VENUS VADYAEVA. RED Room trained assassin, graduate of the Black Widow program. She'd nearly always been at the top of the class. Cold; smart; ruthless. The qualities that they were looking for. It'd taken a little while, but eventually, she'd gotte...
IT WASN'T GOING to be easy to get out, Venus had known that as soon as she'd helped Natasha and her SHIELD partner, but she hadn't expected her side mission to go quite like this. She and Natasha were crouching behind a car that'd been upturned earlier in the fight by a grenade, and she was shooting as many people as she could, the other woman's gun still on her waist. Venus wasn't sure if she should trust Natasha with it quite yet. She seemed completely focused on waking up her partner, shaking him and half-shouting words at him where he rested against the side of the car. Venus was trying to ignore it; she couldn't afford to let her concentration slip. If she did, all three of them would end up dead. Shot after shot, bullet after bullet met its mark, and it was starting to build up a ring of bodies in an arc around the front of the car, which she ducked behind every few moments so she could reload safely. The only problem with hiding behind a car in a firefight was that the fuel could catch on fire if someone got a good shot at the engine. But while that didn't happen, Venus continued to fend off the HYDRA agents, who seemed to be as effective soldiers as most typical basic-level security. In other words, not very effective, at all.
Natasha seemed to finally give up on Clint from beside Venus, who could feel the heat of the gun creeping in her hands, the recoil almost making her wrists ache. But she was taught, raised to ignore it, so she did. She didn't complain, she simply continued shooting, continued fighting, continued killing. She'd gotten out of the habit of hesitating years ago, not that she'd had much of a choice. She didn't ponder much on that either, didn't recognise that she was beginning to sweat, her wrists were aching, and her head was beginning to ring with the gunshots, and anxiety was starting to claw at the pit of her stomach, because she'd been raised not to ask questions. She'd grown up being told to follow orders, nothing more. But yet, here she was, fighting for her life to save a pair of people she didn't know. Yes, Natasha was a figure from her past, but what did it matter if the woman didn't remember? She needed to get this finished as quickly as possible. Every moment she waited, every second that her face could be caught on camera, could lead to her being shot the moment she arrived back in Russia anyway. If she died here or there, it wouldn't make much difference.
Venus ignored those thoughts. In fact, she barely realised she'd had them. All she knew she had to do right now, was complete her mission, and she set her jaw as she began to fire faster harder, reloading faster than she had ever in her life. Now, with every shot, a new HYDRA agent joined the masses bleeding out on the floor. Some of them were still alive, she could hear their pained yells as their teammates fell on top of their injured bodies, but she kept up the onslaught.
Instil Fear.
Venus clenched her jaw as the first set of words that had been drilled into her mind since she was 6 years old began to say in her mind. They were calm, clear, blank words, tainted with the slightest Russian accent, and they were the strongest thing in her head at that point, ringing out over the cacophony of gunshots that echoed in her head as well as in Budapest's night air.
Obey Command.
The second set hit her harder, and her fingers tightened on the grip of her gun, fingers whitening from the force of it, and if her mind wasn't so full, Venus was convinced she would've heard the metal creak. Those four words were the standard ones, pasted onto children's cartoons, used to subliminally warp the young girls' minds. But she had been a bit more trouble. She hadn't obeyed, at least to start with, she'd fought back. It hadn't worked out for her, and she'd been taken to the side for 'conditional treatment'. She remembered every detail of had happened as clearly as if it were yesterday, and the sentences they'd read to her, either in perfect Russian or that strange, lilting English.
Look at the mirror.
What do you see? Venus, in the beginning, had simply responded by describing what she saw in the mirror, but over time, had learned what they wanted her to answer.
'Nothing.' She'd said the one word in Russian at first, staring at herself in the eyes, until she'd seen fingers reaching for a gun behind her, and had quickly answered in English.
Nothing. It seemed to be exactly what they wanted to hear, because the woman beside her allowed a small smile to slip onto her face, and had removed her hands from the area where the gun rested, and crossed her arms, opening her mouth to speak once more.
What is your place in the world?
I have no place in the world. Her words were tinged by a heavy Russian accent that she'd only just started to shake at that point in time, but the finality, solidity of realising that fact as she stared herself in the eyes, had been enough to convince her of the fact, that her only ideals were to instil fear, obey orders, to kill without hesitation. But, they hadn't stopped there.
Are you ready to comply?
Venus stopped shooting. She hadn't faltered, or hesitated at the question that rung through her head, but she'd run out of people to shoot at. She turned to Natasha, who had one of the HYDRA agents' discarded guns in her hands, though she gestured to Venus, and asked in a slightly shaky voice,
"Can I have my gun back?" Venus didn't answer, simply pulling it out of the holster and held it out to Natasha, who took it. In fact, she was trying to supress a slight wave of genuine surprise at the sight of the gun. She hadn't got a good look at it before, but now that she had, she recognised it. It was her old one, that she'd given to Natasha on a mission while they both still worked for the Red Room, and it seemed that the woman hadn't gotten rid of it, even after a good few years of not her not having a clue who Venus was. Venus gave her a slight nod, and started to walk away, picking her way through the mess of tangled bodies that had built up on the side street.
"Why don't you come with us?" Natasha asked, and Venus turned around to see her standing with a slight frown on her face as she looked at the gun, switching her gaze to Venus after a moment.
"Let me know when you remember me. Then, maybe, I'll come with you." She turned again, and walked away, finally giving up her mental fight as she holstered her pistol and slipped away into the night, her swords winking slightly in the light of the stars. Her posture straightened slightly, and she let her face go completely blank, as effortlessly as if she was simply blinking. It was her own voice that ran through her mind this time, but how it sounded now, professionally calm and cold, with no hint of an accent, and the three words rang out in the sudden silence of her head as the ringing of the gunshots faded, the sound echoing around predominantly in the deathly still ruins of her mind.
Ready to comply.
{A/N:} Okay so this chapter really flowed, I found this really easy to write, probably only took me about 50 minutes. I actually quite like this one, so let me know what you think. I kinda involved her past more in this one, so let me know if you liked that.
I'm also doing pretty well with my catch-up chapters, I think I'm halfway through. I've got 1 and a half chapters for Point Blank and one for Trapdoor, so they should all be out quite soon.
Please vote and comment, let me know what you think,
1400 Words
Written: 04 / 01 / 2021
Published: 04 / 01 / 2021
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