osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2019-10-10 08:44 am
osprey_archer) wrote2019-10-10 08:44 am
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Whumptober, days 6-10
The next batch of Whumptober ficlets are here! Lots of sad Red Room girls these last five days.
The Heartland Film Festival starts this Friday (!!!!!), so I’m already hard at work trying to get at least some of the next ten days worth of Whumptober ficlets done in advance. Maybe I should toss in a Sutcliff fic or two? (I briefly considered an Eagle fic for pinned down - there’s literally a scene in the book where Esca has to pin Marcus down to be cut open for surgery! - but I don’t think it’s whumpy enough if we already know it all goes all right.) Ooooh, or perhaps a Tortall fic. I feel I ought to branch out a bit from the MCU.
6. Dragged away. Natasha in the Red Room; Miss Underwood scolds her for having friends.
It all happens so fast. One moment, Natasha is giggling with Yelena; the next, Miss Underwood is jerking Natasha out of her seat by the hair.
Natasha screams. She can’t help it: it’s not just the pain but the shock. Miss Underwood twists her hand in Natasha’s hair and hauls her across the cafeteria, her high heels clicking on the floor, the other girls looking up and then looking away, or watching in silence, just the way Natasha does herself when Miss Underwood drags someone away.
Miss Underwood hauls Natasha down the hall. Natasha scrambles to keep up, but Miss Underwood just walks faster. The pull on Natasha’s hair is excruciating. “You’ll pull it all out!” Natasha protests.
“Nonsense.”
They plow through the outer door into the courtyard. The door slams behind them, and at last Miss Underwood lets Natasha go. A few long red strands cling to her fingers, and Miss Underwood shakes them off onto the dead brown leaves on the ground.
The air is cold on Natasha’s face, but her scalp is burning. She blinks against tears. She will not cry in front of Miss Underwood. “We weren’t doing anything,” Natasha protests.
“What were you giggling about?”
“Nothing,” Natasha says, trying frantically to remember, or at least to make something up. It really wasn’t anything important. They weren’t making fun of the teachers, which is big trouble if you get caught. “We were just making up a song about pogs - ”
“Pogs?” Miss Underwood interrupts.
Natasha nods. Her scalp throbs, and even her eyes are still smarting. She’s not tattling: Miss Underwood has to know about this craze already. The teachers have been confiscating bottle caps for days.
“Liz, I mean Yelizaveta Markova, brought a set back from her mission in Chicago, and now everyone wants to play.” And the Red Room is certainly not about to waste money buying pogs for its girls, but that’s not a good thing to say, so Natasha doesn’t say it. It’s cold out here. She’s shivering. “So we’ve all been collecting bottle caps on our walks.”
“To play pogs.”
Natasha twists like a spider in the wind under Miss Underwood’s disdain. “And Yelena and I were just - we were making up a song about pogs and frogs and bogs - we were practicing our English,” says Natasha, becoming indignant at Miss Underwood’s unfairness in interrupting such a studious pursuit.
Miss Underwood regards her. “You’re good friends, you and Yelena,” she says.
“I guess,” Natasha says, because the way Miss Underwood says it, it sounds like it’s not a good thing.
Miss Underwood takes Natasha’s head between her hands. Her grip is gentle this time, but firm, and she tilts Natasha’s head to the side. “Be careful of friends,” Miss Underwood says. “You never know when you’ll have to break their necks.”
A breeze swirls the dead leaves around the cement courtyard. Natasha shivers. The girls whisper that Miss Underwood killed all the other Black Widows in her year, and that’s why she’s the only one left.
It’s not true, of course. Most of Miss Underwood’s cohort died fighting Nazis, and their photos hang on the Wall of Heroes.
But the whispers persist: Miss Underwood snapped a classmate’s neck when she was no older than Natasha. She could snap Natasha’s neck now with just a twist of her hands.
She lets go instead, and bends down so they are eye to eye. “Pretend you have friends,” Miss Underwood tells Natasha. “Make people believe it. But don’t ever believe it yourself. Then you’ll always be able to shoot first.”
A friend on Tumblr asked for a bit of Briarley fic (self-fic?) with the prompt “isolation,” so what could I write except a bit of my favorite mopy dragon brooding as he flies?
7. Isolation
Briarley is happiest when he flies.
