers at the foot of the bed for a while, staring around the room.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she collects their photograph from the bedside table and the delicate swallow-shaped pendant she’d worn when they went to see Jurassic Park, shoves them at the bottom of the box of research and slams the lid back on top, her breaths coming in shallow gasps.

When she leaves the bedroom, she slams the door so hard that the paint on the doorframe cracks and runs downstairs to the shed, where Yelena is helping Alexei scoop up handfuls of bullets.

“I don’t have my shoes,” says Yelena sadly, looking out of the shed door at the porch, where the new pink Mary Jane shoes they’d bought her last week sit by the front steps.

“You don’t need shoes, honey, Just hurry up, okay?”

“But I’m still hungry! I don’t think I like this adventure much.” Yelena’s feet twitch, an attempt to stamp her foot and throw a tantrum, quickly aborted.

“Well, I have fruit roll-ups in the car, okay? If you’re good you can have as many as you want.”

Melina turns from the shed, going back into the house to do a last check for forgotten weapons or documents. Instead, she finds Natalia, her bright red Converse dangling from her hand, attempting to rescue the photo album, the framed pictures on the mantelpiece.

“No, leave it!” Melina snaps, snatching the photo album from her grasp. “Get in the car. Tell Dad I’ll be there in a minute.” Natalia struggles against Melina pushing her towards the front door. “Go!”

Natalia flashes her a look, all burning fear and betrayal, but heads down the hallway anyway. Melina hears the front door bang open and slam shut again.

She hesitates for a long moment, trying to drink in the room. Natalia’s yellow teddy bear abandoned on the floor. Yelena’s drawing, of a potato-shaped Melina and Alexei and Natalia, stuck to the fridge with ice cream shaped magnets. The framed photographs on the mantelpiece.

There’s only room for the photo album in the box, and when Melina forces herself to walk out of the house it feels like she’s leaving pieces of herself behind in the toys on the living room floor, the VHS tape set aside for a movie night next weekend, the half-finished colouring book on the sofa.

She wonders if Dreykov will make the guards burn them, like evidence of a terrible crime.

Melina bumps into Alexei in the garage. “You have it?” she hisses, grabbing him by the arm.

He flashes the disk at her, its thick, shiny cover reflecting moonlight onto Yelena’s little purple bicycle. “The only copy.”

She nods, and he kisses her quickly, like he’s saying goodbye, before they dive for the car, Alexei turning the key in the ignition before Melina’s even closed her door.

“Where are we going?” Yelena whispers.

“Home,” Melina replies, the lie burning her tongue.

“Don’t be silly, Mommy! We just left home,” says Yelena, but the light of her smile has dimmed and her eyes are doubtful.

Yelena had asked her, once, if their lives before Ohio had just been a bad dream, and Melina had agreed, her heart breaking, that yes, it was just a bad dream, the way that a chair stacked with clothes can look like a monster in the dark.

“We’re not going home. It’s not home,” Natalia mutters. Yelena looks at her nervously, and then looks down at her wrist and licks her finger, rubbing viciously until the makeup is gone, revealing a thin strip of red and purple scarring, a perfect oval of pain. She grabs Natalia’s writs, too, scrubbing at the makeup to uncover and identical scar.

Melina had told her that the scars were birthmarks. She thinks she might have to ask Alexei to pull over so she can throw up.

Yelena isn’t smiling anymore. Melina sees her exchange a frightened look with Natalia in the rear-view mirror before they both turn away from each other to watch their house, their lives, speed away into the darkness. Yelena’s breaths stutter as she tries to keep the tears back.

They turn a corner and are greeted by sirens, police officers redirecting people. Alexei grits his teeth and jerks the steering wheel, turning left and onto the motorway. Yelena gulps and tears start to trickle down her cheeks.

“Don’t, baby, don’t,” Alexei says. “Do you want your song?”

Yelena nods, sniffling, and it feels like a last wish, like she’s requesting a final meal the night before an execution. Alexei selects the cassette, slotting it into the player, and the first, familiar notes of American Pie fill the car. Yelena wipes her eyes, twisting her fingers around Natalia’s, the tear tracks on her cheek shining in the orange glow of the street lamps.

This will be the day that I die. Melina rubs her forehead, struggling to swallow around the rope that seems to be choking her, threatening to break her as easily as a sheet of glass. She is reminded, dangerously, of Akilina’s hands tight around her neck, of the feeling of fighting so hard and yet being unable to breathe.

Can music save your mortal soul? Alexei flicks the indicator and Melina’s heart thumps in time with the click of it as they turn off the brightly lit motorway and onto a dirt track surrounded by trees,

I started singing bye, bye, Miss American Pie. The car shudders to a stop outside the makeshift base that hides their plane and the music stops abruptly, replaced by the scream of the car alarm, informing everyone in what feels like a fifty-mile radius that somebody has taken off their seatbelt while the engine is still running. Melina hurries the girls along, Yelena struggling, Natalia leaning over to grab the photo strip from the dashboard, the shitty, overly saturated little pictures taken with Yelena in the photo booth at the mall.

