prompt: children’s footsteps (x)
“My beautiful darlings,” sighs the voice over intercom’s crackling lines. Not sad, not sobbing, just resigned; a regrettable but necessary choice made, a mild inconvenience to be suffered. “I do feel badly about this. You must know that I love you.”
Dasha has already beat her hands bloody on the door that will not open, wired glass cutting deep into her ruined fingertips as she claws at it mindlessly. Kaisa pries at the edges, while Umit works at the panel next to it with grit teeth and sweat sliding down her forehead. The dormitory is already warm and growing stifling, an orange light growing the corridor beyond.
“I never thought it would come to this,” the voice, the Fat Man says. “Sometimes I find it hard to believe we’ve lost so much. But they are coming. They’re coming for you, my darlings.”
“Let us out!” Dasha screams at the small hole she’s made in the glass, in the mesh. Wisps of smoke are bleeding through the opening, and the air wavers from the heat. “Let us out! Let us out!”
“Sleep, children,” says the Fat Man urges them softly. “I don’t like to think of you suffering. Lie down and sleep.”
“I have an idea,” Natasha says. She’s standing behind the other girls, watching them work and deliberately keeping her hands from forming fists. Two of the younger girls, the ones who still dance in demi-pointe shoes, sit on the floor at her legs.
“Shut up, dura,” Dasha snarls, face a rictus of fear. “Let us out!”
“I can get us out,” Natasha says, though she doesn’t know for sure.
“Children of the Red Room,” the Fat Man muses to himself. “I’d never let them take you back, my darlings.”
Kaisa is looking over her shoulder, thick blonde braids framing her pink face. “How?” she asks, suspicious but desperate. “Where?”
“I need Umit,” Natasha says. “I need her to open the vault.” Umit is the best of them at electronics, though the body-lessons still make her cry. She is at least useful in this one area, unlike many of the other girls.
“The vault!” Dasha says with a horrible cracking laugh. “The vault. Yes, let’s go, deep as deep can get. We’ll bury ourselves and save him the trouble of burning us!”
“There’s nothing down there,” Kaisa says uncertainly, her hands drifting away from the doorframe. “Nothing but the tanks.”
“We could put ourselves in the tanks,” Anitchka volunteers, voice small. She’s watching the older girls try to open the door with an owl-like stare, and makes the mistake of glancing up at Natasha.
“We could,” Natasha says neutrally. The girl brightens, and gets to her feet.
“What happens when the power goes?” Umit asks, not looking away from the panel.
“Umit,” Dasha says turning to look at her with an awful grimace.
“The door has been shorted,” Umit tells her, low and almost gentle. “I can’t open it. We’re trapped, no matter what we do.”
“We’ll be asleep, if it works,” Kaisa says. She’s edging back from the door. “We’ll be frozen like the soldiers, and we won’t even know when we die.”
“I’m not going to die!” Dasha screams, throwing herself back at the door. “I’m not going to die! Let me out, let me out— ”
“Dasha, Dashenka,” Umit murmurs, turning to her, even as the Fat Man says, “It’s almost over. Everything is almost over, my darlings.”
There’s a rumble from somewhere outside their concrete-block room, with its brass beds and its handcuffs at every headboard, and a fine sheet of dust rains down from the ceiling.
“Everything is almost done,” the Fat Man says, and the rumble becomes a series of approaching booms, one after the other, faster and faster as they race towards the dormitories.
Natasha doesn’t say anything more, just turns and runs, and feels Anitchka grab the back of her thin shirt to keep pace. Dasha or another of the older girls might have kicked her loose, but Natasha’s bloody tundra is only a few weeks behind her and everything in that carefully compartmentalized part of her mind is still raw and red. She lets her.
The dormitories are linked by an interior hall, lights flickering up and down the cold white plaster, and the hall leads to the stairs. The stairs go down, down, down, Anitchka stumbling and Natasha grabbing her thin forearm in a brutal grip and dragging her along when she falters. She’s lost track of the other one, the youngest girl. She risks a glance back the way she came and sees Kaisa pelting down after her, alone.
They reach the vault door at the same time the lights go, and the dark overcomes them. The noises starts to die away as well, dust thick and choking, the smell of hot metal and smoke acrid in the air. Nastasha’s arm burns from half-carrying Anitchka down the last of the steps.
“Umit?” she asks the darkness, though she didn’t see her follow.
“Dasha wouldn’t… she stayed with her,” the darkness answers in Kaisa’s voice. “Perhaps they’ll still come.”
“Perhaps,” Natasha says.
“The power is gone,” Anitchka says, high and worried. “It’s gone, even if she was here.”
“It means the door can’t shock us when we force it open,” Natasha says grimly, starting to feel her way along the wall.
“What’s the point?” Kaisa cries. “The tanks won’t work, we can’t sleep! We’re going to die here in the dark!”
The rumble above them is almost constant, the grind and grumble of a hundred feet of concrete settling in over their heads like a shroud, like Chernobyl’s sarcophagus. Something else the new, naked Russia would rather bury. “I didn’t come down here to put myself in a tank,” Natasha says as her hand brushes a blistering hot pipe; right where she remembers it. “And the power outage can only help us.”
