A/N: A day may come when I'll stop being sidetracked from my other story obligations by these random Captain America ideas that pop into my head… but it is not this day. Minimal dialogue, lots of imagery/descriptive phrases, and no references to actual names. Yes, it's intentional. Also, quotes are from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men".
Disclaimer: I don't own anything having to do with Marvel Comics or any of its creations. I can only appreciate the characters they've given us to work with.
Red Room Lullabies
the eyes are not here
there are no eyes here
in this valley of dying stars
in this hollow valley
this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
They tell her it's dangerous for a covert spy to have something so noticeable, so identifying. Black, brown… even blonde would be better. But she keeps the shade nonetheless. It's a reminder, a vow, a sign to the one for which she waits.
Because she knows he'll come. Eventually, he'll find her.
He always does.
A girl runs from a burning building.
A man falls from a moving train.
Timbers groan while wolves howl with the wind. The devil's fingers are long, pursuing, flickering as they stretch out to leave searing kisses on clothes and skin, and the gnashing teeth that circle in the valley are red and white like blood in the snow, like splintered bone.
They both live – a girl reborn from the flames, a man remade in the darkness of winter.
They both die – an innocence charred from existence, a past buried beneath the ice.
He has the target and the location. The weapon is up to him.
There's anticipation in the preparation, an unparalleled thrill that accompanies the hunt, but his heartbeat is steady when the rifle meets his shoulder. Its weight is comfortable, the stock smooth against his cheek, the resistance of the trigger familiar.
The first lesson: breathe slowly. And the woman focuses on the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.
The second lesson: squeeze the trigger. And the woman looks to the finger tightening slowly around steel.
The third lesson: fire between one heartbeat and the next. And the woman turns to the target just as the gun fires, the windshield shatters, and the car veers into the ditch.
They trek back down the mountain to the rendezvous point. White dusts their clothes and hair, clings to their eyelashes, and when the sun breaks through the low-slung clouds, it reflects so brightly that he sees diamonds instead of snow.
Through the shimmering, he watches her. She steps carefully with an easy grace, practices her breathing technique even after an hour of hiking, and it doesn't matter that he's only been training her for a few days, he just knows. Like the blank spots in his mind that will never truly fade, like the icy bed to which he'll eventually return… he knows that she will be the crowning glory of the Red Room.
Perform, actress – fool them all.
Dance, tsarina – play the part.
There's a raise, a hold, a series of spins, and as the number of revolutions climbs higher, so does the volume of the applause. It's a direct correlation, and it's all so very, very simple. She's crafting the scene, setting the trap, weaving the web, and her prey is so enraptured by the dance that he doesn't even see the spider that approaches from behind, won't see until he feels the inevitable bite.
Always fooling the players and playing the game.
The world is a blur, an indistinct blend of awestruck faces and curtains, dancers and lights. They're cheering, showering her with praise as she twirls, but with every rotation, her eyes settle on the same point, the same blue eyes, at the back of the room.
He watches, evaluates, judges her first mission that's more than just reconnaissance or small-scale assassinations with an unreadable expression and a focus that gleams from the shadows.
And so the ballerina dances, the tsarina plays the part, the actress performs, and the Widow fools them all.
When he wakes, he's cold. When he hunts, he's cold. When he sleeps, he's cold. Always, always cold. The rime that isn't already embedded in his very cells hails on a bitter north wind, seeping through his skin and winding its way through his veins like a serpent, like a disease. It burrows into his bones, feeds on his marrow, takes up residence in the hollow space that remains. A never-ending chill, a layer of ice that just won't melt.
Sometimes, he wonders if he'll ever be warm again.
Sometimes, he forgets what it's like to have ever been warm.
Sometimes, he doesn't even know what warm means.
But she's warm, the woman. She tries to hide it, stifle it, bury it beneath layers of fine-tuned concentration, steely resolve, and a hardened exterior… but it's always there. Even when her skin is stained with blood and she smells of death and steel and gunpowder, it can't be contained.
