SMOTHER.

PROLOGUE

NOTE: The bold is supposed to be Russian :)

It starts at birth, because it always does.

There was one singular window in the hospital room. Through the glass, snowflakes fell to the ground, the same color as the clouds in the sky. Inside the room, the late November snowstorm had made its way through the window all day; the blinding white lights blending into starkly white walls and white ceiling panels. The lights reflected on the floor, turning grey into, once more, white.

In the corner of the room, a man with a few splinters of dark hair on his otherwise bald head stood with his arms crossed. Behind him, a couch the same shade of grey as the moon was up close and a jacket only a few shades darker hanging over the armrest. This man was not the color of the room, although close. He resembled perhaps a light wood, or a classified file. However, he still blended into the room. Obviously, there was no way for him to physically look desaturated, but he seemed like he was. Maybe it was the way he talked, or the blankness of his stare.

The two most colorful things in the hospital room were a woman sitting on a hospital bed across the man, and the baby she held. The woman and the baby shared the same hair color, although the baby's face was so red that the color of her hair blended into it. The baby—a little girl—had just ceased screaming, now completely silent. While silence was rare for her now, it would not be later.

"She's so little." Her mother whispers—in Russian—to the father, pear-colored eyes glossy with tears that sat on her waterline. She was met with silence from her husband, nonchalant as ever.

There is a creak of a door opening, and a man enters the room, his suit another contrast. Black on white, but there is still black. His jaw is clenched and the little that is left of his hair is a color not unlike the couch. He has wrinkles, deep crevices in his skin. They don't make him look kinder, though, not like some. If anything, they make him look dubious. There are lines by his eyes, between and above his eyebrows. His cheeks are sunken in enough that he looks like a corpse, the lines going down his cheeks—from his eye to just below his cheekbone—like he was in a fight with a wild animal only adding to it. There are wrinkles between the skin on the side of his nose and the cartilage on the outside, like he had been scrunching his nose for his entire life, the same way you get smile lines if you smile all the time. Speaking of smiles, he was smiling, but it was anything but happy, or kind. Looking at his smile, and the tenebrity of his eyes, his teeth felt like that of a wolf. Nothing about him looked anything but carnivorous.

He walked to the hospital bed, but his walk wasn't a walk. It was a stalk, a wolf slowly moving towards prey. His smile only grew wider when the girl's mother held her closer. "Relax. You know I won't hurt her." Words came out of his mouth, but it didn't feel like he was speaking. If you didn't know any better, you would say he was reading off of a script. "What's her name?"

Her mother held her closer. "Her name is Ava."

"I see. A beautiful, strong name, is it not? I presume that with a name such as hers, she will be strong enough to be a good soldier, no?

The girl's mother grimaced. "Yes, sir." She looked away from the man, instead looking at Ava. She might've thrown something at him and run away if she had spent another minute with her eyes on him.  "I wonder if, sir, I could spend more time with her?"

The man just laughed, knives on skin, nails on a chalkboard. Agonizingly evil. There was no other word for it. Just evil.  "Why would we agree to that? All that does is make her softer." There was nothing kind about his expression, and if anything, it was chilling. Looking at him, it felt like he wasn't made to be good, or even polite.

"She's my daughter, sir—surely, I can have longer than a day with her."

"Ah, you bring a good point." He paused as if considering it, but spoke immediately after. As if he was kind enough to not give false hope—which he wasn't. He wasn't merciful at all. "No."

The girl's mother sat back, though not in shock. She knew this would happen, no matter how hard she tried to pretend she wasn't prepared for this. She knew damn well that her daughter was never going to stay with her. That was never the plan. She knew that she was never a mother, that she was just playing one. A mother would not willingly hand her daughter over to the man who would destroy her life and turn her into an animal. No, no matter how hard she tried to pretend like she was anything close to a mother, she would never truly be one. She gave birth to this little girl, but she hardly cared about her. And the little girl would never care about her. If there was no love between the two girls, there was nothing to make them mother and daughter. For her to even consider more time with this child was odd, and not something she expected of herself. There was a part of her that wanted to raise her daughter, to keep her safe. But what would that leave her? "No?"

"All that does is get you attached, and we would have no choice but to terminate you."

"She's my daughter, sir."

"She's not your daughter. She's a soldier." The man snapped, but he recoiled and his smile returned. "You agreed to give her to us. If you are having second thoughts this late into the agreement, I have no problem resolving them." Of course, his resolution would have been to shoot everyone but the girl and take her back with him. Standard procedure. He pointed towards the gun he had on him, and it was clear that although it was concealed, he could take it out and kill everyone as fast as it would take to just give Ava to him. No matter what, he wasn't leaving without her. It would be difficult to find another like her, and he would never give up what could be an extremely important asset.

The woman—not the mother, not anymore—got up and handed her daughter to the man. She didn't even hesitate, despite the resistance she showed before. Just as the man took Ava in his hands, she woke up and begun screaming. Maybe it was the unfamiliarity of the man holding her, or maybe she knew what was to come. If it was her final cry to her parents for help, they didn't seem to notice. Or care. Nobody was going to rescue her. Not here, not ever.