Chapter Text
The Red Room is unrelenting and uncompromising, but Natalia works and lives and breathes it.
She has thirteen sisters; she once had more, but they failed and they are gone now. She accepts it without much questioning, each time their number drops. Ballet is not for the faint-hearted or the weak, Madame says. Only the best will survive.
All Natalia wants is to be a ballerina. She wants to be Odette, Giselle, Sylphide, Clara. She wants to be lithe and powerful and beautiful and have strong men lift her gracefully into the air like she weighs no more than a feather. She imagines what it will be like on stage when she is older as she practices the movements, jabbing and kicking and standing en pointe until her feet cramp. She lives in her own head most of the time, going through the motions in training while imagining the many bouquets she will receive in her dressing room from her admirers before her shows. This is how she envisions fulfilling her duty to her country, doing it proud.
Then Natalia is picked to help demonstrate in their first real fighting lesson.
It is a class the girls have been looking forward to for weeks: finally, a chance to use skills practiced on dummies for real, to prove themselves to Madame. The recent training sessions have all been used to size each other up, to guess their chances if they would have to fight each other. Each punch has landed on a dummy harder, each kick more accurate and sharp.
Their instructor is a young man, blond and blue-eyed with narrow eyes and a cold sneer. He does not tell them anything; only nods at Madame where she stands at the back of the room and walks along the line of girls, eyeing them up. Natalia is ordered up onto the mat with a sharp gesture; the rest of the girls kneel.
They circle each other on the threadbare mat that serves no purpose other than to mark the boundaries of this new arena. He stalks her like a cat stalks a baby bird; quietly, carefully until the strike that leaves Natalia gasping on the floor, tears in her eyes as she gingerly touches the right side of her face. It stings.
“Get up!” He yells. “быстро!” Quickly!
She stumbles to her feet, only to fail and fall again and again at his hands until she is begging, pleading, “Please! Пожалуйста! больше не надо! No more!”
His face turns purple and she knows that is the worst possible thing she could have said.
“No more?!”
He only stops when it is time for the next class to begin, leaving her beaten and bruised and bloody and curled up on the mat as a demonstration to the other girls. As they file past her, Natalia senses their eyes on her but she ignores them and hides behind hair, humiliated, clutching her ribs (she thinks some of them might be cracked). A tendril of bloody spit drips from the side of her mouth to the mat but she does nothing until she is alone in the room; then, she is racked with sobs.
“Oh, моя маленькая паук.” My little spider.
Ivan.
Fingers gently pull away the hair lying across her face and tuck it behind her swollen ear. She keeps crying, heaving sobs that make her ribs ache. She hears his huff as he settles into a sitting position beside her, gently stroking her forearm.
“Do you know why we choose little girls for the Red Room, Natalia?” He asks but now she knows better than to reply.
“We could choose little boys. Little boys are faster than little girls, stronger than little girls. But, little boys grow up to be big men and people expect them to be dangerous. Big men can't trick people into thinking they are weak.
“Little girls are quiet. Little girls notice things. Little girls can trick big men into thinking with parts other than their brains. Little girls can convince big men that they are weak when they are at their most dangerous. Little girls can watch, and listen, and take their revenge in a most painful way.
“You will learn these things in time, little spider,” he says gently as he lays a hand on her head in an almost fatherly gesture, “and you will do your country proud.”
It is the death of the naïve, dreamy Natalia; the girl that emerges from the ashes is sharp and cold, one who carries out each movement with precision and deadly accuracy, who practices until her knuckles are bloody and then some, who is always first to the training room and last to leave. She heals and learns to stand en pointe through cramping feet, to perform jumps and leaps and tumbles fluidly and quickly, to snap a neck hard and fast.
The next time the girls have a sparring lesson, Natalia does just as Ivan taught her. She watches (he favours his right side and takes a step forward every time he goes to throw a hard punch), she listens (he winces when he has to block one of Yelena’s kicks with his left arm); and when it is her turn she is unsure and cowers, luring him closer and closer until she strikes, wrapping her legs around his neck, bringing him down, wrenching his left arm from its socket until she hears an ominous crack and a strangled yell.
Standing, she leaves her prey (whimpering and sweating) on the mat to look at Ivan, who is standing in the doorway with something akin to a smile on his face.
She will do her country proud.