A/N: Hello guys! I'm still here, as you can see. I think this story was a long time coming and I am super excited to post it, now! Finally decided to post this also on FFN. Happy Pride Month everyone!

I wanna thank my dear beta for putting up with me while I wrote it, so thanks, Hood13!
Thanks Holly, as well, for helping with some details I needed to iron out.

Hope you enjoy!


Flashforward — 2024

Daisy clutched her stomach to stop the bleeding, as she limp-ran outside the garage. Her mind was coming back to itself, but not fully, things were still out of place, like… who were those women in there with her? And who was that man they were with before she arrived? It was all so strange, but all she wanted was her dad, to see him and to hug him tight. It was another strange thing, to want the former Winter Soldier for a hug, but with her he was always soft and understanding, he always knew how to fix things… he would be able to fix this.

She managed to get to the entrance of the garage, but before she could go down the stairs in search for Bucky, she fell to her knees, her body finally too exhausted from everything that had happened. Daisy then heard someone scream her name, before a pair of arms squeezed her tightly around a warm body.

Bucky, surely.

"Dad-"

"Shhh… don't talk, Daisy, I'm right here," her dad said, and Daisy nodded, her breathing turning more shallow.

"S'hurts…"

"I know, kiddo, I know. Someone is gonna be there to help us, ok. We're gonna get you safely out of here, ok?"

"M-ma-"

"I am gonna call him later, tell him about this developpement."

"Th-thanks…"

"Don't worry, everything is gonna be fine. Your body is gonna start to heal in a minute and you will be back in the field in no time," Bucky promised, a smile on his face-


Present — April 2016

"Soldat, otchet o missii," (Soldier, mission report.) her handler demanded, as the young brunette was cuffed to the chair.

"Missiya byla uspeshnoy, ser. S Gideonom Malikom obrashchalis' v sootvetstvii so spetsifikatsiyami. Yego predatel'stvo Gidry bylo khorosho izvestno v organizatsii, poetomu on znal, pochemu ya byl tam. On ne soprotivlyalsya, kogda ya obrushil na nego zemletryaseniya. On umer dovol'no bystro, yego skelet i organy byli razdrobleny. Svideteley ne bylo, i s okhranoy raspravilis' nezamedlitel'no." (The mission was successful, sir. Gideon Malick was dealt with according to specifications. His betrayal of Hydra was well known in the organization, so he knew why I was there. He did not fight back when I unleashed the quakes upon him. He died fairly quickly, his skeleton and organs were crushed. There were no witnesses, and the guards were dealt with swiftly.)

"A yego telo?" (And his body?)

"Pepel." (Ashes.)

"Khoroshiy." (Good.) He then turned to the scientists, nodding sharply at them. The four men started moving around their stations, serious looks in their eyes. She knew those looks, they were preparing to complete an order from her handler.

They gave her a mouth guard to gag her and protect her teeth from the grinding she would do from the pain. Her breathing became shallow with the anticipation of the device around her head activating. "Sdelay eto," (Do it.) her handler told the scientists and one of them clearly pressed the button fast, since moments later, she felt a searing pain in her head.

God, sometimes she missed the Red Room's mind control serum… a lot less pain.

The pain was so great that her thoughts were completely blank, since thinking about anything made her head hurt more. Her mind shut down quickly after that, like it was used to this precise type of pain. Electricity coursed through her body and she couldn't stop the scream that escaped her lips despite the mouth-guard that was in her mouth. Nothing but the pain registered in her mind. Just crippling pain that shut down everything else in her brain.

When the electricity suddenly stopped and she could think again, she found that she couldn't remember why she had been in the chair in the first place or ever being on it before, really. All she remembered was Hydra raising her, training her to be better, to be the Soldier they wanted but never sent out yet. She then looked up to the general before her, a questioning look in her eyes, though the stern one he gave her made the younger brunette grit her teeth and steel her own expression. Satisfied with the blank look he got from her, the general walked over to the girl. Before he spoke, he unclasped her bound limbs, setting her free from the machine. "Vy uvoleny, Quake." (You are dismissed, Quake.) His tone was harsh and cut through the very air around her. Her powers flaked around them ever so slightly, but she automatically rained them in, as to not anger the general.

