The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 6

Russia

Winter 1996/97

He was a legend, a myth, a ghost story. How on earth the Red Room had been able to get the Winter Soldier to appear in the flesh to test its recruits was a mystery to Nadya and it was a development she wasn't sure she liked.

Before it had happened, she would have been thrilled. The chance to test her skills against an agent and assassin of the caliber of the Winter Soldier? She would have leapt at the opportunity to face him.

Now that she had...

It wasn't so much because she had never beaten him while sparring—no one had come close, though Nadya had come closest, so it was a moot point—it was him himself.

There was something...wrong...about him. It took some time to figure it out, but eventually Nadya was able to place the feeling.

He was hollow. Empty. He was a blank slate, a shell of a man who only seemed to exist to follow orders. And it scared Nadya. It also inspired a great welling of pity for the man. Because he was incredible. Stronger than anyone she'd fought or even met and faster than should have been possible. The way he moved was captivating and watching him fight was like a witnessing deadly dance. His body was sculpted and perfected into the ultimate weapon, easily drawing Nadya's eye whether she wished it or not. And he was obviously smart and definitely creative; the best fighters had to be. Assassins even more so, and he was the best. Which was a big part of what made the reality of him so, well, upsetting and tragic.

When he stood waiting for orders or his next match, he seemed so lost. He seemed disoriented, even childlike in his uncertainty as he waited, still and ready, for whatever he was instructed to do next. She'd never even heard him speak. Something awful had been done to this man's head to turn him into the Winter Soldier, to wipe him clean of whoever he'd been before, and it sent a chill down Nadya's spine. It was more than simple brainwashing, more than indoctrination; those she was intimately familiar with, having been taught to recognize and beat them even as she'd been a recipient in her early years. His steel-blue eyes were virtually dead as they scanned and analyzed his opponents, his face—younger and handsomer than she'd expected given his reputation and the stories about him—was blank no matter the painful hits he took or how often he soundly beat and even nearly killed the young but deadly girls sent up against him.

Because they were all deadly. Natalia's group was the youngest to be permitted to train against him and you didn't survive to their age without kills, both of the weak and of those brought in to train against. Of the younger girls, Natalia fared the best, her size, speed and ferocity off-putting to man used to going up against grown men and women. Katerina, the only other girl left from Nadya's group, fared the best next to Nadya herself, her hand-to-hand and close-quarter combat skills second to none; before the Treatments, Katerina had been the only one capable of beating Nadya, the blonde often only just barely surviving their matches out of cleverness. But then, being only a couple months from graduation, it would have been incomprehensible for it to be otherwise.

He was unbeatable.

Nadya watched with calculating eyes as Lena struggled against him, crying out angrily as she twisted free from the grip he'd secured across her shoulders, earning a brief reprieve. It would only be moments, though. Nadya could see the brunette from the group after hers was tiring fast, her honey-brown hair clinging to her damp face. Nadya couldn't help but clench her teeth. This was the third round Madame B had insisted on for the younger girl. Only the purpose seemed to be bent more toward humiliation, this time, rather than training.

Across the room, Natalia's wide eyes met Nadya's, her green gaze hard with the same frustration Nadya felt. Each girl was on her own in the Red Room, fighting only for her own success. That was the way of it. But Nadya could hardly stand this. Lena was going to break eventually, within the next handful of months, she suspected; Nadya had been here long enough that she could see the early signs. But she was not on the verge of breaking yet, not today.