“Come on, girls! Hurry!” Melina shouts. Yelena obeys, running to help Alexei yank aside the tarpaulin hiding their plane, but Natalia hangs back, staring at the strip of photos, until Alexei pushes her towards the plane and she seems to snap back into her Red Room mindset, running towards them.

Melina buckles the girls into their seats as Alexei hovers in front of the plane, his gun pointed at the road. She crawls into her own seat, slamming the door, flicking switches on the dashboard, the engines roaring to life.

Sirens start to howl behind them as Alexei hauls a trailer out of their way, guiding Melina to the track. He gives her a thumbs up and a weak smile, grabbing his gun and turning to fire at the approaching cars. Melina catches a glimpse of the logo emblazoned on the passenger side doors as she turns the plane.

S.H.I.E.L.D. She grinds her teeth together, coaxing more speed from the protesting plane. Alexei sprints after it, still firing at the cars. He jumps, and Melina hears a reassuring little thump as he lands on one of the wings.

A bullet pierces Natalia’s window with a tinkle of shattering glass. Melina turns to check on her as Natalia shrieks and ducks, the plane swerving slightly.

And then a bullet slams into her shoulder. Melina gasps, losing her grip on the plane’s controls and falling into the passenger’s seat, wrapping her good hand tight around the wound to try and slow the bleeding. The world seems to spin.

“Mom!” Natalia screams. It takes all of Melina’s strength to turn around and face her daughters.

“I need you up here,” she pants, and Natalia gets the message, scrambling into the pilot’s seat and wrestling the plane back under control. “Good girl, Natka. Okay, when I tell you, I need you to pull back with all of your strength -” her sentence ends in a gasp as one of the cars slams into the plane’s side. The plane shudders and her head lolls on Natalia’s shoulder.

Somewhere in the back of the plane, Yelena is crying, making no effort to be quiet about it anymore, her terrified sobs bouncing off the plane’s walls and drilling into Melina’s head.

“Okay, hit the accelerator there,” Melina chokes out. In front of them, Alexei shoots out the tires of one of the cars and it careens into another, sending them both skidding with a screech of metal.

Forty five, fifty, fifty five… Melina’s vision blurs, the numbers twisting and stretching out of proportion, morphing into the cartoon monsters from Yelena’s favourite television show.

The dial on the dashboard hits seventy and the wrecked cars spin towards them in a mess of bent, dented metal and tires struggling to find purchase on the muddy road.

“Okay - pull back now!”

Natalia heaves at the controls and the plane miraculously manages to lift off with only a single jerk as the front wheel is snagged on the axis of an overturned car. Natalia breathes out a sigh of relief and the three of them simultaneously turn their heads to the window next to the wing that Alexei had been clinging onto.

He doesn’t appear, and Melina’s stomach twists sickeningly in the heart-stopping second before his face, contorted with effort, appears, pressed against the window. Melina slumps into the seat, the darkness lurking at the edges of her vision closing in on her as the adrenaline rush fades.

When she wakes again, Melina registers, dimly, that she’s in Alexei’s arms, his hands cradling her head protectively as he lifts her from the plane. She struggles to open her eyes as he sets her down on a gurney and squeezes her hand.

“Wake up, Mommy!” Yelena sobs. “Pain only makes you stronger, you said!” Melina feels Yelena lay her head on her chest and tries to reach for her, only to feel the soft fur of Yelena’s stuffed unicorn instead, followed by a rush of air as one of the guards snatches the toy away.

“I’m sorry, Mommy!” Natalia cries in Russian, and her voice sounds like it’s echoing back at her from down a long tunnel. “I’m scared.” Natalia grabs her hand, squeezing so tightly that it hurts.

Melina tries to talk, to reassure her. “Don’t let them take your heart,” she whispers, begging, and knows that her words will probably get back to General Dreykov when one of the guards tuts disapprovingly and muffles her, pressing the suffocating plastic of an oxygen mask over her face.

Melina drifts off again.

The next time she claws her way back to consciousness, she isn’t greeted by the warmth of Alexei’s arms but by the airy, sterile brightness of the Red Room Infirmary.

And the girls and Alexei are nowhere to be seen.

The door opens soundlessly and Melina looks up as General Dreykov’s shadow falls across her bed.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, all fake concern. “You gave us quite the scare, you know.”

Melina shrugs with her good arm, looking down at the starchy, pale desert of the blanket around her legs. “I’m fine, General.”

