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
Winter 1996/97
As Nadine lay back on her narrow bed, eyes sliding shut, the aches and pains she'd been ignoring all day returned in full force. It was bad enough that as she forced herself to relax, a pained whimper was startled out of her before she could manage to swallow it back.
Her entire body ached. It had all day. It had taken almost every ounce of concentration she'd had to make it through her dance routines first thing, her leg muscles trembling and cramping, muscle memory virtually the only thing getting her through the complex sequences. Her mind had felt like little more than mush as they'd gone through the day's chosen language tutoring; German today. Even their weekly session on Stealth and Covert Operations and Detection Avoidance Techniques was a struggle, and it played to many of her strengths; it was a good thing today hadn't been the Psychology, Dissembling and Interrogation Methodologies session—one of her weaker areas of study—or she might have been in serious trouble...certainly in more pain.
It had been the same with the training that had taken up the rest of the morning. By the time midday had come around, she'd already felt worked to the bone. Her head had been pounding in time with her racing pulse and that left her feeling dull and hazy, fighting back shivers that threatened to shudder across her skin. And the additional abuse her body had suffered during the daily sparring matches against first the other girls and then the Winter Soldier had only intensified it all. Bruises and abrasions littered her body, patches on her arms and legs quickly turning a deep, vibrant purple-black, their development accelerated by her faster than normal healing. Her cheek itched and ached, a deep scrape painted across her cheekbone from a particularly vicious kick from her remaining group-mate Katerina.
But all of it was nothing compared to the bone-deep ache suffusing her entire body with a brutal persistence. Even her throat still throbbed, the metallic taste still coating her mouth that always followed screaming her throat nearly to shreds.
But the Treatments were no excuse for not performing during their training. During her sharpshooting session early that morning, two of her shots had gone slightly wider than her typical pinpoint accuracy when her hands had spasmed; one of the many lingering after-effects, like her raw vocal chords or cramping muscles. It had earned a disapproving look from the old veteran KGB sniper the Red Room brought in to train the girls in distance sharpshooting. Nadya was his star pupil, even when fighting the after-effects of the Treatment, but that also meant he judged her against a far higher standard for it.
