Director Carter walked through the empty aircraft carrier halls. It was two in the morning and the recruits had a curfew of eleven and for once no urgent matters were facing the organization so most agents had decided to turn in for the night.
Her workout shoes touched the floor without making a sound, she usually would go for runs on nights she was plagued by her thoughts. For some reason though she had decided to wander. She walked through the halls lined with memorabilia and awards for Agents. She stopped at the wall of the fallen, she could never walk by it without pausing for at least a moment.
Peggy stared at the name she wished that she didn’t have to. She let her fingers trace the outline of every letter of his name. She would never forget about the Captain. The man who changed her life really, he was the first man to ever actually treat her like an equal, if he didn’t treat her like his superior.
She remembered the times they spent together, planning for his Howling Commando missions, how determined he was to fight, how resilient he was, how willing he was to do the right thing. He was the reason she went on to found S.H.I.E.L.D, he had changed her life, changed the world. He was the first superhero, supersoldier.
As she drowned in the memories she let herself walk. She somehow found herself in the agents quarters. As she turned down the hall she heard screams emanating from the end of it. This hall was empty except for the room at the end, the room that belonged to Natasha Romanoff.
As an agreement to bring her on board and to have her as an agent, many of her inferiors demanded that she be isolated, including the assistant director Nick Fury. They claimed it was a safety precaution, that she was a threat to other agents safety and to the safety of the organization. Peggy Carter didn’t like it, but she agreed nonetheless. They were right, they didn’t know if Natasha was sent here to spy on them, or if she had a brainwashing code inside of her head like the Winter Soldier did.
Peggy Carter trusted Natasha Romanoff to an extent, she wouldn’t be alive today if she didn’t, she thought she knew that Natasha’s intentions were genuine, that she truly did want a better life for herself, but with a person like that you never could really know who they were fighting for underneath their masks, but she never stopped believing in Natasha and Natasha never gave her a reason not to believe in her.
When Peggy heard the screams she ran to the end of the hall, she might have been older, but she was in no way out of shape. She hoped that by the end of this night she could still believe that Natasha was a good person at heart.
“Natasha! Natasha! Open this door right now!” She ordered while pounding on the door.
When the screams continued she knew that something was very definitely going wrong behind the doors.
Peggy punched in the all access code and the door slid aside to allow her through. Peggy’s signature pistol was drawn from her side holster as she turned on the lights. She found nothing in the room except for an asleep Natasha chained to the bed who was crying and screaming.
“Please! Please! Make it stop! Please! I’ll do anything!” Natasha cried out in Russian, Peggy understood every word from her training to fight in the Cold War era of spies.
“Natasha. Natasha dear, wake up, it’s only a dream.” Peggy soothed, trying to wake her gently. She put one of her hands on Natasha’s unshackled arm to try and shake her awake, but to also help defend herself if Natasha attacked when she woke up.
“Please?” Natasha begged, still trying to wake herself up from the nightmare she was living inside of her mind.
“Agent Romanoff!” Peggy said louder this time and shaking her harder.
Natasha had finally been woken from her sleep and immediately jumped away from the director and held the knife she kept under her pillow up to defend herself.
“Agent Romanoff. I am Director Carter and I need you to please put the knife down.” Peggy ordered.
When Natasha looked around and got her bearings enough she dropped the knife and put her unshackled hand in the air. She held her head high even though the tears were still running down her face and the nightmare hadn’t stopped replaying in her mind.
“Thank you Agent Romanoff. Do you think that I could take the cuff off of you?” Peggy asked seeing the red marks and torn skin on her wrist from her tossing and turning.
Agent Carter knew about the Red Room, about where Natasha grew up. She tried to learn everything she could after what happened to Dottie, but the lack of information stopped her from knowing more. She knew about the torture they put each and every girl through, how they made them fight to the death. It made her sick to her stomach, but she wanted to know every detail, everything she could so that she could help girls like Natasha when they came to her, so she might one day be able to take them down with the help of S.H.I.E.L.D.
“Please don’t.” Natasha asked the director.
“Natasha, that can’t be comfortable. You’re bleeding from them.”
“I’m sorry for bothering you Director but I can handle myself.” Natasha put up her walls and tried to shut out the director.
“Natasha, I’m not going to leave you here like this, you’re shaking. I’m not your enemy Natasha. You need to trust me.” Peggy said noticing Natasha’s hands shaking and her inability to focus her eyes.
Natasha only shook her head and her red curls fell into her face. She had tears coming down her face and her breathing was ragged.
“Natasha. Let’s come up to my office. I think we both need the fresh air.” She bargained while pushing the curls out of Natasha’s eyes like she was her own child.
Natasha pulled away from the Director’s touch like she had been slapped, but Peggy still continued to reach out and push the hair out of her eyes. When Natasha looked at Peggy she felt a sense of safety, something Natasha didn’t have almost anywhere else so she agreed to follow her.
