Work Text:
The days are always busy—the kids have to be ready for the school bus, lunch boxes have to be packed, dinner set on the table for Alexei when he gets home, and lab results and data to be tallied in the evenings after the dishes are done.
Daytime is easy. But night-time is another story.
As a child, Melina had always been afraid of the dark.
Widow were supposed to embrace the dark, be married to the night. Staying hidden in the shadows would give you the upper hand. Widows were not supposed to be afraid of the dark.
But as a little girl in the Red Room, no matter what her instructors and her handlers said, Melina was afraid of it. Because night is when the monsters come out. Even though the dark hides her, it also keeps things hidden from her. The night means that she is alone, no matter how long or how hard she screams, cries, or throws up, no one will come and help her.
Sometimes she dreams of monsters who break into the room to eat her heart, and how she cannot get away because she is chained to the bed.
The acoustics of the academy distort the sound of girls screaming in other rooms. It is a haunting, terrifying sound that chills her to her bones. She doesn’t know why they are screaming. She doesn’t want to know.
As she grows older, the monsters begin looking more human. She can feel their cold hands on her, their touch lingers on her skin—as invisible as the pink circle around her right wrist is discernible—on her hands, around her throat, between her legs.
It’s no secret that Dreykov plays favorites.
The other girls notice too—she gets praise, more medical attention, she knows she has been spared where they would have been killed or experimented on. So they shun her, and she knows she cannot trust them with the little trust she has left. Being the favorite could get you killed by your peers. It is immensely isolating, and she’s tired of looking over her shoulder all the time.
And she wants to scream, scream that she does not choose to be the favorite. That they do not see how Dreykov looks at her like a hungry animal eyeing its prey, they do not see his fingers running through her dark hair, the way his hands leave bruises on her thighs.
But she doesn’t scream.
She’s learned her lessons.
The first time she’s cycled through the Red Room, her handlers say she has a mind of her own. The greatest fault a widow can have. After all, what use is a strong will unless it can be bent, and what use is an ingenious mind unless it can be controlled? Widows are Dreykov’s weapons, they are not to have their own schemes and thoughts, they are to follow commands and not question them. They put her brain in a blender, channel her brilliance into science and strategizing, and she excels.
The second time they put her through the program, it’s because she has a heart. The way she refuses to look her kills in the eyes, the way she hesitates before snapping the neck of a younger trainee, and how she cries when her hands are stained with the lifeblood of an innocent victim. The Red Room only rewards the heartless. They train her until she can kill without her hands shaking, considers it successful when she kills Olya, a nine-year-old Widow with bright blue eyes and flaxen hair and the brightest smile in the academy. Melina strangles her despite her gasps and struggles, watches as the life leaves her eyes and her little body goes limp, and doesn’t even flinch anymore.
The third time she cycles through, is because she dares to dream. She dreams of graduation, it is a glimpse of freedom in a sense, she’ll get to leave the Red Room, and maybe one day she can run away from all this. But her handlers see her wandering glances of longing at the people passing through the train stations when she is on a mission, how she is bold—or foolish enough—to thumb through the pages of a novel at the airport’s bookstore, the way she enjoys the music from a busker on the street in Italy—her first operation overseas. The small, tell-tale signs of a girl who has the audacity to think she can be anything other than a Widow. So they cycle her through the program again.
By the fourth and fifth times, she doesn’t ask why anymore. She’s learned her lesson. A Widow does not question her orders, so she does not protest even though every fibre of her being screams pure, unbridled fear. Fear because she knows the statistics—approximately one out of twenty Widows survive the training. Surely this time will be her undoing. Every part of her being does not want to go through it again, the beatings the sparring the training, everything. It makes her want to scream, cry, vomit, beg for mercy. But to do so would be a bullet through the head. When thrown into the water, one must choose to swim or sink. Melina chooses to survive.
And somehow, against all odds, she survives. She doesn’t know how. Her ledger is gushing red, her body does not stop aching, her demons still haunt her, but she survives.
