Before the children of the revolution marched through the snow and painted the cities red with their conviction, there was a story in the old world of a man who could not die.

He was a tsar, as all bad men are, rich with gold and stinking of corruption, who lived in a castle which was on a hill which was on a river which was on an island, cushioned on all four sides by the push and pull of the amethyst sea. This tsar has lived for a hundred thousand years, and will live for a hundred thousand more, and again, and again, and again. This tsar will never die.

We all carry our deaths within us; the beggar girl on the streets and the rich merchant's wife in her spacious boudoir, the starving writer in Vladimir Square—our death ticks in every cell of our being, and every second brings you closer to that final exit of breath. It could be a knock on the head, a mugging gone wrong, a hard winter without heat. It could be any number of things. If you are lucky, you will go to sleep, and simply fail to wake up.

If you are not, your country will extend a red, red hand, and say: "You. I want you."

They pick her up in Budapest.

There is an abandoned warehouse, a few miles outside city limits. The ground is criss-crossed with old cables, grime black on the concrete and mould growing on the corners. There is graffiti on the walls, red and black and green and long careless lines and caricatures of local politicians alongside solicitations for cheap phone sex and—

And she is bleeding from a bullet wound to the side.

It is a bare half inch from her spleen, a mere fraction of a centimetre from puncturing her lung. She is having trouble breathing. She is bleeding all over her hands, and she is going cold. She thinks that she has lost at least a litre of blood, and is nearing two. The edges of her vision are already going blurry when the SWAT team bursts into the warehouse, and she is suddenly the singular focus of twenty guns.

There is a cyanide tooth in her mouth. They had pulled out a real tooth to put it in, and hadn't given her any anaesthetics. She had not screamed; she had opened her mouth obediently, and after they were done, she had closed it, because gaping was not comely in a young woman. There is a cyanide tooth in her mouth. There is a cyanide tooth in her mouth, and by rights she should have prodded it out with her tongue, and bit down a week ago when she missed the rendezvous. She should have bit down five days ago, when she evaded her own handlers. Three days ago, when she picked off the men sent to retrieve her with a Dragunov that didn't belong to her. Two hours ago, when she realized that she cannot outrun the man with the bow—when she realized that she didn't want to.

"Stand down." Says the man with the bow. She thinks, vaguely, what a useless weapon. There is a single NR-40 holstered at her hip. She has no guns. She has no bullets, but by God, at least she's not throwing around a weapon from the Palaeolithic era. The man—the child—throws a look around, and the masked men lower their guns.

The blond man steps closer. He has a handsome sort of face, she reasons. A nice enough face; fair proportions, a kind of insouciance that will wear off within twenty years. He has a nice enough voice. From this close, her eyes flicker from his feet to his exposed throat, noting the length of his step and the beat of blood in his veins. She measures her own speed against his—thinks, in some back corner of her mind, that she could do it. Even bleeding and gasping, she could do it; the Department did not tolerate weakness. She could have a knife in his throat before he could blink. Confirm this kill. Finish this mission.

"What's your name?"

She doesn't answer that question. The mere fact that he had to ask tells her that they must not trust him very much. Instead, she says, in American accented English: "What's yours?"

There is a beat of silence. The man's mouth moves. It quirks at the corner, and for a moment he looks so much like—her chest constricts. The blond man raises a hand to the comm at his ear, and says, "I'm bringing her in."

In the old world, there is an old story, about an old man who could not die. Who guarded his own death jealously and cunningly, who devised all manners of traps and ingenious hoaxes to hold off the day of death. Though he was old, and corrupt, and avaricious, we are taught that immortality is possible. You just have to want it more than you want to live.

"You look tired." She says. The dark skinned man opposite the chrome table from her has one hard eye and one eyepatch, and is wearing a black suit. There are bags under his eyes, and he has a perpetually downturned mouth, but his heart is beating the average 72 beats per minute, and she thinks that this is a man she can respect. "Paperwork?"

"Significantly increased after Agent Barton made his call." He leans forward. "You're paperwork, miss. Four hundred and thirty eight pages of it, and here I was, down to fifty."

"How unfortunate for you." She says.

"Very." He replies. "For me, and also for Agent Barton. He will be undergoing a disciplinary hearing tomorrow, you understand. Breach of protocol. Obstruction of mission objectives."

"These are serious concerns," she says. A disciplinary hearing. It's very… quaint. The words don't quite fit together in her mind, not even in Russian do they sound right. She thinks discipline, and she thinks four grey walls and no food or water for three days. She thinks of a tank of water, a chair rigged with electrics. Discipline, in its most disciplined form, is a bullet between the C3 and the C4. "Agent Barton failed his mission, then." A moment. "You sent him to—"

"Kill you." Fury, Nicholas J says. "Terminate you. Put a bullet between your eyes and bring me your body to confirm the kill. This was a level six. So yes, he failed his mission. Anything short of a cartridge in your frontal lobe would have been a failure."

She almost smiles. Instead, she leans forward with a balletic grace ingrained into muscle memory, rests her elbows on the table, and taps the centre of her forehead.

This time, it is Fury, Nicholas J who smiles.

"Miss Romanova," he says, and her muscles tense. "If you wanted to be dead, you would be dead."

She meets his eyes; hard and bright and sharp. He is still smiling.

"So the question is: why aren't you?"

In the old world, there is a story about a man who was a tsar, who lived in a castle on a hill which was on a river which was on an island, surrounded on all sides by the push and pull of the amethyst sea. He guarded his death more jealously than he did his life, and constructed many a devious trap and many a clever hoax to keep his death safe. He was a jealous man, and a cunning man, and a crueller tsar you have never met in your life. But it worked, didn't it?

He is not dead. He is still alive. He will wake in his castle on a hill, and of the thousand rooms, nine hundred and ninety nine will be dusted with cobwebs. And in each and every one, there is the ghost of a death never lived.