Peggy opened the door to her office and watched as Natasha kept touching her barely scabbing wrist, making it continue to bleed. Natasha stood in the middle of the room with her back straight as a board and her vacant eyes looking forward.
“Natasha, you aren’t in trouble. I won’t hurt you.”
Natasha only held her head high, refusing to look at the Director, refusing to show what she thought was weakness.
“Natasha sit down please, get comfortable. I won’t hurt you I promise. You’re safe here Natasha, we aren’t them.” Peggy tried to convince Natasha and gently touched her shoulder. Natasha didn’t react.
“You don’t know what they’re like.” Natasha whispered with her voice filled with pain. Her eyes were the only part of her that showed any emotion, and all Peggy could see in them was anguish, remorse, fear, but most of all pain.
“No. No I don’t Natasha. I can’t imagine what you went through.” Peggy lied trying to get her to open up, to let out some of her pain.
“They call it the Red Room, but it isn’t a room, it's a facility. They train us to be the most elite weapons in Russia’s arsenal. They torture us every single day of our lives there.” Natasha finally let out some of her pain and Peggy saw her relax.
“They beat us, electrify us, even experiment on us. We trained 12 hours a day non stop, on days that we were being punished we didn’t. They trained us to go for 57 hours straight. On a normal day when the training stopped the torture started. Every day goes by just like the next.”
Peggy guided Natasha over to her couch and sat beside her. Peggy could see the memories playing out like a movie in Natasha’s eyes.
“After six months you don’t know your own name until they tell you. Every part of your body has adjusted to it, you sleep when you can if you sleep at all. You get used to the metal cutting into your skin and the sound the chains make when you move in your sleep.”
“Every week they would find a new way to torture us, they didn’t want our senses to pain being completely shut off because then they would have no punishment. Sometimes they would lock us in boxes and fill them all the way up with water and let it out just before we drowned. Sometimes they would inject us with drugs that made it feel like every fiber of our bodies was being ripped apart, and then made us fight another girl. Sometimes they would lock us out in the Russian winter with nothing but a tank top and shorts.”
“Natasha…” Peggy started, but decided to stop herself, nothing she could say would make anything any better for the woman who was sitting in front her, she only handed her a tissue and resumed her silence.
Natasha closed her eyes for a moment and saw nothing but the classrooms. “We had lessons, ballet, language, calligraphy, anything that could possibly help us on a mission, they engrained it into our brains. They had us fighting and training every moment, we had to master everything they taught us because if we didn’t we would lose.”
“They start sending you out on missions when your ten. It’s your birthday present. By then all of us had at least one murder in our ledgers. We have to fight to survive and whoever loses, well they don’t.”
“How old were you?” Peggy asked her quietly, she put her hand over Natasha’s. Peggy’s voice was now hoarse and tears were starting to collect in the corners of her eyes.
“They say I was six and a half, but I can’t remember, I don’t know my actual birthday so I can’t say.”
Peggy sighed. She couldn’t imagine forcing a six year old child to kill another child, or another person for that matter. For these people, these monsters, it must have been like sport and Peggy believed that there was a special place in hell reserved for them.
“After all of that. After everything they put us through, there were six of us left. We started out with over a hundred.”
Natasha took a breath, she had to muster every ounce of strength left in her body to finish the story. “The headmasters, the trainers, Madame B, they all start a selection process, it was more rigorous than anything we had been put through before. They were narrowing the field down to only one. The person who won would undergo the graduation ceremony. I tried to fail my first task, but I was the front runner, they didn’t want me losing, so they put my brain through a blender, until I wasn’t even myself anymore. They brainwashed me into doing whatever they wanted.” Natasha swallowed. She was trying to keep the emotion from slipping through, but knew she was fighting a losing battle.
“When I won, they let me back into my brain enough so that I could remember what happened. Then they started the graduation ceremony.”
Peggy didn’t want to speak up, but she knew Natasha needed to talk about what happened so she did. “What did they do?”
“They had somehow gotten knock-off super soldier serum. Then…”
“Then they forcibly sterilized me. It’s efficient. The Red Room doesn’t allow weaknesses. It’s one less thing to worry about on a mission, it’s the one thing that could potentially mean more to a mission. It was a weakness, so they eliminated it. They eliminate all weaknesses.” Natasha choked out and let the tears fall.
“Natasha. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t fair what happened to you. No one should ever have to go through what you went through, your pain. You are so strong, so strong Natasha. I can’t imagine what that does to you every day. I’m sorry Natasha.” Peggy spoke around the lump in her throat and her tears had started to fall.
Peggy put her hand on Natasha’s face and wiped her tears away like she was a child. She left her hand there as she spoke. “One day we will get them Natasha. One day we will make them pay for everything they have done to you.”