Well, here you go. Chapter Two. I'm writing this in my free time, so I will try to update as quickly as I can. Also, I do not have an intense knowledge of the MCU, so it's possible I will get details wrong some times. So bear with me!
Hopefully you enjoy this chapter!
"She's not an Inhuman, I can tell you that for sure."
They were standing in a dimly lit exam room in an underground SHIELD headquarters across the city from the industrial park where they had encountered the girl. Dust sheets covered several of the items of furniture in the room, and only half of the fluorescent lights waned light across the tile floor. Steve had informed Bucky earlier, as a service elevator clanked and groaned in its efforts to lower them into the belly of the facility, that it hadn't been operational for nearly eight years. Which had then made Bucky concerned at the integrity of the elevator. Apparently, they were only waking it now in an effort to discover more about this wild card before they packed her on a plane and flew her overseas back to the Avenger's compound for a full threat assessment.
"How do you know that?" Daisy asked, rolling a shoulder, trying to loosen what must be sore muscles.
"Well," Bucky's eyes flicked back to the girl in the white lab coat—He thought she had introduced herself as Jemma?— as she adjusted the clipboard propped against her hip and flipped through the top few pages of messily scrawled notes. "Her blood work is nothing like yours or Yo-Yo's. I even cross referenced Liam's blood work" —a careful glance to Daisy, who stiffened— "and nothing. No similarities beyond your average human traits."
"But we watched her jump from a third story building," Natasha said from where she leaned against a workbench, arms crossed. A wicked bruise was forming at her temple where the girl in question had rammed the butt of Natasha's baton. "We all saw it. People, normal people, just don't do that."
"Right," Jemma said, pointing a finger at the spy.
"So she's a super soldier?" Steve asked, thumbs hooked in the belt of his uniform. "That would fall in line with the Hydra leads we followed here to begin with. Hydra agents have come out of hiding to search for something, maybe someone, here. It could be her."
Jemma's pointed finger swung to the Captain. "No."
"She's had no kind of enhancement serum?"
"Not from what I can tell. See, normally when I look at the blood work from someone who has been injected with any kind of serum, like in the case of you, Captain Rogers, or Sergeant Barnes, there's still some remnants on a cellular level of who you were before the change. Honestly, her blood work is like nothing I have ever seen before."
Steve shifted, crossing his arms over his chest, almost as though the mention of him still in part being that scrawny kid from Brooklyn made him uncomfortable.
"So what you're saying," May injected, her fingers lightly touching the bandages across the bridge of her nose, bruises already pooling beneath her eyes, "is that that girl has had no alterations to her body."
"Well…" Jemma took a few steps to her left and switched on a light board that hung on the wall. "The technology here is a little bit farther behind than on the Bus. Once Coulson and the others arrive to pick us up, I'll be better able to scan and study her body. Until then, I have these."
'These' were x-rays. Scans of her torso, a wrist, what looked to be a hip, maybe?
"Are those her...bones?" Daisy asked, stepping closer, her chin length waves bobbing as she ducked her head slightly to inspect the films. She tranced a finger over a long, starkly white shape.
"Yep," Jemma said, the "p" popping lightly. "Anyone happen to know why something like this would show so solidly on an x-ray?"
"It's metal," Bucky found himself saying.
Jemma pointed at him, "Exactly. It's because of the density of metal that is shows up so white in an x-ray. But is that possible? Is it possible for someone to have a metal skeleton? And to weight maybe only a little more than an average girl her size?"
Daisy cocked her head, a brow raised, hand planted firmly on her hip. "Are you going to stand in a room with two super soldiers, a girl who can cause vibrations with her hands and—" Daisy jerked a thumb at May, "a women who was replaced with an LMD for like a month."
Bucky's eyes went to Steve, feeling the confusion shaping his features, but Steve only stared quietly back with an expression that said, Hey, don't look at me.
"And there. Do you see these here?" She pointed to several strands of something as bright white as the bones but they branched like veins throughout the body. "I'm not sure what they are. There is what looks like a control panel at the base of her neck, but its damaged. I can't plug in to it. It looks like some kind of, like, hardwired nervous system, almost."
"So she's a cyborg?" Natasha asked, her eyes inspecting the x-rays.
"Or an LMD?" Daisy asked, before glancing at the pair of confused expressions and explaining to the super soldiers, "Life Model Decoys. A cybernetic copy of a human being."
"But she's not a cyborg. There are no cybernetic alterations aside from that strange wiring,"Jemma said, thumb pressed to her lip as she thought. "The LMD's were synthetic material made to look organic. This girl has DNA, organs, everything."
