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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"Good." The little blonde girl eyes him critically for a moment, then frowns. "You look sick," she says, with the perfect bluntness of youth. "You should sit down."

"We have blankets," one of the other girls ventures, and the blonde nods, prompting her to scurry forward with a thick wool blanket, and a thinner mylar thermal wrap.

He steps unsteadily out of the cryotube, because he can't sit down in there. This is all highly irregular. He doesn't remember much, but he does remember going under the ice, after the-- after the wipe, and there were grim-faced men not bloody children.

It is perhaps that as much as the blonde girl's order that lets him half-sit, half-collapse at the edge of the cryotank's platform and let the girls drop blankets over his shoulders. They don't help, not yet, but they're oddly comforting nonetheless, and one shaking hand plucks them closer around him.

He shouldn't ask questions, but-- but they're children. And no handler has ever given him a blanket before. He thinks. Probably.

"What happened?"

"Meteor strike," the blonde girl, who seems to have been nominated spokesperson by some silent consensus - or perhaps not silent, merely an arrangement the preceded his awakening - says. "Not here. We're secure here. There's a countdown until when it is safe to go outside."

Her frown deepens, and she eyes him uncertainly for a moment before turning back to the rest of the pack. "There were heaters, with the survival gear. Katya, Irena, take two of the other girls and bring them."

"I just. Need to. Finish the thaw process," he says, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Techs always hated hearing that. They never waited long before someone would pick him up and drag him to--

--his mind shies away from that. The wipe always comes after the thaw, he knows but doesn't remember. But there's no one here to drag him there now. The girls are too small. Will he walk to it without being dragged?

"Where are the handlers." Is this girl his handler? She can't drag him anywhere. And she's getting him heaters.

"Dead," the blonde girl says, with a brief shrug that makes it abundantly clear that this is not a state of being she mourns at all. "So are the technicians."

She glances towards the controls at the center of the room, and with the pack thinned by the four girls dispatched to fetch the heaters, it's possible to make out the pair of booted feet sticking out from behind it, the right size and shape for an adult male.

"This is normal?" she asks after a moment, and in contrast to the callousness of a moment previous, there's relief and concern warring in her expression. "We didn't hurt you by doing it wrong?"

He's not sure he understands the question. "I will be mission ready within ten minutes," he says, flat but also cautious.

The handlers are dead. There's some part of him that quails at that. Dead handlers and dead technicians mean punishment. It doesn't matter who did it. There's another part of him that-- is glad. Viciously, murderously glad. And sorry that he didn't get to do it himself.

"You are not handlers," he ventures, mostly a careful statement of likelihood, maybe a tiny bit a challenge. But they're so small. And none of them have guns on him. And there's something about them. Some of them. The smallest he's sure he doesn't know, but the older ones... he knows them somehow. They weren't handlers when he knew them last.

"No," the girl agrees, upper lip curling back from her teeth in undisguised disgust. "We're operatives. Widows. Or we were supposed to be, before they decided to scrub the training program to conserve resources."

She says it matter-of-fact, as though she's not talking about the murder of dozens of young girls - far more than have survived to huddle here - but there's a faint, telling tremor in her hands before she squeezes them into tight fists.

"The mission is to survive until it's safe to go outside, and then we're leaving this place."

He looks up at her, really looks up at her, eye contact and everything, and though he's not sure exactly what his face is doing, he doesn't thinks it would be handler approved. (Horror. And a hint of fury. That's what his face is doing. How dare they. How dare those assholes hurt his kids.) (They're not his kids. He doesn't know why he thinks they should be.)

He struggles to get his face back to a proper blankness, swallows once, and says as firmly as his shivering will let him, "Mission accepted. I will not let any harm come to any of you."

The girl nods gravely, slim shoulders slumping in relief.

"I'm Yelena," she says. "I don't know if you remember. I will introduce you to the others when you're feeling a little better."

Except, apparently, not all of the children are willing to wait - the youngest, still wide-eyed, has slipped away from her minder where the girls are busily sorting through their supplies, and slinks over to plonk down next to the Winter Soldier on the platform, resting her head against his arm.

He shakes his head mutely at that. No, he doesn't remember. There's something... but not enough to call it remembering. (He's not supposed to remember. It's a malfunction. But there are no handlers to report it to.)

The little girl leaning on his arm makes him twitch, but she's warm, and he's not-- he's not going to hurt her. She's small and soft and he kind of wants to wrap his arm around her, instead. What a strange impulse. He doesn't do it, because the blanket is in his way, but he doesn't make her move, either.

"Yelena," he repeats, instead. A pause. There are no handlers. Maybe the girls won't drag him to the chair. So he says, haltingly, "I will remember. This time."

Yelena's expression falls a little, before she marshals it, and glances at the little girl huddled up against him. "That's Alisa," she says. "She doesn't talk very much."

She pauses a moment, then admits, "I don't know what to call you. We know your title, but not your actual name."

Children should talk. They should babble excitedly and yell and laugh. He does finally give in to the urge to gather her up, letting the blanket fall aside on that side so he can tuck her up to his side more securely. It feels right, but not right, at the same time. Like one of them is the wrong size.

Yelena's statement earns a blank look. "They called me soldier," he says after a moment, tentative. The idea of having an actual name is foreign to him these days. It's been so long since he's been allowed to have one. "Soldat."

The little girl doesn't hesitate to wiggle closer, small arms snaking around his middle, and not nearly reaching far enough to close.

Yelena puffs out her cheeks, then blows out a slow breath, and shakes her head. "No," she says. "You're not their soldier any more. You're our brother now." She cocks her head slightly, considering him. "We'll call you that, until you find a proper name you like."

