Prologue
Mary and Ivon Melenov, a Russian spy and a Hydra scientist. The couple took great pride in their work, it wasn’t exactly morally right, but they loved it and they worked well together. For years they had been trying to perfect the serum for the perfect super soldier, one even better than the great Captain America, they worked their asses off to achieve their goals, Mary would head out and take the equipment and information they needed and Ivon would try every combination possible.
But no matter what they tried, their experiment would die on the table as soon as the serum was administered, the process just wasn’t doable, the serum notes Erskine had made had been destroyed by shield almost immediately after the man’s demise, knowing people crazy enough would attempt to recreate the scientific revelation, so it wasn’t like the pair could take a look and have the answer immediately. No, they had to work it out themselves.
They struggled for years, Mary was running out of information to find and hunt down and Ivon was struggling to come up with a combination he hadn’t already thought of. That was until he was reading a book about spiders, trying to wind down after another failure, and he couldn’t help but admire the strengths of such a small creature, the way they could stick to any surface, spin such beautiful webs, lift two hundred times their body weight and so much more. It was fascinating. And the pair latched on immediately. The date marks the start of Project Arachnid.
They worked quickly and hard, the higher-ups had been waiting for years for any results and they were starting to get impatient. Mary and Ivon were supposed to be two of the best in the business and their failures didn’t help their reputation. They had a slow start, nothing like that had ever been done before, they had nothing to go off of and nobody to help them, but they eventually got into the flow of things, and just eight months later, they had results.
But during that time, their son was born on the tenth of August. Pietro Parker Melenov. Ivon didn’t let that distract him, he left the boy to Mary and continued with his work. It’s not like he was being neglected, his wife took care of all his needs. What she thought were his needs anyway. She didn’t teach him how to play pretend, how to be kind to others or to be polite at the dinner table, instead, she taught him what she knew would be necessary for a kid born into their world. She taught him how to fight, how to shoot, where to impale, as many languages as the kid could take and all the spy tricks she had to learn at an early age.
She hoped Pietro wouldn’t have to use them, but she knew somewhere down the line he would. She was right.
On the tenth of August 2004, the small family were getting ready to deliver their research to a Hydra base in the south of Russia, when their small family home was raided by a knock-off Hydra. They had heard about the research and had wanted to get their hands on it no matter the cost. There were soldiers all over the perimeter and they were completely outnumbered. It didn’t take them long to take Mary and Ivon down, leaving them dead almost immediately after entering the house. But they couldn’t find Pietro and they couldn’t find the research.
The kid had also been taught what to do if this was to happen, as traumatizing and hard to understand as it would be for a three-year-old, but he was smart and he knew what would happen if he didn’t complete the instructions that had been drilled into his head since the moment he could talk. Being three and small had its advantage, Pietro was easily able to sneak the flash drive out of his father’s bag, trying not to gag at the sight of blood pouring out of his parents’ lifeless bodies, whilst the guards were looking around the house and crawled out of the cat flap into the woods behind their house.
For the next three days, Pietro wandered around the city, flash drive tucked safely down his underwear, making sure to keep himself hidden to the best of his ability. He knew that his dad’s boss was supposed to come and collect him when the time was right, it had been planned from the moment he was born if what happened, actually happened, so he knew he had to sit tight and wait. That was until an older lady stumbled into him whilst he was digging food out of a dumpster.
That’s how Pietro ended up spending the next nine months in an orphanage. The place wasn’t a good place to live, and if the boy was a little bit older he would probably feel bad that most of the other children would have to spend the rest of their childhoods there. Babies were only allowed one diaper per day, everyone was given cold soup for all meals, loud children were given sedatives to force them to be quiet (Pietro quickly learned he had to be silent to keep the flash drive safe), the rooms were lined with beds and cribs, sometimes more than one child in each and the place was massively understaffed.
No one took an interest in Pietro, staff or visitors, so he was left to himself the majority of the time, which made it incredibly easy for the winter soldier to sneak into the house and take him.
Pietro didn’t panic when the large man grabbed him, he had noticed the symbol on his shirt, the same one on all of his father’s files, so he knew they had finally come for him like they said they would. If only he knew what awaited him was far worse than anything he had already been through.
Pietro spent the next two years locked in a Hydra base room (more like a cell), only being let out to be experimented on and to continue the training his mother had started, he wasn’t told what was going on, all he knew was that he was going to be like his parents, he didn’t exactly know what it was that they did, but they were his mom and dad, and the young boy couldn’t think of anything better than being exactly like them.
He wasn’t in the base for long, as soon as Hydra had gotten hold of Pietro and the flash drive they had made a deal with the red room. Hydra owed them a favor and the red room only wanted one thing. The first spider mutate, and that just so happened to be Pietro.
Once his powers were stable, he was soon shipped off to the red room, ready to become the first and only male black widow.
As soon as he arrived his training immediately picked back up and he quickly became the favourite newbie once it was made apparent that he already had advanced combat skills and didn’t miss a shot, but that also meant there were higher expectations, they needed him to be the best and they didn’t take it lightly when he failed.
In 2008, Pietro was sent on his first mission, it was pretty simple, just something to ‘test him out’. He was ordered to kidnap the French prime minister and torture the man until he gave him the information he was after. He didn’t take long to break, just a few fingernails being ripped off and the older man let out all of the secrets and more, hoping to have his life spared. That hope was diminished when Pietro put a bullet in his brain and ran along with the passcodes for the French government systems.
That was all his life consisted of for the next seven years, training, ballet, and missions. He had worked himself up in the eyes of the higher-ups and had become the best Red Room assassin since Natalia Romanov. He was always the first to be considered for missions and the only reason he wouldn’t get one is because he was already busy with another one.
But what the red room didn’t know, was that he had been planning his escape since the moment he had arrived, the only reason it had taken him so long was because he knew he had to gain their undying trust, no matter how long it took, and after seven long and painful years, he felt like he had finally reached that point.
He waited until his next mission was in Russia and when the moment finally came, he took his chance. He was terrified, he knew that if he was caught his life would never be the same, but he had to take his chance, and he did. He completed half of the mission and reported back as instructed so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And then he blew everything up.