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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Novi Grad, Sokovia
Spring 2015
The lab wasn't as abandoned as he'd thought.
A breath of relief gusted out of Pietro as he caught sight of Nina stretched out on the cot in one of the isolation cells, still restrained despite the thick glass and her unconscious and obviously weakened state. But she was still alive; he could see her chest rising and falling with the same shallow, laboured breaths as earlier.
But as he forcibly moved himself past the thoughts that she had succumbed to the Sceptre's power, another thought hit him.
They would lock her up too, he realized angrily. Strucker had begun the experiments on her that had succeeded on him and his twin. It was still far too early to tell if they had taken—despite Wanda's insistence that they had—but the procedure hadn't killed her yet...so there was a chance that she was now just like him and Wanda: Enhanced.
She hadn't asked for it, hadn't volunteered like they had. She didn't deserve to be locked away and studied because of what Strucker did to her.
Pietro made his decision almost before he'd realized there was a decision to make.
In the space of a heartbeat, he had dashed through the lab to the bank of reinforced glass-walled cells, broken in to free the slight blonde from her restraints and, after carefully picking her up, was whisking her back out of the base and safely away from the Avengers.
Admittedly, she wouldn't exactly be safe—Pietro knew better than to think that; none of them would ever be 'safe' again—but she would be safe from falling into the hands of Tony Stark and the Avengers. And that was something.
In moments he'd reached the old, now abandoned, apartment where he and Wanda had been living before they'd signed up for Strucker's Experiments. It was one of the first places he'd visited during his unsanctioned excursions shortly after he and Wanda had been released from isolation, only to discover the whole building had been abandoned; condemned since they had left for Strucker's base.