“I’m glad to hear it. The doctors say you’re healing well. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll regain full use of your right arm in time. No -” Dreykov pauses, leaning forward and tangling his hands in Melina’s hair, still loose around her shoulders. When Alexei plays with her hair, it feels reassuring, like a promise to keep her safe, but when Dreykov does it, it feels like he is trapping her in a set of manacles. Melina desperately wants to flinch away. “- I’m more concerned about… other factors that might affect your future efficiency.”

Melina’s chest starts to ache, hurting in a way that has nothing to do with her recent injuries. “I’m sorry, General, but I don’t understand.”

“Well, Madame B and I are concerned that the Ohio mission has made you soft. But you know you’ve always been very valuable to the Red Room. My scientist, yes? We don’t want to just kill you. Perhaps some form of… rehabilitation can be arranged? Retaking some training, maybe?” Dreykov phrases it like a question, but Melina isn’t stupid enough to think that she has a choice.

“Okay,” she says, and tries to act like the thought of being put through the Red Room’s training process again doesn't make her feel sick with fear.

When she is released from the Infirmary, it is to Widows that look at her with smug smirks, delighted to see her finally fall from Dreykov’s favour, and instructors who make barbed-wire comments and a routine blatantly calculated to keep her far, far away from Natalia and Yelena.

Melina spends the entire night in her lab, that first night back in the main Academy, but the girls don’t come, and she pays for her lack of sleep in training the next day.

General Dreykov stays faithful to his promise about extra testing. The first time Melina is retested, it’s the day after Dreykov informs her that Alexei has been arrested and imprisoned.

“A shame,” he’d said with a sick grin. Melina had agreed, the pain of the words burning her eyes and throat.

For the test, Melina is put in the line with the little ones as they shoot a real person for the first time, the guns almost comically huge in their tiny hands.

She stands at the back of the line, towering over them all, her hands neatly folded behind her back, as each girl assembles their gun and shoots the prisoner put in front of them. Sometimes they cry, or throw up, and are taken outside and greeted by the cold press of a knife against their backs.

The girls finish and are led out in a little crocodile formation, eyeing Melina curiously. The door swings shut behind them and Melina is left alone with General Dreykov and her prisoner.

Dreykov jerks his head towards the table and she steps forward, assembling the gun with the ease of a child putting together a favourite jigsaw.

And then she looks at the prisoner. He’s nothing remarkable, skinny and brunette with small blue eyes. He doesn’t look like Alexei, but all the same when Melina looks at him he has Alexei’s face and she can’t make herself pull the trigger.

“Melina,” says Dreykov, softly, dangerously, as the gun shakes in her grip, trembling along with her hand, and he takes her back to his office, producing the knife the guards use for the girls who fail to emotionlessly kill their prisoner.

The breakable little girls.

Melina’s throat is raw from screaming when she leaves Dreykov’s office that night, blood soaking into her vest.

The second time she’s tested, Melina is sent out with the twenty-one year olds for their graduation test. She has already graduated, older and more experienced than them, so it should be easy to kill them.

But it isn’t. They have Akilina’s face, Yelena’s face, Natalia’s face.

Melina hasn’t been able to stop thinking of the shining silver of Dreykov’s knife. She kills all five of them, her vision blurry with tears that don’t fall.

Her tears may not fall, but she throws up behind a bush when the girls are dead, and so she ends up back in Dreykov’s office and she gets blood all over the floorboards.

The third time she’s tested, she isn’t in the training room but is in the small attic that is the Red Room’s best approximation of a hair salon, snip-snip-snipping at Natalia’s red curls.

And it’s agonising. Melina feels like a pot overflowing with boiling water, like everything she wants to say is bubbling just under the surface and one nudge in just the right direction will make it all pour out.

“First kill mission?” she asks instead.

Natalia stares at her blankly in the mirror and swallows, the bob of her throat painfully obvious in the bright light of the room.

“Yes,” she whispers.

Melina nods, humming, and unpins another hank of Natalia’s hair to cut. They’re so close together and yet it feels like they’re miles apart, a yawning chasm looming dark between them.

They sit in silence for a while, Natalia determinedly not fidgeting, as Melina carefully trims Natalia’s hair until she is sporting a shoulder length bob and strands of red hair litter the floor around them, looking uncomfortably like blood. Melina sweeps them away and turns to the shelf stacked with hair dye, frowning at the instructions that Madame B gave her.

Black hair. The exact opposite of highlighter blue. Melina shudders involuntarily, closing her eyes.

“Head over the sink, please,” she tells Natalia, grabbing the box. The girl obeys and Melina paints her hair with the dark dye. It smells like the bathroom in Ohio, like colouring bleached blonde hair neon blue and giggling in anticipation of Alexei’s reaction.

Melina can barely breathe until she’s finished, her chest burning. The box says to wait half an hour.

It’s probably the most painful, uncomfortable half an hour of Melina’s life. As soon as the timer is up, Melina rinses out the dye, eager to put an end to the uncomfortable silence. When it's been blow-dried, Natalia’s hair comes out inky black instead of startling blue.