Perhaps death is not a gift people like her are allowed to receive.
She has always wondered if it was a blessing or a curse. If there was justice in this world, surely she has lived past her time, girls stronger than her were already buried and rotting in the field behind the Red Room, so why was she still here?
It must be because she is cursed.
Why else was she supposed to live this long, just to be cycled through the program one more time, to have her childhood and then her womanhood stolen, for men to do what they want to her body, trained to be a weapon and not a person?
Perhaps she’s just a coward.
It’s not that the gift of death has been out of reach—she is surrounded by weapons every day, it is not hard to put her gun to her head and blow her brains out—it is only that she is too afraid to take it. For she knows that as soon as she dies, she may as well not have existed. She will be another mound of dirt in the flower garden, and even the flowers that will bloom bigger because of her bones will simply die the next winter. She will not have a stone with a name on it, which does not matter, because even her name is not her own.
(( What was her name before? She will never know. ))
Every part of her before the Red Room has ceased to exist. Perhaps in a way, she is already dead. For are you living if no one knows you exist and no one knows when you are gone?
So she builds a sarcophagus around her pain, her emotions, and her heart. She becomes the Iron Maiden, one of the finest from the Red Room program, works closely with Dreykov, and racks up hundreds of kills internationally. She is vicious, cunning like a fox, like marble—cold, beautiful, and formed through intense pressure. She buries herself in the lab, testing and creating new chemical compounds; she successfully completes each of the missions she is assigned without so much as leaving a fingerprint; she moves like a ghost through the nights she used to be so afraid of.
By all Red Room standards, she is a success of their program.
She arrives in Ohio, all of twenty-two years old, with her brilliant mind and a world-weary heart that has shattered so many times she can’t find the pieces to put back together anymore. She arrives in Ohio, with Russia’s strongest man and two Widows-in-training in tow. She arrives, feeling decades older than she actually is, yet deep inside, she is still the little girl who is afraid of the dark.
For when night falls, after the dishes are put away and the girls are sent to bed, she lies awake in bed next to Alexei, sometimes for hours, one arm slung over the headboard. She is unable to sleep in any other position, after all the years the handcuff is not just a shackle but also a security blanket. What keeps her chained and helpless in her bed also keeps her grounded as it rubs her wrist raw and the pain brings her mind back to reality. She almost misses it.
Alexei makes a joke about it once—surely it is an uncomfortable position. She merely shrugs and tries to laugh it off. She does not try to explain it, he will not understand, does not know what the Red Room is capable of. But he is right, it is not comfortable, and she often wakes up with pins and needles in her hand, yet there is some odd familiarity in it, a way of reminding herself that she is nothing more than the killer the Red Room trained her to be.
(( She is afraid that if she forgets that, they’ll remind her by cycling her through the program again. ))
And it is in the dark that she is unable to forget. On summer nights, in the humidity and warmth that she is still not used to in her first year in America, she finds it even harder to sleep. Images play over and over again in her mind. Dancing the same ballet routines over and over again until her calves screamed and her toes bled; filling targets with bullet holes before the paper targets became real ones with a bag around their heads; the fear she has to quash down every time the girls are made to spar to the death, and the sickening crack of bones that follow.
But most of all, she remembers the men that come into her room at night. The men that her childhood monsters have somehow morphed into. The way they put their hands on her body and use it like she is not a person, and it makes her feel sick.
She feels trapped under the covers, in the cloying heat and the panic and the cold sweat and it makes her want to run to the toilet and dry heave but she does not want to wake Alexei sleeping next to her because then there would be questions and answers she does not want to think about because he even though he is a super soldier he had a normal childhood with family and toys, not like her who grew up with guns and killing and does not even know her family or her real name.
No, he will not understand.
So she lies in bed, trying to regulate her breathing, trying to force those thoughts out of her mind, trying desperately to fall asleep. Sometimes when it is too much, she slips quietly out of the bedroom, bare feet silent on the wood floor, and pads to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.