"Spasibo, ser," (Thank you, sir.) she replied, getting up quickly to leave the room, guards following behind her.


She woke up with a start that morning, finally fully remembering her last mind wipe. She'd started remembering bits and pieces of that memory, of her last two or three missions. She remembered how they would wipe her mind before and after missions to ensure complete compliance, how they would wipe her every time she showed the tiniest bit of noncompliance. But those were just fragments. She couldn't be sure if it was different days, different missions, since she was always dressed the same. Same haircut, same mission suit - which she only wore during simulations and in the memories, same panicked feeling until numbness took over. Panic was the only thing she did feel, however, since she still didn't register the pain, yet. She also remembered how she never even had a name, or at least not one they'd tell her about. She was always just 'Quake' to them.

The first fragments of memories only started coming to her a few days ago, and she was learning to keep the blank look she'd have when she was just a submissive little assassin for Hydra. That morning was her first full memory, and it made her want to remember more, fight to keep in control, hide if she had to. She remembered everything from after the wipes, all her abilities and powers, and she'd learned from the fragmented memories how to act like she was still a puppet from them. It had gotten harder with every new piece of memory, but she still felt more confidence in her ability to pull it off.

Acting like she was still with them, she went to the computer lab to continue working on the facility's cybersecurity. The computers in the computer lab had been refurbished since the shut-down a few years prior, since the Hydra officials taking control of the new Program wanted her to learn to use modern electronics to her advantage.

The best hackers in Hydra taught her how to do what they did best, but she bested them rather quickly, almost like it was already second nature for her. All her talents meant that she updated security with the facility's servers fairly quickly, and since they left her alone in the room, thinking nothing of it, Quake decided to go into some of the Hydra files, see what they had that she was protecting.

There were files on Hydra alliances, including with the Red Room, and files on all of Hydra's assets, past and present, which included all the Winter Soldiers ever created, from the Original one, to the failed ones, to her. She found information on the experiments they did with the Red Room's help, but didn't linger on them, since she wasn't exactly sure she even wanted to know all that.

She then scrolled through a few of the asset files, to see what was on it, but didn't pay much attention to the details. They usually wrote about the normal information, like their date and place of birth, family information, name, asset number and sometimes there was a date of death. There were many assets before her, but there were nine Winter Soldier assets created before her and five more that were not from the same program but existed within the same servers of Hydra. Asset W-1 was the Original Winter Soldier, Assets W-2 to W-6 were the failed ones from the 1991 edition and Asset W-7 and W-8 were versions they tried to create with small children that were given the serum, like the six before them. They kept the 5 Assets from 1991 frozen, but destroyed W-7 and W-8, since they had gone far too crazy. Her Asset number was W-9, and they also gave her the Quake designation, due to her powers, and called her the only successful Asset they had in the Winter Soldier Program. The Original Asset was a success, up until his programming failed and he left. There were also Assets G-1 to G-5 but those were from a different project using the same servers, so she ignored those files, not interested in the other experiments Hydra did.

Quake found her file, which was under the name; Asset W-9: Quake. It also happened to be the only name she remembered being called, since she was a weapon, and weapons didn't get names. According to the file, she was born on July 2nd 2000 to an Inhuman woman that they killed a year after her birth. Which happened to be around the time the Hydra officials in the Program stopped needing her. Sadly, there was no file, no name or anything attached to her, so the young girl couldn't find any more information on her mother. The only thing she did find was that her mother left her with a name, apparently; Daisy. If she was honest, she thought it was a cute name, somewhat delicate compared to the person she was now. To be fair, she was made to be this way. It was ironic that her mother would name her after such a beautiful thing, and Hydra made her into a monster. Her eyes moved to the information on her father… Which was…

Wait. What? No. No, this couldn't be. Unless… it would explain why she had abilities from the super serum without suffering the injection…

Her father… her father was Bucky Barnes. She was the daughter of the original Winter Soldier, how was that even possible?