He doesn’t dare fly during the daylight, when anyone might see the dragon-creature the curse has made of him. But once night has fallen, when the sky is dark, and even if someone should see him silhouetted by the moon they would believe it only a dream, he takes off from the parapet and flies.
He flies, sometimes, all night. In the winter months, when the night is long, he can fly until he reaches the sea, and look down below at the endless water stretching empty in all directions; and then, when he is entirely alone, he feels at peace.
In the summer, though, the nights are short, and he cannot fly beyond the fields of England. Even when there is no moon, even when the rain falls down in torrents, he can still see signs of human habitation down below. A lantern hung in a window; a flash of lightning reflecting off the window of a church.
Even at this distance, the signs of human life pain him. He is alone, and will always be alone, and can never come closer than this. The only way to break his curse is to love and be loved, and that is impossible for him: he came into this world cursed already, unable to love a woman.
Did the enchantress know that when she cursed him? Did she take a cruel pleasure in knowing that he could never meet her terms?
Sometimes he flies as far as he can go, until his wings are about to give out. Once he flew due north, reckoning by the north star, and yet somehow - somehow when he was about to fall out of the sky, there was his estate below him, his cursed castle that he cannot escape.
I replaced prompt 8 (stab wound) with the alternative prompt 10, Nightmare, and wrote a Code Name Verity fic, which got long enough that I’ve posted it over on AO3: Dreams in Damask. About once a year, Maddie dreams of walking with Julie in the garden with the damask roses.
9. Shackled. Dottie Underwood Red Room backstory.
The girls had not always been handcuffed to their beds.
Dottie still remembers this time, although she was very young when it ended. She wasn’t Dottie yet then, but Dasha, one of a hundred thousand little orphans created by the civil war, so young that she didn’t even remember her full name: just Dasha.
She remembers little of her life before: remembers only how the Red Room impressed her when she arrived. The girls wore smart uniforms that were washed once a week. So much food that no one ever went to bed hungry. Enough beds for each girl to have her own, and even pillows, and sometimes they had pillow fights, because they were not handcuffed then.
Later, Dottie remembers those days as the happiest of her life. She still hates Lilya for running away and ruining it all.
***
In later years, Dottie hates Lilya so much that she nearly forgets how much Dasha once loved her. Dasha was nine, and Lilya, sixteen, was her goddess. Dark-haired, bright-eyed, vivacious, rebellious but beloved: always walking right up to the cusp of trouble, but turning it aside with a remark so clever that even the teachers laughed.
Maybe that was why Lilya thought she could get away with running away.
Dasha didn’t know the details at the time, only that Lilya disappeared in the night. Where she went, and why, and how they caught her: Dottie still doesn’t know.
The incident was never mentioned again, ever. That’s always been the Red Room way. The failures are abandoned and forgotten. Like Dottie herself now.
Not Lilya, though. They brought Lilya back. She had been gone a week, and all the girls had been in high tension. Whispering in the stairwells, glancing at each other in class. Reaching across the spaces between the beds to hold each other’s hands in the night.
They brought Lilya directly to the firing range. Her hands were tied, her feet shackled. The chain between her ankles clanked as she shuffled across the concrete to stand by the targets.
She held her head high, although there were bruises on her face. They’d tied a black rag so tightly over her mouth that it dragged the corners of her lips back into a ghastly smile.
“Ready,” said their rifle instructor, as if they often marched girls out on the firing range to be shot. But they didn’t yet, not then. Lilya was the first.
And so the girls did not ready their rifles. They stood silent and pale and shivering, gazing up at their instructor wide-eyed, as if the combined weight of their frightened faces might make him rescind the order.
“How dare you!” he burst out. “How dare you defend this traitor, this counterrevolutionary filth? She needs to be shot like the mad dog she is. How can you hesitate?” He thrust a finger at Dasha as he spoke, so she was staring down his stubby finger like the barrel of a gun. “Are you a Trotskyite?” And now the accusing finger moved on, stabbing at girl after girl. “A Zinovievite? A kulak? A wrecker?” By then the girls were all shaking, and when again he shouted, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” - this time, they followed orders.
That night, in the dark, Anya reached across the space between their beds to hold Dasha’s hand. They were holding hands when the lights snapped on, and Matron came in with a basket of handcuffs dangling from her arm. “You’ll lock yourselves in every night,” she said. Her mouth twitched as she spoke, as if she didn’t want to say it. “No more runaways, they said.”
