Present Day

Samantha sat at the bar, scotch glass half-empty in her hand, her elbow resting on the smooth mahogany surface. She looked around her and noted that everything else – from the walls to the floor and everything in between – seemed to be at least painted that wooden colour, if not made from Mahogany or something Mahogany-esque. She couldn't help but wonder how many trees had been sacrificed for the sake of this bar.

The staff were used to people like her – government employees gasping for a glass of liquid courage, for an escape from the everyday. They were regulars, she knew, the bar's bread and butter so to speak. She looked back down at the amber liquid refracted against the crystal walls of the glass. She tried to think of the last time she'd reached for a scotch, it had been a while. Even when she first arrived in the strange country with rules so different from the one she had grown up in, she'd managed to avoid resorting to it. Aside from the three years of her life she couldn't account for, Samantha thought that maybe the last time she'd done something like this – sat and drank in a bar out of sheer desperation – was after Peggy Carter had died and she'd been with Steve. She'd been so naïve then, she hadn't yet realised the cruelties that the world had already offered her.

"So, are you going to tell me what that was all about?" Samantha heard Reid's voice, his own way of announcing his presence. She looked up and then back down at her glass, sighing. She didn't really want to have to retell the whole story – most of which she still didn't know – to her technical employer.

"I suppose this isn't the kind of condition my boss ought to see me in," she said, still staring at the glass. Reid perched himself on the stool beside her and ordered a drink from the barman – a beer, one of those with a German sounding name, it could have been Belgian. "Last night, you asked me to tell you one time when I was truly happy and, the truth is there was never a time in which I was," she began "Truthfully, my life has been one big mess from day one."

"It can't be that bad. I mean, you seem to have come out of it relatively unscathed," he said and she scoffed. To say something like that to her was laughable really, she knew that much.

So, she told him everything, the whole story – HYDRA, Audrey and Artemis. About the testing, her father and the day S.H.I.E.L.D. came a knocking. About the car wreck she thought had taken her 'mother' and how, for so long – too long really – she had blamed herself. About the Red Room, Karolina Dvoracek and Sophia. About Emma and Ward and Steve.

"So… this Boris Rachmaninov guy…" he trailed off in a search for words, shocked by the amount of information he'd just had dumped on him. It was a lot to take in, she knew. Had it not been for the fact that she lived through it, and knew it had happened, she probably would have been shocked by it too.

"Potentially kidnapped me, yeah." At that, he took a final swig of his second drink. "The worst part is I thought I could get away from it all but it just keeps on coming back."

"And Steve? The two of you just split up?"

"I handed him the ring back there and then. I am many things Reid but disloyal is not one of them. Thompson would have killed Steve if I didn't shoot, I'm certain of that just like I'm certain that if I allowed myself to be captured by S.H.I.E.L.D. I would have revealed things about him that no one ought to know. Truth serum isn't just something that exists in Harry Potter. It's dastardly stuff," she breathed, ordering another two drinks from the barman.

"And your dad?"

"He knows everything except for Diana's real identity. I don't think that he could take being told that yet another woman had lied to him, that I had yet another woman claiming to be my mother. Not with everything that's going on." Her phone started buzzing – long buzzes, a phone call. Digging through her blazer pocket, the silk lining soft against her hand. Once she located it, she checked the caller ID: her father. "Speak of the Devil and he shall appear." She joked, receiving a half-laugh in return "I'm going to have to take this," she hopped off the bar stool and made her way over to the corner of the room. She pressed the answer button. "Hi Daddy!" she exclaimed a little too gleefully.

"Are you drunk?" Tony Stark asked incredulously and she giggled. To his knowledge, she rarely got drunk these days. He'd prided himself on that as a signifier of his parenting skills, he'd succeeded where Audrey had failed.

"Maybe," she slurred "What's up?"

"You left me in a hospital with a note. You announce your identity at a press briefing and you went out on a date with the British Prime Minister last night, is there anything I've missed?"

"Ooh the part where I pissed off the Russian Ambassador because he wanted MI6 to release a Red Room operative," she responded almost excitedly "You weren't supposed to know that part. Anywho, why are you so intrigued by the many, many different aspects of my life?"

"You're my daughter and I'm concerned about you. I mean, you're in a new country with a new job and you just broke up with your fiancé,"

"And I'm fine," she stated by way of reassurance. She knew she was lying but, at this point, the conversation needed to end and – in her eyes – the best way to do that would be to lie.

"You're day drinking," he pointed out and she scoffed.

"Like you can talk. Nat told me all about why you really gave Pepper the helm of Stark Industries. How you thought you were dying, she told me about how Rhodey basically saved your ass in front of the Senate, how you were so drunk at your birthday party that you all but destroyed the mansion. Compared to that, I think I'm doing fine."

She didn't even have time to think before her father blurted out his next sentence "Steve sent me a letter for you."

"I don't want it," she said with such resolve she shocked even herself.

"I don't think – " he began but she stopped him.

"That bastard called me disloyal despite the opposite being proven to him. Clearly, despite everything, I meant nothing to him so just burn the letter, rip it into a thousand tiny pieces, do whatever with it. I don't care, I just, I just don't want to see it," she said. She hadn't properly realised the effect Steve's comment had actually had on her. She knew he'd only meant to wound her with it and he had but the damn thing was starting to ooze and pus was starting to shot which meant one thing: infection.

"See that tells me you're not fine,"

She thought for a second before pulling one of the most childish stunts of her life. "Look Dad, the uh the Prime Minister needs me."

"No he doesn't."

"The Russian Ambassador's pissed, I'm gonna have to go. I love you," she lied before hanging up and returning to her spot at the bar.

Reid looked up at her "Everything okay?"

"My lovely ex thinks he deserves the final say in everything and decided to use my dad as the messenger," she responded with a sigh as she plonked herself down on the bar stool and ordered yet another drink.