clandestinement | Apocalypse children

Apocalypse children - for worthallthis

There's an alarm sounding somewhere in the compound, harsh and urgent and ignored, and somehow still less jarring than the occasional creak of metal. Beneath that, voices sound, quick and quiet and tense, the pitch entirely wrong for any technicians, any handlers, anyone who belongs in this room.

"...sure you did it right?"

"I entered the sequence exactly like I was supposed to!"

"Then why isn't it--"

The first voice cuts off at the hydraulic hiss of the cryo tube opening. The inrush of air brings with it the smell of smoke, and the acrid taste of heated metal, and the sound of nervous gasps and small feet on grated metal flooring.

Outside the cryo tube stands a group of girls, the oldest somewhere around twelve or thirteen, the youngest perhaps four, clinging tight to the leg of one of the older girls and peering at the tube with wide-eyed fascination.

The girl who positions herself at the front of the pack - and they are a pack, all but the smallest fierce-eyed and wary - doesn't look like the oldest, round-faced, blonde hair straggling loose from her braids, clothing and skin streaked with blood and a bruise darkening beneath one eye. She lifts her chin, and looks with bright defiance at the man she and her sisters have just pulled from the dreamless grip of cryo-stasis.

"Winter Soldier," she says in clear Russian, and despite her fierce air, there's something like hope in her voice. "Can you understand me?"

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"I'll try some things from the mess hall before we go," he promises. He pauses. "I'm pretty sure there's a mess hall here." That is, in fact, not somewhere he has ever been allowed. The girls probably know where it is.

He shakes himself a little. "I'll find it. And check the transports. Where have you all been sleeping?"

"There is," she says. And then adds after a moment's pause, "There is a mess in the cafeteria, but the actual kitchen is fine."

It had been luck, that, and not a deliberate effort to keep food and corpses separate. Obvious as the necessity might be in retrospect, there isn't a one of the young Widows who would have considered it while fighting for their lives.

"One of the rooms in the barracks is intact. We used that. It's a little crowded, but we've all slept in worse quarters."

"I will deal with the mess." He looks her up and down. "You and the other girls should find the hose." A pause. No, wait, the hose was for him. It would probably hurt someone that small. (It hadn't exactly been comfortable, for him, but he needs to get chemicals out of his hair, too.)

"They didn't hose you girls down," he corrects himself. "You should get baths. I will clean up the base while you clean up each other. Okay? Then we will all try the food."

It will give them some time to settle, and give him some time to think. And maybe freak out a little bit.

Her eyes widen a little in alarm when he mentions finding a hose, slim shoulders hunching before she forces them straight. It does hurt, especially in the dead of winter, but shying from punishment has never once lessened it.

But...apparently, he doesn't mean it as punishment. She frowns up at him for a moment, before nodding. "We will get cleaned up. But you need a bath too, once we have all had food."

"Yes. I'll get clean before we go, too." Chemicals. In hair. Ugh. A bath probably isn't for him-- except, of course, there are no techs or handlers to turn on the hose. ... maybe a bath is all he can have. He doubts the girls could really manage it.

Huh. He shakes his head, shaking the thought away. "Go on. I'll handle this. Tell the girls I'll be back soon."

"Yes, Brother," she says, and after a moment spent weighing things, she darts in to give him a quick, fierce hug, small body held stiff, as though she's prepared to bolt. Unlike Alisa, she's old enough to know just how dangerous a combat-trained adult can be, and while he's not one of the men who'd tried to kill them, it will still be some time before she's entirely comfortable with physical contact.

He's frozen for a beat, torn between conflicting urges: to fling her away too close too close, and to gather her close. She's not the only one who has trouble with physical contact. Alisa had been entirely unthreatening, not hitting any danger signals or trauma buttons, but somehow Yelena isn't quite as safe and easy. She's got blood in her hair. He can smell it.

But she's his sister now. He wants that. You can't be afraid of your little sisters, can you? He doesn't want to. He wants to make her feel better, feel safe.

His hands fall on her shoulder and the top of her head, gingerly. He doesn't hug her, but he carefully pets her, like a wild thing he wants to soothe.

It works, at least a little - she doesn't completely relax, but her posture loses some of its rigidity after a few seconds. His hand petting her hair feels nice, and doesn't make her feel trapped.

It's a moment or two before she pulls away, and scrubs at her face with one hand to wipe away any evidence of damp eyes. "I'll organize the girls," she says, and turns to slip away down the hall, back toward the room where they'd so recently found him.

Brother takes a minute to stand in the entry to the records room and process. Scrub his face with both hands, breathe, and put his actual action plan in order in his head.

He starts with the mess hall. Cafeteria, she'd called it. There is indeed a mess there, which makes his original name for it pertinent. He removes the bodies, throwing them into the records room with the other bodies. They won't need anything else in there, and he can close it off. He doesn't bother with more than a cursory wiping up of blood before moving on. The kitchen is clean, that's the important part.

