*RECENTLY REVISED*

Hi everyone,

I've rated this T as it is for the most part pretty PG:13, however at times it might be a bit violent and there is some death. If you disagree with my rating, please let me know, I'll try to put warnings for the most violent chapters. Anyway, this is my first Avengers fic and it will mostly follow the plot of the movies, starting roughly six months before Avengers Assemble. I'd also say, if you've read any of my earlier stuff, that this is probably of better quality in terms of grammar etc as I am quite a bit older now. Of course that's quite an objective view and I don't have a beta for this so in all likelihood a few mistakes will find their way in. Please let me know what you think and feel free to point out any mistakes if you spot them or ask questions if things don't make sense, it's helpful! :)

Last thing, italics are for her thoughts and a line usually signals a flashback in the earlier chapters (there will be lots, fair warning). I'll try to update every two weeks but i can't promise anything. I might update chapters in between if I've found a mistake or want to add anything and I'll let you know if a chapter has been significantly changed.

Thanks :)

"Why don't you start at the beginning?" the agent had a nervous smile on her face. She had a pen clenched firmly in one hand, poised above a pad of paper, ready to record her words.

This was a weak pretence. Yan knew that she was being watched from all angles by hidden cameras and that everything and anything that was said would be recorded for later scrutiny. She was almost surprised that there was not a fake mirror in one wall.

I suppose they are too high tech for that.

"Which beginning?" she had paused just long enough to unsettle the agent. Her pupils widened slightly and her heart rate picked up. There was something about the soldier that could make anyone uneasy, it was how she had been trained. It was her predatory gaze with her dark grey eyes like fractured ice or ever threatening storm clouds, or maybe it was the way she held herself, every muscle tensed and ready for a fight like a feral animal.

Before the agent could answer she continued, "The dawn of time is a mystery to me, I'm afraid, so I can hardly start there,"

She blushed, embarrassed, although she knew that she had asked a legitimate question, "I didn't mean – "

But the soldier was not going to let her off that easily. She had decided pretty swiftly that the agent was not worth her time, she did not have the authority to make it worthwhile to yield the information Yan had to offer. But she was never one to wait in silence when there was a game to be played, and thus she had resorted to her favourite defence mechanism, sarcasm.

"The start of mankind, then?" she smiled coldly at her. It was easy to cut short her words when her confidence had been so eroded. "Homo Sapiens? And the death of the Neanderthal? I can tell you more about that. Our race was born through bloodshed and a better gift for survival."

In truth she was bored. She could sense her newfound power flowing through her veins, whispering enticingly to her, begging her to let them come out and play, but she knew she had to go through the whole charade of pretending to be weak if her plan was to work.

"If you could perhaps focus on your own beginnings, Miss…Thirteen," the agent snapped. Yan had succeeded made her angry and she was weak enough to let it show; for a highly trained S.H.I.E.L.D. agent she was surprisingly incompetent. "Why don't you – "

"It's a number, not a name," she replied, her smile gone. Having a name was a luxury she was not afforded.

But the agent took this as progress and persisted, "Could you tell me your name?"

"13 is all I have ever been called. You will find it is much the same with the others," she crossed her legs and leant further back in her chair to wait for the agent's next move. Strictly speaking, this was a lie. She had a name she had chosen herself, but there was no way she was about to give it up so easily.

The agent – what the hell is her name? She'd forgotten already – shuffled the papers in front of her, taking the opportunity to cast her eyes down and away from the soldier's penetrating gaze, "what would you like to talk about?"

It was a step back, a retreat, an easy way out that Yan was not going to give, "The beginning of civilisation? That would be an interesting discussion, although it is perhaps debatable that we have achieved it yet,"

The agent expected her to say more, so she did not. But just as she opened her mouth to ask another question, she continued, "My beginning then?"

She – Pethers? Peterson? – blinked, surprised that they had at last got to the question she first asked. Finally remembering her training she nodded encouragingly, a saccharine smile plastered on her face clumsily intimating that she was a friendly figure.

God, I do not see myself becoming her friend any time soon. How unconvincing.

"I don't know the answer to that either," Yan mused, tipping her head back so that she was staring straight into one of the supposedly hidden cameras. She smiled at it and raised an eyebrow. She was enjoying this, after all she had been through much worse interrogations. It was so far going just as she had planned it.

"Do you have any family?"

"Dead," she swung herself back up to look at the agent. Her answer was blunt, it was a fact and nothing more.

The compressed sound of the shot, like a balloon being punctured, or a watermelon being stabbed once, twice, three times. The explosive spray of dark red spread out on the wall behind them. A crimson shadow. Their bodies crumpled soundlessly to the ground. The silencer was unscrewed from the gun. The gun was placed in her mothers' lifeless hand. And she was swept of her feet and carried away from the scene.

It was a cruel twist. Assassination in disguise. But it's not like Yan understood at the time; she only remembered her age because of the seven candles on the cake, which she had blown out earlier that day. Most of her memories from before that time had been pushed out, deemed unnecessary and of no use in her fight for survival.

"Can you tell me your age?" the agent did not dwell long on the topic of family, though she seemed almost disappointed at the lack of an excessive display of emotion she could capitalize on.