Behind them came the clan of metal, the clink of small instruments scattering across the floor. It was like release of a spring. Everyone in the room around Bucky sprang into action. A yell echoed down the hall. But Bucky couldn't move. Cold crept into his limbs, spreading through his chest. Over and over the sound of the scattering instruments echoed through his head. He's been out of cryo too long. Wipe him. Start over.
Bucky?
He dragged in a long, shuddering breath.
The man on the bridge. I knew him…
"Buck?"
Everything swayed and rearranged itself until he was standing in the dim room once again. Bucky blinked. Steve stood in the doorway, hand gripping the threshold, looking at him. Bucky felt the back of his neck flush, anxiety working to unsettle him. How many times had he said his name?
Bucky reached down and unholstered the gun at his thigh, ignoring the ever so slight tremor in his fingers. Steve's head turned as more shouts rose down the hall.
"Let's go," Bucky said, forcing his voice level.
Steve gave a sharp nod then propelled himself from the doorway and down the hall. He pulled the shield from his back as they approached the doorway to the lab. Steve stopped just short of it, before glancing back at Bucky, who nodded in response, gun raised and ready.
There was the screaming sound of metal bending and fracturing, an explosion of yells, a short scream, but when Steve and Bucky swung into the room, everything had gone utterly still.
At the center of the small lab room was a gurney, atop which was the girl from the rooftop. Awake. And pissed. Which shocked Bucky. Not the anger, that was expected after being shot in the chest by a sniper rifle, but that she was awake. She was supposed to be sedated. They had given her enough sedation to keep her down for a least another few hours.
Steel shackles had been used to confine her to the table. Three of the four had been ripped open. The skin of the girl's wrist was badly torn and bruised, bleeding on the immaculate white coat of the lab tech she had pinned awkwardly to her chest over the gurney. Bucky raised his gun at the sight of the scalpel in the girl's hand. She instantly sighted the movement and tightened her grip on the lab tech, who whimpered, bringing the tip of the scalpel closer to her neck. Bucky could hear the rush of footsteps in the hall behind him.
"Nobody moves," the girl snarled. "Or we find out exactly how long it takes an arterial severance to bleed out."
Tears welled in the tech's eyes, her body trembling. The girl looked drastically different from the cool, collected threat on the rooftop. Now she looked pale and drawn. Exhausted and...terrified.
"Eris?"
That ruffled the girl. Clearly she had not expected anyone to know that name. All eyes turned to Bucky and he tensed for a long moment before he realized they weren't looking at him, but at the doorway just beyond him.
Behind him stood three men. On the left, a massive dark skinned man, on the right a slim, pale skinned guy who looked far more disturbed by the goings-ons in the lab than the rest of his trio. And at the center was a man Bucky had never met, but had seen in several photographs.
Agent Phil Coulson.
And to put even further the past few events into uncanny, the girl looked straight at Coulson, surprise written clearly on her face, and asked, "Phil?"
The girl, Eris, slid gingerly from the gurney. Her ankles and wrist had stopped bleeding, but clearly they were tender. All of the techs had been removed from the room until all the remained were Steve and Coulson's teams, who stood in a tense circle around the perimeter of the room. This girl wasn't trustworthy, not after what happened on the rooftop, but Coulson was strangely at ease with her, leaving the rest of them in uneasy uncertainty.
Eris turned her back to where Bucky stood as she watched Jemma prep her supplies to stitch shut the wound inflicted by Bucky's blade, which still bled sluggishly. This allowed Bucky a generous view of the hard landscape of muscles across the girl's shoulders and down her back, revealed by the SHIELD issued sports bra she must have been changed into during Jemma's initial examination.
Every movement she made bunched and flexed the swell of muscles beneath her skin. It was easy to see how she could keep speed with super soldiers with a length of legs built like that. While she still held some narrowness at her waist and a generous curve at her hips, there was little softness to her. Natasha could bring down several armed thugs, but she still maintained a deceiving softness over her strength. But there was nothing deceiving about the strength of this girl. It was a quality, Bucky found, that he did not mind in a woman.
Bucky glanced away to find Steve was watching him. He tried not to be embarrassed or ashamed under the scrutiny of his friend's gaze despite the heat of it burning in his chest. What did it matter if he appreciated the shape of a woman? He had seen Steve swing appreciative glances at women on several occasions. This though, Bucky did not do. He did not come to notice people, let alone women. Not when he had just managed to pull himself onto steady ground. And this woman worst of all. She who brought down three SHIELD agents. She who went toe to toe with Captain America, his shield in her hands. Who stopped the metal arm of the Winter Soldier.
This would not do.
"It's just a numbing agent."
Bucky looked back to see Jemma holding out a syringe to a very uneasy looking Eris. "That way you won't feel the stitches. There will be a slight pinch of the needle and that's it."
Eris looked away as Jemma brought the needle and syringe to her skin.
