Chapter Text
April 3rd, 1957: Night
For a further three years, Aria Davis hunted Dottie Underwood.
Chasing her, akin to a game of cat and mouse, had taken Aria across the globe. For three years, Dottie had managed to allude her. Whether it was unfortunate timing, or Aria’s hesitancy to allow others to become harmed in pursuit of her goal, Dottie was too difficult to pin down for long stretches of time.
Aria found that it didn’t bother her. The time away from SHIELD allowed her to gather her thoughts, which had been spiralling well before Howard had ever suggested they marry one another. She had promised Peggy that she would return to the United States when she was finished, and that remained true. But she had not given her a time frame on how long it would take to find Dottie, and if she was being honest, she hadn’t been particularly harsh on herself for failing to find her quickly. She needed this time away, away from SHIELD, away from her father, away from Peggy – but most importantly, away from Howard.
She needed the chance to discover what it meant to be Aria Davis, the immortal, without the influence of those who loved her. They would want the best, she knew that. But only she could decide her fate.
She supposed it was fitting, then, that chasing Dottie Underwood had led her back to the place that her life had begun. Not the Red Room, not Russia, and certainly not the place that she had been born. Germany had been her first home, her first taste of blood and death and ruin. She’d learned how to seduce and slay in the same breath, walking the cobbled streets of every town in Munich. But it was Munich now, where she found Dottie Underwood. Nor was it Berlin, or even Hamburg or Frankfurt. It was instead, a small island located in East Germany, where the only land pathway was a single motorway Aria had surveyed the area with the very same technology Stark had insisted that she employ during the Korean War.
Dottie Underwood was crafty. She hadn’t been named the Black Widow of the Red Room for her looks alone. But Aria knew she was better – and she had ensured that there would be no easy avenue of escape for Dottie. She had her now. Dottie Underwood wouldn’t be able to leave until Aria learned the truth.
It was already dark, when Dottie Underwood entered the atmospheric Lotus Restaurant in the centre of the island town. Aria, from her apartment perched across the street, didn’t need binoculars to make her out. There was a certain stance, worn only by girls who had experienced the Red Room. Aria couldn’t describe it, but she knew it was something that Peggy had recognised within her. Perhaps it was through their rigorous ballet training, the way that they learned that their spines could never be slackened, or that their guard could never come down.
It was a pity then, that Dottie Underwood had agreed to this meeting. For when Aria entered the building only ten minutes later, and Dottie Underwood met her gaze evenly, the brown-haired Black Widow knew that the suave businessman she’d expected was not coming. Aria could see the moment that recognition dawned in her eyes, the moment that latent fear managed to creep into her body language. It was brutally trained by Madame B, that they were not to react to situations where fear could overrun them, that they were to hide their emotions – that they were to feel nothing at all. But fear was human, and the Red Room had not quite yet learned how to erase that humanity. The makeup on her face that hid the wrinkles of age could not possibly hope to hide that from Aria.
Dottie was likely watching her, too. Right about now, Aria suspected that she was studying her reactions. Was she seeing surprise? Was Dottie herself surprised? Aria knew she looked almost identical to the day she’d left the Red Room, back when Dottie was only sixteen. Time had not provided for Aria a single wrinkle, or a grey hair. She had learned to live with her own immortality over these last three years, though it had taken time. Leaving her targets off guard had been an unexpected bonus to the overwhelming knowledge that she would never take her last breath. It must have been disconcerting; to look upon a face you knew was years younger than yours – and still see the beauty of youth reflected plainly. Especially when Dottie was beginning to show signs of age herself.
Though the room was filled with the sound of laughter, and the gentle clanging of metal utensils against ceramic plates, Aria felt the noise fade into silence as she came closer and closer to her table. The two assassins wore matching serpentine smiles as they greeted one another, Aria settling into the table and crossing her knees over her body as she sank into the seat.
“So good to see you, Miss Underwood.” She purred in practiced German as she produced a bottle of wine from the inner sleeve of her coat.
Dottie didn’t speak as Aria uncorked the bottle and poured a glass for each of them. She gently pushed the waiting glass towards Underwood, but she was scarcely surprised when the Widow didn’t bother to bring it to her lips. Poison had of course, been one of the first lessons they’d learnt within the halls of the Red Room – how to use it, and how it could be used against you.
It was a shame though, she mused as she sipped from her own glass of merlot, it really was good wine.
“The years have been kind to you, Dottie.” Aria continued, complimenting her as the glass of wine settled back against the table, the sloshing eventually coming to rest. “You look just as beautiful as the day I left.”