“Done,” Melina announces, stepping back with a sigh of something that’s half relief and half regret.

“Thank you,” says Natalia politely, dipping her head in Melina’s general direction, pointedly not meeting her eyes.

“Natalia?” Melina says desperately, when the girl has turned to leave. “I’m sorry.”

Natalia spins to face her in a whirl of dark hair and she’s looking at Melina with that look, betrayed and terrified and reminiscent of the two of them sitting at the dining table in Ohio for the last time.

Melina doesn’t begrudge her that look, but it strikes home somewhere deep inside her and smarts nonetheless.

After Natalia leaves the salon, slamming the door with as much force as she dares, Melina sits in the spinning chair in front of the mirror, staring at the curls of red hair on the floor and imagining how it might have felt if she’d dyed Natalia’s hair black because she was going through a teenage emo phase and not because she needed a disguise to kill someone.

She’s late for training, in the end, and when she finally pulls herself together and gets to the training room, Dreykov looks at her in that way of his that screams failure.

And even when she’s in his office that night, the flash of the knife glancing off the walls, all Melina can think about is Natalia’s face.

The fourth time she’s tested, Melina’s finished the Widow serum, after she has stalled and fussed for as long as she can, so that is her test.

General Dreykov brings in a girl from the thirteen year old’s class. He handcuffs her to an operating table and Melina fills a syringe with the serum, bright red like fake blood.

She injects it into the girl’s arm. The girl screams as she dies, and when she’s dead Melina looks at her face and sees the glassy blue eyes of the Winter Soldier where the girl’s dark brown eyes should be.

Melina wants to cry, can feel her eyes burning with the tears, but she’s not sure she remembers how to let them fall any more. She blinks until her vision is clear and she can’t stop looking at the girl’s eyes and seeing the Soldier.

She hasn’t seen him in a while. Before Ohio, the thought would sting, but now Melina is selfishly glad. She doesn’t want to know what he would think of her now.

He’d probably be afraid of her, would probably look at her with the same feral fear that’s on his face when he looks at the notebook full of code words that steal away his autonomy.

Melina bites her lip so hard that she draws blood and turns away from the girl’s body.

The fifth time, Melina is sure that Dreykov must be running out of ideas for tests.

He isn’t.

This time, he arrives slightly singed, pain making itself known in the sharp line between his eyebrows, and leads her to the Infirmary.

There’s a little girl lying on one of the beds, dressed in tattered, charred school uniform, an oxygen mask over her mouth and one eye hidden from view by bandages.

“This is Antonia,” says General Dreykov. “My daughter.”

Daughter. Nausea claws at Melina’s stomach.

One of the doctors clustered around the little girl - Antonia - steps forward. “General,” he says. “Have you been seen to? Let me take a look at you.”

Dreykov - limping slightly, Melina realises - is led away into a side room, surrounded by concerned doctors and nurses. Melina is left alone with Antonia.

She steps closer to the girl’s bed, and realises with a shock that she’s crying, tears rolling down her cheeks and making the skin around the oxygen mask wet.

It reminds her, painfully, of another little girl, with curly blonde hair instead of brown, crying like the world is breaking when she scraped her knee.

Gingerly, Melina places her hand on top of Antonia’s and the little girl curls her fingers around Melina’s tightly. Her tiny hands are smeared with soot.

“Sssh,” Melina whispers, rubbing small circles on the back of Antonia’s hand. There’s a bedraggled red ribbon tangled in her hair and Melina unties it, brushing through the knots with her fingers. “There. All pretty.” Antonia is still crying fiercely, her sobs muffled through the oxygen mask.

Melina wracks her brain, thinking back to Yelena and Natalia’s tears in Ohio. “Would you like a story?” she asks, and Antonia nods, whimpering, her knuckles very white as she clings to Melina’s hand.

Melina frowns, digging into the bittersweet warmth of her Ohio memories for one of the stories she used to read to the girls.

She settles on the very first book she ever read to them. Natalia’s favourite. The Borrowers.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Kate who lived in a house in London,” Melina begins, surprised to find that she can still remember the story. She isn’t sure how long it has been since Ohio, the days and months and years blurring into each other, and yet she can almost see the neat print of the book in front of her.

Antonia is asleep by the time General Dreykov returns. Melina hears him talking to the doctors as he opens the door and she lets her voice trail awat, dropping Antonia’s hand like it’s burning her.

Dreykov has a syringe in his hand, filled to the brim with red so bright it makes Melina’s eyes ache. Her Widow Serum. She averts her eyes from the syringe and looks down at Antonia instead, small and sleeping and innocent.

She hasn’t tested this new batch yet, but there’s no reason the outcome will be anything other than Antonia’s death.