The man had trained her in almost every discipline in combat that he knew, and he never seemed to know her, so she guessed he was either never told she was his daughter, or the information was wiped from his mind. She didn't know why she cared about that, but she preferred the second option. It meant that once he remembered her, he might try to come for her, no matter how unlikely that was. He might also believe she was dead. But it was a big 'if' to think that he would have known he had a daughter and would come for her, especially since the Winter Soldier Program had been scrubbed in 2014, so it could be replaced by the Quake Project later on.

She knew not to get her hopes up. It could end badly if she did.

Her eyes moved to the last folder in her file. The name caught her attention immediately due to how impossible it seemed. The folder was called 'Asset W-9 missions/conditioning'.

Her shaking hand moved the mouse to the folder and clicked on it. There was surveillance footage titled by dates and mission numbers, or mind wipe number.

It disgusted her how much they did to her. She didn't have to watch the videos to know how horrible the wipes were. She - Daisy, she decided - heard the Original Asset - her father - scream during his wipes, and she couldn't imagine how much it would hurt. Well, she could imagine, since she remembered bits and pieces of her last ones, though the actual acts of wiping her mind and conditioning her had still yet to resurface fully. But what she still couldn't believe was that they managed to wipe certain parts of her memory, i.e. her missions and wipes themselves. If she hadn't gotten so used to them then she never would have known. Hydra was smart and they had powerful scientists in their employ but even they shouldn't have been able to do that with such ease. They had made her into their weapon, a monster capable of so much destruction and death. All the proof she needed was in those videos.

She just couldn't face the monster they turned her into, however, and closed the folder tab.

Daisy was born in the Hydra base and her childhood had been there, no matter how dark and twisted it was, she realized she didn't want to live the rest of her life there. She wanted to live as close to a normal life as possible outside of Hydra. Daisy wanted, no, she needed out. She needed out of her cage and she didn't want to be Hydra's pet anymore. She didn't remember being let out for missions, only the long hours of simulations and training exercises in the gyms, but she was disgusted by the idea the videos gave her, as they were showing the worst parts of her. In her mind, she was still an untested weapon, trained but not yet taken out to war. She hated how referred to herself as a weapon, untested or otherwise. It degraded her, made her out to be something she wasn't. No, she was a person. A living, breathing, person with her own mind, with her own wants and needs. And what she wanted was to at least know what it was like to be a normal teenager. Hydra didn't care about what she wanted, they cared that they could use her to get what they wanted.


It felt strange to Daisy, working on protecting Hydra's servers. Sure, she'd done it plenty of times, she knew the code by heart, but it felt different now. She felt different now. Before today, she was just Quake, the last Winter Soldier, with no name of her own. She was whoever Hydra made her to be. Now, she had a name. Daisy . She had parents, too; Bucky Barnes and the enhanced Chinese woman. What she was missing was a life, but she needed to have a choice for that, and those were things she didn't have while growing up. She already felt like a different person, and it felt like her first day as Daisy .

She was disgusted by what she saw in those files; they portrayed an assassin she didn't want to be. The person - scratch that, the monster - that was shown in there was not who Daisy wanted to be. It was who Hydra made her into - tortured her into. They wanted her to become a cold-blooded assassin, like the Original Winter Soldier - her father - and like him, she was undeserving of a name, only the moniker they constantly called her as; Quake - Asset W-9.

Her stomach rolled with nausea and bile rose in her throat. Her blood nearly boiled as she turned it over in her head once more, but even underneath that, she almost felt numb. She wasn't sure what to think or even how to feel. How could she be anything more than what they made her if she couldn't even understand her own emotions?