Dottie snorted, and Aria watched with curiosity as she lifted the glass – not of wine, but of water, to her lips. “Cut the shit, Isla. I look older. You don’t.” Dottie’s German was just as practiced, but she’d never had the benefit of living within the country. She didn’t have the same grunt, the same vigour that the people spoke with. Dottie didn’t know this country like she did.
Aria smiled toothily, flipping her hair over her shoulder as she spoke. “I’m glad you’ve noticed.”
A waiter glanced in their direction curiously. A slight shake of Aria’s head was all it took for the young boy to scuttle in the other direction, tail between his legs. He would return soon enough, or someone else would arrive to take their order. Aria suspected that the pair would be long gone, however, before they made it to the table. They were not long for this building.
Dottie’s nose twitched as the silence stretched between them. With her arms crossed over the chest, she asked Aria; “So, are you here to simply kill me? You had to have known I’d never drink that glass of wine. That was too…”
“What of the glass of water you just drank?” Aria interrupted, jerking her head towards the cup. She watched Dottie uncross her arms and lean forward; likely in surprise. Trying to get closer to the conversation when in truth, it was likely she wanted nothing more than to turn tail and run. “Simply because I didn’t pour the glass does not mean that it wasn’t laced, Dottie. Surely you know that by now.”
“What of the wine glass you sipped from?” Dottie questioned in return; eyebrows raised as she swirled the glass of merlot thoughtfully. She chuckled as she added, “You don’t think I didn’t have a plot of my own?”
“What, the scopolamine?” Aria snickered in return, rolling her eyes. “Please, Miss Underwood. The benzodiazepines I needed to combat that were in my wine.”
Aria watched the girl before her pause for a moment. She witnessed the way that the saliva in her throat gathered and swallowed as she processed her words. She relished too, at the fury in Dottie Underwood’s eyes, when she lifted the glass of red merlot to her lips once again, and took one nice, long sip. Unbothered, and entirely in control, Aria finished the glass of wine before she placed it back on the table, licking the corners of her hips to remove the stain from the sides.
Dottie Underwood leaned back against her chair, and Aria knew, that in a small way, she had won.
“Not what you were expecting?” She questioned, a smirk playing across her lips.
“You, Miss Romanov, are neither male, nor a businessman.” Dottie rolled her eyes. “You’ve been chasing me for a few years. I knew that sooner or later, you’d catch up to me. It’s always time, that makes it easier to forget the village that raised you. But I don’t have what you’re looking for, Isla. None of us do.”
Aria shrugged her shoulders, through her mouth twitched as Dottie called her Isla once more. She was no longer used to hearing the name in reference to herself. Patiently, she quipped; “You still work for the Red Room, that makes you exponentially more equipped to answer my questions than anyone at SHIELD.”
“I may still work for the Red Room,” Dottie agreed, “but he doesn’t. He’s a ghost, much like you.”
He. Aria forced her body to remain still, even as confused raced through her body. For all of her planning, everything she knew, there was nothing in her recent memory that she could recall that would lead to such a statement. In fact, the only man that Aria could recall of any importance from the Red Room had been their cruel ballet instructor, but Aria had dealt with him years ago. Back before she’d even realised that she couldn’t age.
“He? Dottie, Nikolai is dead. I killed him years ago.”
Aria felt the tension in the room shift immediately at her confusion. She saw the way that her eyes begun to sparkle, as she leaned forth in her chair. Her brown hair bounced in tune with the movement, and Aria knew that in this moment, the ticking threat of the poison invading her body had long been forgotten. Her own heart rate began to quicken in panic.
And then the woman in front of her started to laugh. It started small, a little chortle, but Aria watched with growing tension as it escalated into a bellowing laugh. Tears of laughter began to pearl in her eyes, and Aria couldn’t help but glance around the restaurant as others within the room began to notice. Her back began to tingle uncomfortably, spiders crawling up and down her spine. When the manager of the building began to look in their direction, Aria knew they had a matter of moments before they were once again accosted.
“Dorothy!” Aria hissed, feeling her hands creeping ever closer to the bread knife resting against the table. Her toes curled in her heels, as every muscle of her body began to prepare itself for a fight.
But Dottie surprised her, when through her tears of laughter, she reached for the glass of water once more, and too, drank until she’d polished the glass. Levelling her eyes upon Aria, the red head suddenly knew that she was no longer the woman in charge of the conversation. As swiftly as she had held the threat of death above Dottie’s head, superiority had been pulled from beneath her. In its wake, was the simple truth of knowledge – knowledge that Aria did not have, that Dottie possessed.
