OOM: Moscow, USSR, January 1948

[redintheledger]

The gloves are heavy. They fit well – they should, the lab assistants took her measurements often enough – but they are heavy, and rub against her stitches when she moves.

Natasha's trying not to move. She's wearing electricity generators; not moving sounds like a plan.

“Um, Comrade Doctor? How do I turn them on?” Or off. Off sounds very important.

“The implants in your wrists, they are attached to nerves. The same mechanism that allows you to move your hands, your fingers, it will turn on the weapon. Try. But don't touch anything,” the little man adds, alarm colouring his normal impatience. “Point your hand at the wall, and activate with it with your mind.”

She doesn't look at him dubiously, but only because she's had a lifetime of learning that's a very bad idea. Instead, she looks at her left hand. A heavy black glove with lines running from her knuckles back towards the ring of metal around her lower arm. The connected pieces look like long bullets, and she has utterly no idea how any of this is supposed to work.

Orders are orders; she lifts her left hand, and points it at the wall.

On, she thinks.

Nothing happens.

Activate- no, he said my mind.

My mind.

She shuts her eyes, breathes slowly, and thinks. Slowly, pointedly thinking about it, she curls fingers in and out, one by one. She thinks about the bones in her hand, in her wrists, she thinks about the orders from her brain travelling down her arm to the tips of her fingers. She thinks about the glove, and electricity, and the glove glowing blue, and electricity criss-crossing her hand, and-

“Ah! You see, it works,” the doctor says, pleased, and she opens her eyes. The lines on the glove are fading, so she thinks, blue, blue, blue, currents from my brain to the glove and staying blue, and she gasps a laugh as the lines light up again.

Glowing blue, like he said.

Dark, dark, dark and cold, release, relax, what the fuck ever is going to turn it off, relax...

As the lines fade back to dark, she permits herself a smile. Just a little one, and she suspects it's more wobbly than pleased, but no one died, she's still standing.

“How high does the voltage go?” she asks, turning her head to look at the doctor.

Gunshots interrupt his answer. Then some more, too close to be the same person.

Romanova (not Natasha now) glances over at the doctor, and for the first time since she met him, she thinks civilian.

(To be honest, the first time she met him, she'd thought, fucking Nazi. 'Civilian' is an improvement.)

“Wait here,” she says, and makes her way quickly over to the lab's door.

“What!” He hasn't moved, and yet everything about him gives the impression of flailing helplessly. “Where are you going?”

Romanova smiles, and he flinches slightly. “My job,” she says brightly, and – taking sensible precautions – moves out into the hallway.

The columns framing the doors and corners aren't quite big enough to completely shield her, but they are better than nothing.

“Dunya!” the voice – young, female, Bogomolova (Marisha) – echoes through the hallways. “Dunya, please, sto-”

Romanova doesn't startle at the gunshot, but she does feel the cold start of anger. Anger enough to swallow whatever admiration she'd had of Dunya. Kaminskaya. Kaminskaya, who is an active threat.

“Natasha? Natasha, are you there, quickly, we need to go.”

Kaminskaya sounds sincere, panicked. Romanova stays where she is, listening for footsteps.

“Natash-”

Romanova lunges forward, grabbing Kaminskaya's arm to haul her forwards into her rising knee.

Kaminskaya throws her back into the wall without taking a step.

Romanova only just keeps her head from cracking against a door column, and uses the curved wood to pull herself out the crumpled heap she'd landed in.

“Uh-uh, stop moving,” Kaminskaya says, too calm for the way she smiles. The dark-haired woman is vibrating with energy, and there's a berserker’s light in her now oddly coloured eyes. Her skin is streaked with grey, and her face...There is something wrong with her face.

She points her gun at Romanova, but doesn't pull the trigger.

“Where's the little Nazi doctor?”

Probably barricaded himself in, Romanova thinks. “Why?” is what she says, trying shift her weight without being seen. Her back and arm are throbbing, but nothing's been broken or overly bruised. But she'd been thrown into the wall, how the fucking fuck had that happened.

“You can't trust him,” Kaminskaya says, overly sweetly, like she's talking to a small cousin from the Urals. “You can't trust any of them. Tell me where he is. Don't get up!”

“If you had any bullets left, you'd have shot me like Marisha,” Romanova replies, getting to her feet but otherwise not moving forward. Normally, she'd just attack, but with whatever has happened to Kaminskaya, she doesn't want to chance it until she has something to back her up.

Blue, she thinks.

