RED IN MY LEDGER.

After All

Natalia has no orders to eliminate the child, only it's father. A bullet to the head while he sleeps in his bed. The child wakes and screams.

"Не смотрите, ребенка. Все это скоро закончится." [Don't look, child. It will all be over soon.]

That night she dreams of a different time. In this dream she is young, before the Department X and the Red Rooms and Black Widow. Before learning how to shoot a man in the chest to guarantee immediate death and how to throw seventeen types of knives at moving targets. She is young and with a woman who must be her mother. There is a street, a snow-covered street. And a soldier, an old man, a gun.

Don't look at the blood, Natalia. Don't look at the body. Keep your head down. Look at the snow. Look at the snow. A gunshot. A scream. The snow, Natalia, the snow. Don't look up. Footprints in the snow. Bloodstains in the snow.

(There's the thing with humans: no matter if they're black, white, or yellow; they always bleed red.)

Natalia remembers being haunted by the image of the old man lying spread-eagled in the cold, blood seeping from the bullet wound in his head. She could have no idea of the things she would see in the years to come.

The Red Room comes after that. She learns to fight for the Motherland. Learns her way around knives and guns and lengths of wire until they fit in her hands like gloves. Learns how to slice a man's trachea in one simple move, how to use her body to gain information, how to walk silently on the balls of her feet, how to speak accentless French, German, English. She learns that the Americans are the enemy, not to be trusted, much less loved.

Then they bring in Codename Winter Soldier. He fights against her in a ring while her superiors watch on, looking to see if she will fail. If he will break her collarbone before she can catch her footing, or, if by some miracle, she survives. She surely can't beat him, no, of course not, because she is a fifteen-year-old girl and he is a soldier - a machine - with a metal arm and years of combat training.

She can't outfight him, but Natalia knows she can outwit him. She does. Stares at him a little too long, catches his gaze. (Even at fifteen, she is beautiful, and he sees this. He is barely human, but he's not dead.) Quirks an eyebrow, then vaults over the top of him, removing the gun in a holster on his back as she does so. It all happens in a fraction of a second, and he barely has time to turn around before she's facing him with a gun raised to his forehead and a self-satisfied smirk on her face.

"я думал, что ты лучший?" [I thought you were the best?] she says.

The Winter Soldier replies with a grimace that almost looks like a smile. For the first time, Natalia sees an emotion in those dark eyes of his. She sees pride. Yet he knows she can do better.

She does.

Two years later and she meets the Winter Soldier again. He has been sent to train Natalia and twelve other girls. One of them will become the Black Widow. Natalia is determined that it will be her.

They spar like last time they met, but unlike the previous occasion, there is no guard standing over them, no commander to impress. It is just the man with the metal arm and the girl with the red hair.

His dark hair is longer than when she last saw him. It looks like it's been cut with a shaving razor, the way it falls jaggedly into his eyes. She has a fleeting thought that it should really be cut by someone.

He looks at her with human eyes. He sees her like he did for that one brief second all those years ago. There is pride in his eyes when she slides underneath his legs and manages to disarm him at the same time. Slips the two knives on the inside of his left leg out of their holders and waits on the other side of him, posed with the knives twirling around her ring fingers.