Chapter IV: Prisoner
"Spion," they called her first, once the German had tumbled from between her own lips. She knew the word, weighed it in the palm of her hand as she was bundled into the back of the lorry, as the harsh sounds of their darkening plans beat at her ears.
The blond, who had fished her from the rush of the river and then yanked the jumper over her head, exposing her to the chill of the night in just her uniform - he was the most gentle, the most sensitive to her comfort. He found a blanket somewhere in the depths of the vehicle and reached over to wrap it around her shoulders. Terror made a mute, biddable child of her, and she allowed her body to be warmed by the action. He didn't, she thought, look like a monster - although his language, the uniform, the foreboding insignia on his breast and shoulder, and his very presence in the little valley she had called home these past weeks all pointed to the inevitable opposition that must exist between them. She was English; he was German. She was VAD; he was HYDRA.
As the lorry lumbered on, further away from the camp, she pressed herself tighter to the wooden crate he had settled her against, willing herself to somehow transcend the situation and miraculously appear back in her bed - before bad decisions, before foolish sentiment had taken over. Conversation rose and fell around her, and her eyes closed with the fear of it all. "Schwester," he called her now, shaking her arm slightly. Sister. Nurse. They thought she was a nurse and a spy and God knew what else, but that indecision could be keeping her alive, and she had to be grateful for it. She opened her eyes and hazel met blue; there was no malice in his gaze, only faint concern. "Schlafe nicht. Du hast dir deinen Kopf schwer verletzt."
Ah, she remembered now. Those slippery planks beneath her feet, the makeshift bridge used by patrol guards when the river proved too unruly to ford with just their boots alone. The waterway wasn't too wide, nor too deep - in fact, "river" was a generous term; it was more of an overconfident brook, really. But the wet autumn months had swelled its ego even more, and as she had approached the water, aiming to traverse the divide between the outskirts of the camp and the forest beyond (where lay the meagre supply of lavender she'd hoped to harvest), she had decided to shift those planks from their hiding place under a copse of reeds. She laid them out, in the dark, heaving their weight across the two metre width of the river until she felt solid earth on the other side. Four steps, that's all she'd managed, before her right foot slipped and she went careening into the icy water.
When she had first arrived at the camp, Rebecca, Pat, and Susie had taken to walking by the river's edge during their breaks. On their fourth day, she had been invited. Oh, it had been lovely - something like home, the rush of water in her ears and the cool breeze rolling from its surface. Back then, the river had been a welcome sight, a place to submerge aching feet and share some good-natured banter. But that night, as she had slid into the frigid depths and felt the fingers of ice wind themselves a little too firmly about her neck, as her temple had made abrupt contact with a rather large stone - that night, all she could think was, What a bloody unpleasant way to die.
Blood had dried on her forehead, and at the soldier's reminder, she scraped a jagged fingernail along her hairline, watching as red flakes fluttered into her lap. Do not sleep. He did not want her to sleep after a potentially substantial head injury. He wanted her to live, not slip away into endless dreams. Why did he care, though? Why did he not want her to die, when she could prove to be much more trouble than she was worth while alive? In the fairytales, did not the monsters always kill the stupid girls first, quickly and without too much thought?
Or did they play with them, their quarry and their sport?
"Ich glaube nicht, dass sie ein Spion ist," grumbled the green-eyed man, he of the sharp jawline and twitching veins. He adjusted the gun in his hands, glanced over at his other companion, the oldest of the lot: with greying hair at his temples, his presence surprised her. Surely the Nazis were not sending grandfathers to the front?
She shifted slightly, pulling the blanket with her as she adjusted her recline against the crate. "Ich bin nicht," she replied. Of course she was not a spy; how could they think such a thing? Green-eyes was correct in his thinking; a spy would not be secreted at a field hospital, she would be deployed to offices, to Allied communication centres, to French, Italian, or Dutch towns. A spy would blend in: she would have a simple but deep history; she would smile at the right moments and she would be gaunt and tired, because her ability to self-camouflage was her only chance at survival. A spy would not balk at a gun pointed to her head, let alone cry because she had knocked it against a river stone.
No, she was no spy. Nor was she a nurse, but she did yet not have the courage to correct them on that point. Odds were, they had plans for her - else they could have left her in the river or finished her off in the grass. The fact that she spoke and understood German well likely had something to do with it; her English accent curved around the foreign words subtly, and the uniform she wore clearly said she was no true Fräulein. That must have piqued their interest.
She could kick herself now for allowing the German to slip out. It was her father's fault, truly - he had possessed an innate gift for tongues and it had worn off on her over the years. The knock on the head hadn't helped with her self-control, either. As she'd lain there on the grass, Blond's hands wiping the sodden strands of her hair from her face, he'd spoken his worries aloud in panicked tones: "Is she dead? Oh, God, she's just a girl. Wake! Wake! Please, please."