Many times, she wants to replace the tea with the vodka they keep at the back of the kitchen cabinet, pound shots back until the alcohol burns her throat and helps her forget—but to do so would be slip, and the Iron Maiden is supposed to be stronger than that.
She sips the hot tea, sitting on the cool tiles of the kitchen, head against the cabinets. Sometimes Natasha joins her, probably plagued by similar nightmares, and it makes Melina’s heart clench to know the two girls in the next room will be going through what she went through for all those long years.
(( Hundreds of girls pass through the program—why does she care so much for these two? ))
They don’t say a word, neither of them trusting the other enough to share their deepest secrets yet. But they sit opposite each other in the heavy silence, as the steam curls up from their cups, and maybe it is enough, just to know that they are not alone. When the tea is gone and the chill from the floor has begun to settle into their bones, one of them gets up first to leave and return to the bedroom—generally it’s Natasha, but sometimes it will be Melina. It soon becomes a strange but oddly soothing routine, once, twice, and sometimes when it gets bad, thrice a week.
(( Years later, Melina would wish she had said something to Natasha on those nights. She knows they have so much in common, that the little redhead will suffer the same fate that she did, that no amount of words can heal that kind of pain, but she just wishes until her heart hurts that she had given the girl a word of comfort, let her actually know that she was not alone. ))
(( Instead, they sit in silence, knuckles white around the warm cups, like two ships in the night that pass each other on the vast ocean, until one gets up and returns to bed. Perhaps Melina is too much of a coward to say anything. ))
She’s a coward.
(( Natasha says the same, twenty-four years later, as they sit in the same positions at the dinner table in St. Petersburg. ))
Love is for children—it’s been drilled into her so many times. Love has only caused her heart to be broken.
She remembers Olya, the Widow-in-training she murdered during her second cycle. Olya was nine, and she was almost twelve. Melina would brush her beautiful blonde hair before barre, pin it up in a bun with no flyaways. Olya was like a little sister to her, and Melina would whisper jokes or words of encouragement in her ears when they passed in the dining hall or corridors.
And yet, in the end, Olya’s life would end with Melina’s hands wrapped around her neck. Melina would spend years afterwards convincing herself that she had been forced to do it—Madame B had threatened her with the barrel of a gun against her head. But even then, she’d had a choice. She could have said no, but she was just a coward, just too selfish to do the right thing. Perhaps it simply proved that the Red Room was right, she was nothing more than a trained killer, and never would be anything else. She was doomed to run this race, and run it she must.
Maybe that was the whole point of the training—associate love with so much pain and death that the girls would never dare love again. Melina certainly didn’t want to. She is sure that her heart died the same day Olya did.
(( She desperately wants to tell Natasha this when they meet all those years later, explain why she acted the way she did, tell her how she was too much of a coward to love again. But she cannot. Instead, Melina asks her, “How did you keep your heart?” ))
Teach me how to love again, she wants to beg whatever entity might exist, on the lonely nights when she thinks of the family and the life she never had. Oh, cruel fate, for making her become a mother when she never had one. To force her to show love when it has only broken her heart. Yet that same heart aches to love, because life without love just feels so empty.
Love is for children, she decides, but Natasha and Yelena are children, eight and three years old, despite the machinations of the Red Room and whatever fate they are doomed to after this mission is complete.
***
In the end, she learns that pain is the price she pays to feel. Even though it hurts and she cries and there are days she wants to give up, love is beautiful, and she learns to love Natasha and Yelena and Alexei with all of her broken heart.
She knows their time in Ohio is limited. The curtain will fall onstage, and after they have finished the show and taken their bows, they will be torn apart and her heart will be shattered again. But she is given a choice, and she takes a different one than what she was trained to—she chooses to love. She loves fiercely, knowing they only have a short time together.
It’s messy and painful, but it is real.
Maybe, in the end, that is what’s truly important.
After all, pain only makes you stronger.