Lucy hears heels clacking against a freshly polished floor. They're taking long, heavy strides-it must be a man. He's eleven feet away, now ten and a half…Why does she know this? The drugs, she reminds herself. She breathes in and can feel her blood pulsing and her cells sending and receiving signals like wildfire. Her eyes flicker open and she leaves the cold ground to take a seat in her chair. Six feet away… Her brain is locked onto him with newly awakened senses, senses that will be put to good use when she escapes this joint.
The door's lock clicks open and in steps the man with a crew cut, the nicer one of her two captors. Tattoos seems to be gone, but that's for the best.
Lucy straightens in her seat. Option number two is that he's here to change her stained bandages. She watches as the man sets down his gun on the table at the end of the cell, along with a set of four keys. He then turns to her with a glint in his eyes. Lucy offers him a smile as she slowly spreads her legs apart.
Of course. He's here for option number one.
He slinks closer to her, eager to have what his buddy failed at getting.
Lucy hums as his fat fingers caress her jeans right below the zipper.
He gladly reaches for her belt as the blonde's head leans back.
Her belt is unclasped, and now, the guy's going for the button… now the zipper, and then…
His head lowers, just in time for Lucy to deliver a brutal head-butt against his nose. He steps back, swearing and cupping his bloody nose.
Lucy whips out her belt in one swift motion while her opponent is distracted. With only three steps forward, she's closes enough to the table to use her belt as a lasso. Her belt latches onto a table leg and Lucy sends it skidding towards her. The man shouts at her, but before he can act, Lucy's already uncuffed herself and holds a fully loaded glock at the man's head. Her quick-thinking is astounding her-this is the kind of stuff the Black Widow does on a daily basis. She wonders is her subconscious is channeling that into her actions… "On your knees!" she orders in flawless Mandarin. Funny, that phrase never came up in any of her language comprehension books. Well, maybe in one, but it was a book she picked up for laughs.
The man ignores her and makes a mad grab for the gun.
Bad move.
Lucy expertly lassos her belt around his neck and sends him crashing to the floor with a remarkable unknown strength. While he's down, she cuffs him to the wall before leaving the bleak cell.
The hallway is just as dreary as the prison chamber. She strides past dark walls lined with electrical wiring and dying overhead lights. The scent of food is guiding her. She assumes that she's gone at least a day without even a scrap, but she's not feeling hungry. Her body needs the sustenance, though, according to a group of cells. Lucy needs herself to keep functioning at full speed, so she follows her nose past a heavy metal door.
The kitchen has a much cheerier tone from what she's seen of her prison so far. It's well-lit, warm, and smells of spicy pork and kimchi. Lucy wordlessly approaches a table of four men seated at a cheap fold out table as they stuff their faces while playing a casual game of cards. The first thing she notices is Tattoos, leaning back in his chair and motioning to the chef as he cooks over a hot grill. "Hey!" she shouts at them.
They all whip their heads around in unison, perfectly in sync with five consecutive shots from Lucy's gun. In the time it takes for her gun to fire, two men had grab their own guns from off the table. Both shoot, but only one manages a hit to Lucy's right shoulder.
Taking the hit was inevitable. The bullets can only fire so fast, after all. Lucy lowers her weapon as her pulse is now the only one to beat. She feels like she's got a high-speed computer for a brain. Shouldn't someone feel frightened if they can see their entire childhood playing out in a matter of seconds? Lucy can remember the exact day that she took her first step. It was a Wednesday, she was seven months and three days old. She even remembers her grade school text books word for word-they're all there, and she's got every word of every page in every book she's ever read memorized. Shame she didn't have this knowledge growing up…
She shoves a body out from a chair and sits. After setting her gun down amidst the clutter of cards, cigarettes, and unfinished food, she snatches up a dumpling and shoves it into her mouth. She grabs and inhales some fried noodles and a spicy pork bun, barely allowing herself to chew. The mouthful of food barely makes it down her throat, but she doesn't panic, let alone feel bothered that she's ready to choke. She grabs a glass of water and swigs it down in several gulps, letting the hardly-chewed food slide into her stomach. As she looks to her right for another dumpling, a splotch of red on her shirt diverts her attention.
Blood, but she's not bothered this time. Nor does she feel any pain. She simply eyes the wound and her body starts signaling the bullet's location. It's lodged in between muscle, and if she's careful, she can pull it out and not need to worry about too much blood loss. Lucy averts her eyes as her fingers brush past the neck of her shirt. Her mind's eye is giving her an image of the bullet as her fingers expertly dig into her skin. It's two and three quarters of an inch in there and Lucy has it out in four seconds flat without so much as a whimper.