What exactly were you expecting? I'm a trained killer not a cry baby.

"Seventeen, give or take a few days," All of her birthdays since that day had been a moment's celebration of surviving another year. Cake was out of the question.

"Date of birth?" she was sticking to facts, apparently giving up on her previous strategy of false chumminess.

Here's hoping!

"I don't know exactly. Some point in December 1994," such personal details were not allowed. They were assigned a number and left to make do with that.

"How old were you when you were taken?" S.H.I.E.L.D had assumed they were all taken. They were wrong, many signed up willingly; the Organisation could be very persuasive in that regard. When you have a gun to your head and a debt to pay, you are willing to do many things to survive.

And some people are just that idiotic that they are easily convinced.

"Seven," in her case, at least, they were right. Yan was one of the youngest entered into the programme. Or perhaps, more accurately, she was the only one to survive from that age.

Chunks of wood flew through the air narrowly missing her as another mine exploded, taking out a tree and sending earth catapulting upwards. She had wrapped a strip of cloth around her head to protect her eardrums from the sound of endless explosions, which ripped through the calm of the forest scattering terrified wildlife.

Her feet seemed to skim over the ground as she sprinted between the tree trunks, dancing over roots and brambles as if she was on completely level ground. Her eyes were well adjusted to the darkness and there was no danger of her colliding with anything other than the other runners.

Yan did not stop to think of them. They were irrelevant and posed no threat at the moment, although it was customary for competition to be disposed of in situations such as this. In fact, she did not stop at all. Her pursuit of survival did not allow her limbs to be slowed by fear or pain of any sort. Feeling either was a sign of weakness and the weak did not survive.

She was nearing the safe house. She knew that there would be weapons there, but she also knew that she did not need them. There was plenty of material around her which could be used and she could be deadly in hand to hand combat. As she passed it she heard a distant scream. Someone had failed.

A shadowy figure emerged suddenly from the gloom. She did not hesitate, it didn't matter who they were. Launching herself off a tree trunk, she leapt with arms outstretched and seized their head, using her momentum to swing round. There was a crunch and the body toppled as she landed. Satisfied that a threat had been dealt with, she hurried on her way. Wasting even a second could mean death during these tests.

Yan survived that night. As their numbers slowly dwindled (for the few who were forced to join their ranks were far outnumbered by those who failed to survive), she strived for survival and always came out running. That is not to say that she didn't ever come close to death. She took on many a wound in order to win a fight and, although they were rare, she did make mistakes.

"So you've spent a decade in the Bunker?"

"More or less," there were many times when they were taken to some patch of wilderness in the depths of winter to trek through snow, or to a baked plain at midday to die of heat stroke. It was not real freedom, of course. The only way to survive was to collapse into the trucks when the Organisation came to pick up the few survivors, and to fight for the meagre supplies provided for them. It was in their interests to acquiesce to being carted back like cattle to the Bunker.

Sunk under tonnes of earth held in place by the roots of trees, so tall and intertwined that they blocked out the weak sunlight that struggled to even reach the canopy, the Bunker was a maze of clinically grey corridors lined with cells and training rooms. Torture chambers, to be more accurate. If they didn't return to their bunks with several shades of bruises and a few broken bones, they weren't being pushed hard enough.

The Organisation wanted the perfect soldier. They were dependable, replaceable, worthless, but the scientists wanted to craft a slave worth holding onto.

Yan was not bitter. Emotions were a distraction, even anger had to be suppressed and wiped out, and so she did not feel it. She understood emotions, of course, it was important to recognise signs of weakness in your prey. In the complex, any moment that they did not spend fighting, they spent learning of the outside world most of them would never see.

"What do you mean? You have been outside?" The agent pressed her. She leant forward, making a deliberate move into the agent's territory; the merits of always being on the offensive had been drilled into her, sometimes literally. Annoyingly her blond hair fell in front of her face and she wished she could tie it up, chafing at the restriction of the handcuffs which she yearned to tear off.

"There were missions," she replied, neatly flicking the stray strands of her behind her shoulder with a toss of her head. "Tests, I suppose,"

"What did these missions entail?" Peters – Peters! Yes that's it – was speaking softly, as if the Yan was a child and needed a soft touch.

Even at ten I was a murderer.

Her hands were betraying her. It should be so easy, such a simple task. To simply pull back the trigger and let the bullet fly. The thing in front of her was barely a person, it was pathetic to watch them grovel and cry on the floor at her feet. She knew they were weak and would die no matter who pulled the trigger. She knew this. But her hands trembled, the gun was too heavy. She could feel them watching her, waiting for her to fail.

She braced herself and pulled the trigger.

It got easy. Too easy to snatch the life from the unwilling bodies of their prisoners and her fellow soldiers. She knew what a monster was. They were shown everything that might be of value. They meant for them to see how weak and deluded the populace was, so that they would follow their orders without question. To use the truth as propaganda was something of a skill. They missed the point. For sure, there were a few – there were always a few – who genuinely believed they were fighting towards some greater good and obeyed with a disgustingly obsessive level of loyalty. But most of the soldiers followed their orders because they had to if they wanted to live. It was simple.