"I'm fine," she'd sputtered, spitting out a mouthful of river water before struggling to turn over, to find purchase in the mud and the reeds. "I'm fine."
Green-eyes, Blond, and Grandfather were frozen, staring at the English nurse who had just replied in perfect, crisp German. Blond's hands were still gripping her shoulders; Grandfather held a torch aloft, illuminating in full the baffling situation before all of them. How could she have been so stupid?
She knew what HYDRA was, what her capture meant. Early on in her posting at the hospital camp, Surgeon-General Belasis had conducted a seminar of sorts for the volunteers, detailing the risks posed by their position. "HYDRA is the scientific and research branch of the SS," he'd boomed, reading mechanically from a stack of papers provided to him by Matron Barnett. "They conduct experiments and the organization's goal is to support the endeavours of the Schutzstaffel, creating advanced weapons and the like."
Belasis had gone on to explain that there were thorough reports of HYDRA scouts being spotted throughout the Italian countryside, and that the group possessed a particular affinity for Allied hospitals. "Reconnaissance on hospitals gives the SS a better idea of our numbers," he added. "Wounded, killed, and so on."
Allied field hospitals in France and Holland had already encountered difficulties with HYDRA attempting to gain entrance, numbers, and even prisoners from their operations. They had a nasty habit of blending right in as locals or volunteers; there were even a few reports of some agents having gained actual access to the hospitals and their records.
At first, she had been chilled by Belasis' lecture - but then, everything in those early days of arriving in Italy had sent shivers of fear down her spine. Once she had settled into her work and found her place in the day-to-day life of the camp, those fears had necessarily been pushed firmly into the back of her mind. After all, she'd made it alive through the battered Atlantic, where U-boats lurked like so many sharks beneath the surface. The risks she had taken to actually volunteer and arrive at the front had already been so daunting, it simply would not do to shrink away from these new ones. Knowing that, however, did not prevent the dread from creeping up her bones, gripping her brain and heart in such a sluggish fury that it was nearly impossible for her to assess the current level of danger.
"Schwester." Blond had knelt beside her again, this time bringing another blanket. "You are a nurse, yes?" His German was perfect, she realized; elegant and formal. A memory of her father burst behind her eyes: reciting an ancient poem with the fluidity of one born and raised in the nation, gesticulating broadly and with passion. He had so loved the German poetic canon; it would devastate him to learn how that beauty was being twisted now, into something so dark, so repulsive, so cruel.
"An aide," she whispered. "Just an aide." He nodded, glancing furtively over his shoulder to where Green-eyes and Grandfather were engaged in a furious, whispered conversation. "Please - where are you taking me?"
He cleared his throat, eyes avoiding hers. "To our headquarters. We have orders to return tomorrow. You will come with us."
"Warum?"
"Because" - he looked back at his companions once more; she gathered that Blond was not supposed to be providing her with this much information - "you may yet prove to be useful, and because we could not allow you to return to your camp."
How could she possibly be useful? An injured, half-drowned aide discovered on the outskirts of the camp? How could she possibly pose any purpose for these men, for HYDRA? Belasis had said the organization was interested in numbers, in logistics, in intel. She knew none of that. Were they interested in how certain soldiers took their tea, or how many ginger biscuits were left in the tin on Clarke's desk, or the number of P.G. Wodehouse devotees on Recovery Ward D - those tidbits of intelligence, those she could provide. Everything else, though, was out of her purview. Volunteers at her level were not to know the type of information these HYDRA scouts would want to learn.
And when they realized that, she would be killed.
Horror crowded her throat, squeezing out the last bit of hope she'd been holding onto - inspired by Blond's gentle tone and actions - as she realized the true depth of what she had stumbled into here. Surely, she tried to reason, if they wanted her dead, they could have just let her drown in the river. That she was with them now meant they were going to pump her for as much information as they could get, and when they did indeed come to learn that she knew nothing beyond the finer details of soldiers' creature comforts, she would be shot anyway. Isn't that what they did? Interrogation, torture, and then finally, anonymous death against a stone, cold wall, far away from home. Her body would be tossed in a canal or an unmarked grave, or left to rot where they left her and she would…
"Sh, Fräulein, sh." Blond gripped her shoulder. "No need to cry. You are safe for now, and if you are quiet and agreeable, there is no reason for you to be hurt. If you are willing to be useful to the Reich and to HYDRA, there is no need for fear." But oh, how she wept: great, violent, silent sobs that tore at the vestiges of empathy that had not been crushed by his training, and Blond thought of another blonde, his pretty wife at home, who had wept so at their parting months before. He bit his lip and turned his back more fully on his companions; it was likely he would be reported for this demonstration, but some deep, humane instinct within him encouraged him to keep speaking, to soothe this poor, overwhelmed woman before him. "Sh, Fräulein. Nun, sag mir, wie heißt du?"