And yet Melina isn’t sure how to refuse when Dreykov hands her the syringe. She isn’t sure if her mouth remembers how to form words of protest anymore.

But Antonia lives when Melina gives her the serum.

Dreykov nods, the closest he gets to impressed, and hands Melina hastily drawn plans for body armour, a hard drive, an algorithm.

“Get to work,” he commands, and Melina does.

Dreykov gives her a house, a little two-up-two down thing, nestled away in the countryside surrounding St. Petersburg.

It makes Melina wonder if she’s finally passed, is finally good enough, but you can never be sure when it comes to Dreykov. Maybe the house is in itself a test, a carefully constructed experiment to see what she will do when there’s no Dreykov, no super-soldier husband and Widow children, no Red Room eyes to keep her from running. No mission to occupy her days, to dictate what she does.

The lack of cameras tracking her every move, the days stretching out in front of her, endless and unsettling in their emptiness, terrifies her.

But she doesn’t run. Melina buys a pair of handcuffs on the internet on her first night in the house instead, and when they arrive she starts getting back into the habit of cuffing her hands to the bed each night. When Melina turns the key in the little lock, the night after the cuffs arrive, it feels like something has slid back into place inside her. She doesn’t think she’s slept so well in years.

After a month has passed, Dreykov himself comes to visit her.

“I have something for you,” he says, when he has checked over every inch of the house and has satisfied himself that she’s not going to run or defect to America or turn the gun she uses for target practice on herself. He places a cold hand on the small of her back, pushing her towards the front door. “Come.”

Dreykov leads her to the truck he arrived in, unlocking the door at the back and flinging it wide open to reveal a pen crammed with pigs.

“For further experimentation,” he tells her. “I expect monthly reports.”

“Thank you, General,” Melina replies. “Understood.”

Dreykov nods and gets into the truck, leaving Melina to unload the pigs.

She likes them more than she thought she would. She builds them a pig pen filled with hay in one of the sheds and another in the garden.

And she names them. The largest becomes Alexei. The two smallest, most playful of them all become Akilina and Yelena. The pig with reddish-brown hair becomes Natalia and the large, dark brown pig becomes Zima.

Melina gets used to the house the same way she gets used to the pigs. She buys bookcases and fills them with books and carefully plans out her days, dividing everything that needs to be done into groups and writing it down on the calendar hanging on the kitchen door.

She requests the box of files collected from the North Institute and finally, finally rescues the photo album, the swallow shaped pendant, the photograph of her and Alexei. Melina sets the photo album on the bookcase and the picture on the kitchen windowsill and fastens the necklace around her neck and it makes the house feel a little less like a show home.

It doesn’t feel like home the way Ohio did, but it feels like something all the same.

Melina doesn’t think Dreykov intended for her to like this tiny scrap of a house and the fact that she does feels a little like watching the Red Room crumble and burn away into nothing. Like a victory.

Chapter Text

The sun is setting, the weak, dying rays of its late afternoon light painting her farm golden, so Melina shuts down her tablet for the night, feeding each pig one last treat.

“Go on,” she says, herding the pigs out of their pen and towards the shed where they sleep. “Go back home where it’s safe.” The pigs, as obedient and unquestioning as dogs, sniff politely and trot off. Melina follows them, shutting the shed door when the last curly tail is tucked safely inside and heading back up to the house to make dinner.

She gets inside and locks the door, hiding her tablet under the loose floorboard under the kitchen table. She fetches carrots and stands at the sink to peel them, staring out of the window into the distance.

A wisp of carrot peel lands on the picture sitting on the windowsill, curling stubbornly around the frame - it’s the photo of her and Alexei, hugging against a backdrop of turquoise ocean. Melina sighs, putting down the knife and flicking the peel from the frame.

It hurts to look at the picture, even all of these years later. It feels almost invasive, like she is looking at memories from another person’s life. Several times, Melina has almost destroyed them, the picture and the photo album and the necklace, going so far as to sit herself down at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors and a lighter before she realises she can’t make herself do it.

There’s a very slight wheeze behind her, coming from the bedroom. Automatically curling into watchful readiness, Melina carefully places the picture back on the windowsill. She hears the noise again: a minute exhale of breath. Barely audible. Easily missed.

Unless you spent your childhood playing with guns instead of playing with dolls, watching the girl across from you on the sparring mat plan her next strike instead of watching cartoons, learning ten different ways to kill a man with your bare hands instead of learning right from wrong.

Slowly, mindful of the door’s habit of creaking no matter how many times she oils it, Melina opens the cupboard under the sink, easing a gun out from between the bottles of washing-up liquid and bleach.

Her unexpected visitor seems to realise they’ve been heard, though. They don’t make another sound.

Melina takes a step towards the bedroom, activating the Widow’s Bites that she still wears on her wrists constantly. They power up, a reassuring flash of bright blue under her sleeves, before the glow dulls, leaving the weapons warm against her skin.

