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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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.

He gives Alisa's hair a stroke in parting, idly and distracted, following Yelena to the first body. He regards the man steadily for a long minute before deciding he doesn't actually know his face. It doesn't matter. He's dead and he deserves to be, for what he'd agreed to be part of. Hurting little girls.

He grabs one of those boots to start dragging him to one side, well away from the cryotank and the rest of the girls. Might as well start the clean-up now.

She tilts her head, watching him curiously for a moment, then follows in his wake. She doesn't offer to help with the body - it would, she thinks, be a little insulting, considering the difference in their sizes and the fact that it's probably screamingly obvious why the girls hadn't moved the man themselves.

Namely: he's big. Not as large as a super soldier, but big enough they would have struggled to move him.

"We stripped his weapons," she says after a moment. "We stripped most of their weapons. If you want to be armed."

Being armed would be better. It would be... appropriate. So he nods. "I would be better able to protect you with weapons," he agrees. "We can clean up. Then I will load up with weapons." He heaves the dead body out into the hall behind his cryotube, letting it block out the sight of the Chair temporarily.

It's the one that leads to the medical rooms rather than records or dorms. There are probably more bodies in the dorms and training rooms, he's guessing, but probably not many in medical. He has no desire to go into the medical rooms to check. The girls probably did that already, and he can just. Leave any that were in there, where they fell.

He realizes he has no idea of the regular complement of this place, beyond the guards he remembers seeing trained on him before the put him in the ice. "Is this all the girls left?" he asks, looking back over the motley collection clustered around his cryotube.

Yelena's silent for a long moment, then nods, gaze flicking towards the hallway he's just turned away from. There are bodies in those medical rooms. They just don't belong to the guards or the handlers.

"Some of the older girls were relocated to another facility," she adds after a moment. "But I don't know where."

It's possible that those girls are dead, too. It's possible that they also led a revolt. It's possible that they were the ones considered worth keeping, and the ones here left to dispose of. He doesn't know.

"We can look for them later," he suggests, turning towards the hall leading to the storage and records rooms. He can clear out any bodies there, too, and check for previous security logs at the same time. "Do you want to stay with them or come with me," he says. It's meant as a question, even if it doesn't really sound like one.

"I'll come with you," she says. One of them needs to - they don't know how recently the codes might have been changed, what he may or may not have access to. And besides, "No one goes alone. That's what we decided, when we moved against the handlers."

That's a sweet sentiment. Maybe not always feasible, with him, depending on what they will need to do in the future, but sweet and something he wants to encourage with the girls. "Okay," he says, starting that way.

After a few steps of silence, he asks, "Did they ever put you or the other girls. Did they ever." He frowns and points in the direction of the Chair, which is also the direction of the cryotube. Either one. He'll take either answer, really.

Her brow furrows slightly, and she glances in the direction he's pointing, maintaining a puzzled silence for a few seconds before she realizes what he must be referring to.

Well, what there's a 50/50 chance he's referring to, at least. Fortunately, the answer's the same either way. "No," she says. "Maybe the older Widows, the graduates, but I've never heard of it. I think we're meant to be a different kind of weapon."

"Good." That's good. Maybe it was just for him, he doesn't know. There's only one cryotank, anyway, and the Chair is... it's too big for the little girls. Even the older ones would be able to slip their arms out of the clamps, duck away from the halo. And that's good.

He moves into the hall, turning the corner, and frowns at another body before kicking it to one side. He'll drag it out on their way back out. "I don't remember much," he warns her. "You know I don't remember you. Not really. But that thing. It. It takes everything except the training."

"Then we'll break it before we leave," she says, matter-of-fact and unhesitating. "So no one can ever use it again."

She reaches up to rest one small hand on his flesh-and-blood arm, squeezing gently. "It's okay if you don't remember us right now. You will make new memories, and we won't let anyone take them away."

He twitches once at the touch, and drifts to a stop again, not shaking her off, but having to actually process what she said and what it means. He can't envision a future where he has a past. He doesn't know what that feels like. He doesn't even know if it's possible.

But breaking the Chair. He wants that. (The soldier is not supposed to want. He does anyway.)

Finally, after a long pause and a heavy swallow, eyes burning a little with some unfamiliar emotion, he says, "Good. That's. Thank you."

He doesn't have to shake her off. When he twitches, she withdraws her hand as though her fingers have been scalded. Two steps carry her beyond him, and then she stops, turning back toward him with a look of slightly-uneasy concern on her face.

"You're one of us now," she says. "We protect each other."

