Valeriya loved everything about winter, especially now that she lived in Russia.
She loved it when the snow fell from the overcast sky and a blanket of white snow covered every possible surface, she loved sitting by her little fireplace with a hot cup of tea, and she definitely adored wearing all of her cozy winter coats. The glacial climate had always brought her great comfort, rather than the irritating heat that summer had to offer.
Oymyakon, a small, Russian village inhabited by only a little over four hundred individuals, is one of the coldest places on planet Earth. With a permanently frozen ground and sunlight for only three hours a day during winter, the place looked like the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic movie. Stories were often told of the temperature once dropping to almost one hundred degrees below zero– but visitors never seemed quite surprised to hear this. During the brutal winters, villagers somehow lived off of reindeer meat and rabbit stew because everything else just died off. Most people did not own cars out of fear that the battery would just freeze or they would get in a fatal crash on the snow covered roads. Cell phones and other forms of technology didn't exist in a place like this; living in this village was like living on another planet.
If there was ever a place you wanted to go after faking your own death or even if you just wanted to fall off the face of the earth, Oymyakon was the place to do it. Everyone was too busy struggling to survive to give a damn about your background, what crimes you have committed, or even your name for that matter.
A clean slate.
That's what SHIELD had promised her after they tossed her away like one does with a piece of trash.
She couldn't quite blame them though– even she knew there was something wrong with her mind; some type of chemical imbalance that had been causing all of the dark thoughts in the back of her brain to surface. Natasha had noticed how her sleeping pattern became erratic, how she had gone eight months surviving on only an hour of sleep every night, sometimes no sleep at all. Clint would observe her on missions, watching silently as her dark eyes would gloss over and her mind went to another time and place. Tony and Bruce had noticed her dramatic weight loss and how every bone in her body seemed to become more and more prominent against her sickly pale skin or how she was drinking more alcohol than she used to.
People had started to look at her like she was a psychopath.
Who knows? Maybe she was.
Maybe she still is.
Certainly there were nights where it felt like her head was about to spontaneously combust- thoughts of malevolence and rampage lingering on the forefront of her mind. Never in her life had she felt such an overwhelming sense of bloodlust, the desire to make another human being suffer just like they had done to her once in her life was so overwhelming sometimes. Nightmares and terrors plagued her dreams; she could feel their hands all over her body, poking and prodding at certain areas, taking down notes whenever she cried out in pain or responded to a treatment in a peculiar way. She would spend countless hours thinking of all the ways she could kill those men; she wanted it to be as slow and painful as possible.
Yes, she wanted all of those men to suffer.
Valeriya Checkhov was not a ruthless person though.
In fact, she actually had a soft and kind personality compared to most SHIELD agents.
No, Valeriya did not take pleasure in killing people and whenever dark thoughts would cross her mind, she would remind herself that she was still a human being.
Despite what most people thought, she was an unbelievably emotional individual- or at least she used to be. She had been a skilled assassin and did her job effortlessly, but that didn't mean she was cut out for that life. Unlike many of her former comrades, she didn't have a cold personality and always let her conscious get the best of her. There were times where she would come back from missions and suffer in solitude, crying out in pain when the realization that she had killed another human being finally set in. Director Fury always tried to convince her that they had been the enemy and that they had been terrorists and murderers, but that never really eased the pain.
Was she any different?
Killing people was almost just as easy as breathing for her; doesn't that make her a murderer too?
Even now, as Valeriya walked the eerily silent streets of the little village, her mind was flooded with flashbacks of the incident that had landed her a life of complete solitude in the coldest place on Earth. She knew SHIELD would never take her back after the things she had done; those horrible things she had done- the crimes she had committed were unforgettable and unforgivable. Valeriya wished she would have been sentenced to death; it would have been a lot easier than dealing with the everlasting guilt and the hostile glares SHIELD agents constantly gave her.
She no longer had to worry about that though—it's not like she was ever going to see any of them again.
Valeriya stood underneath a dimly lit streetlight and watched as snow relentlessly attacked the small village.
It was quiet and peaceful though, the only noises coming from the wind rustling tree branches and her quiet breathing.
What a strange place to call home.
The Winter Soldier couldn't remember a time in his life where he had been so cold.
At this point, he was really starting to despise winter.
Though he knew he hadn't been born in Russia, he had definitely spent a lot of time in the vindictive region and knew just how harsh the climate could be in the winter- but this was different. Seemingly every muscle in his body was taut as he tried to warm himself up, even the sensors in his bionic arm were going into overdrive and he longed to find a warm place to sleep; but he had a mission and he had to find the familiar woman from his nightmares.
The girl with the sad eyes.
It had been the first time he was going on a mission on his own terms; he hadn't been ordered to eliminate anyone or bring them back to the Hydra base for interrogation, nobody had threatened to put him in a cryogenic stasis if he failed this mission, and he didn't have to worry about them wiping his mind anymore.
He was finally doing something for himself.