She mentally shook her head to make those thoughts disappear as she felt the ghost of a hand on her back - a little too low for her liking - which sent a shiver down her spine, forcing her to look behind her but finding nothing. Memories came back in so many different ways and Daisy hated that this particular one came with a flash of a much older man pressing his hand on her back softly, at the same time as she physically felt the hand do the movement.

Daisy felt the memory continue to play in her mind, and she tried to ignore it, like all the times it happened for real, and with other men within Hydra.


Daisy couldn't take it anymore.

She had had enough of the agents' behavior towards her, and all the lies… the secrets. It was all too much. She wanted to keep remembering… keep being Daisy without fear that her name would be taken away from her. How many times had she done this… finding the file… before they discovered her noncompliance and wiped her… how many times would she continue this cycle of coming back to herself. She couldn't remember much, so those were still a bunch of unanswered questions that she wanted to get the chance to find the truth about.

She did know the truth about one thing, though; she would fight her way through every Hydra agent in this base if it meant she could be free of them. She didn't want to, but she would. Even if she had to die trying.

"Vremya vyshlo, Kveyk. Trenirovki nachinayutsya v desyat'," (Time's up Quake. Training starts in ten.) a guard said, as he banged on the door 2 hours later, and she froze on her seat. When she came out of her stupor a few seconds later, she got up and walked in the direction of the gym with the guards walking behind her but she stopped moving halfway through, tired of it all and deciding to do something to change that. "Dvigaysya, Soldat." (Move, Soldier.)

"Net," (No,) she said, shaking her head. She heard the sound of a gun cocking and knew the guard who ordered her to move was now aiming his gun at her.

"Teper' soldat." (Now, soldier.) She smirked and twisted her body to steal the gun from him. Before the other one could move, she had her second hand aimed at him, ready to send a shockwave at the guard.

"YA by ne stal probovat' nichego radikal'nogo," (I wouldn't try anything drastic,) she said, threateningly.

"My sdelali vas takim, kakoy vy yest'. Ty nashe oruzhiye. Kak vy dumayete, chto proizoydet, yesli vy vzbuntuyetes'. General sotret vam mozgi i pomestit vas v kriokameru do tekh por, poka vy yemu ne prigodites'," (We made you what you are. You are our weapon. What do you think will happen if you rebel. The general will wipe your mind and store you in cryo until he has a use for you.) the guard with the gun said, clearly angry at her, but still not thinking of this act as a rebellion. Just the insubordinations of a child.

Anger…

The most present emotion they displayed in the facility.

She was taught at an early age that people could be manipulated through emotion. You show the right emotion and a person cracks. Maybe pull a tear or two for effect when displaying sadness. That was all theoretical, however, since she was never brought on those kinds of missions, not that she would remember if she did. She still only remembered an assassination or two, nothing big, yet.

They had manipulated her, kept her thinking she wasn't ready for missions, telling her her words weren't programmed in, yet. But those were just lies from her handler to keep her eager to prove herself to the General. She remembered parts of missions, remembered when she was recalibrated using her words the last time. She remembered seeing the dark purple notebook her handler kept with him, the words he'd used written somewhere inside. It was similar to the one the original Winter Soldier's - Bucky's - handler had, just different colors-

The sound of a gun cocking behind her brought her back to reality.

Oh right. She was holding a guard at gunpoint while he did the same with her and she was also threatening the other guard with the use of her powers.

But the noise came from behind her, so… that meant a guard was now also behind her.