“But Matron.” This was Ksenia. When the death matches started, not too long after, she was one of the first to have her neck broken. “What if there’s a fire?”
Matron snapped the handcuff closed around Dasha’s wrist. The metal was cold against her skin. “Then I guess you’ll all burn up.”
10. Unconscious. A tranquilizer dart knocks Steve unconscious, and he’s too heavy for Natasha to lift.
The problem is that Steve is too heavy for Natasha to lift. If it were Tony, now, she might throw him over her shoulders and stagger out; or if there was a gurney or a wheelbarrow or a goddamn rolling chair, she could manhandle Steve into it and roll him out.
But they are pinned down in an empty spare room without a single stick of furniture, let alone any wheels, and Steve’s too heavy for her to lift. And he remains unconscious.
She slaps his face again, hard, even though his face is already flushed red from earlier slaps. Hydra got him with a sleeping dart half an hour ago, and they made it to this room before he collapsed, and now he will not wake and she can’t move him.
And Hydra is closing in on them again. She can’t make out the words yet, but she can hear the sound of their shouts.
If he doesn’t wake soon, she will have to leave him behind.
“Steve,” she says, and slaps his face. He moans, and she holds her breath, her hands clenched so tight that she can feel the thump of her pulse in her palms.
But he doesn’t wake.
The door squeaks at the far end of the hall. Boots thump. They’re coming.
She pushes aside a ceiling tile and hoists herself inside. She’s not abandoning him: she’s going for help.
But when she turns to put the ceiling panel back in place, and sees him lying on the floor, his face pale and sweaty and slack - he looks so alone.
Natasha clenches her jaw and hardens her heart. If she escapes, there’s a chance that she’ll save him. If she stays, there is no chance at all: they will both die, and die slowly, and no one will find what is left of their bodies.
She replaces the panel just before a Hydra goon kicks open the door. There is a tiny gap in the ceiling, just big enough for Natasha to see the goons stomp into the room. “We got him!” the lead goon exults into his comms.
The comms crackle. “Good. The surgical suite is prepared,” an unseen voice replies, and Natasha’s heart fills her throat. The leader snaps his fingers, and a man almost as big as the Hulk steps forward and tosses Steve over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Even this does not wake Steve up.
The Heartland Film Festival starts this Friday (!!!!!), so I’m already hard at work trying to get at least some of the next ten days worth of Whumptober ficlets done in advance. Maybe I should toss in a Sutcliff fic or two? (I briefly considered an Eagle fic for pinned down - there’s literally a scene in the book where Esca has to pin Marcus down to be cut open for surgery! - but I don’t think it’s whumpy enough if we already know it all goes all right.) Ooooh, or perhaps a Tortall fic. I feel I ought to branch out a bit from the MCU.
6. Dragged away. Natasha in the Red Room; Miss Underwood scolds her for having friends.
It all happens so fast. One moment, Natasha is giggling with Yelena; the next, Miss Underwood is jerking Natasha out of her seat by the hair.
Natasha screams. She can’t help it: it’s not just the pain but the shock. Miss Underwood twists her hand in Natasha’s hair and hauls her across the cafeteria, her high heels clicking on the floor, the other girls looking up and then looking away, or watching in silence, just the way Natasha does herself when Miss Underwood drags someone away.
Miss Underwood hauls Natasha down the hall. Natasha scrambles to keep up, but Miss Underwood just walks faster. The pull on Natasha’s hair is excruciating. “You’ll pull it all out!” Natasha protests.
“Nonsense.”
They plow through the outer door into the courtyard. The door slams behind them, and at last Miss Underwood lets Natasha go. A few long red strands cling to her fingers, and Miss Underwood shakes them off onto the dead brown leaves on the ground.
The air is cold on Natasha’s face, but her scalp is burning. She blinks against tears. She will not cry in front of Miss Underwood. “We weren’t doing anything,” Natasha protests.
“What were you giggling about?”
“Nothing,” Natasha says, trying frantically to remember, or at least to make something up. It really wasn’t anything important. They weren’t making fun of the teachers, which is big trouble if you get caught. “We were just making up a song about pogs - ”
“Pogs?” Miss Underwood interrupts.
Natasha nods. Her scalp throbs, and even her eyes are still smarting. She’s not tattling: Miss Underwood has to know about this craze already. The teachers have been confiscating bottle caps for days.