She blinked, catching a sob mid-stream and wiping a hand childishly under her dripping nose. Her gaze - cagey, guarded - clearly said she had not expected this normalcy, this courtesy, not here in the back of an enemy vehicle, in the dark of what surely must be the worst night of her young life.
"Elle. Elle Andersen."
Hours passed in peaceful, succulent sleep. Blond gave her a small vial of liquid that slid down Elle's throat like honey and bloomed in her weary, beleaguered mind as a happy memory she had not yet made. In the dawn, she became vaguely aware of being moved, of cool air rushing over her skin, of strident German voices barking orders and questions that did not, somehow, concern her. More hours passed - these ones in swift, smooth travel, in the chill darkness of a train car. Blond disappeared; Green-eyes and Grandfather too, but she scarcely registered her solitude. The sweet, feathery depths that Blond's treatment had plunged her into were far more preferable to the underscoring awareness that she was moving further and further away from safety, and ever closer to an unknowable doom.
In dreams, she walked with the boy. He whispered heated nothings into her ear, and she blushed with the merriness of it all. He meant no harm. She loved him so. Her boy, her darling, her lovely, lovely wolf-eyed boy. Were he with her now, she would have nothing to fear. He would protect her. And what a wonderful thing, she thought sleepily, to be protected, to be cared for, to have no worries, none at all.
"Leg sie auf ihre Füße!" But oh, they ached - her poor, battered, frozen feet could not hold her, could not bear her weight into the frigid night. "Schnell! Schnell!"
Hands slipped beneath her armpits, hauling her up to her feet, and she blinked into bewildered consciousness, eyes darting wildly to and fro. The air was thinner up there, and it slipped through her lungs like gossamer; she choked on its absence. Where were her blankets, she wondered dully? She was so cold, so very, very cold.
The landscape rose like a nightmare before her: peaks of white-capped peril, as far as she could see, marching sturdily in every direction under an ironclad sky. Flakes of snow swirled about her, but there was nothing delicate or festive to be found in the scene. Ironically, Elle had found herself once again situated in a valley of sorts, with a forest to the east - dense and foreboding. A dark fairytale of a forest. She continued to stare, to gaze out and around at her new surroundings, reconciling the memory of a damp, autumnal Italy with this new wintry wasteland. "Nach vorne," a man snapped, and she turned slightly to see a HYDRA agent - helmet shadowing his face - approaching with a hand outstretched. She cringed away from the blow, but he managed to catch her on the shoulder just the same, and the force of his fist drew her down to her knees.
Where her stockings were ripped, the rough kiss of concrete stung, and with a cry, she was hauled back to her feet. "Nach vorne. Schnell!" Forward, they wanted her to move forward, as fast as she could. But to what? Through the October squall, to her left, she could make out the shadowy angles of a building that seemed to grow larger and larger as they approached - the guard's tight grip on her upper arm a significant motivator in picking up the pace. As the snow lightened, spotlights glowed bright and warm, unwelcome beacons, and the sharp rise of aeroplanes startled her every several hundred feet. They were monstrous beasts, those aircraft, nothing like the affable metallic curves of Allied Lockheeds and Douglases, and the incongruity - the modernness - of their appearance chilled her more than the frigid air.
She turned away.
Her original captors were nowhere to be found; another faceless guard joined their small group as she was led through a narrow steel door, past a large, paved lot filled with a variety of lorries and motorbikes. Oil tanged the air, so heady she felt ill, and couldn't help but be slightly relieved when they had finally ducked through the doorway and down a series of corridors that gradually grew more and more polished. Framed landscape paintings lined the walls - generic, soulless vistas of meadows and mountains, farmsteads and beaches. Battlefields now, she thought darkly. Each and every one.
They had walked for at least ten minutes when, finally, the first HYDRA agent stopped abruptly before a gleaming mahogany door. He knocked twice, and then rapped out an order for his compatriot to remain there with Elle. The second agent seemed to bristle at the instruction, but obeyed just the same, pointing to the far wall and ordering her to face it. Level with her forehead, the sea opened up, a silent rush of frozen waves; a lonely tracing of sand dunes, lighted by delicate, green grasses. If this was to be her last glimpse of the world, then it gladdened her to know it was one of natural beauty. Despite herself, she smiled. It was a private thing, just for her.
Elle knew she was going to die. It was a thought she had never quite managed to fully entertain, not even as the St. Vincent had departed and not when she had arrived at the field hospital. Death was all around them, and the war had been going on for three full years at this point, nearly four, and the abject travesty of the loss of life was devastating and relentless. And yet, not even when she had cowered under the whistle of bombs back in London - not even then had she wondered what it would be like to die. To cease. To cease.
