He woke to a shrill in his ears, a sharp metallic taste in his mouth and blurred vision. A feral growl escaped as he dragged himself to his feet, stumbling slightly as the world slowly started to right itself. He gently palmed the back of his head with his fingertips, checking for any signs of bleeding or swelling but came up empty. The last few moments before he hit the wall flooded his mind and anger rose within him that his plan had failed. He was sure that he could break her, sure that he could trick her into believing him when so much around them was chaotic. It was a watertight strategy and yet somehow she had managed to escape, slipping through his net of carefully woven deception. How had she managed to escape him?

Bombproof, that was how he would describe Lucia Stark. Every hit seemed to glance off her with minimal damage. Still alive because of nothing more than blind luck. It infuriated him. Rumlow had had to drag himself up the ranks of SHIELD over broken glass, constantly in the shadow of the woman who had ridden to heights he could barely dream of on someone else's coattails.

He was desperate to hate her.

Worse, he hated that despite that he still wanted her.

He considered that he had mistaken it before, thinking it to be love. Convincing himself that together there was nothing that they couldn't achieve together. Who wouldn't want her? What self-respecting man would be able to prevent himself from being drawn to that kind of beauty and passion? Certainly not Rumlow. He had persuaded himself that possessing her would be enough. If he could just have her then he would be able to rise higher. Agents would be relegated to his shadow, they would revere his name. HYDRA was willing to give him that. Lucia had her chance to take the path of least travelled, to follow him into glory.

"Stark is in the wind. Repeat, Stark is in the wind," he grunted, tapping his ear only to find that his earpiece was missing.

He kicked at the wall in frustration with the side of his foot before bracing himself on the steel handrail for a moment to catch his breath and steady his thoughts as rage threatened to take control. He gave it a handful of seconds and then straightened himself up and made his way up the stairs, two at a time, the entire time ignoring the splitting headache that had set up shop behind his eyes and beneath his skull.

He took the cell phone of the first person he crossed paths with, an unfortunate intern from admin. The intern went from furious to malleable in under a quarter of a second, keeping his gaze low and scurrying away out of sight to avoid meeting Rumlow's eye for a second time.

This time, Rumlow managed to get through to the Commander, reluctantly detailing the escape of the prisoner in his charge.

"I will personally hunt her down, Sir."

Rumlow barely managed to get the sentence out before Pierce started talking over him, his disappointment clear as he quickly decided on an alternate course of action.

"No, leave her for now. We can use this to our advantage," Pierce relented, there really was no need to chase her when he could simply plant enough rumours to discredit her completely. If anything, her running from SHIELD made her look guilty.

"The next stage of the plan is in motion. Have your team ready for Operation Orion in fifteen minutes."

"Yes, Sir."

When the call ended, he tossed the cell phone into a trashcan en route to the elevator

Rumlow bowed his head, making his way to the floor that housed STRIKE so that he could quickly assemble and brief his team. Higher ranking members of the team and confirmed HYDRA were already well aware of the plan to subdue the Captain, all they were waiting for was the call to arms.

Every primal instinct within her told her to run far, far away from the Triskellion but logic and experience told her to simply stay out of sight. To find somewhere she could stay silent and wait. It was instantly by her experience and training.

The burn in her shoulder throbbed, warning against any further strain. She rolled the joint to test the range of movement and winced before completing the movement, unable to go further. It wasn't good news.

"Well there goes that plan," she said to herself, massaging just above the bandage to try and relieve some of the pain.

She assessed the room she found herself in. Room was a generous description; at best it was an oversized storage closet, packed with boxes of printer paper, stationery and an overhead projector that had long since been forgotten judging by the thick layer of dust that had settled on the glass. There wasn't much space and a closet was rarely her go-to hiding spot but she didn't have much of an option.

Pulling a cardboard box of paperclips from one of the shelves, Lucie ripped off the tape holding it shut and pulled out a handful, securing them to her waistband and then starting to pilfer her way through other supplies for anything that might be useful in case Rumlow or one of his cronies came calling.

