The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 14

Russia

Winter 1996/97

Sleep had eluded her as restless anxiety kept Nadya's mind from settling. It was why she found herself in one of the mansion compound's nearly forgotten rooms on far end of the third floor, sitting with her knees hugged to her chest, ignoring the cold that seeped through the old paned window she was looking out of. It was too cold for snow, and there was a harsh sharpness to the moonlit landscape of the winter night that suited Nadya's current mood just fine.

The torn, fretful state her earlier encounter with her Training Mistress had left her with refused to abate. It certainly didn't help that, anytime her memory came close to reviewing precisely what she had all but been ordered to do, her anger and agitation came back in full force.

She fully intended to defy their wishes. She might have been raised to be morally flexible, but that didn't stop the whole situation from sitting wrong with her. But then, she was finding that was happening more and more frequently in the Red Room as she began to see past the indoctrination and conditioning to be blindly obedient to orders built into her training.

Her troubled thoughts were one factor of many that had led to her slipping from her narrow bed, leaving behind the rows of identical beds and their sleeping occupants for the sanctuary of the abandoned room that had served as her temporary refuge many times in the past.

Another was born out of the very distracting set of memories that revolved solely around the Winter Soldier. She couldn't get him out of her head and it was driving her to distraction. Her body remembered clearly the way he'd touched her up on the roof, winding itself tighter than a bowstring with want as her subconscious worked hard to wake the desires she'd been trying so hard to suppress, trying to stir the heat beneath her skin again. And she easily remembered the way he looked at her; she could have sworn there was something there that hadn't been up until then, some trace of humanity—even a trace of who he'd been before—that had managed to survive against the concerted effort to erase it completely.

But when she encountered him the next day, it was as though the incident hadn't happened. He was just as blank and uncomprehending as before, paying her no greater mind than he had any other day in the couple weeks he'd been working with them.

A faint sound jerked her from the pair of vivid memories that had been trying to reassert themselves; the memory of his mouth on her skin, his hard body flush against hers...and the memory of Madame B's blunt, withering assessment of him from that afternoon, the words echoing through her thoughts: It defies his purpose for him to exhibit any trace of freewill. The point of the Winter Soldier's programming is to erase everything that was there before, to leave only the perfect soldier behind. He can exhibit no true freewill because there is no freewill left in him.

Knowing what would happen were she to get caught out of bed, she pushed her thoughts aside, unfolding herself from her perch and slipping toward the door, careful not to make a sound as she did so.

It was then that she caught sight of a cot tucked away in the far, shadowed corner of the room.

It pulled her up short with confusion; this room was rarely used, and yet now it was a place where someone had been assigned to sleep, a set of makeshift quarters? A shiver of unease went through her as the back of her neck prickled with the sudden sensation like she shouldn't be there.

But just as she was about to move, a hand closed around her arm, pulling her back...a cool hand. A metal hand. She whirled around, instincts surging forward to lash out with a strike that would have been too fast for any regular person to react to. The Winter Soldier was far from a regular person, though. With an almost lazy gesture, he caught her fist and turned it aside, effectively trapping her against him as he did so.