As quickly as her mind was back on task, she switched the aim of both hands, shooting the armed agent standing beside the other in the kneecap. She disassembled the gun with her powers before they could react and crouched down, twisting her body to do a leg sweep on the two remaining agents, which included the one behind her. She clenched her fist, disassembling the gun that the agent behind her had dropped. "Eto mozhet nemnogo povredit'," (This might hurt a little.) she said, her hand flicking at her side. The three guards then started to cry out in surprise, rather than pain, as they saw their legs start to disintegrate before their eyes. She had learned that fun party trick in training while she was still brainwashed. She'd never had a reason to use it against the handlers, since she was 'loyal' to them, but now she wanted to be free, and this was the best way to not have the other guards discover three dead bodies while patrolling the halls.

You never know who's watching.

Daisy then stealthily hid in the vents to come up with a plan. Killing everyone on base was a possibility, she could do it, it would just be really messy, though disintegrating them would be far less messy, but far more exhausting. She would just have to find an easier way of getting rid of them, then…

A few moments later, she slid out of the vents, making as much noise as a mouse as she touched the floor with her combat boots. To be fair, her powers helped reduce the level of impact and noise. Once she was in the corridor, she walked to her cell: Asset W-9 - Quake.

Extending her hand up, she destroyed the lock on her door so she could enter and headed for her desk. There was a hidden compartment in there with knives, in case of an emergency, that she had probably stashed while she was more lucid and less loyal to Hydra. There was also a gun, which she took. Daisy hid everything in her suit's hidden pockets before leaving the room, going back into the vents.

Daisy knew the layout of the base by heart, since she spent a lot of her time in the vents, and her powers let her take ultrasound scans around her, so she could know where everything was. She knew the command room, with the alert buttons, was nearby, so she moved through the vents to go take it from the guards, kill the agents inside so she could either kill everyone else or force them to leave. She went through the labyrinth of vents leading to the command room, her gun at the ready once she got there, and jumped down without making a sound, knowing the two agents had their backs to her. The young assassin twisted the silencer onto the loaded gun in her hands, before aiming it to the first agent.

She took a deep breath, squeezing her grip on the handle, her index finger moving to the trigger ever so slowly. She didn't have to worry about the safety, since it was always off, as per her training.

Daisy released the air from her lungs as she simultaneously squeezed the trigger, shooting the agent in the head.

He was dead before he even hit the control panel. The gunshot didn't make a sound, but the body's head colliding with the panel definitely did, causing the second agent to turn in shock at his dead colleague.

The young girl's brain fired as many neurons as it could in the seconds that followed, coming up with a new plan that didn't involve killing the second agent right away. She could use him to get Hydra out of there. It would no longer be her problem if the agents left, since once she did as well, Daisy would be able to disappear, never to be seen again. She would just have to prepare for that eventuality, process every bit of knowledge she could find about being a teenage girl in the world of normal.

Finally deciding against pulling the trigger, she kept the gun on him, knowing the agents in that room didn't carry weapons, since they weren't necessarily trained for it. The second agent had turned to her while she was finishing her thought, his eyes going wide and his hand moving to the alarm button. It wasn't hard to see, it was big and red with white cyrilic written on it. The brunette girl couldn't have that, so she flicked the wrist of her free hand, quaking his index finger to bend in an unnatural way. "YA by ne stal etogo delat' na tvoyem meste. Teper' nikto ne mozhet tebe pomoch'." (I wouldn't do that if I were you. No one can help you, now.)

"Chto ty khochesh'?" (What do you want?) the agent asked, his heart racing faster with every minute. Daisy could even feel it go even fast when she took three steps closer to him, his body even shaking when she did so. Good. They all knew what she was capable of, clearly they had feared a time when she would have enough and break from the programming.

"YA khochu, chtoby vy peredali soobshcheniye cherez sistemu gromkoy svyazi. Vy mozhete sdelat' eto, ne tryasyas', verno? Eto dolzhno byt' pravdopodobno." (I want you to give a message through the PA system. You can do that without shaking, right? It has to be believable.) He nodded, though Daisy wasn't worried. He would do it, and he would do it well, only to save his own skin.

"Yesli ya eto sdelayu, ty otpustish' menya?" (If I do, you'll let me go?) And there it was. She knew he would ask that question.

