Part 4: The Kids
Summary:
Riven always believed he was the only one. The only victim. The only subject. But through a vent in the wall, he hears them—children. Teenagers. Some mutant. Some not. He doesn't feel hope. He doesn't feel protective. What he feels is confirmation. Hydra's evil isn't just personal. It's systemic. And now his rage has fuel.
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The vent was just a shape in the wall.
He hadn't looked at it in months. Maybe years.
But one night—half-conscious, sedatives still clinging to his nerves, jaw wired with pain—he heard it.
A sound. Muffled. Weak.
Not a machine.
A voice.
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> "Don't cry. They'll hear you."
Then another, smaller.
> "It hurts…"
Then a beat.
Footsteps.
A sharp sound.
A slap, maybe.
Then silence.
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Riven didn't move.
Didn't even blink.
He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open in the dark.
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He wasn't the only one.
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Over the next weeks, it became a pattern.
At night, when the facility was quieter, when his body wasn't strapped to a table or filled with sedatives, he would listen.
Tiny voices.
Some crying. Some whispering. Some praying.
Some laughing too—just a little. Broken laughs. Fearful ones.
He didn't feel empathy.
He felt rage.
---
Hydra hadn't just done this to him.
They were doing it to kids. Dozens of them. Every day.
And suddenly, everything he'd endured—the tests, the mutilation, the waking up unable to scream because his throat was shredded from the day before—it all became something else.
Proof.
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Hydra wasn't trying to find answers.
They were feeding a machine.
One body at a time.
And Riven? He was part of the engine.
---
He started paying more attention.
He counted footsteps in the halls.
Noticed when the guards changed.
Learned where certain screams echoed from—farther left, down, near the sub-level with the wet pipes and always-damp floor.
He memorized the patterns.
Not because he was planning.
But because his hate needed direction.
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One night, a little voice whispered through the vent.
> "They took Tommy yesterday."
Another replied, "Did he come back?"
A long pause.
Then:
> "No."
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Riven closed his eyes.
Not to sleep.
He hadn't truly slept in years.
He closed them because he didn't want anyone—any camera, any glass eye behind a mirrored wall—to see what was inside them.
Because something was happening.
And it wasn't hope.
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It was the slow, volcanic burn of purpose.
Not to protect.
Not to save.
To punish.
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