"My only crime is the pursuit of science," Dr. Deborah Risman said. Again. And again and again. Now that the director of SHIELD and Wolverine were off chasing down X23, the rest of the spy agency was lining up to persecute the girl's creator. They had welcomed her with open arms, made a show of treating her with respect, even brought Wolverine in at her request... but now she knew that had merely been to soften her up.
The SHIELD agent who was doing the bulk of the persecuting, a hard-edged man in his thirties who'd introduced himself as Gabriel Jones, countered the latest cry of innocence with, "Not the creation and destruction of twenty-two children?"
Risman pinched the bridge of her nose in a futile attempt to ease a monstrous headache. The fluorescent lights, reflected as they were off of a thousand steel surfaces, were killing her eyes. "They never survived gestation."
"Lucky them," Nick Fury said, entering the room with all the force and menace of a lurking black shark. "Jones, I'll take over now."
Jones nodded and left, but not before giving Risman a glare overflowing with disgust and hate. She endured it silently, too sick at heart to be anything but sick at heart.
"Wolverine subdued the girl but couldn't hold her," Fury said, swinging a chair out from the gleaming metal table and settling into it like he owned the place - which he did, for all intents and purposes. "We lost her in the city. Smart kid."
"Urban combat was one of the most extensive training programs." Risman was twisting her fingers in her lap, over and over and over, and forced herself to be still. She gave a short, rueful laugh. "X23 loved it."
"I'm not surprised. Got her out of the white room."
Risman shook her head, slow and weary. "We used the white room for behavior modification only."
Fury leaned back and evaluated her over the table. "Which makes it okay."
She just shook her head again. He didn't understand.
"I've seen footage of Wolverine in sensory deprivation environments," Fury said. The flat black gaze of the eyepatch was equally unnerving as the single good eye he focused on her with unblinking intensity. "No sound, no smells, no visual... They go crazy after a few hours, don't they. Either that or drop into catatonia."
Risman bristled. "I never liked putting her in there!"
"But you did put her in there." Fury stood up abruptly, pushing back his chair. "Come on, Doctor. I think it's past your bedtime."
Risman hesitated, then got to her feet, pulse quickening in the fear that this was it, they were going to start... doing whatever they had planned to do to her. She pushed her own chair in before slowly moving to join Fury.
He led her out of the room, into one of the corridors jammed with equipment, security features, and armed guards. Even X23 had not penetrated this far into the building, and she had gone further than any other operative in HYDRA history. The slashed walls and incapacitated guards were proof of that.
Two of the guards fell into step behind her. They entered a secured elevator and rode down an unknowable number of floors - there were no lights or chimes here - and exited into a corridor that looked remarkably like the one they'd just left. The only difference was that this hallway was lined with doors. Blast doors, set into the wall about six feet apart.
"What's going on?" Risman asked, but was summarily ignored. One of the guards prodded her forward, close on Fury's heels. The SHIELD director stopped in front of a blast door halfway down the corridor.
He keyed open the door and it slid back with a hiss. "Here we are. Your new home away from home, Dr. Risman."
She peered inside; it was a cell perhaps ten feet deep and four wide. An inset light glowed overhead, protected by a close-woven metal grill. Aside from a bed and a sink, there wasn't any furniture, and the mirror above the sink had the dull sheen of bulletproof glass.
"No," she said, backing away. The guard stopped her motion after only a few steps. "No, I'm not staying here."
"You used to work for the bad guys," Fury said. He produced a toothpick from somewhere and stuck it in his mouth. "Now you've run to their sworn enemies. Us. And we both know that if you step outside SHIELD headquarters, you're a dead woman."
"I refuse to be treated like a prisoner!" she exclaimed in indignation, crossing her arms and scowling even as she quailed at the prospect of certain death. "I am a scientist."
"You're a heartless monster," Fury said swiftly, with such genuine anger that Risman shrank away. "You experimented on human infants, violated international law, and committed atrocities out of greed and ambition. I don't have to do anything for you. My guys want me to drop you at HYDRA base and tell 'em, 'she's all yours'."
Risman swallowed at this bald-faced declaration of malice, but she found with wherewithal to say, still defiant, "So why are you keeping me?"
Fury removed the toothpick and examined the tip. "Because you used to work for the bad guys. HYDRA's a hard nut to crack. And you know how much a good double agent costs?"
She shook her head, knowing that it was a rhetorical question.
"A lot more than an interrogation team and a bodybag." He replaced the toothpick in his mouth, regarding her with that uneven, unnerving stare.
Reality washed cold and quick through her veins, freezing her out with desperation. She'd run straight to SHIELD when she'd heard X23 was loose, knowing they could do more to find the girl than HYDRA. She'd run, clutching nothing but the contents of her office computer and the foolish dream that she could continue her work with X23 at SHIELD. Ultimate warriors didn't come along every day, right?
Instead she was faced with the truth that SHIELD saw X23 not as a warrior, but as an abused child, and harbored no warm feelings towards the person who'd brought the girl into the light. "You're going to kill me," she said. Her voice wavered only slightly.
"That's one option. Frankly, I think we'd profit more with you alive, but you know, the assistant directors -" Fury broke off with a one-shouldered shrug. "A lot of them have children of their own. They're having a hard time understanding how you had fourteen years' worth of chances to help that girl and you didn't do a single thing."
"What was I supposed to do?" she demanded, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. "If I made waves they would've pulled me from the project! You don't understand - the project supervisor, Dr. Essex, didn't care about her at all. I had to be there," she said, firm in her convictions, knowing she had made the absolutely correct decision. "There were no other options."
"You could have," Fury suggested with icy quiet, "come to us fourteen years ago."
And for that Risman had no answers. None whatsoever. She closed her eyes, feeling sucker- punched, and walked blindly into the cell where she would be spending the rest of her life, which might be short, or which might be agonizingly long. Standing in the middle of the small space did not make it seem any larger.
"Someone will be down in a few hours to start the debriefing," Fury said behind her, and she turned around to face him. He was standing in the open doorway with one hand poised to key it shut. "Debriefing" was a polite way of saying that she would either spill her guts voluntarily, or come under some not-so-subtle persuasion.
"I'll be ready," she said, defeated. She sat experimentally on the bed and found that it was rock hard. The blanket was thin; no match for the constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit of the room. She would spend the rest of her life shivering.
"You ever give her a name?" he asked unexpectedly. "A real name, not that designator garbage."
Risman mustered a faint half-smile that faded out almost immediately. He didn't understand at all. She realized with a final, despairing insight that no one could understand. No one in the entire world would ever understand. "No, I didn't."
Fury nodded, looking as though he really hadn't expected anything different, and said, "Maybe you should start thinking about one."
The door slid shut with an echoing finality, and Dr. Deborah Risman found she could not cry.