"Konechno." (Sure.) Daisy shrugged as she spoke, never intending on keeping that promise. If it even was a promise.

She wrote a text for him to read from, her gun on his head reminding him not to break from the script, or there would be a bullet in his head as a result of his defiance. "Vnimaniye vsemu personalu." (Attention all personnel.) He turned to Daisy, and she nodded, he wasn't shaky, so that was good. For her more than him. But he didn't need to know that. "Baza skomprometirovana, yeye nuzhno evakuirovat', Programma ostanovlena. Povtoryayu, ves' personal dolzhen evakuirovat'sya. U vas yest' 20 minut." (The base has been compromised, it needs to be evacuated, the Program has been shut down. I repeat all personnel must evacuate. You have 20 minutes.) He stopped the broadcast and turned back to Daisy, hoping to evacuate with the others. "YA mogu idti?" (Can I go now?)

"Da." She shot him in the head before he could even sigh in relief.


As expected, all non-combative agents left far before the 20 minutes were up, scared that someone was coming for them, if the base was compromised enough that it needed evacuating. The high-ranking agents left, but it took them longer, clearly confused as to why they weren't notified by their allies in the Russian army. The only ones who called bullshit and stayed were about a third of the highly trained agents that had trained her.

Daisy found them roaming the halls of the base after the 20-minute marker had passed, their guns aimed in front of them. She had decided to stick to the vents, since she knew them by heart and could track anyone from there using her powers to echolocate. Doing a headcount, she detected 14 agents had stayed, and had separated into three groups.

She found the first group of five, sliding out of the vent and using her powers to push them into the wall all at once. Daisy had learned a few months back that she could create a blast around her to throw off circling enemies, and she had used their technique against them. She shot two and engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with the first one who got his bearings back. She ended up using his larger size against him when she had to use her momentum to flip him to the ground and use her powers to break his ribs. He wouldn't be up anytime soon.

The other two stood together and tag-teamed to fight her off, but like the first one, they were doomed to fail. Daisy blocked fists left and right using her powers as a cushion, going a little harder on the soft blasts just enough to hurt them. She'd had enough a few moments later, breaking every bone in their hands when they tried to punch her again. She then quaked one of the guys' knees so he'd fall and she basically broke most of the other one's bones in his body. Then, to make sure they wouldn't follow, she shot them all in the head.

The second group of five was pretty far out, so she had time to check on her ammo before sliding up into the vents for stealth once again. Daisy managed to find the second team pretty easily and decided to not waste anymore time on fighting these Hydra agents and get done with it as fast as she could. She decided on jumping out of a vent further behind them and surprise them, since they were all facing the front in a 2-1-2 formation. She threw her knife at the man in the middle, knowing it would catch the attention of the agents behind him, and subsequently the two in the front. The four agents still alive (she assumed the man in the middle was dead, unless he miraculously survived a knife to the head) turned around, aiming their guns at her. Daisy smirked and waved her hands, causing the AK-47 to levitate out of their hands in balls of vibrations, before they were promptly dismantled and sent to the ground. With another flick of her wrist, she pushed them into the walls opposite them, pinning them there with the force of her will. Two of them had their necks snapped a few moments later, and she shot the other two in the head.

This fight, even if they were five against one, was an unfair match, and not on their side. No, she was largely more capable than all of them, even if she'd let them fight back like the five agents before them. Before leaving to go find the last four, she took out her knife from the first agent's head and shot him in the heart, making sure he was well and truly dead.

Daisy found the last four pretty fast, and decided that they wouldn't even see her as she killed them all one by one. She found them walking forward in an intersection and waited until their backs were to her before shooting the one closest to her location. There was another agent in perfect diagonal opposition to him, and when the bullet hit the first one in the jugular, it went through and through, flying into the other agent's jaw. The first one bled out on the floor, but the second one was still alive, just knocked down. When the other two turned to their source of the bullet, Daisy was gone and back into the vents. She was always near a vent hatch, so she could always make quick exits. She shot one of them in the head from her position in the vents, before rolling off and exiting through the second hatch in the corridor, landing behind the last man standing. He didn't last long, however, as she promptly snapped his neck with her bare hands.