“All this time,” Dottie breathed, “I thought you were chasing me for him. For knowledge I did not have. I knew you’d find me, I knew you’d kill me – but this? My death will be for nothing, Isla.”
Aria shook her head, resisting the urge to surge across the table and snatch at the older woman’s arms. It would do nothing beyond antagonise her, even if Aria wanted nothing more than to beat her into some form of submission.
“You don’t have to die.” She warned the woman instead. “I have the cure; I can give it to you – if you tell me.”
“You think the cure saves my life?” Dottie rolled her eyes. “Naivnaya devushka. You would merely be prolonging my suffering.”
“Naïve?” Aria grumbled. “You talk as if you have no choice, dorogoya. I got out – you can, too.”
“Did you?”
Neither assassin blinked. Silence encased their words, even though the restaurant continued in their revelry. Prying eyes that had once glanced in their direction with such curiosity and accusation now seemed to forget about their presence all together, lost in their meaningless conversations about their lives, their jobs, their love and their happiness. They did not pay any mind to the two, highly trained individuals exchanging barbs over a table that would never serve them dinner. They did not know that by the end of the night, only one of the women seated would be alive.
To compare SHIELD to the Red Room – it had Aria sharply intaking her breath. Three years she had spent away, three years, she had debated that very person. When she created SHIELD, was she merely exchanging one overlord for another, in Peggy? To say she hadn’t thought about it would be a lie. To say, however, that she thought it the truth, would be incorrect. For the Red Room served only themselves, and the greed that the cultivated. Peggy, whether or not Aria agreed with her methods, always wanted to do what she thought was best for the world. It was why she was chosen, and it was why Aria continued to trust in her.
They would get nowhere sitting in this restaurant. It was too crowded, too exposed. It was not the place to share secrets between old training rivals. It was not the place that Dottie Underwood deserved to die.
“Let us walk, Miss Underwood.” Aria suggested, rising from the table. Without taking her eyes from Dottie, she began to take measured steps towards the door of the restaurant, pausing only once to collect the coat that she knew belonged to the Black Widow across from her. “We can talk in the fresh air. Clear our minds – perhaps gain a different perspective.”
Only once she was by the door, did Aria Davis turn her back on Dottie Underwood. She heard the clicking of her heels against the cobbled ground, as she turned down the alleyway close by. The only hint as to her path remained the coat of the other woman, discarded at the entrance to the walkway. Rather than announce her presence, Aria secluded herself in the shadows and readied herself with mantras. When Dottie Underwood turned the corner to follow her into the dark, however, Aria realised that there was no fight to be had.
“I suspect the poison will be painful?” The Russian woman called into the darkness. Aria knew that she could not yet make out the shape of her in the shadows. She was calling into the void, hoping that in return a shadow would answer back.
“Quite.” Aria agreed quietly, allowing her voice to carry on the wind. She hadn’t much considered the experience of Dottie when selecting her poison – only the length of time that she required for the interrogation to be completed.
Dottie continued to walk deeper into the alleyway. “And if I tell you what I know,” she heard the brown-haired woman’s voice shaking, “will you make it quick? Painless?”
Aria blinked for a minute. She analysed the words over in her mind, more times than she could comprehend in the span of a second. But there was nothing in those words that hinted to a betrayal. There was only a careful sort of begging, a desperation for the end that Aria had not come to expect. Peggy had told her this woman was formidable. This was the woman who had once slept with Howard. This was the woman who Peggy had struggled to pin down. This was the woman who had been chosen to become the Black Widow of the Red Room, and here she was, begging for the opportunity for Aria to kill her.
“You could kill yourself at any time. Why me – why now?”
Dottie’s footsteps stopped, just behind the only illuminated patch of moonlight in the alleyway. “Pride, I suppose. I’ve tried to do it – but the survival reflex we have… I couldn’t. I’m asking you for a favour.”
“And in return?”
She heard the moment that Dottie crouched before the jacket, discarded on the ground. She heard her rustling inside the pockets, searching, until her hands seized on something that jangled against one another like chains. She listened as the fabric of the jacket moved against the will of Dottie’s hand, until she heard the item spring free from its hold. It was not a gun that Dottie was holding. The sound alone had told her as much, and the nervous breaths coming from Underwood led Aria to believe that she was scared of something. But not her.
Curiosity overcame her. Again, her heels crackled against the cobblestone. But they silenced upon the sight of Dottie’s hands. Wrapped around them, dangling, Aria peered forth at the necklace. As her eyes drifted lower, to the apex, she stopped breathing all together.