Keeping her footsteps light, Melina creeps into the hallway, pausing only to snag her Iron Maiden mask from the weapons stash behind the fridge, securing it over her face as she walks. When she reaches the sliding door to the bedroom, it’s hanging open, like a gaping mouth ready to swallow her whole.

The attacker stands with their back to her, quietly rifling through the drawers of Melina’s dresser. They’re dressed in a black catsuit, dark blonde hair coiled into tight, complicated plaits, standing exactly how Melina always stands: shoulders back, neck straight, posture unsettlingly perfect.

Another Widow, then.

The Widow turns, catching sight of Melina. She’s young, just a few years out of the Academy by the looks of it, with wide pale eyes and a vein standing out on her forehead.

The two of them stand there for a moment in silence, staring at one another, each considering how best to attack.

And then Melina cocks her gun, aiming at the Widow’s forehead. The girl spins out of the way just before Melina can release the trigger, leaping at her and aiming for her gun. Melina jerks her hand out of the way, aiming a kick at the Widow’s chest, lashing out like a frightened, cornered animal with the hand clutching her gun when the kick is blocked.

This time, her hit connects. There’s a satisfying crunch and a small, hastily muffled cry of pain as the barrel of Melina’s gun makes contact with the other Widow’s shoulder.

The Widow stumbles back, clutching her shoulder, and then lunges for Melina’s gun hand, using the momentum of her swing to slam her face into the dresser. The hit is hard, so hard that even with her mask, there’s a hot stab of pain and another crunch bounces around the room, one that sounds suspiciously like her nose breaking. Blood starts to trickle down Melina’s face and into her mouth.

She reels for a second, faking unconsciousness, before rolling out of the way just in time to dodge a punch aimed to knock off her mask. The other Widow spins wildly, swinging a fist at the centre of Melina’s chest. It connects and Melina staggers for a moment, burning pain spreading through her ribs, the wind knocked out of her. The girl takes advantage of her second of breathlessness, using it to grab the back of Melina’s head, yanking her hair from its elaborate plaits and trying again to prise off her mask.

Finally managing to get a breath into her aching chest, Melina clutches at the other Widow’s arm, spinning the woman to face her and elbowing her hard in the throat. She flops, gasping, and Melina flips her onto the floor, putting her in a chokehold and squeezing tight. The Widow struggles, legs kicking frantically, as Melina presses one of the Widow’s Bites to her temple and slams down on the button to shock her. She jerks violently and Melina grits her teeth, pressing the button again.

And again, and again, and again, until the Widow’s legs stop kicking and she goes still. Melina shoves her limp body onto the floor and shoots her in the head, just to be safe.

She’s trembling. It’s been so long since she’s killed someone that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like.

The picture of her and Alexei is still on the kitchen windowsill, and in the photo Alexei’s eyes seem to stare at her accusingly.

Melina presses her lips into a thin line, her eyes burning. She acts on instinct, grabbing her emergency bag from under her bed, pausing only to retrieve the photo album from the bookcase and place the framed photograph from the windowsill carefully in her bag. She stands in the kitchen for a long moment, contemplating, and then, moving almost robotically, walks back into her bedroom and shoves the bag back under her bed.

She feels eyes burning into the back of her neck. Melina slowly turns around, and sees General Dreykov standing next to the other Widow’s body, blocking the door. He didn’t need to bother: she already knows that any haphazard escape plans still in her head won’t be carried out.

Melina never runs, when it comes to him. Dreykov often calls her his most obedient Widow and she hates that it’s true, hates that he could order her to destroy herself and she would do it without question if it meant he would praise her again.

“I see you fight as well as ever, even after all this time holed up in your lab. Have you been practicing?” Dreykov asks, his tone pleasant, conversational, as though he’s commenting on the weather. “I have a new job for you, Melina. Something different this time.”

It takes Melina a few seconds to regain her voice. “If you have a job for me, why did you send somebody to kill me?”

“A test for you,” he replies softly. “To see if you could still kill efficiently. After all, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? This is an important job, I wouldn’t trust it to a Widow gone soft. We saw what damage that could do in Natalia’s case, wouldn’t you agree?”

Melina swallows, half sick pride and half fear. General Dreykov doesn’t think she is soft. It feels like she’s passed an important test, like she can finally move past those nights spent in his office with his hands in her hair and his knife in her back and his voice in her ear, whispering, You want to be the best, don’t you, Melina? You want to be good enough for me?

And yet bringing up Natalia feels like an accusation and a threat mixed up into one. Like the warm Cuban sun and syringes in her girls’ necks and painting Natalia’s hair with black hair dye and sending her out to kill.

So Melina smiles agreeably, forcing her face into polite curiosity. “That goes without saying, General. What do you want me to do?”

