NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE ∙ Peter Parker

☆ ✸ ☆ 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓-𝐈𝐅...? ☆ ✸ ☆

"Pull up all connections to the deserters."

Dreykov watched their names come on the screen, profiles side-by-side. Instruction of destruction. That was the work the Red Room did. Elizabeth Carter knew the Red Room as long as one could know it, just as it knew her. Her history was extensive and started before she was even born with the infamous Peggy Carter. The Red Room and HYDRA had been long-time affiliates, and when they were first notified of a Sharon Carter being born as the first girl in the Carter bloodline, alerts went off. They could have taken her; they would have tried, but the Red Room knew she would be defective immediately.

So they waited, and a second alert came out about an Elizabeth Carter being born in Brooklyn, New York to Michael and Sophia Carter. Four years after her sister, Dreykov went through the same procedure to identify her potential. He decided on her third birthday that she had a destiny to be his. At four, she became a new person. She excelled at everything from a very young age. Elizabeth Carter was specifically chosen—she was specifically taken, as she was genetically built for a life of training...a life of perfection. Dreykov gave her that.

She was thirteen when she killed a person for the first time. It was praised afterwards by her instructors, telling her that she was on her way to being a prime contributor to the Black Widow Ops, a smaller association driven by the most viciously trained of young women. When she was fifteen years old, she had murdered a total of twenty-three strangers, and five other girls in her class during a 'kill-or-be-killed' match. The Academy continued to give encouragement through brutality, though, which ended with her graduation ceremony. The ceremony was anything but congratulatory. She graduated prematurely and found herself working in controlled, experimental missions alongside a various number of Widows.

Partnership was an evolution of Elizabeth Carter's life in every variation of timeline. Each have been different. In some, she saved the world alongside her partner, Peter Parker. In others, she conquered the world with Loki Laufeyson by her side. All have been special, and not every one has been happy—but I must not intrude, I must only Watch as a woman is born into a multi-verse of purpose—a multi-verse of partnership.

"Agent Carter. Meet your new partner, Agent Belova."

They were opposites in every form. Elizabeth Carter was three years younger than Yelena Belova, but had been among the first of the Black Widows in her class to migrate into higher ranks. Partnership was her asset. Yelena Belova was a defect, swept off the streets and instantly placed into an undercover mission when she was a child. Innocence built inside of her long enough that she was defiant and that meant eyes were on her constantly. There was no pure excellence, but control—proving that she was the strongest through every pain they put her through—and because of that, she moved up. She graduated. She began her life as a Widow outside of the Red Room, a Team Leader at nineteen of a congregation of specific Widows.

Specifically chosen. Names built from a list, gone through every analytical process, and every rate of error, until the official report left Dreykov with a partnership unlike any other between the two women. Perhaps there was more to it than an indestructible, killing machine in the form of two assassins—something more volatile, in an attempt for a perfect creation of one singular individual. One that had not been attempted before in human subjects.

"I do not do partnership," were the first words twenty-year-old Yelena spoke to a seventeen-year-old Elizabeth when they appeared on their first mission; that was their first moment alone, without the training, without the prying instructors, without the experiments on a train to kill a government official. "This mission, we show we can work alongside one another, but I do not want to be chained to you. You'll only get me killed."