“Bogomolova's a traitor,” Kaminskaya says, as if it's the most obvious fact in the world. “Can't trust people who are protected by the system.”

Blue, currents from my brain, blue, come on...

“Protected? I thought you just said we couldn't trust the Germans, now we can't trust our own people?”

“Oh, our own people. Turn on each other like starving wolves, and I had to escape wolves, Romanova. We got evicted, we had to walk hundreds of miles, just my little brothers and me, you know why?” Kaminskaya is shaking now; her words coming too fast, lacking in her normal knife-sharp coherence. “They called my parents kulaks. Kulaks! They'd done nothing wrong, but that's what this what happens, people get marched away, lined up and shot and buried where they fall, and the party officials just need to fill in their little quotas and oops, your luck's run out.”

For a moment, Romanova stares at her in horror, entirely distracted from attempting to get the electroshock weapons working. You don't say things like that. Not ever. And in a building run by the NKVD?

You don't even think it.

Hell with these stupid bracelets.

Romanova lunges at her again, diving low to shove Kaminskaya off balance. She's heavier, solid, like a person several times her mass has been condensed down into a slender form, but Romanova manages to get her to stumble.

It's a short-lived victory.

Romanova is unarmed, which shouldn't be a problem; she's trained in unarmed. So is Kaminskaya, and their first training ground was the war. They bite as much as they punch, twist joints and grab at each other's hair as a handhold. They're both vicious, but normally, Romanova's better.

But again, and again, Kaminskaya throws her off. She slams her against the walls, lands punches that should break her body if Romanova hadn't been enhanced herself. Kaminskaya throws her into the floor, and it's the floor that does it.

Pain spikes out from her ribs, and just trying to roll over makes things pull, stab, pinch. Not that she's given much time to asses the damage. Kaminskaya hauls her off the floor. Bones grind in her ribcage, and Romanova shrieks.

Instinctively, she grabs Kaminskaya's wrists. Stop, stop, fucking stop, hurt you I'll hurt you I'll make you stop fuck off stop!

Her gloves light up.

Blue light crawls and lashes its away from her hands across Kaminskaya's arms, and the woman goes rigid. Kaminskaya's eyes and mouth are wide as she starts to convulse, her fingers tightening in Romanova's shirt as she falls, dragging Romanova with her.

Romanova screams as she falls on top of her. She lets go once she can manage the thought, and tries to wrench Kaminskaya's fingers off her. She has to break them to do it, trying not to gag at the smell of burning flesh as she does so. She awkwardly manages to kneel, still trying not to look too closely what she's done. She'll start to vomit if she does, and her ribs-

She chokes back bile, pressing her arm against her mouth. Not her hands, her hands are still blue. Hands, not gloves. Whatever containment the good doctor designed aren't working, because the lines of electricity seem to be doing what the hell they like. She screams at them in her head (stopstopstoprelaxdarkandcoldpleasegodstop) and nothing happens.

The doctor.

When she was a little girl, Natasha would visit her mother in the laboratory. The scientists there knew things. They know things. And he designed these.

She doesn't like him, she's never liked him. He's patently insincere, and the only thing she associates his accent with is death and swastikas. But he's a scientist. He designed this, he knows this, he's the only one there.

Her hands are still glowing blue, and through the pain of bruises and sprains and possible fractures, she can feel her body tingling. Not bothering to hide her childish whimper (even if someone was watching, she's beyond caring), Natasha manages to get herself to her feet, and stumbles back down the hallway to the door she'd left.

“Please,” Natasha hears herself say, “how do I turn them off?”

There's no reply.

“Comrade Doctor, please.” Help.

She rests her head and shoulder against the door and shuts her eyes. Of course there is no reply. He wouldn't be still alive if he didn't know how to save his own skin; why would he come out and help her?

Through the pain, her body is tingling, and she has no idea if it's the electricity, or whatever Kudrina injected into her changing her into a monster. Kaminskaya's face had been distorted, and she stops that line of thought. There'd been another person with a gun (who else had gone with Kaminskaya today? Zharkova?) and regardless of her personal opinions, the man currently hiding behind the heavy door is more important than her. Physically defenseless. She can protect him should anyone else come along.

It's what they brought her here to do, after all. Take out threats. Defend people.

She can do that.

She can do this.

She can.



(But deep in the privacy of her mind, Natasha hopes the idea of being defended by an injured girl only partly way through her linguistics degree disturbs him.

Fucking coward.)