𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐃𝐎𝐖 𝐖𝐄𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐑 | romanoff-barnes ¹

vii. | ЛЕЛЯ РОМАНОВА

FILE n°888 | SUBJECT RED
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hydra facility
siberia
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july, 2008

A year. It had been a year. A year since he had returned from his mission to find out they had taken her away from him. A year since he had lost everything again.

At the facility they still managed to use Sashenka against him, they still used her as a leverage.

"Soldat, yesli vy ne budete sotrudnichat', vozmozhno, nam pridetsya prekratit' zhizn' vashego potomstva"

Soldier, if you don't cooperate, we might have to terminate your offspring's life.

So, he cooperated. He killed. He interrogated. He completed assignments. All that, to keep the little red headed child safe for another day.

The Soldier didn't know where they had taken her. But he knew they were training her, making her more like him every passing day. A notorious assassin, a killer, a lifeless machine that carries out orders.

That wasn't her. It wasn't the daughter with the curious blue eyes that never left his lips when he talked. Sashenka wasn't a killer, she was just a child, a child who didn't deserve to have this broken shell of a man for a father.

Some nights, whenever the guilt would claw at his chest, and he would feel the walls of his cell constrict around him his mind would take him somewhere else. A place where Sashenka had been allowed to grow up in a happy family. Where she could have James Barnes for a father and Natalia Romanova for a mother. They would be far away from Siberia, in a small village in Russia where they could live in a small cottage. Natalia would take Sashenka to school, where she could have a normal childhood. She could have both her parents there when she graduated and make a speech in front of her classmates. She could have a voice.

He could be there when she got her first boyfriend. He could chase him through the house while Sashenka stared at them, mortified.

But this would never happen. He was a prisoner of his own mind, a soldier locked in a cell. Sashenka was somewhere out there, losing more and more of what made her innocent every second. And Natalia...Natalia was either dead or alive.

The Soldier's mind brought back the last moments he had ever shared with the mother of his child.

The last time he saw Natalia, was at the Red Room Academy in Russia, in 2002. It was the first day of the new spring season, on one of those frisky mornings where the sky was a soft blue colour, and you could see the flowers slowly blooming on the branches of the trees that were boarding the academy. The wet green grass was barely emerging from the thin coat of leftover snow that was too stubborn to melt, giving their surroundings a canvas-perfect air.

He remembered reading about what spring symbolizes in one of the few books he had picked up during his time at the Red Room. In literature, spring is a symbol of rebirth and renewal. Spring is a promise that everything can begin again, letting go and embracing something new. It is a transitional time of year, when the cold and dark dwindle away and the rains of rebirth fall upon the Earth. The light begins to shine brightly once more, animals emerge once again, and plants and flowers spring into bloom.

From what he had seen, this season's symbol was reflected in the change that the Academy's soon to be graduates would be experiencing in a few days. During spring, things changed around the Academy, for good or for worse. The graduates, like Natalia, would be going through 'the ceremony' that was necessary for them to take their place in the world. After that, they became assassins and were sent out on missions. Once they completed their first assignment, they would return to the Academy where they would be given an individual room that was only slightly bigger than a cell. They were locked in that cell during the nights, and when they weren't on missions, they trained the ballerinas and future assassins, breaking them down, layer by layer until finally there was only a marble statue left to work with.