Widow of Siberia

Chapter 3

Wet grassland dried out as they walked further inland. The Winter Guard were used to colder climates and walking through the humid gulf coast irritated them all. Small bugs bit at their skin and were swatted with fast reflexes the second their bites itched. 

“We need to get our bearings and establish a first step,” Dimitri said, large boots squelching through the mud as the water thinned, “Natasha and the others will not be easy to catch, let alone find.”

“We should get to the city,” Laynia suggested, floating over the mud to keep her boots clean as she stayed with the group, “there will be more resources.”

“You want us to walk into an American city looking like this?” Nikolai asked, glancing around at the five of them, only Dimitri and Mikhail wearing civilian clothes, the rest of them in their suits. “We'll be spotted straight away, Americans don't like Russians snooping around.”

“Then we'll be playing spy for a while,” Laynia smiled, laying on her back in the air as she flew, the dark force glowing around her, “any tips, Krasnyy?”

“I didn't hide in plain sight like the others,” Vienna said, squinting through the sun as it beat down on them. 

“But you're a Widow. I thought all Widows were the same,” Nikolai said, rolling his shoulder as he glanced over at her, “what makes you special?”

“I'm skilled enough not to get shot.” Vienna frowned up at him, the scars around her eyes subtler than when he last saw her face but still prominent on her face. She wasn't pretty like other Widows needed to be, she'd been told that for twenty years by Sidorov. Novikoff had said she had her mother's looks but she had no idea if that was a positive or negative thing. 

“So you can dodge a— never mind,” Nikolai said through a tight jaw, rolling his shoulders as he changed topics. “We need casual clothes, we can just change.”

“Into what?” Vienna asked, shaking some mud off her boots when they reached dry terrain. 

“You didn't bring casual clothes?” Dimitri asked with a chuckle as they slowed to discuss their current problem. “I thought you'd be the most prepared out of all of us.”

“I don't own any.”

“Not anything?” Laynia asked, touching her feet back down onto the ground as Vienna shook her head. “We'll just get something, Nikolai and I can go into the city first and bring clothes back.”

Vienna nodded in agreement as Dimitri settled their equipment down in the grass to wait. 

#####

Sitting on a duffle bag, leaning forwards onto her knees, Vienna stared blankly at the still grass. There was no breeze to cool the summer heat but the ocean air was cooler than it would be in the city. She should have slept more. Vienna felt like she was ready to collapse again, just shut her eyes and sleep on the floor. 

“So… a Red Guardian fan, eh?” Dimitri said, breaking the silence they had been sitting for nearly an hour. 

“Not really,” Vienna said, her eyes staying unfocused as she watched nothing at her feet. 

“Really?” Dimitri asked, glancing over at her as he lounged on the box that contained his Crymson Dynamo suit. “Because you nearly showed actual emotion back on the boat.”

Air filled her lungs as she took a deep breath. “My name is Vienna.”

“What?” Dimitri frowned, head turning to look at her properly at the sudden willingness to share. 

“My name is Vienna Retnikopf,” She told him, thinking about his comment about her not caring about the trust of her comrades. A name couldn't hurt. It wasn't like it meant much, other than a tie to some people. He had already seen her face. “I'm not dead.”

Studying her vacant expression, Dimitri watched her for a moment. “I can see that. A loose end fraying after all these years.”

A bird chirped in the distance, singing to the sea as the two Russian soldiers sat in tense silence. 

“How did you break the Red Guardian?” Dimitri asked after a while, “who ordered it?”

“No one,” Vienna told him, grinding the toe of her shoe into the mud beneath the grass, “he felt responsible for my pain. His heroic act of saving the little homeless girl was wasted when he saw how harsh the Red Room training really was.”

“Alexei wasn't stupid,” Dimitri said, watching her with a knitted brow. 

“Willfully ignorant,” She corrected, kicking out a clump of grass. “He wanted me to smile in my happy new life, but the Red Room beat me for smiling. I was a Widow, not a child anymore. So, to make sure he would still follow orders, they made him beat me.”

Dimitri swayed his head a little, weighing the decision up in his head. If it worked it would have distanced the two of them, but considering Alexei ended up in the gulag, it clearly didn't. 

“So what happened?” he asked, risking her anger to learn more about the Red Guardian’s downfall. 

“He was hitting me, I was crying like some kind of whimpering baby.” Vienna told him, half zoned out and just letting the story flow out with a bitter grimace on her face. “I begged him to stop, I would've said anything. That I'd be good, that I'd train harder. He snapped and punched right through the officer shouting at him to keep going.”

Eyes widened with a frown, it was like Dimitri couldn't avert his gaze from her. He had expected something dark, but somehow not like that. 

“A waste of a soldier,” Vienna mumbled, standing as she stamped her clump of grass back into the ground. “Sentimentality destroyed him, and it was all for nothing.”

Dimitri let out a gruff but quiet laugh. So that was where she got it from.