𝐒𝐔𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐎𝐕𝐀 | While the Winter Soldier was a ghost story, Nadine Ryker is a ghost. She's The Ghost. Her past is a mystery, her identity even more so.
Few knew her as Nadya Ivanovna Rykova, the lost recruit of the Red Room, never spoken of aft...
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Russia
Late Fall 1996
Despite the headache that pulsed behind her eyes and the way her muscles felt like they were cramping from overexertion despite having done little to work them yet, Nadya was alert and attentive. She had to be. Anything less was weak. Even the Treatment was no excuse for weakness. Far from it, really.
Anything less than perfection was considered failure. But she'd long learned how to suffer through. Headaches and broken fingers and cracked ribs were nothing to her now. She could hide it all, even from herself.
So when Madame B gestured for her and Inga to take the floor, her pale eyes lethal and cold, Nadya walked to meet the other girl as though her body didn't feel on the verge of rebelling against her. Each step was measured and easy, her breath coming in an even, relaxed rhythm. And before Madame B could say a word, Nadya was darting forward, hands and feet lashing out faster than Inga could track with her dark eyes.
But the other girl recovered quickly, retaliating in kind. She hit hard, and she struck fast, her heel connecting with Nadya's thigh with enough force she could have snapped the limb out from under her. But Nadya was faster, shifting her weight so the power transferred from the other girl's kick helped fuel Nadya's own attack, helping her twist and propel her body around and through the air to crash with precise efficiency into the dark-haired girl's torso.
Back and forth it went, both girls fast and clever, bodies lithe and honed into effective weapons. But Nadya was proving stronger, her strikes just that much faster, her blows—when they landed properly—just that much harder. Her acrobatics were fluid and swift. With one final, whirling tackle, Nadya sent Inga slamming into the floor with a violent crack, her knee digging into the centre of the other girl's back. Beneath her, the dark haired girl's breath wheezed erratically out of her, severely winded from being driven into the ground.
But she didn't finish it. She couldn't. It hadn't been an even fight. As much as Nadya knew she should, she didn't reach down and end it. Despite knowing that Inga was not the strongest of the older girls who remained, it sat wrong with Nadya to do it. It wasn't supposed to be a lethal fight today, not between the older girls. They were supposed to be able to fight until Madame B called time. Nadya shouldn't have been able to take Inga down as she had; she hadn't anticipated the degree of the Treatment's effects this time.