“What do you mean ?” Anitchka demands, sounding every bit as young as she is.
“Help me open the door, and I will tell you,” Natasha says.
It’s not the most impossible task she’s set herself, but it takes eons to do it in the dark with two girls she does not trust: to follow the pipe to the radiator set into the wall, to burn her hands and wrists feeling in the gritty dust below it, to find the syringe and scalpel, to take them back to the door and use them, as she has imagined for so long, to coax its heavy tumblers into motion.
“What is it?” Kaisa asks, both of them pressed to her back as she works at the door. “What did you find? What are you doing?”
“I need you to hold this,” she grunts, her sweaty palm sliding on the scalpel’s handle just enough for it to nick her.
Tentative fingertips skim her knuckles. “What am I holding?”
“You useless cow , hold it or we really will die here in the dark,” Natasha shouts, straining, and a third set of smaller hands reach under hers to brace it up, shaking with the effort. Kaisa’s hands join Anitchka’s a second later, and together they force up the last steel tumbler, and the whole door groans.
Luckily for them, the door is built to withstand blunt force, not manipulation. Luckily it is meant to open from the outside (only from the outside). Natasha’s fingers are numb and Kaisa is crying from frustration when it cracks, and Anitchka slips her small thin fingers through it and pulls with all her might.
There’s a weak light here, pale and greenish where it maps the edges of the floor and moves in rippling chevrons towards them and the doorway: emergency lighting. It stings after the darkness, no matter how weak. Natasha looks away, back over her shoulder, and sees that half of Kaisa’s face is slick and dark, a head wound left unattended.
She also sees a ragged, uneven shape on the stairs, lowering itself step by step.
“It’s me,” Umit says steadily, despite the wheeze in her chest and the full weight of the other demi-pointe is in her arms, not moving. “Darina is dead.”
Kaisa squeals and runs for her, dropping the scalpel with a clatter; Anitchka follows wordlessly to help her with the younger girl, who appears to be unconscious. Natasha sweeps out a hand for the scalpel and tucks it in her sleeve. She plants her bare sole against the door jam to force it open wider, and it takes all her strength to open it enough for her body to slip through. The steel is almost a foot thick.
She doesn’t wait for the other girls to follow, trotting quickly into the cavernous vault. The placement of the emergency lights paints everything in a ghoulish underlight, leaving the rounded ceilings dim and haunted and the walls untracked. It doesn’t faze her. She knows where she’s going.
Her feet take her past abandoned desks, paper and folders scattered in panicked haste and rustling with a sound like dead leaves as she picks her way through them. The boxy, paste-grey computers are gutted, screens a blank black and electronic entrails strewn over the floor, the tables, the chairs. Keyboards dangle from their cords, swaying gently as the ominous rumble continues far above them, sound occasionally rising to a muffled crescendo as another bomb is detonated.
There isn’t much time, even if she succeeds in finding what she wants. A few minutes dawdling and they will all die. Natasha picks up her pace, vaulting onto a desk and continuing when the way is blocked by a supply cart. The desktops take her to the far side of the long, long room, to the metal stairs that lead to the offices above.
The book is in the head technician’s office, the prized possession of a man called Lukin. He is not Soviet, not properly; one of Ivan Alexandrovich’s volunteers from the fractured aftermath of the Great Patriotic War. His windows look down on the banks of desks like the boss of a factory floor, and they spiderweb and shatter in large, jagged pieces under blows from an abandoned chair.
Hate has been cored out of her, the hollow where it burned sanded smooth, but Lukin ranks as Natasha’s least-favorite technician. It occurs to her as she picks her way carefully over the glass that the man is probably dead, shot by the Fat Man or burning alive in his bed. The thought makes for satisfying contemplation while she feels her way through the dark room, to the desk, to the secret panel in the bottom of the top drawer, through the combination. 19-17-10. Predictable.
Distantly, she can hear the girls shouting. They’ve followed her into the vault, and as Natasha picks her way back down the metal staircase they appear from around the corner.
“Where did you go?” Kaisa cries, hurrying towards her. Natasha is growing impatient with her constant emoting.
“What is that?” Umit asks, immediately noticing the book.
Natasha doesn’t answer her or acknowledge Kaisa. Anitchka, she sees, has already seen and understood. The girl runs on ahead of her, towards the deep silo, and is already descending the ladder when Natasha reaches it. Natasha swings onto the metal bars with the book tucked awkwardly to her chest, and begins to ease her way down one-handed.
“You want the soldier,” Umit says above her, quietly.
There are many soldiers. There is only one soldier.
“He will get us out,” Natasha says.
“Who?” Kaisa says in confusion. She is a very stupid girl, Natasha thinks; possibly the stupidest.
“I will stay here with Galya,” Umit says. “In case you fail.”
Natasha nods once, feeling for the next rung, and holds the book more tightly.
aka the au where the winter soldier acquires five daughters and becomes the world’s most overprotective NIGHTMARE DAD
1. chernobyl’s sarcophogus
2. ivan alexandrovich serov’s russian version of operation paperclip
kototyph 