In time, he sees it more. There's a glint that sparkles in her eyes as they spar, a smirk that plays at the corners of her mouth when she bests him… so many things that are miniscule and massive all at the same time. She's fiercely passionate, blazes white and hot, and he can't help but drink her in because in a world of dark, cold ice, she's air and light and life to his greedy, starved soul.
She likes the way the stone scrapes her back as it rubs against the wall and the hands that grip the backs of her thighs when her legs wrap around his waist. There's the sharp taste of iron in her mouth when she bites the inside of her cheek to remain quiet, and she knows there will be fingertip-shaped bruises on her hips the next day… but she just casts a furtive glance down the hallway to make sure they haven't been seen before claiming his mouth for her own once more.
He likes how she looks twenty-seven when they put him in cryo and how she still looks twenty-seven when they wake him nearly a decade later. It gives them more time… because he also likes the way she feels in the circle of his arms and the quiet sighs she issues when he trails his fingers down her spine before leaving in the middle of the night. More than anything, he wants to stay, trace her ivory skin and mark it over and over again as his, but they both know the repercussions if they're found. There's an added level of excitement that comes with taking part in something that's strictly forbidden, but even if there wasn't, he'd still come back to her.
The world is a monochrome shadow, all blacks and greys and whites. The floor and the walls, the ceiling of her bedroom and the blanket tucked under her chin, the room in which she trains and the knives in her hand. Everything, cast in a hundred thousand variations of the same color.
It makes things simple – if something's not white, it's black; if something's not right, it's wrong. There may be grey in the colors comprising the world, but there's no grey in the decisions she makes. She either does or she does not. She either can or she cannot. She either succeeds or she fails.
Blacks and greys and whites, all of them revolving around each other in a tempestuous display of sameness, and in the eye of the storm is the Widow. The Slavic Shadow. The Red Death. She knows what to do, understands what's expected… and in the greyscale universe, she does what she's told.
But when she dreams, she dreams in color.
Vividly brilliant, they tear the monochrome free from her retinas and replace it with hues so intense they burn into her very being. Green is the grass that pushes through the permafrost, blue is the sea that stretches out and meets in an indecipherable line with the sky, orange is the white-hot center of the flame, purple is the flower her father used to give her mother, yellow is the bright, bright sun.
There's red, too.
It's the hourglass at her waist and viscous liquid that coats her hands. It's the painted sky at sunset and the leaves on the trees when the seasons shift. It's his lips when they separate, the marks her nails leave on his back, the whisper of his breath on her skin, her cheeks in the aftermath.
It's the star on his arm.
It's the hair on her head.
It's them.
And she sometimes wonders if he's only a dream… because with all the color he brings, he no longer fits in the black and white life the Red Room has created for her.
"I'll never know why you take the chance."
Heated lips trace the seam where metal knits with skin, and she whispers…
"Because the reward is worth the risk."
"I'll never know why you like it so much."
Silver fingers card through and tangle in red hair, and he grins…
"Because I know I'll always be able to find you."
The weight of the past hovers behind his eyes, forty years of nothing suddenly replaced with… everything. Memories and faces and conversations combine in a dizzying whirl, and they're things he both does and doesn't know because it's difficult to find the line between what's real, what's a lie, and what's just his own imaginings.
And everything shifts so fast.
A group of men loiter on a dock, and in the background, is the smell of fish and sweat. A run-down apartment with peeling wallpaper, bars on the windows, and a leaky faucet that drips around the clock. A slight man with dirty-blonde hair, a kind smile, and a wracking cough. A shield, rimmed in alternating red, white, and blue with a star in the center that mimics the one on his arm. A lab, a red skull, a train…
Part of him doesn't know.
Part of him does know.
Part of him doesn't want to know.
