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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Chernivtsi, Ukraine
Spring 2015
Natasha's patience was beginning to wear thin as Steve continued to insist she should stay behind on the Quinjet, something she was not at all interested in doing. It wasn't like it was bound to be a particularly dangerous mission anyway. It was just grabbing a guy who sat in front of computers all day and questioning him. If anything, she should be a crucial part of the plan given that she was the expert in interrogation and hacking. She wasn't even all that badly hurt, not really. It was just a graze, and the duration of the flight and the first aid she'd gotten had gone a long way to get her back into passible fighting-form again. But if Steve was one thing, it was protective of those under his command and equally protective of his friends, no matter how capable he knew them to be...and Natasha was both. She had to fight from rolling her eyes, nearly having to force herself to keep listening to him.
She glanced over to where Nadine was standing, deceptively casual in her stance as she stood near the bulkhead not far from Natasha and Steve. The blonde assassin's face was blank and calm. Not unexpected really, given the training Natasha intimately knew the other woman had received.
Natasha still couldn't quite believe Nadine was standing only a few feet from her. She was one person the redhead had never expected to see again. Sure, she'd hoped against hope that Nadine—Nadya then—hadn't died, but it had been simply too unlikely to believe otherwise. Graduation was something that was celebrated, Natasha having already known another girl who'd managed to survive training in the Red Room by the time Nadya had disappeared. So it hadn't been that. And there had never been any indication that the blonde recruit had deserted, much less eluded anyone sent after her.
But neither had there been a confirmation nor even specific mention of her death at the compound. They had just never spoken of her again. That in itself had seemed confirmation enough that Nadya was dead. A lack of any acknowledgement from Madame B had conveyed a certain knowledge and subsequent lack of concern on her part. As such, Natasha, like just about every other girl there, had interpreted their Trainer's ambivalence as closure. After all, it was how the deaths of the other two girls who had succumbed to the Treatments had been handled. So they all had naturally assumed the older girl had died, likely because of the Treatments, and that was that.