“We recently lost a Widow,” Dreykov says, his gaze sharp with another accusation. “Yelena Belova. It is possible she will try to contact Natalia Romanova and attempt to attack the Red Room. Stop them.”

Yelena Belova. Natalia Romanova. A wave of nausea rises in her throat and Melina’s heart beats frantically against her ribcage, like a trapped bird. General Dreykov smiles, the sort of smile a cat might make while toying with a mouse it is about to eat. Melina suppresses a nervous shiver and, shifting from foot to foot as though contemplating his orders, pushes her emergency bag further under her bed. The photo frame scrapes against a gun and the sound, muffled through the fabric of her bag, could almost be laughter.

“Of course, General Dreykov. Whatever you wish,” Melina says blandly. Dreykov nods, spinning sharply on his heel and leaving the room.

Melina stands at the kitchen window and watches him walk away, back to his helicopter, the gate clanging closed behind him. His words bounce around Melina’s head like tennis balls on a court. You fight well. Important job. Wouldn’t trust it to a Widow gone soft.

And maybe she’s a fool to think that Dreykov wouldn’t cycle her through the Red Room again in a heartbeat, but for a moment Melina feels almost free, as though Dreykov deciding, finally, that she’s not soft is a key turning in the lock of a cage and setting her loose. She almost wants to celebrate, like she’s hit a twisted new life milestone.

Before she can talk herself out of it, Melina gets in her car and drives into St. Petersburg.

Twenty minutes later, she finds herself in a grocery store, staring at shelves and shelves of hair dye. She could almost be back in Ohio, surveying the selection of dyes on offer at their local supermarket while Natalia tugs excitedly on her sleeve and points hopefully at an especially bright neon blue.

Melina runs her finger along the row of bright blue dyes thoughtfully, but her eyes are drawn to the dark reds on the shelf above.

Red like her Red Guardian. Red like Natalia’s hair and red like the shorts Yelena wore on the night they left Ohio. Red like her ledger. It feels right, in a morbidly poetic way.

She pulls a box of bleach and a box of red hair dye from the shelf.

At one o’clock that night, Melina is standing in front of her bathroom mirror, admiring the new streak of red in her dark hair. It reminds her of crystals of salt shining silver in the Red Room’s moonlit laboratories and eating cake on a park bench with the Winter Soldier and sitting behind the sheds at the Academy with Akilina’s head on her shoulder. A tiny rebellion against them.

The next day, Melina hears the crash of a helicopter and when she picks up her rifle and looks through its scope they’re there. Alexei and Yelena and Natalia. Melina wants to run to them and throw her arms around her daughters and kiss Alexei until she can’t remember how to breathe.

He looks different now, blonde hair eroding away into grey, with a straggly beard and a softer body and sadder eyes, but when she looks at him there’s still a hint of Alexei: playful and kind and strong.

And suddenly, even though the girls look at her with distrust, no longer seeing a mother but seeing the monster that she really is, General Dreykov and the Red Room feel like nothing more than a traffic cone in the middle of the road, an obstacle easily removed.

“Honey, we’re home,” Alexei declares, spreading his arms out wide. Melina doesn’t quite trust her voice to work, so she simply unlocks the gate and turns, hoping they will follow her.

They do. Melina lets them into the house and sets out plates, turning to the kitchen to put away her gun and fetch some food. The emergency call button connecting her to the Red Room draws her eyes like a magnet, gleaming innocently, disguised as a screw in the fridge handle.

Alexei follows her into the kitchen. He doesn’t say anything, simply leans against the counter, but all the same Melina knows she’s going to weaken and so she opens the fridge door, subtly pressing the call button before she can change her mind. It feels like a fork in a well-trodden path, and Melina knows she has picked the road that will take her into a dark forest full of wolves.

She closes the fridge and faces Alexei, hugging a box of salad to her chest like a shield. He looks at her like he always has, like she is something perfect, like he sees the monster that lurks under her skin and loves her all the more for it, and it makes the knot steadily tightening inside Melina’s chest loosen slightly.

“Hi,” Alexei mumbles, a barely contained smile playing about his lips. “You look so good.”

“You do, too,” Melina replies. He scoffs, shuffling his feet, but looks pleased all the same. She takes a cautious step forward, placing the salad on the counter, and tangles her hands in the hair at the nape of his neck. She thinks that his hair, long like this, is her new favourite look on him, so she can wrap strands around her finger and pretend it will anchor her to him forever.

Alexei’s hands settle on her waist and he kisses her almost experimentally, like he’s testing the waters. Despite everything, warmth works its way into her chest as she leans up and kisses him back.

“Um,” says Natalia - or Natasha, as she calls herself now - and the spell breaks. They step apart and Melian turns to find her standing awkwardly in the doorway, looking for all the world like that embarrassed little girl back in Ohio who once walked into the living room to find her parents kissing over a mess of notes about the North Institute.

