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 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...)

"How long will it last?" she asks, giving him a sidelong look. "The dust."

The shapes shrink as he rewinds; it becomes clear in short order that a few are merely drifts blown by the wind. Others...are not. They resolve slowly into a man in uniform similar to the guards, and two women, one in her mid-twenties, the other in her late thirties or early forties, both dressed in cold-weather gear. Yelena makes a small sound of protest as she sees the latter, eyes wide.

" ... a long time," he says after a moment, thinking of large lizard things and extinction events while staring at the bodies, trying to see if he recognizes any of them. He can't see their faces very well.

When Yelena makes a noise, he looks away, over at her. "Do you know them."

"She looks..." Yelena bites her lip, leaning in to peer more closely at the grainy screen. "I was assigned. To a family, when I was very little, for a part of their cover. The older woman looks like my mother. But she died. I saw her die."

He leans over, too, above her head, but he doesn't recognize her. If it was a cover related to HYDRA, he hadn't been part of it. He doesn't get the impression he did a lot of undercover work. He isn't any good at that sort of thing. "We can go outside tomorrow and check," he says, uncertain. "I hope she isn't your mother."

Fake mother. Or real mother. When you're that small, is there any difference?

She nods, the motion a little bit jerky, and edges closer to him, as though seeking comfort before she catches herself and stops. She scrubs one hand across her face, and nods again.

"We should check them anyway. In case they're carrying things we can use, or intel about the other bases."

He almost, practically automatically, puts a hand on her head when she inches closer, but she pulls away before he can do more than lift it. He looks between her and his hand a moment blankly, as if unsure why he did that, but-- it helped little Alyssa. Maybe he thought it would help Yelena, too.

"We will," he promises, then continues rolling the tape back, looking for what actually happened to them. "Maybe don't watch this part," he suggests to her.

She stands stock still for a moment, clearly torn - and then turns her head away, just in time to miss the bullets punching through the bodies. It's not automatic fire - while the shooter or shooters aren't in view, the shots are too precisely placed. Deliberate, not the result of a security system that couldn't be overridden, or couldn't be overridden in time.

If he continues rolling the tape back, he'll see the younger of the two Widows apparently pleading with whoever's manning security - to let them get in, or perhaps to let them walk away now that they've found the installation locked down. It isn't clear - even if the footage were being played in the normal order, there's no audio.

He does, watching grimly. Whoever killed them is dead now, at least. He can say that for certain. But he takes the tape out once he's seen it, sure there's nothing else on this one he wants or needs to see, to replace with the one from the previous day.

He speeds through this tape, too, looking first for the direction the other children were driven, and for the event itself that set all this in motion, if any of that was caught on camera.

There's only one route away from the facility; where the children were taken once they were out of the sightlines of the camera is unclear. There may be tracks, or maps elsewhere in the facility that could be used to determine that.

The event itself was, apparently, far enough away to not be directly caught - but it's clear enough when it happens. Going in reverse, the sky brightens dramatically, as though the sun is rising, at three in the afternoon.

"It's so dark out," Yelena says quietly - she has, somewhere in there, elected to watch again. "Now. I didn't realize how dark it must have gotten."

"Dust and ash," Brother guesses, feeling-- resigned. Like he expected it, though he doesn't know why. He thinks it's going to start getting cold outside in the next few days, if it isn't already. They will definitely need the cold weather fear.

He turns off the system. "This is all I needed to see. Thank you."

She nods acceptance of the guess - it makes sense, if a little distantly, and it's not like she's been outside since the facility locked down.

After a moment, she swallows hard and says, "We will show you the supplies we've gathered. And you can tell us what we will need when the doors open again. Yes?"

It's a goal, if a short-term one. Better than dwelling on the woman who might or might not be her mother, lying under a heap of dirty snow, or on the girls lost or dead. Maybe she'll have time to mourn, once they've found somewhere better, somewhere safer to hole up, where none of their masters will know to look.

Short-term goals are the best kind of goals. Brother nods, still looking at her side-long more than full-on, still warring with the entirely unfamiliar urge to take her up against his side like he had with Alyssa. That had been alien but natural at the same time. But Alyssa had asked for it-- wordless but obvious. Yelena has not.

So he doesn't. He just steps away from the records and towards the hall, again. "The more supplies we have, the better. Especially food and clean water. And weapons." The last is more of an automatic afterthought than the main gist of his expectation. And that is mostly for him, more than the girls.

"We should have food and water for a couple of weeks," Yelena says. The facility had been well-stocked, and meant to cater to inhabitants both larger and more demanding than a pack of traumatized children. "If we can carry it. I don't know how many of the transports are working, or if we have the right parts to fix them."

A pause, and then more quietly, she adds, "There are plenty of weapons. The ones we collected are mostly what we are best with, the girls who are fully trained, but there are more."

"We can carry it," he assures her, and hearing that there are transports actually on site is a weight off his mind. Enough that he can say: "And I think I can fix anything that's broken even if there aren't parts, depending on how it's broken. Put most of the supplies in a truck, drive slow, take turns riding in it when someone gets too tired to walk. Just need to bring fuel."

It's a plan. It's a plan he likes. He'll check for the trucks later. First, "When did you eat last." He knows, even if he doesn't remember, that coming out of the ice means he needs nutrients. His nutritional drinks ought to be on site. He... doesn't know how to make them, so he hopes they come pre-mixed.

She listens with keen attention, shoulders dropping just a fraction, as though with relief that there's someone else to make plans, to help handle the logistics of keeping their sisters safe. "We should be able to scavenge things from the transports we aren't taking," she says after a moment.

They can't take them all. Not enough of them can drive to take them all.

As to when she'd last eaten... "A few hours ago. We had breakfast. But it must have been much longer for you."

"Since before I was put back in cold storage," he agrees. He isn't sure what his fueling requirements are. ... probably more than a child that weighs less than half what he does.

"Standard procedure post-thaw includes taking nutrients." He has to admit, "I don't know where my supply is. They never showed me that."

Yelena's quiet for a moment, turning that over in her head. "Probably in the medical bay," she decides. "They don't wake you up enough for the mess hall to make sense, and there wasn't anything in the room where we found you that had any food or medicine."

She pauses, studying him with the sort of gravity only a child can muster. "Are you able to eat normal food? Or do you need specialized things because of your enhancements?"

The medical bay. With, one, a bunch of things he doesn't want to think about let alone see, and two, probably the bodies of the lost girls. Unpleasant.

But he needs to answer her question. It's something they'll need to account for, going forward. "I don't know. They always gave me a big cup with a straw and this thick liquid to drink." It was gross but it did the job, and that's what counted, he supposes. "Is that normal food?" He doesn't think it is, but it doesn't hurt to make sure.

If he can eat something else, that would probably be better than carting around a bunch of the nutritional goop. He's pretty sure there were drugs in the drink, too but he'll have to do without those.

Her nose wrinkles slightly, and she shakes her head, swift and sharp. "No, that's not normal food."

She pauses for a moment, teeth worrying at a patch of dry skin on her lower lip. "We'll look for it. But you should try normal rations too, before we leave. It will be easier to resupply, if it will not make you sick. Or if you're able to tolerate a mix."

"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?"

Apocalypse children - for worthallthis

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