She was facing that threat now, and it was a bitter reveille. Twenty-six years, was that to be it? Sometimes she felt much, much older than that, but still - twenty-six years was not nearly enough time. And the boy? What would the boy do? How would he learn of her death? Would he ever know what had happened to her? Would he mourn? What would it to do him, her poor love?
The daunting aspect of her own imminent obliteration was not, as she had anticipated, a fear of pain - but just the end. The terrible finality of a life unfinished. HYDRA would put a bullet between her eyes, and her name would become nothing more than a footnote, an amendment, a statistic. She would not die a hero; she was about to die alone, cowering against a wall. No one would know.
Elle closed her eyes against fate, holding the image of the sea in her mind and vowing not to open her gaze ever again, so that a peaceful beach would be the last thing she saw and her death would be painted in soft blue and pale green. She would tell them nothing. She would not betray her cause, her people. She would die on the beach - like a soldier.
Death was not timely, and the world moved in increments of pain. She was brought before a doctor, a man who brought her neither healing nor comfort. She trembled before him, stammered out her name and answered his brief, clipped questions as composedly as she could. Upon his return, the HYDRA agent had ordered her to open her eyes as she was brought in to Doctor Zola's office, but Elle held the sea, the gorgeous sea, in her mind and her memory, and no matter what they did, they would never be able to take it away from her.
Zola was a surprise: a short, stout man with an owlish look, who appraised her arrival with a surprising amount of interest. "Wo hast du Deutsch gelernt?" he asked, inviting her to sit down across from his desk. The agents flanked the door behind her; she felt their judgement, their stifled rage, simmering at her back. They hated her. And they were confused.
"I learned from my father," she replied hoarsely, fiddling at a loose thread in her skirt. "Er hatte ein Ohr für Sprachen." And he had: an innate ability to pick up new languages easily, to learn the peculiarities and rules inherent in each. A single conversation with a traveller tended to to launch him on intense journeys of linguistic scholarship, and many of these had been then handed down to her. She could speak French, too, quite well, as well as Norwegian, Romanian, and Spanish. She loved the way the words danced on her tongue, unlocking new worlds and stories and experiences. That the pure joy she had once known from reciting German poetry and fables had now been usurped, tainted by her capture, caused her an aching, raw pain deep in her soul.
Elle gazed across the expanse of Zola's desk, watching a smile slither across his face. "Your father taught you well, then, Mädchen, and you should be grateful to him." He rose, gesturing to the guards behind her, and she heard the click of a lock before she was roughly handled once more. "It is because of him that you are still alive. Take her to Lohmer."
Pain.
Pain of such insistence, such unremitting severity. Enveloping her. Consuming her. Devouring her whole.
The monster painted her skin with punishment.
On and on it all went, but she had nothing to give.
And when he was done, when he had left her battered and bloody in the cold, dark lonesomeness of that anonymous room - only then did she allow herself to cry.
Tapping away the last remnants of ash from his cigarette, Colonel Lohmer offered his final verdict with a cruel, twisted smile: "She's useless, sir."
Useless. The word held dark potential. From where he sat in the far corner, banished to the outskirts of this meeting like an errant child, Zola weighed the likelihood of the girl surviving to the dawn. Lieutenant-General Johann Schmidt had arrived that afternoon from an inspection in Czechoslovakia; he was visibly tired, and though he liked and respected Lohmer and the work he was accomplishing at the alpine facility, he was not enjoying this report. "Why did they bring her here in the first place?" Schmidt asked, drumming his fingers on the elegant desk, avoiding the nearby stack of papers, which promised hours of dull, detailed production reports. Progress had brought him up this snowy incline; progress for the cause, for HYDRA, and the news of a scared young Englishwoman being secreted somewhere inside the factory did little to encourage him.
Lohmer shrugged - a brave move for a man of his position, Zola thought with a secret smirk. "Fischer said she spoke German like she was born to it, and at the time, that made him suspect her of being a spy. Apparently, Sommer all but fell in love with her then and there, and would not be parted." His tone was amused, sardonic, but it did nothing to lighten the mood.
Schmidt's lips thinned into a tight line of clear displeasure. "How indecorous of him." He glanced over to Zola, who had attempted to make himself appear occupied with a logistics report from Prague, lest he be removed from the office. "Doctor, I wonder, do you have any need for her?"
"S-sir?"
Lohmer chortled at Zola's obvious discomfort. "It seems to me, Herr Schmidt, that the good doctor would not know what to do with the woman."