The soldier pulled his metal hand out of the pocket of his coat, observing the crumpled photograph that he had been using as a reference for the past seven months. A girl with blonde hair stared right back at him; her dark eyes seemed to contrast deeply against her pale skin and light hair. She had been with Steve Rogers that day in D.C. and every instinct in his brain told the soldier to kill her, and he almost had. Bucky remembered wrapping his metal fingers around her throat, watching with misery as she attempted to breathe as he squeezed the life from her. He had been incredibly frustrated when she didn't struggle against his grip; she had merely accepted that she was going to die because of him and she was alright with that. A part of him didn't want to kill her, but he had been ordered to kill Steve Rogers and anyone else that got in his way. He remembered hearing Captain America begging for him to stop as the light faded from her eyes, but he didn't listen. Her eyelids had started to flutter, the colour had drained from her face, and her bow-shaped lips were pulled into a pained grimace as a few tears slipped from her dark brown eyes.
Then the girl reached up and had touched his cheek with her cold fingertips.
He remembered.
Not everything, but enough to know that he had once known the girl and she held some significance in his long forgotten memories.
She had once worked with Hydra too?
James Barnes shook his head as the thought crossed his mind; he remembered the look on the girl's face when Brock Rumlow had carelessly tossed her into a cell across from his holding room. It was the same expression he had seen on many of his victim's faces right before he killed them- fear. That had been so long ago though, but Bucky couldn't be quite sure how long. Time had always been a foreign concept to him; ten years sometimes felt like ten days to the soldier.
But he remembered her facial features so vividly.
Even when they painfully wiped his mind clean, her sad face continued to haunt him nearly every day. It got to a point where he thought something was wrong with him; maybe his handlers weren't wiping his mind enough, maybe they needed to make the treatments longer and more intense, maybe he was just broken.
Broken...
How come he never forgot about her?
The Winter Soldier isn't supposed to remember things from his past, and he's definitely not supposed to have conflicting emotions.
There were nights where he would pass her cell, listening to her whimper and sniffle as she tried to contain her sobs; it was the first time the Winter Soldier ever felt guilt or pity for another human. She had been a lot younger back then, her cheeks had been a little chubbier and she had clearly been going through an awkward teen phase what with the metal braces attached to her teeth and the few blemishes on her chin and forehead. There was a certain innocence to her that just seemed so extraordinary in a dark place like that Hydra base and for whatever reason, it caused a dull ache in the soldier's chest.
James' head started to hurt as other memories resurfaced from the depths of his mind; they were awful memories and the girl with the sad eyes were in all of them. She had been screaming out for his help, but why? Were they hurting her? His eyebrows pinched together as he desperately tried to remember what Hydra had done to her. She had been so young at the time... Hydra wouldn't hurt someone so innocent just for fun, would they?
The soldier frowned and continued walking through the quiet village, focusing back on his mission. After showing the photograph to a few villagers, he finally got word from an elderly man saying she lived on the outskirts of the village in a small wooden cabin with a blue mailbox- that detail wasn't very important though, considering a heavy layer of snow and ice seemed to cover ever single surface for miles.
He made a left turn off the path he had been walking on and froze in his tracks.
James squinted his eyes and looked at the figure that was standing a few yards away from him, right under a streetlight- as if she wanted him to see her. She was tiny—more so than he remembered. He must have had a good ten inches on her and at least ninety pounds or so and she was quite thin, Bucky noticed. They were all characteristics that seemed completely opposite of an assassin and Bucky thought she looked rather… endearing? He advanced closer until he could see her facial features better, confirming that it was the same woman he had seen months before. Her hair was darker now and fell to the centre of her back in a thick french braid that she would occasionally pull over her shoulder and play with. The dark locks were nearly the same shade of brown as her eyes and she was certainly a lot paler now from the lack on sunshine in this part of Russia. His eyes scanned her mournful expression, noticing how she suddenly seemed more emaciated and exhausted than he remembered; the dark circles under her eyes left James with the impression that she hadn't been getting nearly enough sleep lately. They both had that in common and he knew that horrible memories must have consumed her thoughts at night as well, keeping her awake until some ungodly hour in the morning.
Despite living in such a brutal climate, she looked warm– like she was used to this type of weather.
Like she was especially designed for it.
James watched closely as she wrapped her fur coat tighter around her dainty frame and pulled the giant hood over her head; revealing a bow and set of arrows that were securely strapped to her back, along with a string of dead rabbits. The corner of his lips twitched in the slightest bit- clearly she wasn't having any trouble surviving all by herself, without SHIELD. She gazed up into sky, observing the dark abyss for a few moments before continuing her small journey back to her residence. There was something so graceful about the way she moved quietly through the snow; she still moved like an assassin, James noticed. Every step she took was well thought out and perfectly calculated, her head held high and her dark eyes searching for any targets even though she knew she wasn't going to find any. It was one of the many aspects of being an assassin—always being on the lookout for any suspicious suspects.
Bucky felt sorry for this girl, because as he continued to follow her in the complete and utter isolation that this village had to offer, he realized something that even made the Winter Soldier's heart ache.
Valeriya Checkhov was quite possibly the loneliest girl on the face of the Earth.