With every minute that passed, a quiet, clean escape became easier. Eventually, Rumlow's agents would fan out far enough that there would be more blind spots than not. The perfect time to slip away with minimal risk. It was the first thing that Natasha had drilled into her when she was first being vetted for Rosetta; when on the run, always walk. As a rough estimate, she guessed that it had been around thirty minutes since she had introduced Rumlow to the wall of the stairwell. There was always a chance that he was still out for the count, but it was just as likely that he was conscious and hot on her heels.

Despite his newly unearthed loyalties, Rumlow was a good agent. Ruthless and efficient, taking pride in his work; it was one of the few things that Lucie admired about him. He would follow his training to the letter, never deviating from the unforgiving set of protocols that would inevitably cause them to fail because to him a mission was nothing more than a sequence of events, risks and outcomes. He would have every security camera monitored for her.

Lucie had a different kind of training, the kind that taught her to break the rules and think on her feet. While he used every tool in his arsenal, she would do the exact opposite. He expected her to behave like a terrifying creature of prey, instead, she would do the unthinkable. She would walk out the same way that everyone else did. Through the front door.

All she could do was wait for an unsuspecting guard to walk by and hope and pray that for once luck was on her side. There was no way that she could hold her own in hand to hand combat for long but she knew that all she needed was one well-placed hit. It was her only option, the alternative was being caught and ending up with around to the forehead. Once she had a uniform, her escape would be easier, she would be able to slip away unnoticed in a sea of Kevlar and leather-clad agents. Like a thief in the night, she thought to herself.

It didn't take long for someone to make their rounds. Lucie listened to their footsteps, heavy and offbeat as if carrying an injury. There was a squeak each time one of his boots lifted from the floor Inexperienced, Lucie thought, grinning as the footsteps moved closer. Everything was starting to work in her favour, a lack of experience meant that she could allow muscle memory to take over for the most part. There would be very few, if any, moves that weren't drilled into SHIELD's initiates. They would be ruled by panic and fear. All Lucie had to do was use that against them, if her luck held out she might not even have to throw a punch.

As the agent approached the door, Lucie cracked it just enough that it was free of the latch, selecting the perfect moment to swing the door open and pull her victim inside. Using her uninjured arm as leverage, she pushed hard against his throat while he flailed for purchase, desperate to get away. She screwed her eyes shut to keep herself from crying out as her shoulder screamed in protest, all she needed was a few more seconds.

She carefully shushed him in the same tone one might use to speak to a small child, to lull them back to sleep after waking from a nightmare. Lucie let him kick and try to pry her arm away as wordless threats and pleas tried to escape but she held tight, standing her ground so that she could gently lower him to the floor as unconsciousness took over.

When she was sure that he was out for the count, she quickly started to strip off his uniform. She stared down at his face, his body crumpled on the floor and folded together in the foetal position. He was just a kid, probably still in the academy with acne coated skin with adolescent glasses only half balanced on his face. For a moment she felt guilty, reminding herself that he was just an innocent bystander, that he wouldn't have been looking for her.

"Come on, keep it together," she said.

Rather than the tactical gear that was her official uniform, he wore the uniform of someone that belonged to the academy complete with an ill-fitting suit and visitors pass. It read Tobias Fischer and like everything else, Lucie relieved him of it and pinned it to the front of her stolen blazer.

"Sorry about this Tobias, I'll get these back to you eventually," she promised, taking his glasses and wincing at the strength of the prescription.

She padded down the corridor in bare feet, making sure to keep her head low and to avoid all eye contact of the few agents she passed along the way. Nobody seemed to be on alert, there were still regular conversations happening, people walking from the tiny kitchenette with fresh cups of coffee back to their desks. Nobody stopped her, nobody questioned her. Taking a chance, she swiped a neglected radio from one of the cubicles, dropping it safely into her pocket before anyone noticed.

Rumlow had been both expected and a blindside. His desperation for power and respect made him the prime candidate for defection but somehow she still expected him to be loyal to SHIELD. She wouldn't allow him the privilege of surprising her a second time. When they next came face to face he wouldn't be able to understand why she wouldn't pursue power with him, why she wouldn't revel in the glory that he would give her because the truth was that he didn't understand her.