A dry chuckle from Schmidt broke the awkward silence, and Zola looked askance at the accusation. He'd only had a brief glimpse of the girl, and though she was comely enough, terror made an unflattering accessory on any pretty face. He felt no temptation in that regard, whatever Lohmer chose to insinuate. "She might make a good secretary," Schmidt mused, reaching for his cup of tea. "Her German is excellent. Her fear will make her a fine worker, I am sure." Delicately, the seasoned officer dragged a finger along the rim of the china cup - it was a beautiful piece, quite out of place in this den of killers. "Loveliness is so easily broken, Doctor. Do not be gentle."
Elle Andersen served as Doctor Arnim Zola's personal secretary for precisely six hours, fourteen minutes, and one black eye. She arrived in his laboratory wearing that same bloodsoaked uniform and bearing a motley barrage of bruising from Lohmer's interrogation. He could see the pale, battered flesh of her legs through torn stockings and her hair was wild, as though she had run through the hills to come to him, rather than be escorted down the length of the hallway.
Fischer brought her. An older gentleman from Cologne, Fischer had volunteered for HYDRA two years ago, after the noble sacrifice of his only son. Lohmer had a bit of a soft spot for him, though Zola found him to be rather sanctimonious at times. "Doctor Zola." Fischer did not even rapped upon the door to announce his entrance, and this rankled the doctor. Surely he was due some amount of respect? Herr Schmidt certainly seemed to think so - even the appointment of this frowsy-haired girl from Italy constituted near enough an acknowledgement of his workload that Zola could not help but preen a little under the compliment. He did need a secretary. Someone to field visitors, at the very least.
Fischer shoved the woman forward slightly, and Zola registered a twitchy wince cross her face at the action. He found her face rather painful to look upon: the brighter lights of the laboratory cast her cuts and bruises into much sharper relief than had the softer glow of Lohmer's office. An unpleasant greenish hue traced down her left cheekbone; a vivid scrape could be seen at her jaw, a lover's kiss she had not wanted. And her eyes. Her eyes. Her eyes made Zola's stomach clench.
Once hazel, once rich - Elle's eyes had paled, retreated in chary distrust and anxiety, casting this way and that about the new space, assessing the room for threats. The colour had gone, washed away with the tears she had not been able to staunch these past twelve hours. She had a hollow look about her - not emaciation, no, nor starvation. The girl was haunted. Tailed by bad memories and dashed hopes. Scraped raw by deep, agonizing loss.
Zola had seen that look before; once upon a time, he supposed he had worn it himself. But there was no pity in him now, not for this husk of a woman. Schmidt had ordered him to take her on as a secretary, and that he would do, though he had little enough need for scheduling appointments or fielding correspondence. The doctor had more of an idea to turn her into a menial right hand for his laboratory assistants; the Valkyrie was coming along nicely (the new contingent of workers from Italy had made for a sizeable boost in productivity), but Schmidt had requested an additional shipment of assault rifles. High-powered and deadly, the guns were in high demand among HYDRA's forces. Besides the Valkyrie, they were Zola's pride and joy at the moment.
He asked Bergmann to explain her initial tasks, which included filing some paperwork recording the previous week's output, the rates at which the new workers were performing, and his own requisition for a few very specific pieces of lab equipment. Zola had plans to revisit an older series of experiments, this time aided by the exciting developments brought to him by Schmidt just a few months before. Once he had selected the ideal candidate, his schedule would be even more full, thus further necessitating some thorough training for this sad-eyed girl.
She moved through the lab as though she was familiar with the place, following Bergmann and his terse instructions, sitting gingerly down upon a stool next to Zola's desk in the far corner. Ideally, the doctor mused, watching as she bent her bruised head to her task - ideally, she would not be in the lab at all. Once he had her conditioned to her work and his orders - once she was broken in - then she could be trusted on her own for spells at a time in his private office just down the hall. It would not do to have so much of his paperwork and personal items being attended to in this unpredictable space.
As they tended to do when he was immersed in his work, the hours passed by rapidly. Zola left the lab briefly to check on the production line; Lohmer was observing the floor from the catwalk, his meeting with Schmidt evidently concluded, and had just a few complaints to report about some American soldiers getting a bit smart with their supervisors. "They are bold, these men," he observed over the curl of smoke from another cigarette. Zola bit back an insubordinate instinct to point out the dangers of smoking so close to the assembly line, to the birthing room of the Valkyrie, as the Colonel continued: "Nothing we cannot remedy, though, eh, Doctor?"
He ate a light lunch in his office, reading over some papers Schmidt had brought detailing the recent brouhaha in New York City. When he returned to the lab, he noticed that the girl had left his desk and was being raked over the coals by Bergmann and another assistant. As Zola secreted the papers in a bottom drawer, he picked up the gist that Elle had been moving carelessly through the laboratory, nearly knocking over a stack of handwritten calculations.