He spends the next two hours or so hauling bodies until all the dead handlers and techs are out of sight behind a closed door. The occasional body of a little girl he moves to another room entirely, much more gently. The only room he doesn't go in is the medical one, because he stops outside the door and can't make himself go in.

Well, fine. They probably won't need to go in there, either, or if they do he can send Yelena. He considers his task done and heads to investigate the showers. The girls will be done by then, probably, so this way he can figure out how someone gets clean without a hose without them staring at him. It takes him a little while, but he finally emerges and seeks out the barracks much cleaner, and much warmer, and with his hair still dripping a little bit. He feels tired and a little shaky, which he doesn't entirely understand, but he has girls to see. Sisters. Little sisters. That will make things better.

The first thing he might notice about the barracks is that several of the beds have been dragged together to make a large, communal sleeping space. The younger girls are huddled in the middle of it, scrubbed clean, hair neatly braided, watched over by one of the older children, who's halfway through reading a fairy tale.

The rest of the older girls are busy inventorying the gear they've collected so far, having shifted it in the intervening time from the cryo chamber to the barracks, where they're sorting it into neat piles, one for each girl. They look up almost as one when Brother enters, a sea of wide, solemn eyes, which is broken when Alisa wriggles free from the puppy pile on the bed and beelines to attach herself to his leg.

The sudden flood of stares makes him stop short and shrink a little in on himself, uncomfortable and uncertain-- a reaction which is thankfully forestalled by the small child grabs him around the knee. It's hard to focus on being stared at by a dozen murder-children when you're gently detaching someone from your chin and hefting her up onto your hip, instead.

Which is what he does, on the right side with the proper flesh arm. It feels comfortable, natural even, like it's something he's done hundreds of times before. Weird.

It makes it easier to look back at the other girls, though he doesn't actually make eye contact with anyone. "Everyone clean?" he asks, though he can see-- and smell-- for himself that they are.

Alisa snuggles against him, one small hand latching onto his shirt, as though afraid he'll vanish if she doesn't hold on. The rest of the younger girls seem to lose interest at this confirmation that he's still a friend, chattering over each other in a bid to convince their minder to resume the story.

Yelena waves the rest of her cohort back to their task, and trots over to report. "We've all had baths," she assures. "And we have winter equipment for most of us, just not the littlest girls. We will have to use blankets and oversized coats, and maybe they can ride in the transport, where it will be warmer?"

The chatter is better. He tentatively can even say-- privately, to himself-- that he likes the chatter. It's a pleasant noise to fill the space with.

He nods to Yelena's report. "Yes, the smallest ones do not have to walk, but I may be able to alter some of the winter gear to fit them better."

In the meantime: "Has anyone eaten."

"Not yet," Yelena admits. "We were waiting for you to get back."

He won't hurt them. She's certain of it, and the rest of the older girl agree. But it's still ingrained in them to be where they're expected to be, when they're not acting in direct defiance.

Even then, they'd lost more than a few of their sisters to that well-trained obedience, moments of hesitation born of brutal conditioning.

For now, that will serve them well. If Brother knows where they are, it will be easier if there's trouble, and he won't have to worry about corralling them. For now, he just nods. "And I am back. Let's go eat." He'll figure out something. His nutritional sludge wasn't in the kitchen, when he poked around a little there.

It takes a moment or two for them to get moving, like they're one large organism, bound by inertia. But once they do, he has a small pack of girls huddled around him, watching the shadows in the doors along the corridors warily as the make their way down toward the mess hall.

All the other grown-ups are dead, and with lockdown still in effect, no one could possibly have come to replace him. The children will still be flinching at shadows until they're well gone from this place.

He's tense with conflicting urges: they're so close, they're close enough to grab and shove and hurt, and he wants to get them away; but they're nervous and small and he wants to gather them up with his free hand, touch each little head to reassure them that he's here. He does neither of those things, just holding tight to Alisa and keeping his metal hand close to his body, but the tension is there.

Thankfully it's not far to the kitchen, and the mess hall next to it where he's cleaned up... some of the blood, anyway. There are no more bodies, at least. He sets Alisa on a counter with the gentle admonishment to, "Stay put," before he starts opening cupboards for the things he did see. He only has vague notions of how most of it gets prepared, but maybe it'll come to him when it's in his hands.

"My food isn't here," he warns Yelena as he pulls milk and eggs from the industrial-sized fridge. "I will try your food."

Alisa does stay where he sets her, though she squirms around, eyes wide with fascination, to take in every inch of a room she's never been allowed in before - the trainers might be willing to instruct small children in how to use a knife as soon as they're able to hold one, but trusting them with food preparation is another matter.