"The last time I saw you," Coulson said from where he leaned back against a workbench, arms crossed over chest, chin resting on a fist, "You had been out of the tank—what—a year?"
Eris nodded, watching Jemma clean the torn skin at her wrist as she allowed the injection time to numb the skin around the wound. "Yes. Carlton had just fled his brother's program, taking me with him. I had been the only reason SHIELD even considered his offer."
Coulson nodded slowly, eyes unfocused as a memory played through his mind. "You, along with his considerable knowledge, in exchange for a clean start. When I came for you, though, he told me you weren't ready."
A soft smile pulled at her lips. "I wasn't ever part of the deal. Not really. He knew that without the offer of me, of what I am and what he could create after me, SHIELD would just as soon let him rot in prison. So he lied about being willing to give me up."
"Yeah," Coulson laughed. "I got that feeling real quick, with the way he fussed over you."
Eris looked up at Coulson, gaze cool and serious. "He trusted you though. After you left that day, he told me that if something ever happened to him, I should go to you. He trusted you. Not SHIELD."
"I suppose he would know. Considering the whole 'Hydra is SHIELD' debacle."
"Wait, hold on just a second," The man who had introduced himself as Fitz said, taking a few steps closer to her. He held Jemma's clipboard in his hand. "What exactly are you?"
Eris's eyes remained on Coulson, a silent consultation of his opinion. He swung open a hand in an invitation to speak. She turned her head, resting her chin on her shoulder and closing her eyes. It was surprisingly timid gesture. Bucky imaged she could be a great many things, but timid didn't feel like it should be one of them.
"I, uh—" She started, then stopped. A full stop. The kind of stop that requires you to take a breath and regroup. It was almost as though she was trying to decide how exactly she would explain this thing she was about to reveal to them.
"I, uh, I was created. Not born."
Her words were met with silence.
Eris took another breath, letting it out slowly, like a smoker's exhale. "The tank Phil mentioned earlier. It was an incubation tank."
Still, no one spoke. No one moved. It was like they stood on the edge of understanding. They could see the shape of it, and yet could not comprehend what it was. Then suddenly, Jemma straightened, the roll of gauze dropping from her hand. Bucky watched it unravel across the floor.
Fitz took another step closer, head tilted slightly as though it would allow him to understand her better. There was indeed a tint of comprehension in his voice when he spoke. "He built you, didn't he?"
"No," Jemma said, staring at her with a strange wonderment in her eyes. "He created you. Down to the molecular level. That's why your blood work makes no sense. He literally wrote your DNA. You are a melting pot of specifically chosen traits. The incubation tank must have been something like the cradle Ultron used to create the Vision. He could have cast a skeleton then built a body to his own exact specifications. Why use a serum on an unpredictable host to create a super soldier when you could literally build your own?"
Fitz reached out, touching Jemma like she grounded him. "Who—who created you?"
Eris looked to Coulson, again, unsure. "Carlton DeRossi."
"Wait," Jemma said, holding up her hands, needle and thread pinched between her fingers. DeRossi? As in the DeRossi brothers?"
Bucky stiffened. Across the room, the third man who had appeared with Coulson and Fitz, Mac, threw up a hand. "Does anyone understand what's happening here? Aside from the ones with the PhD's?"
"Who are the DeRossi brothers?" Steve asked.
Bucky didn't need to ask. He knew that name. No amount of electro shock torture could fracture the pathway to that memory.
"The DeRossi brothers are legendary in their field." Jemma explained, barely managing to say the words before they tumbled out. "They worked in Hyrdra R&D. I glimpsed their lab once during my time undercover. I knew they worked in genetic coding, but I never thought...I never imagined."
"Yeah," Eris said lamely, clearly unsure how to respond to that, as she tugged at the tail of gauze that had unraveled across the floor. "Yeah. And there is a lot you can do with a person like me. Carlton, uh, didn't want that for me. So he ran. I think I was a lot more than he expected me to be when I woke up. A lot more...human. He went into full dad mode." She gave a slow rueful smile. "Which I suppose isn't such a bad thing when there aren't exactly spokesmen for genetically engineered human beings. I was only in Hydra's program for about a year before Carlton pulled me out."
"The only thing I don't understand is the panel at the base of your neck, right at the start of your spine. That is electronic?"
"Yes," Eris slowly began to reroll the gauze, tediously keeping its edges neatly aligned. "It's some kind of hard wired nervous system. It was supposed to be used to download large sums of information all at once and allow me to process it in seconds. It's like changing over from dial up to broadband. It helps me process sensory information faster, to respond quicker. I can survive without it, but I sure don't mind that it's there."
"But it looks broken?"
