And here I'd been thinking that they were just emigres. Maybe got out under a semi-legit Jewish visa or something like that, St. Petersburg to Nairobi to Italy to a three AM arrival in La Guardia, actually were in love and got married and she got pregnant and took the vitamins and went to the clinic didn't -- didn't think that it would pass on down. It doesn't, with the son. A couple of miscarriages suggest that the particular set of genes associated with it is incompatible with less than two X chromosomes, but she got pregnant with a girl first, and it wasn't like they exactly knew what went into making the program, OK? OK. It had been something of a state secret.
By the time they figure it out, it has a name and a personality and her father's mother's eyes. Wet-work, assassinations in Prague, once garotting a would-be defector with her bare hands in front of a bathroom mirror and keeping her eyes on his face in the reflection until blood came out of the nose. Super-strength, super-speed, going on your first mission at the age of fifteen and your first kill three weeks later. Still, Yelena can't bring herself to kill her own baby in its crib.
"How much of that did you understand, little sun?" her father asks.
It's late afternoon on a spring day in an apartment in Brooklyn. The crib is in the only bedroom in the place, and shadows make lines across the walls. It's warm enough that the windows are open, and he reaches down and picks her up and goes for a walk with her. Yelena isn't exactly crying in the kitchen, but it's probably best that neither Natasha nor her father are around for a few hours. He knows Yelena; they used to work together. In fact, he knows her better than any human being alive because he used to be her handler.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-23 09:26 pm (UTC)And here I'd been thinking that they were just emigres. Maybe got out under a semi-legit Jewish visa or something like that, St. Petersburg to Nairobi to Italy to a three AM arrival in La Guardia, actually were in love and got married and she got pregnant and took the vitamins and went to the clinic didn't -- didn't think that it would pass on down. It doesn't, with the son. A couple of miscarriages suggest that the particular set of genes associated with it is incompatible with less than two X chromosomes, but she got pregnant with a girl first, and it wasn't like they exactly knew what went into making the program, OK? OK. It had been something of a state secret.
By the time they figure it out, it has a name and a personality and her father's mother's eyes. Wet-work, assassinations in Prague, once garotting a would-be defector with her bare hands in front of a bathroom mirror and keeping her eyes on his face in the reflection until blood came out of the nose. Super-strength, super-speed, going on your first mission at the age of fifteen and your first kill three weeks later. Still, Yelena can't bring herself to kill her own baby in its crib.
"How much of that did you understand, little sun?" her father asks.
It's late afternoon on a spring day in an apartment in Brooklyn. The crib is in the only bedroom in the place, and shadows make lines across the walls. It's warm enough that the windows are open, and he reaches down and picks her up and goes for a walk with her. Yelena isn't exactly crying in the kitchen, but it's probably best that neither Natasha nor her father are around for a few hours. He knows Yelena; they used to work together. In fact, he knows her better than any human being alive because he used to be her handler.
Phil reminds Natasha of her father.