Chapter Text
It's funny, when people say your life can change in an instant you don't quite believe it. You just nod and smile, yeah sure you say but you tone is clearly disbelieving. It simply can't possible for one simple, often overlooked action to cause a change so enormously vast. Can it? I used to think the same but if it wasn't for that phone call... well I don't know where I would be but my bones would most likely be buried so deep no one could possibly have the misfortune to stumble upon them. I guess the repercussions of a single phone call really can alter the path you believed your life to be on up until that singular, fateful moment.
"I want you to prepare the girl." I was pressed up against the wall, just outside the doctor's office space. I could hear the tinny sound of someone talking over a phone. I recognised the voice. It was that man, the same one who gave orders to papa, the one who gave orders to everyone. He was new. Or maybe he wasn't. But he wasn't the first man to control us and he was unlikely to be the last. We were objects, papa and I, passed from person to person, tortured and experimented on as if we weren't human too. Perhaps we aren't. Perhaps we truly are the monsters they say we are.
"Sir?"
"Don't make me repeat myself. This is top priority; I want them found in the next ten hours so you will prepare the girl for service and bring her with you."
"Sir with all due respect, she is eleven years old, her brain will not withstand the preparation process."
"Do I sound like I care? Just get her down here. You have twenty minutes."
"Yes Sir."
I tried to disappear into the wall as the doctor stepped out of the room looking immensely annoyed. He turned left, away from me and I relaxed slightly and let out a loud breath. He stopped and turned back, giving me a tired look,
"If you are going to eavesdrop at least try and be sneaky about it." My head dropped slightly,
"Sorry Sir." He said nothing, instead he grabbed my arm and dragged my down the hallway to another room, the one they took papa to after he came out of the cryofreeze, where his brain got all muddled up until I told him my name again. He shoved me into the chair in the middle of the room and signalled the guards to lock the door.
"Right, we're going to have to improvise a bit here. Are you a strong girl?" I nodded, he would hit me if I didn't, "good girl. Lean back, this won't hurt a bit."
It hurt. It hurt a lot. It was like everything was being ripped apart and sewn back together in the wrong order. Like the stitches were parasites leaking into my soul, not letting me know what was me and what was them.
When they do that, put your brain in the blender, tear up your soul, its hard to remember everything. Its like your brain can't focus on anything so the world becomes a confused blur until it finally wears off. I couldn't tell you in exact detail any of the events that followed. When I look back I can see a plane, I can see dozens of soldiers staring stone-faced at the wall opposite them. I remember two vials filled with red liquid, one for each missing person. I know the almost sickening sensation as I pulled on a foreign power, forcing myself to track them through the rubble of what had once been an army base. I can still feel the sting of a soldier's hand against my face, Rumlow his name was. If I really focus I can visualise the night and early morning that we spent hunting those two people like animals. There is only one thing I can see clearly in my minds eye. Papa. His eyes blank, I knew mine looked the same. If I had been myself I would have fought for him to remember me but in that state I knew better than to even think of it. He was just another weapon to be used at their disposable. Dangerous and deadly, a slave to himself and to them. We were alike in that manner. Even if we did not share blood, we shared who we were at our very core. Two people with their fate in the hands of everyone but their own.
My first clear memory starts on the highway, I would find later it was my first safe memory too. It's funny, eleven years old and I couldn't remember a time I had been safe, even before, with my parents, I had not felt safe. Not that a three-year-old particularly knows what it means but we were always moving from safehouse to safehouse, pretending like it was some great adventure, as if the possibility of death wasn't a constant presence. That day, on that highway, that would change my life what happened there. Meeting those two, now three people I had been tracking for hours would bring me such an incredible amount of pain and joy for so many years to come, maybe more pain than I had experienced in those first years of my life but only because I finally found myself surrounded by people who actually cared, who loved me and didn't use me or see me as a valuable asset, who would allow me to love papa without the never-ending fear that one day I wouldn't be able to bring him back. And love, love comes hand in hand with heartbreak.