Cornelia Street - Avengers

Perfect World

"No matter how good you are, you can always be replaced."

St Petersburg, 2002

(The Perfect Girl, Mareux)

...

Alyona Krasnaya seemingly lived in a perfect world. She was utter perfection as far as the eye could see. She had two parents who adored her, who would lay down their lives for her, without a second thought. But everyone that she met instantly loved her too and would do the same.

How could they not?

It was a rare sight to see any children on a HYDRA base such as this, especially not a five-year-old child such as her. She was renowned for her beauty, luminous blue eyes and hair of fire, cheeks of lively rose as she would smile up at passersby. Alyona's hair often shifted colours, it wasn't of her or anyone else's doing, but by the seasons the colours and tones would change.

Born with mousy hair the colour of bark which had shifted into copper, the colour of their apartment's taps. But now it was fading. Fading into a pale red, like she had been kissed by sun rays and the gods themselves, her Mama would tell her whilst brushing her hair, singing.

когда она спит в мягком лунном свете, Это

это видение красоты, которое нельзя пропустить,

Моя драгоценная дочь,

дороже золота.

Пусть ангелы поют свой сладкий припев.

Пока она дрейфует в снах без оков, И пусть боги даруют свои.

Ведь в ваших снах все хорошо, шепот ангелов и поцелуй пламени.

Her innocent and inquisitive demeanour, accompanied by her placid smile put everyone at ease. Their sun, as she was affectionately called, for she brought the dawn into the Siberian facility, a place which had been devoid of colour and warmth since it's conception.

She didn't quite understand where she lived, why there were children whom she would be around for no longer than a day, and then never seen again. She didn't understand why she wasn't allowed to leave, and was unable to see the outside world like many around her. 

But to put it simply, she was told that it was to keep her safe, safe from the harms and dangers of an outside world that would stop at nothing to corrupt her and her innocence, one which had been so wildly protected since her birth.

She didn't know much about outside the base directly and couldn't recall its differences from any other home. They lived in Siberia she knew, but on the missions, she couldn't quite recall from her youth, she would be taken to and from the locations in black-out vehicles.

 In Siberia, it was cold most of the time, and their base was entirely underground, aside from their own apartment and exterior courtyard. Normally guards or training staff would step aside, or bow their heads as she walked past them in the hallways, smiling brightly.

But Alyona was naturally curious, she asked far too many questions, stared far too long at those who could stop her heart within an instant, and she even managed to coax smiles from those behind those barred cages. She wasn't defiant, she just had a mind ready to absorb information way beyond her years. And it was from here that she had begun her training.

Starting off easy, her Papa, Massimo Krasnaya, had begun with foreign languages, teaching her to speak the languages from waters far beyond Russian shores. Then began mathematics, writing, and geography, which then turned into weapons identification and bomb dismemberment.