Bergmann was a tall man, hulking and rigid; the doctor himself could confess to feeling intimidated by his looming frame and fiery eyes. And yet, despite the spitting vehemence in his tone, the girl stood unflinching before him. Dull resignation, however, rather than courage, accounted for this show of stoicism, Zola could see that clearly. Her pale gaze was fixed upon a clock on the far wall, as verbal blow after blow assaulted her honour and last vestiges of self-possession. "Blödel!" Bergmann snapped. "Watch where you walk from now on, understood?"
Her nod was subtle, almost imperceptible, but Bergmann seemed satisfied. After barking out another order, this time for her to return - carefully - to Zola's desk and see to the personnel reports, he turned on his heel and headed back to his station. The doctor moved away from his desk as the girl approached, torn between wanting to commend her for that show of composure in the face of Bergmann's barrage of criticism and understanding that such a display would be highly inappropriate. Impressive or not, the girl was an enemy of HYDRA - albeit a conquered one. Add to that, he thought again, she had not borne the brunt of that dressing-down out of bravery. Nothing so warm as that.
Why was she so fascinating? Zola had never before found himself so acutely focused on a person he had just met - except for Schmidt, and that was down more to fear than interest. No, this girl, this battered and weary English aide, she was compelling. Not overly attractive (her eyes were a too deep-set for his liking, and she was tall; Zola did not like tall women), but memorable just the same. Perhaps it was simply that he had not seen a woman in several weeks; all of the workers at this particular research facility were male, given that most were prisoners of war. All of his lab assistants were male as well, and it had been three or so months since he had last visited Berlin.
Yes. That was it. That was all. Elle's arrival marked the first time in months that he had encountered a woman, pretty or not, and that he had been forced to work in close quarters with her now - that was why his eyes kept drifting over, why she occupied his thoughts. Why he felt something too close to pity for his liking bubble up inside of him as he counted the marks on her face, on her arms. He shook his head now, recalling that he had hoped to check in with the small group he had designated to help him prepare for the upcoming experiment. There were a few things he needed to finalize before moving on to the next stage.
He couldn't wait.
To cope, Elle allowed herself to slip into memory. Her father had taken her to the river one afternoon, years and years ago, intent on finishing a poem that had been causing him some trouble. She had splashed in the shallows while Papa searched the sky for the perfect adjective.
My honey. He had always called her that, her Papa had. My honey.
There was no honey in HYDRA's world. Her entire body ached from the beating, from the shock and the horror of the past few days. That she was now sitting behind a desk, sorting papers and fetching mugs of tea and coffee for the scientists at work here - she could not reconcile these moments of relative calm (apart from the explosive anger of that tow-headed giant) with those hours of pain and darkness. At any moment, she expected the peace to be broken, as his outburst had confirmed.
If nothing else, though, the lab was fairly quiet; an industrious silence had befallen the technicians as Doctor Zola had returned and the giant had finished with her. The silence helped soothe her pounding head, and she stole a brief moment of rest to rub her temples. Hunger was a gnawing monster in her gut, insistent and unfulfilled. She had managed to slurp down a bit of water while making coffee earlier, so dehydration should not be an issue, but Elle had no idea if she was to be fed today, or who she should approach to ask. She did not even know how long she was expected to work in the lab, or what her tasks would entail beyond the sorting and filing.
Survival was a surprise so far, and Elle had decided that she would simply have to live her life one moment at a time from now on. The interrogation had ended with a promotion, a few hours of safety, but she could not count on anything beyond that. Keeping her head down and her hands innocently busy, that could help. Plotting escape could come later, once she had recovered and built up her strength.
She hoped. She hoped.
As Elle shifted in the unyielding wooden chair, her right knee hit the exposed lip of a slightly opened drawer. Puzzled, she leaned down to adjust it, realizing she had not done so in the first few hours of her work. She assumed, then, that someone had opened in the interval, either when she had gone to put the kettle on or while the giant had been shrieking at her. Curiosity got the better of her, and after ensuring that all the scientists in the lab were occupied and that no one was paying attention to the prisoner-cum-secretary in the corner, she slid the drawer fully open, enough to see that a new manila folder had been placed atop a series of loose papers.
There was nothing remotely strange about a manila folder being placed atop a series of loose papers in the bottom drawer of a scientist's desk. There was nothing strange about neglecting to close the drawer all the way in a hurry to go somewhere else. What was acutely odd about the folder in the drawer, however - and this was a detail that made Elle's breath catch audibly in her throat - was that the label was written in English and the stamp on the front of the folder declared it the property of the United States Army and more specifically, the Strategic Scientific Reserve.