So Yan knew that she was a monster, it just doesn't follow that she cared. She did not feel emotions.

"Survival,"

"Survival?"

"Of the fittest," she smiled cruelly, allowing a false emotion to break through. Bitterness was convincing, and the skill of game was in no one knowing you were a player. "They would try to kill us, only the strongest, the fastest and the most…determined survived. It was their way of…removing weakness." She knew exactly what she wanted to say, but it had to seem difficult, so she added in a few dramatic pauses for her own amusement.

"What was this for?"

"Weapons,"

"Human weapons?" for once, she had the right idea.

Yan nodded curtly, "perfect soldiers ready to fight their battles for them, concerned with nothing but our orders and our own survival. In that order, of course, if we failed the mission then we weren't worth keeping."

"Did many survive?" She had unnerved Peters with "keeping", but they were just possessions.

"Few,"

"That must have been hard for you," it was a statement, but it was meant as a question. She was looking for humanity, some sign that the soldier could be saved, be reformed.

They thought they were saving the world. They always did, these people, they had to cover up the horror of the death with a thin veneer of idealism. They just wanted to mould the world to their own rules, and they were laughably far from it.

The cost of their experimentation with human evolution would haunt the lives of many, although no one from the Bunker would survive. It was one tendril of a far spread fungus of organised crime and fanaticism, the heart of which was focused on profit. Those at the Bunker were the extremists, the ones who had to push at the boundaries of humanity and play the scientist. And create things like her.

But the Bunker was gone now and they were all gone with it, or sitting in a cell just like she was. And her fellow soldiers, well, they would have followed their orders.

Survive, that was what they taught us, survive until we have no more use for you.

Yan knew that every single one of them would be dying even now and in a way she was glad, she could not have them telling S.H.I.E.L.D. what they knew.

Just as she started to answer the agent, the door was flung open and two more agents entered. One of them was holding a gun, pointed vaguely in her direction. She tensed, ready to snap her wrist in order to pull it from the handcuffs and leap forward to kill him, but she saw that it was a stun gun of some sort and so shifted her body so that her barely perceptible movement seemed like fidgeting.

She inwardly breathed a sigh of relief, cursing her instinctive move to kill. It would not aid her purpose now. It was not like she even needed to inflict such damage on herself, after all she could have simply snapped the handcuffs like a toothpick, had she really wanted.

"Agent Coulson?" the Peters seemed surprised that the interrogation had been interrupted.

Agent Coulson. She stored his name for later deeming him to be of importance, unlike Peters, whose name she had forgotten almost immediately after she'd introduced herself.

Coulson moved further into the room and she noticed that his colleague did not lower his gun. She pretended to be surprised, but she was right. Cyanide pills under the back tooth; it was an efficient method of ensuring that no information was passed on to the enemy.

Yan was almost disappointed in them. All those years of learning the art of survival and they fell at the last hurdle to freedom. She was the only one who truly understood it.

"Agent Peters, I will be taking over this interview," she nodded and left swiftly, seeming almost relieved to be free. At a sign from Coulson, the armed agent seated himself on a chair in a corner. He had lowered the gun but he was still tensed to take her down. She did not see him as a threat, certainly not against her. He was there to ensure she stay alive, although they had nothing to worry about; her cyanide pill was long gone.

"They're all dead, aren't they?" She was done playing, it seemed easier to cut to the chase with this agent.

"Yes," his smile came very close to disarming her. The fact that she was still alive already betrayed that she was something different. "But I somehow doubt that we have to worry about that with you,"

"No, I don't go in for that brand of twisted loyalty," She matched his smile but with less sincerity.

He let the silence fall and leant back in his chair. He seemed happy to wait for her to speak.

He must have been watching.

"I have a question for you," this time she was the one who would not wait.

"Go on," he made an encouraging gesture.

"You know what I am," he nodded in affirmation and she continued, "and you know everything about them, what they did, or tried to do" he nodded again, "so what is it you plan to do with me?"

"That has not really been decided yet," he replied, "it is partly up to you,"

Yan understood him perfectly, "what do you want to know?"

"We found the others scattered through the woods trying to get to other bases. Yet you were just sitting there in the crater, waiting for us. You are right, we know what was going on there, we had an inside source. And we now have many of their records; they were transmitted at the same time as a signal was broadcast to us. But we don't know what happened at the Bunker, why it was so completely destroyed, and why only you and a handful of their prisoners made it out."

An inside source? Now this is interesting.

"I see," She weighed up her options. He was right that she was waiting for S.H.I.E.L.D. She was certain that they would come and saw no point in exerting herself to escape. For the meantime, she would do better if she revealed nothing of import, but merely tested the water until she found out what she wanted to know. She was confident in the knowledge that she could get up and leave any time she wished; they would be powerless to stop her.

"So, why did you wait?"

"I was sure someone would turn up to get me. I saw no point in wasting energy," it was the truth, but it was such a small part of it that she might as well as have said nothing.

Thank you so much for reading! I welcome feedback (including criticism) as it really helps me to improve my writing both retrospectively and in future chapters, so please do let me know what you think :)