She eyes the 9 millimeter piece of brass and suddenly, her brain's going haywire by giving her the weight, the circumference, the force at which it came at her-everything that no normal person should know just by fiddling with such a tiny thing. Lucy tosses it into her empty glass and grabs her gun before abruptly rising from her chair.
She needs to get to a hospital to stitch up her wound, along with getting the remainder of Killian's drugs removed from her stomach. Before she leaves, she steals a tattered denim jacket from one of the bodies and slips it on as she walks. The sleeves are six and three-eighths of an inch too long (her mind is going nonstop with the measurements, but Lucy can't turn it off).
Finding out what the hell is wrong with her is the main goal of the day. But first, hospital. The first door she finds is an exit. She takes in a breath of fresh air-it's seventy one degrees- and walks until she sees two men having a smoke near a car. "Hey!" she shouts, putting her Mandarin to good use. "I need to get to the hospital!" They both side-eye her, but the taller, leaner one spots the blood staining her shirt and pales at the sight. "Hospital. Now!" She raises her gun and fires a shot at the squeamish man's foot. He screams and Lucy mentally rolls her eyes. The bullet hit the ground two and a half inches from his foot. On purpose. She thinks about giving him an actual shot to the foot, but his buddy has the car door opened for her, so she allows herself in and lets a complete stranger drive her away.
Natasha pulls up directions on her phone whilst briskly walking the streets. Pinpointing a pharmaceutical company on a miniscule city map is easy. Actually navigating one's way through unfamiliar streets isn't, but the Black Widow isn't one to give up. She follows the flow of the crowd, checking her phone's GPS every time she needs to switch streets. After twenty minutes, she's close, but after hours on a plane, her stamina's low. She stops at a coffee shop, orders a large drink, and sits by a window that conveniently overlooks the FuturePharm building. Natasha takes small, slow sips and contemplates her next move. There's bound to be at least one back entrance-there always is. Then there's definitely gonna be a code that needs to be cracked-that's not a problem for her, either. Natasha relaxes into her seat and waits for the caffeine take effect.
Natasha happens to glance up at a television fixed to the wall. Maybe it's pure chance, or maybe it's a sign from the gods, but the news is on, and on that screen is Lucy's face, accompanied by footage of her walking through a hospital lobby. Natasha can't understand a word of what the reporter is saying, but she knows it's urgent.
Lucy tried keeping her gun hidden beneath her jacket, and for the record, she was certain that her weapon was well-concealed beneath her arm. Apparently not.
As she passes a mother and her young son (he's just had an allergic reaction to peanuts. A swollen tongue. He'll live), she hears her whisper to the man next to her.
"Did you see that woman? She had a gun, I swear she did."
Lucy walks faster, straight past the receptionist, but it's drawing even more attention to herself.
"Miss!" the receptionist yells.
Lucy can always play the 'American in a foreign country' card, but the truth is, she can understand every word. She can even read the language, even the characters she had never seen before.
The drive to the hospital made Lucy come to this realization. She could suddenly read every sign, every poster, and even overhear people's phone conversations as if she's some kind of a satellite.
She walks past a sign reading 'surgery' and follows the arrow that guides her straight down a hall. Chinese isn't the only language she's somehow memorized, either. She's now downloading Russian, courtesy of her mother, and Brail, thanks to her father. With every step she takes, her mind is expanding to accommodate every scrap of knowledge the world has to offer. Languages, old textbooks, childhood memories-they're all swimming through her head at once and it's both exciting and frightening at the same time… Only Lucy can't properly feel the rush of it all. The more she learns, the more she finds herself losing touch with her emotions. The pain from the gunshot is non-existent. Same for the incision across her stomach. She stops and hugs her jacket close. She should feel terrified after all that's happened. Hell, she shouldn't even be walking with her injuries (especially since three of the stitches have come undone and she's slowly bleeding out).
But she can't remember how pain feels. The things making her human are slipping away.
There's an alarm sounding back in the waiting room. The woman who saw her gun told the receptionist and now the cops are on the way. Lucy picks up the frequency from the receptionist's phone. She's frantic as she sputters on about a suspicious American woman with a gun. Now male staff is being contacted to apprehend her.
Lucy walks past two doors and pushes open the third on her left. There are four doctors hovering over a man's body. Lucy saunters over to a display of chest x-rays. The left lung has collapsed and the doctors are doing their best to get the man breathing properly. Lucy turns and sets her gun on a chair before letting her jacket and shirt fall to the floor. "There's no saving him." She picks up her gun, knowing that she'll need it. Just one look at the patient is enough to tell Lucy his vitals. The heart rate is steadily dropping. Lucy looks to the heart monitor and mentally speeds up the progression. Over the course of six minutes and twenty-two seconds, he'll be gone.