Elle did not know much about the American forces, and as an Englishwoman with no connections overseas, the sight of such an insignia should not necessarily fill her with a rush of homesickness, but it did. She glanced upwards, hoping that her gasp had not caught anyone's attention. Zola was preoccupied at the far end of the lab, huddled with a knot of scientists around one of the benches; the giant was nowhere to be seen, and everyone else was, as they had been for most of the day, engrossed in their work at the various tables and workstations scattered about the huge space.
Delicately, she flipped over the front of the folder, scanning the first page of typed, uncensored text in search of familiar words or details. Project Rebirth, the title of the page read. She could make out a series of names - Steven G. Rogers; Howard Stark; Agent M.E. Carter - and a few recent dates, back in the early summer of that year. On the whole, the names really meant nothing to her, though the first of the list did tend to stick oddly in her memory. Had she met someone with a similar name, back in London?
The file consisted of about thirty or forty pages, all typed and annotated in a spiky black-inked hand, so far as she could tell from her gentle thumbing-through. The annotations had been made in German, perhaps made by Zola himself. She knew he could speak English rather well; he'd delivered some of his first orders to her in the language, though nearly every HYDRA representative she'd met so far had known she understood German well.
She paused on one page in particular, if only for the peculiar layout she observed. A chart, titled Rogers, compared the measurements of what she assumed must be two separate men, so disparate were the statistics: 95 pounds, 5 feet, 4 inches; and then 240 pounds, 6 feet, 2 inches. Though she did not have time to calculate a precise conversion to metric units for the clarity of her own perspective, the difference between the two sets of measurements were enough to paint a fairly detailed picture. Could Rogers refer to one man, perhaps that Steven G. whose name seemed familiar? If so, he had made a substantial transition.
No, Elle reasoned, shuffling a few pages past the chart - it was far more likely that the measurements were comparing two individuals, and that the title was a code word of sorts, some sort of reference known only to those who were meant to have the folder. How had HYDRA come in possession of it, she wondered? It was not a German composite - it was the genuine article. Just weeks before, she thought, this very folder had likely been sitting on an American desk. An Allied desk.
She could not make much sense of the contents, but that was to be expected: her martial purview revolved around creature comforts and bedside chats, not reports and secret projects and codenames. And yet, she kept turning pages, hoping for an epiphany. So engrossed was she that the shadow falling across the desk never registered, nor did the soft but audible approach of footsteps. Zola's hand on her shoulder, though - that she was aware of.
"Was glauben Sie, was Sie da tun?" he bellowed, and she dropped the folder, swivelled around in his grip. The man was a good foot and a half shorter than her, and was smart enough to keep her seated in the chair. "What do you think you are doing?" he repeated, spittle flying from his lips in his sudden fury.
What was she doing? Shame and self-hatred flew down like shutters on her heart, as she realized what those few moments of stolen curiosity had bought her. She would be killed for this, surely. Having so narrowly escaped death at the hands of that Colonel, after surviving that interrogation, now she would be shot for reading.
A fitting end for her, personally, she supposed. Every martyr needs something to burn for.
Zola's bony grip tightened, a vise, on her shoulder, and he had managed to place three of his fingers in the precise hollow where she had been struck upon her arrival at the facility, out on the tarmac. A dull, throbbing burn erupted where his hand met her pain and she could not help but cry out as he twisted her right and left, hoping to shake the truth out of her, evidently. "Tell me," he snapped. "Tell me now."
Another hand appeared, this one far broader and far stronger. The blond giant had returned, and pushed the doctor out of the way. His hand made its way around her throat. "Answer him, you bitch," he spat. His thumb pressed up against the underside of her jaw, and stars burst in her eyes. How the bloody hell did he expect her to reply while being throttled?
Six hours. She wanted to laugh out loud, but her windpipe was dangerously close to being crushed and she was being all but lifted by the neck. Six hours. Just six hours. That was all she had lasted. What a rubbish spy she would have made.
"Nothing, sir, nothing," she choked. The giant's free hand smacked her across the face. "Nothing, I promise. The folder. I was simply rearranging it to close the drawer properly. I read nothing."
The doctor shook at the giant's arm, levelling an uncharacteristically steely glare in his direction, until he'd released Elle, allowing to rub at her neck and look for possible escape routes. If she was going to die for this, she would rather die running. "Enough, Bergmann," Zola groused. "We will let Colonel Lohmer handle her again. Schweiss?" A thin young man with a tremor in his hands appeared at Zola's side, summoned as though by magic. The doctor looked up at Elle with a smile as he continued: "Fetch the Colonel, please, Schweiss. Tell him it is...urgent."
He struck her before they made it out into the corridor. Square in the eye, the left eye, and the stars disappeared as she howled with pain, clutching at the socket with tender, uncertain fingers. "Idiot girl," Lohmer snapped, wrapping his hand into her mass of matted curls, appropriating her hair as a leash to drag her down the length of the hallway. She lost her footing four times before they had reached the elevator, but he simply pulled her back up.
