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Every daughter thought the world of her father. From the moment she was held in his arms, that man became her everything: Her best friend, her teacher, her protector. At least, that was what Antonia had believed for most of her life. She couldn’t recall an instance when her own flesh and blood had shown her anything besides disappointment or ever bothered to keep her safe from the evil lurking in the shadows.
She may have been too young to realize it then, but her father had been one of those evils. It was something he had kept hidden from her until it had all blown up in their faces. Antonia could vaguely remember bits and pieces from That Day, the explosion and the intense heat and the heavy rubble. There were desperate screams, and she still didn’t believe they could have come from her mouth.
Did she die, back then? For years, she wished that she had.
There was nothing else in her life but pain.
Antonia Dreykov died that day.
Something else lived on.
Antonia lost months, years, of her life between That Day and her Reawakening. The pain of her injuries had been so piercing, despite the medication pumping through her veins, that it numbed her. There was a constant something in her mind, lingering in the back of her head, and it drove her crazy.
Her cries constantly fell on deaf ears; doctors turning a blind eye, guards standing watch in silence, the man she knew as her father implanting memories and combat and orders. Antonia’s father must truly have died in that office bombing in Budapest, because she refused to think of the man forcing her to train in the Red Room with the other girls as the same father who once raised her.
The man, the General, kept a close watch over her throughout the years. His eyes burned into the back of her head. Her days blended together. Rinse and repeat. Monotonous. When the General executed the Taskmaster Protocol, what little autonomy Antonia had over her actions was immediately stripped away. The only difference in routine that she remembered was The Surgery. Antonia had fought until she couldn’t.
Afterwards, she just felt hollow. She still wished she had died.
One of the older Widows told her to keep her heart, but Antonia had no heart left to keep. She learned quickly, too quickly, that growing up heartless was the only way to survive in that godforsaken place.
She would stare into mirrors and just feel off. Was that her, the sad woman staring back? She didn’t recognize the person in the reflection. They had her face, but they also had burn scars marring their skin. The eyes — they weren’t absent but there was no light in them, not anymore. Antonia never knew which thoughts were her own and which were the program’s.
But the armor they built for her did just as well with taking away everything else. Antonia Dreykov would disappear behind the mask, and no one was the wiser. The metaphorical armor she built for herself kept her mind from splitting.
There were no more choices.
There was only the next task.
She was a mimic. That’s what the General called her: The perfect mimic. The something in her head made her into that, and no matter how hard she tried, or how much she didn’t want to continue, she couldn’t escape her orders. Antonia lost more and more of her memories the longer she studied the combat recordings of the superheroes the world celebrated, the more she cycled through the Red Room under the General’s watchful eye.
“Lost” was the wrong word. “Buried” was more accurate, she thought. Lost implied wanting to return to a place from where she once came, like a little girl left behind and wanting to come home. By burying her memories, Antonia hid away the best years of her life and protected them from the pains of her reality. It kept her sane over the years.
Sane enough.
Whenever the General laid a hand on her, an involuntary shiver would jolt down her spine. Whenever the General would whisper fake nothings into her ear, give her orders that her consciousness couldn’t resist, and celebrate the blood she washed her hands in, Antonia wished that she were dead.
The first time Antonia remembered seeing the Avenger, it was on security camera footage from a facility in Queens, New York, during the StarkExpo. The next time, it was on the newsreels after the alien invasion. The General was always talking about the Avenger, the only Black Widow operative to have defected from their ranks and lived long enough to become a hero.
Antonia couldn’t help resenting her, after the General recounted the story of That Day. The Avenger was the one who bombed them, targeted them, the one who landed her in the Red Room in the first place.
Her programming prevented her from doing much, but she felt so deeply. There were waves of emotion crashing down on the shore of her mind. Seething rage and disgust, followed by a roll of envy and mourning. With every new video projected across the wall of her cell, Antonia learned the Avenger’s skills, absorbed her actions along with her teammates’ movements.
The only constant that kept going in the back of her mind, watching the face of Natasha Romanoff, was how did you escape have to escape get away can’t escape from him want to leave get out how did you get out.
When the General called for a new mission deployment, Antonia went through the motions. New data was transferred through the chip in the back of her head. One of the other Widows had managed to defect — the details were scarce because it was need-to-know, and she did not need to know.
A new mission: Retrieve neuro-gas vials from the Avenger.
Returning to Budapest should have meant something to her, given it was years since she and her father had been there since That Day. In the back of her mind, as she chased the Avenger and the Defector down the streets of the city, Antonia noted the not-familiar-but-should-have-been buildings of the place she had once called home.
The arrow she deployed had flipped their vehicle, sending it careening down into the subway. One of them was bleeding, leaving a trail of crimson on the dirty tiles through the station. The Taskmaster helmet filtered in shocked screams and muted whispers of curiosity from bystanders as they ran; the heads-up display tracked the blood trail to a grate on the floor. Antonia followed the blood into the underground.
She’d seen people bleed. She’d often been the reason those people bled. In the darkness, she let the thoughts come unfettered: Do I bleed am I human or machine will they ever let me die can’t escape want to escape have to capture the Avenger don’t disappoint him or he will bring pain.
The next time Antonia saw the Avenger, they were in the General’s office. She had disguised herself as the Scientist, to get to them. As Antonia raised a pistol to shoot, he told her not to. It was… confusing, but she obeyed. He was laughing when he came beside her and hissed out, “Say ‘hello’.”
She reached to the control panel on her right gauntlet and released her helmet. Her gaze met the shocked expression of the Avenger, and the words tumbling out of the other woman’s mouth caught her off-guard.
“Can she hear me?” the Avenger asked.
Yes please how did you get out show me how you got out let me—
The General only laughed, and then dismissed her. Antonia didn’t fight it, she never could, and slipped her helmet back on when he told her to leave them be.
It was later, when the Red Room was breaking apart in front of their very eyes and falling out of the sky, when Antonia was fighting the Avenger in hand-to-hand combat while in free-fall, did she let the thought cross her mind about dying from ground impact. Maybe if she fought hard enough, she’d complete her mission and finally just—
The Avenger deployed the parachute attached to Antonia’s suit, and the two of them came tumbling roughly to the ground. She was dragged through water before she reached out and cut herself free from the chute tethers, like a puppet freed from its strings.
Antonia wasn’t truly freed from her own strings until the Avenger undid her helmet and tossed them both to the ground. They stole a glance at each other before scrambling for the red vial that lay in the dirt. A flip, a hard punch to the glass, and then…
The air around her turned red with the gas and her lungs filled with a spicy-sweet smell that sent her mind reeling. Moment by moment, it felt like elastic bands were snapping inside of her head, a heavy tension lifting off of her.
She was tired.
Antonia collapsed. Her limbs ached. Her scalp prickled from the heat of the sun. Her eyes burned as she stared up at the bright sky above, filled with still-falling debris and dark smoke. For the first time in years, her head was empty. No thoughts or commands that weren’t her own. Like leaves in the wind.
Her heart ached and she felt pressure in her eyes. The Avenger was at her side in a moment, crawling, pressing her forehead next to hers. Her skin was warm and alive against her own, and the touch from another human was almost overwhelming.
She was so tired.
Antonia’s words were rough as she spoke, voice breaking from underuse and holding back a sob: “Is he gone?” It was a whisper, a plea, a prayer. When the Avenger, Natasha, nodded, Antonia let out a shuddering breath. The explosion in Budapest had taken away her life. At least, this time, the explosion of the Red Room had given her a new one.
Warm tears started sliding down the sides of her face, rolling past her ears to the ground, and she let out a relieved sob.
Free. She was free.
