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They had told her that she was free.
Whenever Katerina thought back to that time, back to the events that clouded her twenty-first year on this Earth with such terror that she wished she could not remember it, those were always the words that came to her first. Whenever she looked back on her past self, Katerina couldn’t help but think her to be naive, to be a fool for believing such an empty promise, and yet, she also knew she couldn’t blame herself for believing it. It had been too wonderful a prospect to pass up, even if she could now see it for the flimsy lie that it had been.
Katerina had gone decades now without being plagued by nightmares; that is, nightmares about that twenty-first year (there were still plenty of other events that had caused her nightmares over the years, changing and shifting as she too changed and shifted). But after her time in Madripoor, she found those nightmares coming back, the awareness that they were happening only making them worse and worse. What was perhaps most unfortunate about the situation was that Katerina knew why she was having these nightmares now, after all these years, and yet it did nothing to stop them. If anything, she suspected that this awareness was one of the factors that was making them worse.
Trust James Barnes to make her life a little bit worse, even when he wasn’t the Winter Soldier anymore. Though, of course that was the case; Katerina’s tailspin into sleepless nights and an overactive mind had been caused by him no longer being the Winter Soldier, after all.
“I’m not that man anymore, Katerina.” How ironic it was that words meant to comfort her had wound up causing her so much hurt. Because, if he could be someone different now, if he could move on, then so could she, which led to the pivotal question that had started it all; why hadn’t she?
Even after three and a half weeks in a completely different country to anyone and anything she had encountered in Madripoor, the nightmares were still bad. If anything, they felt as if they were growing worse. She woke up in a cold sweat almost every night, leaving her so deeply uncomfortable that she would need to shower before she could even try and fall back to sleep. Some nights, she didn’t even bother; if it was close enough to morning, she would change out of her pajamas into her workout gear and exercise, only stopping when the sun had risen and she could feel the air she pulled in grating against her aching lungs like sandpaper.
But still the nightmares would not leave her alone. Soon, they began to plague her during the day too. Sitting at the kitchen counter eating breakfast, picking up groceries, even when she was exercising, the memories would follow her. Waking nightmares, she had taken to calling them. She assumed this was what James must have gone through; only for him, after decades of brainwashing, it must have been a thousand times worse.
Katerina didn’t want to imagine what this feeling would be like if it were a thousand times worse.
The sun had been shining down on Katerina, bathing her in a warm glow, when she had received the news. And, even with that warm glow upon her, she had still felt her blood run cold.
“That can’t be right,” Katerina said, even as the face of the woman sitting across from her changed, softening almost, which Katerina might have interpreted as pity if she had believed the woman cared at all about the implications of what she had just said. Whatever the expression was, Katerina wanted to slap it off her face. Instead, she dug her fingernails into the arms of her chair. “They - they said I was free.”
“Well, I’m afraid they’ve changed their minds,” the woman replied and, though her voice ran as smooth as honey, Katerina felt as if it had frozen her insides. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
Katerina had no intention of doing any such thing. But, as she rose to her feet, the woman did the same, their movements so in sync that Katerina might have mistaken herself to be looking in a mirror. Katerina stepped away from her chair, and again the woman did the same.
“Katerina” -
Katerina took her opportunity. She didn’t have any weapons on her - something she was already deeply cursing herself for - but the table in front of them wasn’t empty, and she had become very well versed in creating weapons out of whatever she could find, including herself. Within seconds, she had the woman pinned to the floor, one knee pressing into her abdomen and a fork from the table dug into the side of her neck. If Katerina pushed it in too deep, she knew she could burst one of the woman’s blood vessels, but she didn’t particularly think that would be a tragedy.
“You tell them,” Katerina hissed, digging the fork deeper into the woman’s neck, making the woman cry out with a half-gasp, half-sob, “that I’d rather die than be roped into whatever plans they have for me. I’m not going to be their lab rat anymore.”
The woman smirked, though it wasn’t until she spoke that Katerina understood why. “Tell them yourself.”
Katerina had already lost, long before she had been aware that the fight had even begun.
There were only moments left after that; fragments, pieces of a puzzle, still shots saved from a video reel that had gone missing decades ago and would likely never be found. Katerina remembered blood dripping off the tines of a fork, the same blood staining her hands. She remembered seeing guns pointed at her, but she didn’t remember if they had been shot, so she assumed that they hadn’t. She remembered seeing a needle, and then she remembered her vision blurring so she could see nothing at all.
After that, everything went dark.
In her nightmares, that was where Katerina would wake up. The world would blur and fade away, and then she would be jolted from her mind and out into the darkness of the night, the pitch black of her bedroom indistinguishable from her nightmares for only a moment, yet long enough to send her reaching for the knife under her pillow, or the gun in the second drawer of the bedside table. On those first nights, when the nightmares had started up again in the days following the end of her time in Madripoor, she had had the gun loaded before she had realised that it was just a nightmare, that they had never come back at her. But even now, after weeks of the same, repetitive dream, she still needed to remind herself that the Red Room was gone, that they could never come for her again.
That was, perhaps, the part that felt the least real about all of it. Katerina had been there when the Red Room had fallen, had been witness as it quite literally fell from the sky, and yet it still didn’t feel real. Particularly after she woke up from those nightmares, she would feel the shoot of fear that only the Red Room could instill in her. Some nights, that fear made her wish she was just as naive as she had been when she was twenty-one, when she believed that they had really let her go, that being allowed to leave when she was eighteen had meant that they would never come back for her.
But the Red Room always comes back for their own in the end. Katerina should have known that right from the start.