Sweat began to bead at her forehead, as hundreds of thoughts raced to the forefront of her mind. She could almost see Steve, picture him the moment that he had arrived, to tell her what she feared the most had become her reality. But there was no sound that came forth as she stared at the dog tags being held by the Black Widow. In her mind, came only the sound of howling wind, and the feeling of being battered against a beaten shore. She did not need to see the name written against the metal to know what Dottie Underwood was implying.
“Where did you find those?” Any kindness had drained from her voice, and in the back of her mind, Aria understood Dottie’s fear and hesitation. The worry that the woman before her would not offer a kind, painless death, in the wake of the information that she was about to reveal. Dottie Underwood need not worry, however, about the death that would come for her. As long as she cooperated, Aria would make it swift, and painless. As long as Dottie Underwood told her everything.
“A mission. We encountered a soldier. A metal arm – stronger than he should have been. Faster. I barely escaped with my life,” she shook the tags in her fist, “and these were all I had to show for it.”
“And who do they belong to?”
Aria knew. She knew who they belonged to. She didn’t need to see the name on the tag. But she needed to hear it from the lips of another. She needed to know that she wasn’t crazy, or insane. She needed to know that this was her reality – a reality not forged by her mind, but happening in time, in the space between her. She needed to feel it.
And Dottie seemed to understand that. The brown-haired woman met her gaze evenly. Aria watched her square her shoulders. She watched her intake breath, and she watched the moment that the syllables left her lips. “James Buchanan Barnes.”
The wind stopped howling. The waves silenced themselves, the water becoming still. Dangerously so. She felt her eyes close, if only to prevent the tears from falling freely to the ground. The world fell silent in the gravitas of the name, and Aria’s world crashed alongside it.
She could feel the senses in her body firing desperately, urging her to do something, anything, about the information she’d just received. But she was almost paralysed by the weight of it all. Not once, in any of her years, has she suspected that Barnes would be alive. Not once had she looked for him. Howard had – and he had done it for her, but she had not asked him to. Asking him to do so, was admitting that it hurt every year he failed to find him. Asking him to do so meant that she wasn’t pretending to move on, even though she knew she never could.
She had stopped looking for him. In return, he had been alive. A soldier; working against her. Working against everything that she had built.
“They call him the Winter Soldier. Soviet, I think” Dottie whispered in the silence. Aria glanced up at her now, surprised to see her pain reflected vividly in the woman’s before her. “He won’t remember you, Aria. Your father, he…”
“My father?” Aria whispered, running her fingers through her hair. He’d experimented on Bucky. Perhaps what he had done to Bucky after Azzano had allowed him to survive the fall from the Alps. Perhaps her father had perfected the super soldier serum, all the way back in 1943. Not the completed product, she was sure. But enough that he was alive.
He was alive, and she had never once searched for him. Hers. Krasivyy. The thoughts choked her up, wire seizing around her ribcage, until she could no longer breath. Her father thought Barnes too small for the weight of her. But he had guided her every decision, whilst he had lived. How many hours had she agonised over his death? How many days had she pleaded for things to be different? Her decisions, even now, were still guided by his memory. Her want to do better, if only for him.
She shook her head. Mentioning Zola now, was too much if he had only been involved in Bucky’s initial survival. Her father was involved now – she was sure of it. She should have known it from the moment that he’d bothered to learn how to speak Russian – not as a slight against her as she’d presumed, but to work alongside the men that had enslaved the love of her life.
She had warned Peggy, warned Howard, that he could never be trusted within the walls of SHIELD. She too, had become blind to him over the years. For this – she would kill him. She would kill him slowly, and intimately. She’d skin him alive; she’d ensure that he endured every ounce of pain that he ever put her through. And only when she was satisfied, would she even consider allowing him the pleasure of eternal rest – a pleasure that he had long since confiscated from her.
“How do I find him?” Aria demanded. But Dottie only shook her head.
“He’s a ghost, Aria. Just like you.” She repeated.
“Tell me.” Aria snarled, taking a single step closer to the woman. But there was almost a smile on her face as she spoke again.
“I’ve given you what you wanted.” Dottie insisted. Aria blinked at her, flexing her fingers against her sides. She searched her up and down, looking for any hint that there was more information to find, something else to learn about this. But there was nothing other than the truth reflecting in her eyes as they glistened in the dim light. The Russian was almost pleading, “Now give me what I’m asking for… And,” she added, after a moment of hesitation, “…one day, promise me you’ll save the rest of them, too.”
Minutes later, Aria would depart the alleyway – Bucky’s dog tags in hand, and Dottie Underwood’s corpse left to be still in the single patch of moonlight reserved for her.