Because if that's true, then the surgery and the wiping and the cryo aren't just a part of his life, they're acts that have been done against him, to him… erasing the things that made him who he was and reforming them into something else. A tool. A Soldier.
Her steps are light when she enters the room, but it only takes one look at his expression for her blithe comment that the target's been taken care of to die off. And then she's watching him carefully, like he's a bomb about to explode, like he'll crack and throw the jumbled mess of his past, all over the room at any moment.
There's a memory where the small man and he throw spaghetti noodles at the wall because someone told them they'd stick when they're finished cooking, and he wonders if his memories would stick to the grimy walls of the motel easier than they stick in his brain.
He shakes his head and tells her he needs to leave, that things are different and he can't stay anymore. But when he extends his hand and asks her to come with him…
She hesitates.
She breathes deep.
But her one halting step is too late.
The room is filled with dark-clothed agents that quickly subdue him and bring him to his knees, and in the split second before the butt of the rifle connects with his skull to knock him unconscious, he meets her eyes and tells her to run, to get out, that he'll find her.
And that's the exact moment she knows something really has happened… because even if a group of half-ass agents did manage to best the Soldier, he'd never implicate her in such a way.
Later, the directors tell her that it was a fault in his programming and that he's to be wiped. They question her, probing deeply with keen inquiries to reaffirm where her loyalties lie, to ensure that she hasn't been compromised, but while she answers, she remembers the black and white from before that's now interspersed with lines of intense, vibrant red.
They nod when she answers correctly, believing what they see on the surface. Inside, she smirks, because it's so easy to fool them all.
An actress at work.
A spider weaving her web.
Their hands are stained with the blood of many. It's the rotting scent of murder and sin, and the wages of sin is death. A priest once said that hell smells of fire and brimstone, that it's an eternity of suffering and ceaseless pain… but maybe hell isn't so bold and outright.
Maybe it's blackened soles as a girl escapes a burning building and the ragged edges of skin as a man lies in the snow.
A closed door and the quiet slip of a lock.
An intricate chair with faceplates that spark.
A red room.
A bed of ice.
If she could re-write their history, she'd have taken his hand without hesitation and run, left the snow-covered Russia and the crimson-tinted Red Room and gone somewhere warm, some place where the sun would instill color in her skin and chase the ice from his arm and his eyes, some place where the ocean was tepid and the air humid and the sky so, so clear.
If she could re-write their history, they'd have run a long time ago.
They are red, and they are cold. Fire and ice and the fire-hot burn of ice… and it's that burn that remains like a brand on their skin. It sears the surface and the outer layer peels away, but beneath is fresh skin, a fresh start.
They were just weapons to be used.
They were just children forced to grow up too fast.
But they are more than that…
When he disappears behind a layer of frost, she sets her mouth in a thin line of determination.
When she sets her mouth in a thin line of determination, she leaves.
When she leaves, she runs.
When she runs, she doesn't look back.
She thinks of islands and oceans and warm air, but outside, the blizzard rages, snagging the heat from her body and stinging her face. The ice-edge of the wind smells like metal. Like the knife in her hand. Like the hard glint in her eyes. Like his arm. It's only one tear that slips free to slide down her cheek. Still, it takes a moment to remember the sensation. But she leaves it there… feels it halt halfway through its descent, feels the burn as it freezes to her skin.
Its mark is a promise.
And she won't forget.
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a whimper
(Coda -
The years drag on, time passing in an endless song and dance, but through it all, one thing remains the same. Bright, vivid, the hue that catches eyes and draws stares. It's dangerous, but it's also a necessity.
A finger touches lightly to the raised spot on her abdomen, a mark from the one time she'd changed the color and been unrecognizable as she tried to protect her charge. Then, she brushes the decades-old scar on her cheek.
She needs her hair to be red.
Red like autumn.
Red like fire.
That way, the cold winter with its cold ice will be able to find its way back to the warmth. That way, he will be able to find his way back to her.)