“Liz, I mean Yelizaveta Markova, brought a set back from her mission in Chicago, and now everyone wants to play.” And the Red Room is certainly not about to waste money buying pogs for its girls, but that’s not a good thing to say, so Natasha doesn’t say it. It’s cold out here. She’s shivering. “So we’ve all been collecting bottle caps on our walks.”
“To play pogs.”
Natasha twists like a spider in the wind under Miss Underwood’s disdain. “And Yelena and I were just - we were making up a song about pogs and frogs and bogs - we were practicing our English,” says Natasha, becoming indignant at Miss Underwood’s unfairness in interrupting such a studious pursuit.
Miss Underwood regards her. “You’re good friends, you and Yelena,” she says.
“I guess,” Natasha says, because the way Miss Underwood says it, it sounds like it’s not a good thing.
Miss Underwood takes Natasha’s head between her hands. Her grip is gentle this time, but firm, and she tilts Natasha’s head to the side. “Be careful of friends,” Miss Underwood says. “You never know when you’ll have to break their necks.”
A breeze swirls the dead leaves around the cement courtyard. Natasha shivers. The girls whisper that Miss Underwood killed all the other Black Widows in her year, and that’s why she’s the only one left.
It’s not true, of course. Most of Miss Underwood’s cohort died fighting Nazis, and their photos hang on the Wall of Heroes.
But the whispers persist: Miss Underwood snapped a classmate’s neck when she was no older than Natasha. She could snap Natasha’s neck now with just a twist of her hands.
She lets go instead, and bends down so they are eye to eye. “Pretend you have friends,” Miss Underwood tells Natasha. “Make people believe it. But don’t ever believe it yourself. Then you’ll always be able to shoot first.”
A friend on Tumblr asked for a bit of Briarley fic (self-fic?) with the prompt “isolation,” so what could I write except a bit of my favorite mopy dragon brooding as he flies?
7. Isolation
Briarley is happiest when he flies.
He doesn’t dare fly during the daylight, when anyone might see the dragon-creature the curse has made of him. But once night has fallen, when the sky is dark, and even if someone should see him silhouetted by the moon they would believe it only a dream, he takes off from the parapet and flies.
He flies, sometimes, all night. In the winter months, when the night is long, he can fly until he reaches the sea, and look down below at the endless water stretching empty in all directions; and then, when he is entirely alone, he feels at peace.
In the summer, though, the nights are short, and he cannot fly beyond the fields of England. Even when there is no moon, even when the rain falls down in torrents, he can still see signs of human habitation down below. A lantern hung in a window; a flash of lightning reflecting off the window of a church.
Even at this distance, the signs of human life pain him. He is alone, and will always be alone, and can never come closer than this. The only way to break his curse is to love and be loved, and that is impossible for him: he came into this world cursed already, unable to love a woman.
Did the enchantress know that when she cursed him? Did she take a cruel pleasure in knowing that he could never meet her terms?
Sometimes he flies as far as he can go, until his wings are about to give out. Once he flew due north, reckoning by the north star, and yet somehow - somehow when he was about to fall out of the sky, there was his estate below him, his cursed castle that he cannot escape.
I replaced prompt 8 (stab wound) with the alternative prompt 10, Nightmare, and wrote a Code Name Verity fic, which got long enough that I’ve posted it over on AO3: Dreams in Damask. About once a year, Maddie dreams of walking with Julie in the garden with the damask roses.
9. Shackled. Dottie Underwood Red Room backstory.
The girls had not always been handcuffed to their beds.
Dottie still remembers this time, although she was very young when it ended. She wasn’t Dottie yet then, but Dasha, one of a hundred thousand little orphans created by the civil war, so young that she didn’t even remember her full name: just Dasha.
She remembers little of her life before: remembers only how the Red Room impressed her when she arrived. The girls wore smart uniforms that were washed once a week. So much food that no one ever went to bed hungry. Enough beds for each girl to have her own, and even pillows, and sometimes they had pillow fights, because they were not handcuffed then.
Later, Dottie remembers those days as the happiest of her life. She still hates Lilya for running away and ruining it all.
***
In later years, Dottie hates Lilya so much that she nearly forgets how much Dasha once loved her. Dasha was nine, and Lilya, sixteen, was her goddess. Dark-haired, bright-eyed, vivacious, rebellious but beloved: always walking right up to the cusp of trouble, but turning it aside with a remark so clever that even the teachers laughed.
