Prismatic ⇒ Avengers [ 2 ]

Ivanna

Walking through a crowd of ballet dancers is a really good way to discover that you have zero grace, poise, or balance. Or perhaps it's a bad way- despite sticking to the wall like glue, I almost collide with several of the dancers as the music abruptly halts.

Aleksander, dimple boy, is talking to the blind pianist, his mouth inches from her ear. Surely he doesn't know who she is- who she was. The things she did are mostly classified, and Natasha won't talk about it, but I know enough. It makes me sick that she's still here, sitting on a mountain of blood and sacrifice.

Does she smile at the little girls? Does she tell them that they're going to be the best?

Her name is Ivanna Draco, and she looks like a skull. It's the sort of face that makes you fear ageing- instead of kindly wrinkles and graceful years, her hair scrapes her face back into a mould, rigid and tight, and her thin mouth looks like a slit in her face, a gaping wound smeared red. And her eyes- she doesn't wear glasses, like Matt does, and when her head raises, her eyes are cloudy, milky white.

Christ.

The sound of the dancers' leather shoes on the floor makes a soft, dappled sunlight colour on the sprung floor as they shuffle around, moving into a formation that wouldn't be out of place in the military, waiting with their heads raised for the music to start again. It doesn't.

Ivanna Draco rises from the piano, her clawed hands reaching out for her walking stick propped against it, and grasps at Aleksander's wrist, pulling him towards her and saying something I can't hear, from my position across the room. He nods once, and crosses the room as she hobbles towards another door, her movements painfully twisted. It's impossible to believe that she once wielded the power that she did, seeing her so old and helpless. Her hands once broke backs. Now they're playing the piano for the most delicate of arts.

It makes me feel sick.

"She will meet you in the other room so you can talk." Aleksander says, practically skipping over to me. There's so much spring in his step it looks like he's about to take flight. "I have to rejoin my class- maybe I will see you after?" He adds hopefully, his velvety voice rippling.
I smile weakly. "Maybe." I agree, my eyes flitting towards the door. It feels like the pressure on my shoulders is rising, threatening to crush me. My tongue suddenly weighs a tonne, and the rest of my mouth is so dry I keep my reply to a single word, for fear of my voice cracking.

My eyes fixed on the door, I step past him, crossing the wooden floor as if I'm in a dream. All this time, all this effort, has led to the woman behind that door. A woman that trained Arachne Alkaev, who probably knows her better than anyone else on earth. If anyone knows how to bring her down, it's her.

As I reach the door, I wonder at the fact that most of the people involved in the program- at least, the ones that are still alive today- are women. Natasha, Arachne, Ivanna- and it was the Black Widow program, a spider mostly associated with the female gender. The Red Room didn't allow boys- and I suppose when it started, that was because spies and assassins were nothing but boys. A female killer would have been unheard of, and even now I know that we are constantly underestimated as a gender.

I am delicate, I am fragile, I turn into a monster that can rip your body limb from limb.

But the majority of the Red Room women are gone, assassinated, killed after the collapse of the whole regime. A whole breed of killers wiped out, with only a select few survivors wily and cunning enough to make it out alive. I wonder, not for the first time, how Natasha feels- that she isn't alone anymore, that she never was. She must have thought she escaped her past, and now it's back in the worst way possible.