verb.
To fall back under pressure. To shrink back physically or emotionally.
noun.
The kickback of a gun upon firing.
•
It takes a stubborn mind to cling to their humanity when the world seeks to strip it away.
It takes a desperate soul to reach f...
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1989
Siberia, USSR.
The low, static crackle of a radio that echoed through the room was interrupted by a heavy thud, the action granting a moment of silence – followed by a few indiscernible notes of music – before the crackling resumed.
If the click of the power being cut to the device didn't betray the user's frustration, the long, weary sigh that followed certainly did. It was no surprise that the workshop she sat in, buried beneath several hundred feet of concrete, received little to no radio signal, but the young woman had hoped to be able to pick up something that would cut through the silence of the room. She wasn't desperate enough yet to listen to the static.
It was cold. It was always cold. Any warmth generated by either her body or the clunking electric heater beneath her workbench seemed to be leeched away almost instantly by the grey stone walls or the heavy steel door to her back.
"Should have stayed in St Petersburg." She grumbled to herself, her breath misting in front of her face as she turned back to the task at hand. She didn't mean it though, not really. Outside the facility walls, miles away in the cities she had left behind, the Soviet regime she had been raised under was rapidly crumbling. Power was changing hands, lines were being redrawn, but inside this concrete labyrinth none of that mattered, and it was a welcome reprieve. Flexing her stiff hands in their fingerless gloves of grease-stained wool, she lifted the fine screwdriver she had set down when she had turned to thump the radio and resumed her careful examination of the small device before her.
Skilled fingers roamed over the sleek temperature regulator, as she held it before her eyes and watched as the digital display fluctuated between declaring the miserable temperature of the workshop and jumping up a few degrees each time she breathed near the sensor. She had been called down from her office to examine it that morning, though it wasn't her usual fare. Transport and weapons maintenance were closer to her job description – this was technology beyond anything she had ever studied. Even this workshop was a few levels below where her clearance usually allowed her in the facility. She hadn't yet gathered the courage to try the keypads that guarded the reinforced cabinets on the other side of the room.
Still, she knew her role. And she knew her place – and that place wasn't to question a task set before her.
It was some time before the grind of the automated lock on the door behind her jolted her out of her focused headspace, the sound of two sets of footsteps approaching just as she was sliding the covering panel back into place on the regulator.
"Hail HYDRA."
"Hail HYDRA." She echoed in response to the dual greeting, rapping her knuckles against the panel to make sure it was secure.
"Progress report, Katrina."
Pushing herself up from her stool at the workbench, she turned and clasped her gloved hands behind her back, smiling at the uniformed man who had addressed her, but not offering the same expression to his grim-faced companion, dressed in the same uniform.
