"Where are you from?" she asks after a while, when they have exchanged names and she discovers he is, in fact, American. They're a few feet apart, the cages they keep them on don't touch one another, but she will keep thinking of this side of the cage as a shared wall, even if there are no corners.
"Boston. You?" he tips his hat, a funny things she's kind of surprised hasn't been taken away, and she smiles a little before answering.
"Brooklyn" she says, and it tastes like summers with Steve and James, of their little flat with the creaky door and the bathroom faucet that dripped in the night.
"Hey, we have a guy from Brooklyn! Hey, Sarge! There's someone from Brooklyn like you!" Dugan shouts, hand cupping the side of his mouth to help carry the sound.
There is a voice answering a few cells down, but not clear enough to hear. She thinks it's kind of familiar, although she can't be sure. Another man, closer to the Brooklyn man, relies the answer instead of Dugan.
"Smartass over there says he doesn't know everyone from Brooklyn, but I bet if you gave him your address, he can tell you how close he lived from there"
Lucy stays quiet for a few seconds, not really daring to hope, but maybe, just maybe, what were the odds…She gives the name of the street and waits until they have shouted it over the heads of so many, like an echo, and then the answers is given back cell to cell until it reaches her, because by then a guard has come to shut them up.
"He says if you knew the Rogers, that his sister and his best friend lived on that street" the man tells her, and when she asks for his name, he tells her it's Gabriel.
And then she freezes, because she's a Rogers, and she didn't know any other, even if she obviously didn't know every person that lived on her street. And he called her sister, so she can only think of one soldier in the whole world who would call her that, who could even phantom it.
"James" she whispers, and then she scrambles to her feet and turns around to shout his name "James, is that you?"
"Lucy?!" he hears back, and she sees someone stand up, and thank God, for some unfathomable reason she would never begin to understand, the men that had taken her had decided to leave her glasses on, because it helped see James' face with a clarity she could've never dreamt of without them.
"James, oh God, you're alright!" she says loudly, gripping the bars as hard as she can when her knees threaten to give out. After months of not knowing, of having no way of knowing whether he was fine, or injured, or God forbid dead, he was alive, a good few feet ahead of her, with worried eyes.
"What are you doing here? Are you-Did you dye your hair?"
"I got a new job!" she laughs, and a few tears fall from her eyes. A guard comes then to shut them up, and she's so fucking happy to see James alright that she doesn't even think when she barks back to tell him to shut up in German.
"You also learnt German?!"
"I did!" and now she's bouncing a little on the tip of her feet, and the man uses his rifle to hit the metal and points it at her head, shouting for her to be quiet or else. She quiets down, even sits down because she might be happy, and she might hate them and everything in her body might be telling her to stand up for this, but she's not an idiot.
She feels somewhat childish in her glee, but James was alive and okay in front of her, and he had called her sister. Whatever happened from there, whatever the hell Gift and Schmidt meant, it was nothing now that she knew James was alright.
She only needed to know if Steve was too.
She barely sleeps, the cold biting to her bare legs. She's made herself as tight of a ball as she can, curling into herself in an attempt to warm up, but it is of little use.
They lead her to a filthy bathroom to relieve herself, something they hadn't done the day before, and they give her stale bread and a cup of water, which they hadn't done either. She tries to ask about what they plan to do to her, but they just either ignore her, or tell her to wait. For what, she doesn't know.
And when the soldiers come back from the forced labor, James enters the cell beside her own.
"Lucy" he calls to her, on his knees as he passes his arm between the bars of his cell.
"James, oh how I missed you" she gets closer to him on her knees, stretching until she can barely take his hand, and he's there and real and warm. She doesn't notice the moment she starts crying.
"What happened? You need to tell me everything. Is Steve okay? The girls? My parents?"
So she tells him. She starts with bumping into Dr. Erskine, the job offer, the training to become an Agent. The lack of missions, the job as Dr. Erskine assistant/nurse, the project, checking on his family. Steve enlisting, getting chosen, the procedure. She tells him about the relocation, of the last time she saw Steve, and the mission. She tells him of Berlin, of the spying, of the betrayal. And when she's done, she lays down, her arm still stretched towards him, hands held tight.
"So you don't know why they took you"
"No. By all means, they should have killed me" she answers as she shakes her head just a little, bottom lip caught between her teeth, her voice small in the quiet of the night. She thinks a lot of men are listening to them, but she can't bring herself to care. A guard walks over their place, and she watches the shadows dance over his face as he looks at her with sad eyes.
"You'll get out of here, Lucy" he says, and she tries to smile at him.
