FILE n°888 | SUBJECT RED
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ loading

╭─────────╮
hydra facility
siberia, unknown
╰─────────╯
september 14, 2002

When the baby took her first breath, she was all alone, and everyone thought her dead.

She was laid out on a metal tray, in the underground laboratory that had been built by the Red Room and HYDRA as soon as they had found out about her existence, covered in her mother's blood and that gnarly white bodily fluid that no one had bothered ridding her of. She weighed barely two and a half pounds and was so small that they could easily fit her on the metal dinner tray and still have space to lay down tools next to her head.

The child of the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier looked dead. She had been dead for the first ten hours of her life while she was being transported to Siberia, closer to the HYDRA facility where she would be growing up. Her skin was horrifyingly pale, practically translucent and clung to her bones like the first snow clung to the ground in late November. Her lips were blue and as were the tips of her tiny fingers that had almost been snapped in half while they were moving her away from the Red Room and her young mother. They had not had a chance to look at her eyes, given that a premature baby's eyes remained shut for the first few weeks of their development but had immediately noticed the small sprouts of auburn hair on her flaky scalp that matched her mother's hair color.

Now, laying on a sterilized tray in an underground lab, the baby that had been quite literally dragged into this world by cold, unwelcoming hands was being kept there forcibly as some of HYDRA's best scientists worked to bring her back from the dead.

"How long are you going to poke my new toy with your devices?" Two men stood in the corner of the room, surveying the tiny corpse with a malicious intent, each of them having their own projects for this child that had not taken it's first breath yet.

The first man was short and quite portly, with black rimmed glasses and a gold ring on his plump, littlest finger. He had a hungry gleam in his eyes whenever his beady black eyes were on the dead infant. He spoke English quite well, but had a noticeable Russian accent.

The man next to him, who was taller, leaner with wider eyes chuckled quite loudly as if he wasn't sitting in a room trying to bring someone back from the dead. "She will be your toy as soon as she turns six years old, General. Until then, she is my Asset to break." The man was American. Alexander Pierce, one of HYDRA's newest esteemed and the first one to be on board with the idea of keeping the child as an Asset. "Now come, let us discuss the terms to our agreement in private." He lead the General away from the room that smelled of death and malice, opting instead to take the man to his office.

Once the men were out of ear reach, the scientist that had been readying the child for the injection that could save her released a breath she didn't know she was holding.

"Everything alright, doctor?" A lot of the scientists at HYDRA were English and American. The ones that spoke solely Russian were those in charge of training, guarding and doing the gnarly jobs that the scientists and medics did not get to do. This hadn't always been like that, but ever since Alexander Pierce had been working undercover at SHIELD, he had managed to get American doctors along with English scientists to come work for him in Siberia.

"This baby has no idea that the life she is about to live is going to be one filled with more pain and suffering than what any of us could imagine." Doctor Amelia Wilson said to no one in particular as her colleague handed her the vial filled with the serum that had been used on the Red Guardian by the Soviets which had been a gift to them from HYDRA.

There was no malice behind her voice, but not a lot of regret either. She too had a daughter, Evelyn Wilson, born a few weeks before she started working for HYDRA that had been staying in Edinburgh with her mother while she came to work here. She had decided to come here because she believed that Alexander Pierce was going to lead a new revolutionary era for science and medicine by combining the two together. Now wasn't the time for remorse.

"Will the child be as powerful as her predecessors?" A young boy named John asked, fiddling with the hem of his white coat and nervously tugging at his curly red hair. He felt uneased by the idea of bringing someone from the dead and was trying as much as he could to avoid glancing at the corpse they had splayed out on that table like a baby frog they were about to dissect. 

His mother was a very devout woman, and she'd already had her reserves about him pursuing a career as a scientist, worrying that he would "become like all those men, who think that having a bigger brain mean they are entitled to every new discovery, no matter the ways they have to go about it to make said discovery first."

He wondered what she would say if she could see him right now, working for a corrupt organisation, being complicit in ruining the life of an innocent before the first breath had been taken, "playing God." she would say, her voice filled with disdain and her black leather Bible she never parted with in hand, ready to point out the exact scripture that would prove that what he was going was wrong.

"This dose should be enough to mend her body and heighten her senses. As for the rest, if they keep injecting her with doses of the serum regularly, she could very much be an outstanding success."

Doctor Wilson steeled herself, focusing on the fact that at the end of the day, she would get rewarded for what she had done. Lamenting over the child's future was of no use to anyone, especially not the child herself. "Injecting the super soldier serum in five," That child would grow up locked in a cage.

"Four," She would never be treated as a human being, only an asset and a weapon. "Three," She would be shipped between facilities like some sort of animal being shipped from zoo to zoo. "Two," She would never know a mother's love or a father's trust. "One." She would lead a life of suffering and destruction.

"The serum has been injected." She removed the tick needle from the child's shoulder.