For someone who has never in his remembered life been protected, it doesn't even really compute. He doesn't know what that looks like, either. But he thinks maybe he wants that, too.

Not even an hour out of the ice, and the programming is already degrading this much. But if there's no more Chair (no more Chair no more Chair), then there's no way to fix it. He thinks these girls wouldn't try to fix it, anyway. New memories. New programming, maybe.

He swipes at his face with the flesh hand and resumes walking. "The records room is in here," he says.

"I know," she says, giving him a tiny smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes, bleaker and more weary than they have any right to be, at her age. "It's a bit of a mess."

That turns out to mean more bodies - and while the two that have been left where they fell had both belonged to grown men, there are streaks on the bloody floor that suggest at least one smaller corpse that had been removed.

Right. Just because he doesn't remember her in here doesn't mean she hasn't been in here. He shakes himself a little, and steps in to take in said mess. These two faces, he knows. And he scowls at them, and resists the urge to kick their fallen bodies. Instead he takes a foot on each one and drags them out of the way easily, where no one can see them.

"How many did you lose," he asks, without looking at the place where another person clearly fell. "Taking this place."

"Too many." It's very quiet, and unlike him, she does look at the void where someone much smaller than the two handlers fell. Looks in that direction, anyway - her expression is slightly out of focus, like she's seeing what's no longer there.

"They started with - Alisa is the only one of the very little girls we have left. The trainees who could fight - we have a little less than half left."

It makes him feel-- sick. He wants to take Yelena against his side, like he did for Alisa. (And at the same time his skin crawls with the desire not to. It's an unpleasant contradiction.)

He wants to kick the bodies, again, but he knows it's pointless. They're dead. It wouldn't do anything. He does drop them with a little more force than necessary when he puts them down, though. "It won't happen again," he promises instead, managing to inject something fierce into his voice somehow. "It won't."

She peers up at him, then nods once, sharply.

"I hope they're all dead," she says, and there's an edge of brittle defiance in her voice, as though she's half-expecting one of the corpses to rise to exact punishment. "The handlers, the doctors, the guards. All of them, everywhere."

A pause, brief, and then, "--The equipment should still be able to play back the recordings we have. We didn't damage it in the fight."

If they aren't, Brother thinks he might make an effort to make them. But only if he can do it while the kids are safe. That's the most important thing. That's the mission, not revenge.

He moves over to the monitor and keyboard, frowns at it a moment until he remembers how to use it, then starts typing to activate the system. The most recent records should already be in the system, if it went down shortly after the meteor strike. Two hours were corrupted, the girl said. There's still almost two days of records.

"Check that shelf. See if there is a tape marked with yesterday's date," he tells Yelena.

Yelena nods, and picks her way over to the shelf, stepping carefully around the tacky pools of dried blood - less squeamish than fastidious, like a cat avoiding getting something unpleasant on her paws. She scans the tapes, sucking in her cheeks as she takes in the filing system, not immediately intuitive.

Finally, she finds the right tape, and stretches up on tip-toe to retrieve it, then trots back over to join him at the console.

"It's going to be bad," she warns. "If it scared them that much."

"I need to know what to plan for," he says with a shrug of his right shoulder. "And whether I need to outfit you all with tiny radiation suits or woolen coats." He has no idea how he would do either of those things, but he's got to make sure he's prepared either way.

The current video feed seems to show... snow. Maybe. Maybe it's ash. There aren't any people in the field of the cameras outside the bunker, at least not immediately. He tries to see through the poor quality video to whether there are buildings nearby. His memory seems to say there won't be, but his memory is unreliable.

There are no buildings within the space the current feed captures, though even were the quality better, there's enough particulate in the air that it would be impossible to make out anything further than perhaps two hundred yards. So: not right in the middle of a city, but perhaps not entirely isolated. There are a few shapes beneath the mix of snow and ash - and why shouldn't it be both, here at the end of the world? - that might once have been human. They are, at any rate, roughly the right size.

"There is cold weather gear here," Yelena offers, almost automatically. "Radiation gear, I am not so sure of."

"We will need the cold weather gear," Brother guesses, speeding backwards through the tape, looking for changes. To see whether those potential bodies were coming or going, or if they ever walked at al. "And maybe masks to filter the air. A meteor strike could create a heavy cloud of dust over much of the planet."

He doesn't know how he knows that. It feels like very old knowledge. (His original self, after all, did love dinosaurs and would follow the theories for why they died out...)

Apocalypse children - for worthallthis

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