"I will search the medical wing," she says. "Before we go. Or tonight, if you can't eat what we do."

She's been sent to bed hungry before, and denied food for longer, when discipline was needed. Most of the older girls have. None of them want to inflict that on their new brother by sheer carelessness.

"Thank you. I can't make myself go in there." He doesn't say why. He's only a little bit aware of why, himself, but he doesn't want to talk about even that little bit.

There's bread in one of the cupboards as well, so he gets that. He thinks he can make something out of this. Maybe not enough for a dozen kids... once he figures out what exactly it is he's doing he can set up some kind of assembly line...

"Someone pour everyone glasses of this," he says to get them all started, setting the milk on the counter, while he grabs some bowls to start breaking eggs. "And there is a little fruit in that cabinet there." Some last few apples ready for slicing. He sets one of the older girls to cut those up for everyone while he cooks.

Once he gets going, he does clearly know how to make this: he's scrambling eggs in a pan over the industrial stove, slicing some kind of meat-- maybe ham? it's a lump of protein, that's all that matters-- and putting both things between slices of bread to offer one to each Widow. That's going to use up all the bread and eggs, so their next meal will have to be something else.

The food is enough to dissolve the last litte bit of caution gripping the younger girls, and they fall upon their meals like a pack of tiny, freshly-scrubbed wolves. They haven't been starving, but they've had to make what they'd been locked in with last, and that's still not an entirely familiar concept for the littlest ones.

The older girls are more measured, eating slowly, carefully, for the illusion that it will last longer that way.

Eventually, though, everyone is finished, and the older girls take on the task of herding the younger ones back toward the barracks to prepare for sleep, and an early rising to start getting everything ready for departure. Enough of them are restless that Yelena takes a seat on the foot of one of the unclaimed beds, and starts into a story - halting at first, but smoothing out as she goes, about an evil wizard with a castle far up on a mountaintop, who kidnapped young maidens for nefarious purposes, and a small army of magical animals that rallied to help them.

There's a small chorus of protests when she breaks off, which she meets with a scrunched nose and a promise of, "If you are all good and go to sleep, I will tell you more tomorrow night."

Brother drifts after the group, feeling no desire whatsoever to be alone in this base full of dead people. He even sits in the doorway, on the floor, to listen to the story along with the girls. He's never heard a story before. It's interesting. He thinks maybe he wants to know what happens, too.

Then he shies away from the idea, because he doesn't want things. He shouldn't. He has his mission, and that mission is keeping these girls safe, not hearing the end of stories.

He picks himself up when Yelena tells the little ones to go to sleep. He thinks he has a room somewhere. A pallet on a floor behind a locked door. Maybe he should be there, instead of here... even if the idea is kind of unpleasant.

His movement draws Yelena's full attention - she hadn't forgotten he was there, won't be able to forget he's there for quite some time yet, but he'd been so still and quiet that it had been easy to focus on the little girls.

She watches him come to his feet, expression shifting to one of - not distress, exactly, but certainly surprise. Concern.

"You're going?" A pause, and then, almost hopeful: "One last patrol before bed? We'll help." She beckons to two of the older girls, and while they may have a year or two on her, they also don't protest.

That does make him pause. He's very, very good at reading faces, even if he doesn't always know why certain expressions come about. That one, though, was pretty clear: the girls expect him to stay there over the night. Or Yelena does, which is as good as all of them.

That's... probably better. They aren't like handlers. They won't want him contained, they'll want him where he can watch over them. Keep them safe. So he should be with them, not in whatever room they kept him in. It makes sense.

So he nods. "Just a quick one," he promises. "We can set a watch schedule on the door after, while the little ones sleep." He doesn't expect anyone to come to a room buried this deep in the bunker, he doesn't expect anyone at all gien everything, but it will make them all feel safer to have someone on watch.

She doesn't bother to hide her relief. There probably won't be trouble overnight - but she will still feel better with Brother there to watch over them. Will still feel better with him there so they can watch over him. If anything does go wrong, he's as likely to be the target as they are.

Yelena nods briskly, and hops off the bed to pad over to his side, the two patrol recruits trailing her. "A watch would be good," she agrees. "Just in case."

"You three and me," Brother says as he heads out into the hall with the girls in his wake. They're the oldest ones there, even if Brother is the oldest by a lot. They're likely the ones best suited for watch. "Two hours shifts. For now, two pairs-- Yelena and Katya take the north wing and cryo chamber, Ilena and I will take south wing and the front door."

And conveniently avoid the medical rooms and said cryo chamber, in his case. That was on purpose.

He's also splitting up from Yelena, because he's spent a large chunk of his time awake with her now. He needs to spend time with the other girls, too. It's going to take him a while to get to know all of them, but he will put in the work to learn their skills, preferences, and temperaments. They're his sisters.

Apocalypse children - for worthallthis

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