Lucie wasn't motivated by power or respect. No, she was an agent moulded since childhood to be nothing short of extraordinary, to be a good person in the face of everyone and everything that tried to control her. She had skipped down the hallways of Camp Lehigh as a small child, spent her time in every other library checking books in case they opened a hidden passageway, convinced that at least one of the staff at each boarding school was a plant courtesy of Peggy Carter. There wasn't a moment of her childhood that she didn't ask herself "why". Why things worked a certain way, why people reacted the way they did, why they kept secrets, why they lied, why they told the truth.

She should have known not to trust SHIELD, that it was never SHIELD that she was loyal to, that she stood by and defended and fought for. It was Peggy. The woman who had been kind enough and stubborn enough to try and convince an entitled playboy to stay out of trouble and when that didn't work, try to keep his child from doing the same. Grandmother wasn't a title that Peggy had been given, it was one that she had earned. Empires and governments and corporations fell every day, why should SHIELD be any different?

With a final look at the corridor behind her, she stepped into the stairwell, closing the door behind herself. To her left she eyed a fire extinguisher, immediately picking it up and slamming it into the control panel beside the door that allowed those with the right clearance to enter. The plastic cracked and splintered from the blow, the green LED slowly fading as it lost power.

Her bandages felt tacky and loose under Tobias' jacket, something that was far from ideal but would at least be easily remedied by the time she managed to get away from the Triskellion. The only question was where? Her apartment was out of the question, there would likely already be agents combing the place, trashing her belongings in the process; nothing would be salvageable. She wouldn't leave anything useful if the shoe had been on the other foot. If she was still wearing them that was.

The thing about Washington DC is that it is one of the oldest cities in the United States, there were a lot of forgotten tunnels and half funded projects that had long since been abandoned. It didn't provide the security of some European cities but there were certainly more than enough options for bolt holes. If she knew Natasha, and she did, then there would be at least half a dozen options scattered throughout the city, all she had to do was figure out where she could find one. That was the thing with Natasha, she liked to drop breadcrumbs. Somewhere in a conversation, they shared over the past few weeks there would be the location of somewhere safe, somewhere where she could find enough supplies to stay on the run long enough to figure out a plan.

"He's heading for the garage, lock down the bridge!" the radio in her pocket yelled.

Sitwell was easily recognisable over comms, the carefully curated attempt at authority that he didn't quite have the stones to pull off. He was a middle man, the one that SHIELD sent in to negotiate with the businessmen that they crossed paths with. When it came down to it, he was good at his job, not the best, but good enough. What he wasn't good at was running the operations centre.

Lucie sighed, taking the steps two at a time to reach ground level. There was only one man within SHIELD that had to make a dramatic exit and by the sounds of it, Steve Rogers had told the interim director exactly where he could shove his job. While she admired the fact that he immediately saw through Pierce's bullshit, she groaned at his lack of composure, the ability to keep a straight face or his convictions to himself long enough to get clear of the blast zone. She dragged herself through the vent system to the nearest hatch. Nobody would be paying any attention to the inside of the Triskellion, not while Steve was in the wind. He was the more important target.

The lobby was in chaos, people gawping at shattered glass ceiling and trying to piece together what had happened. Lucie shed Tobias's jacket and plucked the sweater that rested atop a briefcase, swinging it around her shoulders as she rounded the corner. She raided the pockets while keeping an eye out for spectators to her pickpocketing, sliding some reading glasses she found up her nose and using a ballpoint pen to twist her hair up into a bun, making sure to leave just enough free to obscure her face from the cameras. It wasn't her best disguise but it would do. The quickest way out was the subway, it was risky, there would be no escape once she boarded and it was possible that she would find STRIKE waiting when the doors opened. With the bridge on lockdown, it was either the subway or swim. She chose the former. Positioning her directly beneath the outdated camera on board so that she was in the blind spot, keeping her head low, seemingly absorbed on the morning copy of the paper she found on the seat.