Maybe the sight of Natasha looking like that is why it’s so easy for Melina to trick herself into thinking that they’re back in Ohio as they sit down to eat, Alexei at the head of the table, Melina next to Yelena with Natasha opposite her. She feels right, as though she has always been that all-American housewife and the spy part of her is the real act.

She manages to make the illusion last right up until Yelena drops her bombshell.

“It was real. It was real to me! You were my mother, my real mother. The best part of my life was fake and none of you told me!” Yelena says, almost screaming the words, her voice breaking. Melina realises, eons too late, that Yelena’s crying. Looking at her feels like being stabbed in the stomach, so Melina looks down instead, staring at the remains of their dinner, at Alexei’s hands on the table, at the slight lump that is the knife hidden in Natasha’s sleeve. Beside her, Yelena takes a deep breath, clearly steeling herself for what she is about to say.

“Those agents that you brainwashed? That was me!” The words explode out of Yelena’s mouth like a snarl and finally, Melina forces herself to look at her. Yelena’s eyes are starry with tears, her cheeks wet, and suddenly all Melina can see is the little girl that she used to be, with chubby cheeks and curly blond hair, calling Melina from the kitchen to watch her do cartwheels around the garden, as excited as a gymnast at the Olympics.

She can’t breathe around the lump in her throat.

“Are you going to say anything? Are any of you going to say anything?” Yelena sobs. She slams back her chair and it sways, overbalances and crashes to the floor. She stalks out of the room and into the bedroom, shoving the sliding door shut behind her, so hard that the whole kitchen seems to wobble.

Or maybe that’s just Melina.

The silence Yelena leaves behind is deafening for a painfully long second before Alexei gets to his feet, running off some spiel about going to comfort her. He puts a hand on Melina’s shoulder as he passes, squeezing it gently. The message is clear: You didn’t know.

Melina looks up at him, quirking one eyebrow sadly. But I still did that to her.

Alexei leaves and she is left alone with Natasha. The silence is tense, curling around Melina’s throat like a noose as she folds her hands in her lap so Natasha can’t see how much they’re trembling. She is determined to keep up the facade, as unbreakable and cold as the callsign Dreykov gave her. She’s made of iron, after all.

Suddenly, Melina is very tired of playing Dreykov’s iron-hard puppet.

“You’re a coward,” Natasha says, very quietly. She gets up, heading for the fridge that hides Melina’s hidden treasure trove of weapons and tugging at the handle experimentally. “I’m taking your tech. Tell us where the Red Room is.”

“You wouldn’t survive! None of you would survive,” Melina whispers, too quiet and too little and always too late.

“I wish I could believe you cared…” Natasha starts to say, and then she stops, as though pulled up short by some unseen force. She’s staring at the photo album that Melina had put back on the bookshelf the night before. “You kept this.” Natasha’s voice is soft and bewildered, like she is mentally realigning how she thinks of Melina.

Melian feels like Natasha is holding her heart, like the ink on the photos in the book is her blood. She gets up from her seat, alone at the dining table, and walks over to face Natasha next to the bookcase.

Natasha’s eyes are wet and she stares at the pages of photos with a war of expressions raging across her face. She finds the pictures of the three of them, Melina and Natasha and Yelena, and runs a finger over Melina’s dark brown hair thoughtfully.

“What…” Natasha swallows, her voice shaking. “What happened to my mother? My biological mother.” Melina hesitates, the question unexpected, and Natasha’s eyes widen. “Please.”

“I believe a bargain was struck. She was paid off… But she never stopped looking. Eventually, she had to be eliminated,” Melina murmurs. Natasha ducks her head, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Why are you doing this?” Natasha asks. “Dreykov’s killed so many people. He killed her. My biological mother. Why are you doing this?”

“Why does a mouse run on a wheel in a little cage? Because it knows nothing else.” It reminds Melina of an experiment she once read about. Skinner’s rats, always pulling on the lever in their cage as long as it supplies them with food. And if Melina is one of Skinner’s rats then General Dreykov is the cat that lurks outside the cage, waiting for the rat to slip up, to try to escape, so it can be caught and the cat can feast.

Natasha nods, holding her gaze for a second.

“Maybe you didn’t have a choice. But you do now. Just tell me where the Red Room is, please, and we can stop him,” she says, eyes pleading, and Melina takes a deep breath, like Yelena had just a few minutes earlier, preparing herself to speak as the words claw their way up her throat.

“I’m sorry. I already alerted the Red Room and they should arrive any minute. But… I have an idea.” The words hurt to say, ripping themselves from her throat, but at the same time Melina feels exactly the same way she did after spending a week throwing up back in Ohio, when Alexei had tried to cook for her and ended up giving her salmonella.

It feels like she has rid her body of a parasite, like pulling a weed up by the roots.

It makes Melina feel lighter and freer than she has in years.