Maybe that was why Lilya thought she could get away with running away.
Dasha didn’t know the details at the time, only that Lilya disappeared in the night. Where she went, and why, and how they caught her: Dottie still doesn’t know.
The incident was never mentioned again, ever. That’s always been the Red Room way. The failures are abandoned and forgotten. Like Dottie herself now.
Not Lilya, though. They brought Lilya back. She had been gone a week, and all the girls had been in high tension. Whispering in the stairwells, glancing at each other in class. Reaching across the spaces between the beds to hold each other’s hands in the night.
They brought Lilya directly to the firing range. Her hands were tied, her feet shackled. The chain between her ankles clanked as she shuffled across the concrete to stand by the targets.
She held her head high, although there were bruises on her face. They’d tied a black rag so tightly over her mouth that it dragged the corners of her lips back into a ghastly smile.
“Ready,” said their rifle instructor, as if they often marched girls out on the firing range to be shot. But they didn’t yet, not then. Lilya was the first.
And so the girls did not ready their rifles. They stood silent and pale and shivering, gazing up at their instructor wide-eyed, as if the combined weight of their frightened faces might make him rescind the order.
“How dare you!” he burst out. “How dare you defend this traitor, this counterrevolutionary filth? She needs to be shot like the mad dog she is. How can you hesitate?” He thrust a finger at Dasha as he spoke, so she was staring down his stubby finger like the barrel of a gun. “Are you a Trotskyite?” And now the accusing finger moved on, stabbing at girl after girl. “A Zinovievite? A kulak? A wrecker?” By then the girls were all shaking, and when again he shouted, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” - this time, they followed orders.
That night, in the dark, Anya reached across the space between their beds to hold Dasha’s hand. They were holding hands when the lights snapped on, and Matron came in with a basket of handcuffs dangling from her arm. “You’ll lock yourselves in every night,” she said. Her mouth twitched as she spoke, as if she didn’t want to say it. “No more runaways, they said.”
“But Matron.” This was Ksenia. When the death matches started, not too long after, she was one of the first to have her neck broken. “What if there’s a fire?”
Matron snapped the handcuff closed around Dasha’s wrist. The metal was cold against her skin. “Then I guess you’ll all burn up.”
10. Unconscious. A tranquilizer dart knocks Steve unconscious, and he’s too heavy for Natasha to lift.
The problem is that Steve is too heavy for Natasha to lift. If it were Tony, now, she might throw him over her shoulders and stagger out; or if there was a gurney or a wheelbarrow or a goddamn rolling chair, she could manhandle Steve into it and roll him out.
But they are pinned down in an empty spare room without a single stick of furniture, let alone any wheels, and Steve’s too heavy for her to lift. And he remains unconscious.
She slaps his face again, hard, even though his face is already flushed red from earlier slaps. Hydra got him with a sleeping dart half an hour ago, and they made it to this room before he collapsed, and now he will not wake and she can’t move him.
And Hydra is closing in on them again. She can’t make out the words yet, but she can hear the sound of their shouts.
If he doesn’t wake soon, she will have to leave him behind.
“Steve,” she says, and slaps his face. He moans, and she holds her breath, her hands clenched so tight that she can feel the thump of her pulse in her palms.
But he doesn’t wake.
The door squeaks at the far end of the hall. Boots thump. They’re coming.
She pushes aside a ceiling tile and hoists herself inside. She’s not abandoning him: she’s going for help.
But when she turns to put the ceiling panel back in place, and sees him lying on the floor, his face pale and sweaty and slack - he looks so alone.
Natasha clenches her jaw and hardens her heart. If she escapes, there’s a chance that she’ll save him. If she stays, there is no chance at all: they will both die, and die slowly, and no one will find what is left of their bodies.
She replaces the panel just before a Hydra goon kicks open the door. There is a tiny gap in the ceiling, just big enough for Natasha to see the goons stomp into the room. “We got him!” the lead goon exults into his comms.
The comms crackle. “Good. The surgical suite is prepared,” an unseen voice replies, and Natasha’s heart fills her throat. The leader snaps his fingers, and a man almost as big as the Hulk steps forward and tosses Steve over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Even this does not wake Steve up.