Eris reached up beneath the dark ponytail at the base of her neck, touching something with her fingers before drawing them back. "The programing itself is undamaged. I just broke the port. It turns out that kind of system does have one major flaw." Eris swallowed, looking down at her hands. She flexed her fingers lightly. "So I ensured it never happened again. But if the right person came along, if they were able to knock me out long enough, then they could fix it."
Eris looked at Jemma then, and the other girl's eyes widened. "I'm sorry about your tech, but I freaked out. This is the kind of thing that Carlton warned me about for years, but I've never been caught before. So I just assumed the worst. And I am sorry. If I had known you were with Phil, everything would have gone differently. I wasn't expecting to wake up and still be me."
Bucky drew in a long breath. He could relate that. The fear. The overwhelming panic.
"But what are you doing here?" Steve asked. "In this city."
Eris's dark gaze swung to him. "I have been tailing a group of Hydra scientists for a few months. I'm looking for someone in particular, so I haven't moved on them yet. I had hoped he might stop in for a visit."
"I thought Hydra was essentially wiped out after the death of von Strucker?" Bucky asked.
"Parts of Hydra still remain," Eris explained. "The militant side of Hydra is basically gone, yes, but the scientists remain. And that is who I am after."
"So that was you?" Daisy asked suddenly.
"What?" Eris looked to her, brows raised in question.
"The graffiti in the streets? The girl with the scythe. Anytime we asked around about the possibility of someone enhanced in the city, all the stories came back to you, didn't they? The Reaper." Daisy looked at May as though the sight of her would help draw the words from her memory. "'The girl who has come to claim the souls of the men who terrorize this city?'"
Eris laughed softly. "The scientists are afraid after the fall of Hydra. There is no one left to protect them. So they came here, to an old Hydra laboratory, and they hired thugs to protect since they cannot protect themselves. And those thugs run this city like a gang. I couldn't sit back and do nothing just because they aren't who I'm after. Not with what I can do. It seemed like a waste. The city is poor. They drag in a kids who are desperate and hard up for money to do their dirty work. They get them into trouble. I tried to get some of them out."
"Well, then we are going to have to do something about that," Steve said, as he leaned back, crossing his arms. "When we pull you out of here there will be no one here to—"
"No. You not taking me anywhere. They are looking for me, and they won't stop until they have me. If you don't let me go then you are putting everyone in danger," Eris said, taking a step closer to him. She drew herself to her full height, squaring her shoulders in an attempt to intimidate him. Maybe if it was another man, Bucky thought, it would have. "Including those techs out there." She stabbed a finger toward the door. "Who clearly have no combat training. You are going to get them killed. It would be best to stitch me up and send me on my way. I can draw them off."
"Why are they looking for you?" Coulson asked.
"Damian DeRossi feels that I belong to him. With his brother dead, he sees no reason to believe otherwise. He wants his all his hard work and research back."
"Carlton is dead?" Couslon asked.
Eris's hard expression fractured with lines of pain. Clearly, Bucky thought, she had cared for her creator.
Steve pulled the conversation back in the direction they had been headed before. "Then the safest place for you right now is here. With us. They won't touch you here. Not with all of us around."
"I can take care of myself." She smirked at him.
He ignored this. "That may be, but if you are really as valuable as you claim, then we can't take any chances that could allow them to get their hands on you."
The sharpness in Eris's smile faltered. "I'm more than just a thing to be had. I may have been created, but I have a mind of my own. I can make these decisions for myself."
"The thing is," Natasha said, moving to stand beside Steve, "Is that we have no reason to trust a word that you are saying."
"Phil can tell you—"
"Coulson doesn't know the whole story. Every good lie is based in a grain of truth.
"I thought if I told you the truth—"
"We know very little about you," Coulson said calmly, trying to diffuse the rising tension. "I know very little about you. But you should also consider the fact that if you go back with them, if you give them a real reason to trust you, they might actually come to aide you in your vendetta. How long have you been hunting Hydra scientists?"
Eris glared at Coulson, looking betrayed. "Three years."
"So you have three years of intelligence that you can share with them. They are the Avengers. They have infinite resources. If you comply with our wishes, remain on their good side, maybe they will actually help you out."
"But how long will it take you guys to trust me? A few months? A year? Hyrda may not be active anymore but there are several high ranking scientists out there. People will pay a lot of money for what they are able to do," Eris argued.
"We haven't even had a chance to discuss any of this among ourselves," Steve said. "We will need to decide exactly how we want to proceed."
"You should 'proceed' by letting me go," Eris said. "The only reason they haven't caught up to me yet is because I keep moving. They may not be Hydra soldiers anymore, but they have the weaponry of Hyrda scientists to aide them. They use it to track me. When they come, you will have to be careful."
"If they come," Steve said.
"Fine, fine." Eris said, throwing her hands up. "But don't say I didn't warn you."