Two doctors turn to give Lucy a questioning look.
"It's no use," she mutters as she approaches the table to shove the man and his opened-up chest to the floor. A doctor to Lucy's right passes out on the spot. "He's not getting air and you should've focused more on the right lung. Would've found cancer." She sits herself down on the operating table, displaying her wounds for the doctors to see. "Gunshot in the right shoulder, bullet's been removed," she informs them. "The incision on the lower left needs to be re-opened. I've got a bag of drugs in me and it's leaking." She notices another doctor pale beneath her surgical mask. "I'd like to know what's in the bag once it's out." Her eyes narrow as she raises her gun.
The head doctor signals for her to lower the gun. Once she does, he reaches for scissors to snip apart the browned bandages around Lucy's waist. "Get the anesthetic ready," he orders.
"Don't," Lucy answers. "I don't need any."
He stares at her like she's crazy, but he nods and tells his assistants to patch up her shoulder.
She turns to an assistant doctor. "Can I borrow a phone?" she softly asks, reaching over to set her gun on the tray of surgical tools. A man nods and goes to fetch his phone from across the room. The phone is soon in her hand and while the doctors get to work, Lucy decides that it's time to give someone a reassuring phone call. She's not going to cause any trouble-it's not worth the burden. All she wants is to hear a familiar voice, and not one inside her head. She's already playing out thirty-seven various scenarios of what could happen. Her dad finds out something's wrong and panics, or he's calm, in one he's even scolding her to study. Her father is the only one she's having imaginary conversations with. No one else matters more to her, and Lucy feels a sense of longing. She holds onto that feeling, because she knows that it's going to be gone before she realizes it.
The phone rings twice as a doctor begins snipping apart the incisions along her abdomen. "Dad?" She's certain it's her father even before he speaks, but she chooses to pose a question in hopes of holding on to her dwindling humanity.
"Lucy?" There's a genuine surprise in his voice, and she can't blame him. This is the first time in seventeen days, four hours, and thirty-two seconds since her last phone call. "It's good to hear from you sweetie, how are you?"
She carefully watches the doctor as he makes a clean cut before clearing the blood away. As if she will tell her dad that she is currently a drug-mule, lured into this whole mess by a strange, handsome man who got his only daughter trashed enough to forget her own name. "Dad, I just wanted to say I miss you." The heartfelt greeting-card message is said in a monotone, so she works to force some genuine concern. "And I love you." Her heartbeat quickens as she feels the pressure in her belly. She isn't nervous or scared, though. No, her pounding heart is just her body managing itself as a two-thirds empty bag of Killian's latest illegal drug is tugged out of her. "Dad…" Lucy stares off into space and envisions her own vitals. Her heart is racing, so she signals for it to slow down. Fast forward hours ahead and it still maintains a steady beat. But then it stops. Barely twenty-four hours into the future, and Lucy can't stop that. Whatever is in her bloodstream is killing her slowly.
"Lucy? What is it?" His reassuring voice has never changed in his twenty-four year role as a father.
"I feel everything," she begins, keeping her eyes forward as the stitching process began. "I can feel your fingers stroking my hair, the millions of kisses you've given me…" Her eyes begin to sting and she wonders if this is the last of her human self leaving her. "I know you're disappointed that mom isn't home." Even without the help of her enhanced mind, she knows that her mother is out working. She always is. That woman had a stronger marriage to her job than she did with her own husband. Go figure things never worked out. "I can feel my blood flowing, my cells growing and dying… I even remember the time you dragged mom and I to that boxing match. She complained that it was a waste of time and that she could take out any man on her own."
"'Boxing match?'" he parrots. "Luc, I haven't been to a match since you were a baby."
He's bewildered, but she can't blame him. "I remember," she promises. "Like I remember leaving your body to join mom's. I can-"
"Lucy?" There's an urgency to his voice and he must be thinking his little girl's on a bender again. "Lucy, the reception must be bad. Are you feeling okay?"
She feels the tug and pull of the needle and string piecing her back together again. "Fine."
"It's late there, isn't it? I'll let you go then."
"Goodbye, dad." She ends the call after a definite final goodbye and lets the doctors finish their work.
Natasha's making her way to the hospital when her phone starts to ring. Barton. "This better be a lead," she warns.
"Yeah," he breathes. "We've got these guys identified. Hydra men, but we can't make the kill until we know their boss. Killian can't be running this show alone."
Natasha sees Lucy's face on the TV screen. She's in a hospital, she tells herself. But she's also alive. And she can fend for herself… "Do we have whereabouts on these guys? And notify the others. We're not sleeping until we have answers."