That brings a strange lump to his throat that he has to swallow hard to clear. "Okay," he says when he thinks he can without sounding pained. And it's not just agreement because he doesn't care. He. He likes that. It makes him feel warmer than the blankets or the little girl cuddled up to his side. It feels... right. Like it's a word he's had applied to himself before, except he knows it isn't, so it's probably just all in his head.

But he still likes it.

As the girls return with the heaters, he finally stops shivering so hard. Alisa wrapped up around his waist helps, too. His hair is dripping and his cryo suit grows heavier with moisture, the chemical ice crystals melting. "How long," he asks. "There is a countdown. You said. How long is on it."

The children are quick and efficient; it doesn't take them long to get the heaters set up. Carting them in had been the hard part, sized as they are for adults to carry.

"Seventeen hours," she says, with an upward lilt to her voice, and a glance at one of the girls standing closer to the central console. At the confirming nod, she repeats, "Two days. We have time to strip what we need before the doors unlock. We do not know what will be waiting for us outside - satellite connection all went down with the meteor strike, and we lost external cameras this morning."

He still feels sluggish, but the warmth is helping. Usually there are drugs after the chair, he thinks. Something to wake him up faster once he's no longer half-frozen and disoriented. He doesn't know what they are, so he'll have to make do without them.

(There is something else that happens after the chair, too, but he doesn't think about that. He can't.)

"Is there recorded footage of the external cameras. To see what was on them before." He knows the layout of the base without knowing how he knows. There is a records room, but he doesn't know what they keep there, if they keep their own security tape records. But intel will help. If he wants to keep these girls safe, he needs to know more.

"There is," Yelena says.

One of the other older girls pipes up with, "I overheard the handlers saying the last two hours before the cameras went down were corrupted. So it won't tell us everything."

He nods, trying to force his brain to work. "Any intel is better than no intel. When did this. Meteor thing." Meteors. Jesus. Sounds like a penny novel. (What's a penny novel...?) He shakes himself, finishes the question. "When did it hit." How long have they been trapped down here, with handlers who wanted to kill them?

"Two days," Yelena says. "A little more. We had warning to evac, so we have been here longer, but the lockdown only started after it hit. We don't know how bad it is outside - the people, not the air."

That, at least, they have data for.

Winter takes that in with a sober expression. He doesn't know people in general. He knows targets, and handlers, and backup, and occasionally assets to protect. But from what he knows of handlers and targets and backup... "It might not be pretty," he suggests. "But that's why you have me." His eyes flick to the feet he can still see on the other side of the console. "And guns of your own. I can show you how to use them if you need help. Can you all fight?"

The look Yelena gives him is almost offended. "We know how to fight, and how to use a gun, except for Alisa. She is too little. And Sofia and Rose are just learning."

She pauses for a moment, chewing the inside of her cheek, before admitting, "Katya and I are the only ones who have been on high-contact missions, but the rest of the girls have training."

He nods to that, expressionless. He... knew that, to some extent. He knew at least some of the girls could fight. He just needed to ask to remember, apparently.

Knowing which ones can't is useful, too, and his curls his arm more protectively around Alisa. He will make sure nothing harms her. And that if she doesn't want to learn to fight, she doesn't have to. That's his job. (Why would she not want to learn? That seems like a strange thought.)

"If they want. If you want. We can keep training. But anyone we come across. Will probably not need high-contact mission skills." Most people, he thinks, will be injured or sick or at the very least untrained. Easy enough for him to pick them off himself. Little girls should not need to murder people.

Should not need to murder people again. Since they have clearly done so to get him out.

Alisa presses her face into his side, shaking her head at the prospect of more training. Yelena watches them, something like regret flickering across her face.

"Maybe," she says, though she doesn't sound convinced - what little she's seen o the world in the course of her young life has taught her that there are far too many people willing to hurt children they see as helpless, and while they awakened him in part to protect them, there's still only one of him. "But it's better for those of us who can to keep in fighting shape. Just in case."

If you want a hug, Yelena, all you gotta do is come snuggle, too. Despite knowing at least some of these children are deadly, he finds he isn't particularly afraid of them. It's a strange feeling, to not be afraid of a person. Maybe it's because they are so small. Or because this one calls him Brother.

He nods. "All right. Not now. You have. Clearly just had practice." He shoots another look at the boots, gives Alisa a pat in warning, then eases to his feet. He isn't shivering anymore, and while he still feels a little ice in his veins, it's tolerable. It's the lack of the predictable routine that has him feeling off balance, but in a way like he's waiting for the hammer to fall, more than out of actual discomfort. He doesn't look at the Chair, across the chamber. He doesn't look at it.

"Show me what you did to the handlers," he says first. Seeing them dead with his own eyes feels. Necessary. He can catalogue them all, help drag them somewhere that the children might not have had the strength to do. Get them out of sight. "And someone take Alisa for me."

It's not so much a hug that she wants, as the level of innocence required to seek out physical affection so readily. She's learned better, over the years, and that's a lesson that will take time to undo.

One of the older girls hurries over to shepherd Alisa away, The girl clings for a moment, trying to attach herself to his leg, but in the end, she allows herself to be led with only a few sniffles, quickly quieted. She might have retained some measure of innocent trust - but she's also learned to obey.

"Most of them are not in here," Yelena says, but she starts with the one who is, dutifully leading him around the console. There's no mystery as to what killed this one - there's a cluster of bullet wounds punched through his chest. If this were a shooting range, it would be a tidy firing pattern. Since it's blood and bone, 'tidy' is the last thing it is.

Apocalypse children - for worthallthis

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And I realize my rewrites a few tags up ate the original "it's been two days", oops

oh THAT'S what that meant XD I thought it was an edit mistake on the timer

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