History is a ghost story. My own childhood has passed into history, and the ghosts I find there are the ghosts of heroes and assassins and friends and soldiers. And sometime time cannot tick backwards.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Siberia 2002
The wastelands of Siberia were a fearsome thing.
Little Winter looked down at the grave, her heart a stone in her chest.
She thought about the girl in the ground, the Black Widow girl that had pulled Little Winter from her silent, personal hell.
The Black Widow girl was named Raisa Trotsky, and she was Little Winter's second best friend. Raisa said her first best friend was the sky. Because the sky was every girl's best friend. There were things the sky would tell a girl about herself that a friend would never tell her. Raisa said the sky was watching over Little Winter for a reason. Every lesson she would need to learn about herself was waiting up there in that sky, and all she had to do was look up.
She had been so quick to accept Little Winter, despite everything, training, the atrocities committed, telling her otherwise. She had followed Little Winter in danger, to try and save the Winter Soldier, because both girls new that even though death was bad, it was not the worst option out there. Their identities, their free will, removed with a simple voice command and the activation of decades worth of programing.
Fucken diabolical.
And the Winter Soldier had shot Raisa right through Little Winter as she tried to cover her.
Now, there was the grave. Everything about it was false, from the name listed on it to the name of the person who'd killed her. It looked very real, though.
Little Winter sank further into the snow, holding all the feelings behind her eyes. Little Winter, the mad girl, always hiding something. The red on her hands, her thoughts. Little Winter, burying dead bodies in the dirt and burying secrets inside herself. Little Winter, walking upright but buried deep in blood and bones.
She felt completely alone in the world, except for the dark nothingness that stared back at her every time she tried to connect her powers. More than anything, she wanted a figure to appear out of the falling snow, for the Winter Soldier to track her down and finish her for real this time. Or to get him out, to save him so this whole mission wouldn't be in vain. All she could do was what she had decided to do: go to ground.
Her white clothing camouflaged her into the broad, flat plain around her. She was surrounded by nothingness, the only change in the land's barren features was the mountain range far in the distance. And the sky here was different—an impossibly vast grey-blue.
She stood quickly and resisted the urge to pick up Raisa's belongings from the ground. They must be left there, memorializing the girl they were recorded as having killed, a trophy for the coming Red Room and HYDRA agents to find.
And they were coming. Little Winter could feel it in her bones. She placed a hand on the grave marker and allowed herself one more moment to think about the girl who was buried there and about the girl who wasn't.
With determination, she let cosmic energy serge through her. She stopped looking for people she might have known once before through the connection they shared. She stopped remembering the girls in the Red Room, alive and dead.
She let herself hover in the air for a moment. She wondered what she would say when she got to a new town, and someone asked her who she was. She knew her name was on a list of criminals and monsters. There was never any safety in the name Little Winter.
Not that she had any other name. She might have, once, but it was so long ago she couldn't remember. Maybe she did have a name, but it held so much weight she didn't want it.
Maybe the sky would tell her.
Meme of the day
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