"Not without you"
They come for her in the middle of the night. She wakes up alert, letting go of James to stand when she hears them opening the door to her cage. She tries to ask where they are taking her, but they won't answer. James tries too, shaking the bars and yelling, but all it gets him is a hit to his fingers with the butt of a rifle.
"Lucy! LUCIA!" she can hear him yell as they take her arms and lead her away.
"I'll be fine! James, I'll be fine, I promise!"
They take her to a room where a short blonde man is speaking to himself, writing something down. When they enter, he makes the guards take her to a chair where they strap her on.
"I'm terribly sorry for all the waiting, Agent Rogers" he says as he fusses with something, his back to her "You see, my train was delayed, so I could not make it here in time to welcome you. But now I'm here, and we can finally start" he turns around and then she can see that what he has on his hands is a needle. She tries to pull away, to get away from it, but she can barely move with the leather straps that bind her to the chair.
He injects her with something, and it burns as it travels through her body, taking a scream out of her. She tries to control it, to keep it in, but it's a horrible thing, to feel like you're burning from the inside out.
They take her as she trashes, clawing at her arms to relieve some of the pain, and then they shove her into a tank cold as ice. It does little for the burning inside her, but it helps her to take her mind out of it, to ignore it as best she can.
She hits the door, even if she knows it's useless. She won't beg, won't give them the satisfaction, but then the degrees start drooping, and her hands start to hurt from the cold as she keeps hitting the glass. After it hurts, it starts to numb.
"LET ME OUT!" she shouts, using her feet too, but her toes are so cold she has to stop after a few seconds for fear of breaking something without realizing it.
She starts blowing air into her hands, rubbing her hands on her arms and thighs, whatever she can think to bring her just a little warmth. By then the burning has all but banished. She's not sure how long she's in there, but it must be a long time, because she's barely conscious when they take her out, and it takes her a second even when they slap her across the face. Her cheeks are so cold she barely feels it.
"Did you lost consciousness, Agent Rogers?" the man asks, eyes trained on hers. She has to blink a few times, take her seconds to even understand the question she's being asked. She refuses to answer, and then they slap across the face again, hard enough to bust her lip this time.
"I don't know" she snarls, tugging her arms and not being set free. She truly doesn't know, because everything in there blurs together, until she can't even remember if she was there a minute or an hour or a day. Everything she does feels slow, like she has been turned into lead, heavy and unmovable. Rigid.
"Experiment failed" the man hums, turning around and leading the way out of the room with the tank.
They strap her into a table this time, legs and arms and waist tight enough she can just barely breathe. They put blankets over her, the room somewhat warmer than the rest of the building she has been to.
"Hey! Why are you leaving me here? Answer me, bastards! What do you want from me?!" she shouts to the guards, first in English and then in German, her teeth clattering together, but they don't acknowledge her.
The days blur together. There is no way for her to know how long it has been, for there are times she doesn't know how long she's strapped to the table, how long she spends in the tank. As the time passes, she stops remembering what happens inside there. She gets in and then wakes up after what seems like minutes but could have been days.
She refuses to eat, and they put mush in her mouth and cover her nose until the reflex makes her swallow. She refuses to drink water, and they pour it on her face as one of them holds her mouth open. She stops speaking, stops asking questions. They take her to the bathroom twice a day and let her shower with cold water every three, and if she refuses they strip her and hose her down. The man will sometimes speak, but she never answers him unless they have drawn blood. It's usually a busted lip, but there had been other cases.
She asks him something, only once, maybe a week after it starts, maybe two, she had lost count.
"Why me? Why not kill me?" she's strapped to the table this time, and he's getting ready whatever it is he's going to put in her next. It's not always followed by the tank, sometimes he just takes some blood and calls it a day.
"Herr Schmidt wants you to be my subject, of course. He thinks it...just...to have Dr. Erskine little nurse help him achieve his goals"
She starts to repeat things in an effort not to forget them, though most of the time she repeats things she hasn't forgotten, things she could never forget, like her name. All that time, she had been nothing but Agent Rogers.
James and Steve called me Luce.
More than once, she falls asleep to memories. She thinks of Steve, skinny and brave and loving, of Steve big and warm and still him.
She thinks of James, laughing and dancing and behind bars.
Becky and Annie called me Lulu when they were happy.
She thinks of her mother, of how easy it would be to close her eyes and meet her again.
My mother called me Lucia when she was sad.
It helps her ignore the cold, to remember the winters when they would cuddle in front of some fireplace, one of them leaning, one of them laying their head in their lap, the other cuddled close for warmth. She remembers running her fingers through her boys' hair, remembers the way James had called her his sister, if only once.
Holy shit almost 100 reviews say what.