Elle watched as he punched the button for the elevator, terror pooling and roiling in her stomach. She did not want to go back to that awful, horrid room, that cell, that torture chamber. God only knew what he had planned for her next. The elevator rose smoothly, silently, opening up before them within seconds of his request. But the Colonel made no move to enter; rather, he turned abruptly left, heading for a door maybe two or three metres further along the wall. Beyond, a narrow metal staircase wound up and down; here and there, the intervalled lights caught the sheen of the metal and sent up a glimmer. A glimmer that felt, somehow, menacing.
She hit every damn step.
Lohmer made sure to pull her roughly down those seven flights, so roughly that she only managed to touch the first few steps with feet - the rest she made contact with via her face and body. She was pounded and dragged over the length of them, and once, her right ankle got wedged between two - her sharp scream bought her only a moment to disentangle herself, and then Lohmer regained his furious pace. She wept freely, tears streaming down her cheeks and agony twisting her soul-deep, as she realized her last moments in this world would be ones of pain and humiliation. She tried to find the image of that painted beach in her mind once more: soft dunes and pretty blue water. She would die there. She would die there. She would die there.
When the steps ended, she opened her eyes again, this time to the shadowy lengths of a new space, this one lit intermittently by the faint pinkish glow of an autumn sunset. A pair of guards held open both metal doors, allowing Lohmer to stride through, his prisoner bumping along mutely behind him.
The room was vast, the size of a warehouse, and situated throughout, in neat columns before her, there were a series of cages - tall, cylindrical cages, stretching up to a platform above. There were at least fifty of them, and as Lohmer paused before one of the ones closest to the doors, Elle was given a moment to breathe, to collect herself, and to observe the slowly-approaching crush of prisoners.
Oh, no. Her heart broke to see them, so weary and tattered - a sea of olive-green ghosts, bloody and beaten. Pale faces, sharpened by hunger and lost hope, looked briefly at the girl in the torn aide's uniform, knees scraped scarlet and face swelling with one thrashing too many. They could not extend her more than a quick glance, though - their lives depended upon filing neatly and speedily into their cells. Half of them thought she might be a figment of their exhausted brains, a spectre drummed up by hours of back-breaking work.
Elle struggled to her feet; to her surprise, Lohmer allowed this, though he kept a firm grip on her hair. She watched as the men silently approached the opening of their cells, each one flanked by two guards. In groups of about a dozen, they filled the cages, sliding down against the bars to rest, and she thought about how cold they must be, how little comfort they must find. There were no beds, no safe corners. They were horribly, horribly exposed.
"Kommen Sie," the Colonel barked, tugging her forward. He approached the third cell down, in the first column, a smile dawning on his face. "Herren!"
The gentlemen in question looked up, and she closed her eyes against their stares, against their pinched, hungry faces. Against their bruises. "This is Miss Elle Andersen," Lohmer continued, this time in clipped English. "Formerly of London. She has come to keep you company, soldiers, now - won't that be nice?" He shoved her forward, eyes still closed, so that she felt the cool kiss of the metal bars against her skin. Instinctively, she anchored herself to it, gripping the bars tight.
"She is not yet fully attired, though, I'm afraid. She is just missing one...little...thing."
Curls in hand, he pulled her head back sharply, and then slammed it back into a bar. She shrieked, hands slipping on the bars as she hit the ground with her knees. A goose egg was blooming on her forehead, and she opened her eyes, half-expecting to be blind when she did, the pain was so great. Instead, she was met with a pair of brown eyes and a chorus of American curses. Tears welled in her vision. "Please," she whispered. "Bitte. Nicht mehr." Her pleas were meant for Lohmer, but she could not bear to break away from those kind, warm brown eyes.
The Colonel laughed, gesturing to the nearby guard to open the cell door again. "Ah, Miss Andersen," he crowed. "It has been a pleasure getting to know you. I only hope my friends here enjoy your company just as much." A yank on her hair pulled her back to her feet; a blunt jab between her shoulders pushed her into the cell. She hit her knees again, hands scrabbling on concrete, as the metallic clang of the cell door sounded behind her. "Good night, gentlemen...lady."
She sobbed, curling into herself, a comma of self-preservation, bowed and finally, mercifully, done. She surrendered herself to the pain, to the immense vulnerability of explicit imprisonment, and she sobbed. Sobbed until a pair of hands pulled her up, a pair of hands graced with elegant, long, musician's fingers.
I apologize for any mistakes in the German dialogue. I was relying on a combination of murky memories from first-year university and the aid and intervention of Google Translate. Not the most reliable sources ;)