Around her, the doctor's and scientists craned their necks to take a good look at the baby. "What know?"

"We wait."

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

Back in Alexander Pierce's office, him and General Dreykov were hovering above a multitude of documents concerning the fate of the young child that was currently fighting for her life just a floor beneath them.

The project had been dubbed the Crimson Widow project. It was the first official initiative that would push the Red Room and HYDRA to work together for a longer period of time than usual and for a goal that was ten times bigger than anything they had worked on since World War II. At the center of this project was the newly resuscitated baby that they had named Subject RED, due to the fiery nature of her hair. She would be the first ever asset to be shared equally by HYDRA and the Red Room, the result of a combination of the Red Room's best widow and HYDRA's deadliest Asset's genes. The child would be trained at HYDRA during most of her childhood, she would be experimented on and improved until she turned six years old and would be sent to the Red Room Academy for young orphaned girls.

"Things will be changing for the Red Room within the next years. I might need to drop under the radar."

General Dreykov had been planning the utter and complete disappearance of the Red Room for a few months now, this new project only being fueled by Subject RED's rapid arrival into the world. The Red Room had been working on implementing the same mind control on it's widows that HYDRA implanted on it's Assets. They would start using it on their widows, for missions only, in the next two or so years, the only future widow that would be spared from such a treatment would be Subject RED.

"The child needs to experience the same things her mother did if she ever has a chance in besting her." Subject RED would be psychologically conditioned, just like her mother was, unlike the rest of the widows in the Red Room in six years.

Once Dreykov dropped off the radar, he would implement Red Room facilities throughout the World to cover his own tracks and Subject RED's. Each time any of their enemies thought blowing up their main facilities, they would only be fooled, because there would always be another one. The General would hide in the shadows with the newest recruits and his oldest ones. The rest would be placed under chemical subjugation and assigned to facilities around the globe. A careful selection of one hundred or so would be assigned to the same facility where Subject RED would undergo training, they would be handpicked by Dreykov himself.

Once the graduation ceremony completed, she would fall back into HYDRA's hands and would continually be passed on from them to the Red Room for missions and assignments until she was ready to complete the final task of the Crimson Widow project.

"The murder of her progenitors." Alexander Pierce said, shaking hands with General Dreykov after giving him a copy of Subject RED's file.

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

A floor below them, the laboratory was empty aside from the tiny body laid out on the metal dinner plate.

The doctors and scientists had been assigned back to their posts, leaving the tiny infant battling for her life to fight on her own. Fresh blood was making it's way through her veins, giving her skin a barely pinkish hue, just enough to indicate that she wasn't gone, that she was still willing to stick around. Her heart was just starting to pick up, it's accelerating beat indicated on the monitor that the baby was hooked to. Her index finger twitched and so did her big toe, her breathing was starting to grow louder, though it did sound like the purring of a baby kitten.

No one came to check up on her until late in the night.

She had opened her eyes maybe two hours before anyone walked into the lab. Brilliant, astonishingly pale blue eyes had been peering up at the wall for the past hours, getting accustomed to the bright fluorescent lights. They resembled the sky trying to get back to it's blue color after a thunderstorm, the blue barely there but fighting to bleed into the sky. Her tiny fists had been balled up and were currently being suckled on while she tried to give the doctor staring at her a lopsided smile.

She looked nothing like the baby that had been dead on their table just hours ago, she looked everything like what you might expect a very premature baby to look like, but nevertheless she was alive. HYDRA agents swaddled her in an over-sized shirt and fed her milk from a cat that had lost one of it's babies on the same day.

Most days, she stayed in a basket with the mother cat and her kittens until she grew older and had started grabbing the kitten's tails out of curiosity which earned her a good few scratches from them. At one years old they locked her in her first cell, with nothing but a cat's basket and a blanket to sleep on. By the time she was two, the blanket smelled off urine and the shirt she had been swaddled in as an infant hung over her bony frame and reached her toes, causing her to trip on it more often than not. Her red hair has grown dirty and was matted with knots that no one bothered to untangle and her cell was so dirty that stripes of dirt littered her face, hands, elbows and knees.

Once a day, she received a piece of hardened bread, a bowl of cat milk and some rice. The cat milk caused for her stomach to hurt and for her to throw up a lot. There was a reason why it was cat milk and not cow's milk. But as long as it kept the child alive another day, it didn't matter.

When she took her first breath, she was alone, cold and covered in blood. At two years old, she wished she had never been brought back to life.

Soon after she turned three, the door of her cell opened and the guards came to drag her off. They didn't tell her much, other than she was going to have the privilege of getting the meet the Soldier.

"Schitay svoi blagosloveniya, lisenok. Ostalos' ne tak mnogo." The guard said as he picked her up by the scruff of her neck like one would with a kitten. Count your blessings, little fox. There won't be many left.

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

author's note : don't mind me just editing the beginning of this story and making it sadder because there's nothing i like more than torturing my characters 😍