Once that was done, she did one last sweep with her powers, relieved to find that she was officially the only living being in that base, aside from the five 1991 Winter Soldiers in the bunker, but they were contained in cryo-sleep so they weren't technically alive. Daisy then decided to clean up her mess of dead bodies, using her powers to disintegrate them all, leaving no trace that they even died, like she did with the first Hydra agent she killed before the command room.

The next place she went to was the hangar where they stored their vehicles. When they'd evacuated, it seemed that the staff had conveniently left cars for her. Well, it was probably for the last agents, thinking they'd come to their senses and leave like the rest of them. Which they hadn't, but no one but Daisy would know that, so…

She went to the weapons storage room right after. Unsurprisingly, there were more weapons and ammo than there was of anything else. Probably enough to arm a small army. Or her and the original Winter Soldier.

She noticed maybe five dozen handguns - MP-443 Грач (Grach) and 9mm - a similar amount of AK-74Ms, AK-47s and sniper rifles and knives. There was more than triple the amount of ammo per firearm, a large amount of holsters for guns, knives and ammunition carriers.

She also noticed something else. There was a case near the middle of the room, so she approached it. Not caring if she was allowed to check or not - there was the word 'Quake' written on it in cyrilic, so it was hers - she opened the case and looked inside. There was a sleeveless black-leather bulletproof vest with a zipper and buttons in the front, a black tactical hooded-jacket with a zipper on it to put under the vest, black tactical pants with kneepads, metal gauntlets for her powers that look more combat-ready than her training gloves and some black combat boots.

She loved it.

It was beautiful.

She already had a mission suit, which was what she was currently wearing, as it was the same thing she wore at all times, including missions. She couldn't be sure, though, since she couldn't remember everything, but she guessed they'd made a new one not too long ago. Daisy closed the case, grabbed it with two gun holsters, three knife holsters and ammo carriers, four knives, two pistols, six ammo recharges, a sniper rifle with ammo and placed everything else in a duffle bag before leaving the room. That was all just in case someone figured out her plan and decided to come back to the base.

She decided to start preparing for the real world the next day and went back to her cell. She dropped her duffle and case on the ground and left again. She was getting hungry after the day she had, and the last time she ate was when she woke up. It felt like that was over eight hours earlier, and was probably that amount of time. She walked into the cafeteria and headed right to the counter, opening the cabinet with the protein shakes. She grabbed the box and then went back to the cabinets to find the bottle they always handed her when giving her a shake. She checked the instructions on the box and went to get the milk once the right amount of powder was placed in the bottle, and placed the instructed amount of the liquid. She shook the bottle as instructed and drank its contents, enjoying the familiar taste of the vanilla protein shake in her hands.


Once she was done, she went back to her cell and grabbed her duffle bag. She walked into the training room and settled for the punching bag in the middle of the room, wrapped her hands and placed her gloves over them before starting her evening training.

Jab. Cross. Cross. Hook. Cross. Jab.

Hook. Jab. Jab. Cross. Jab. Cross.

Jab. Cross. Hook. Jab. Cross. Jab.

Cross. Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook. Cross.

She fell into a series of punches, finding her rhythm while also keeping the unpredictability of her movements that had been ingrained into her since she could remember. By ingrained, she meant it was beaten into her. When she started to gain a pattern, she would be forced to stop and receive a beating, until she stopped and changed the pattern before it became readable.

Cross. Cross. Jab. Kick. Hook. Cross. Jab.

Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook. Cross. Jab. Cross.

Cross. Kick. Jab. Hook. Jab. Cross. Jab.

Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook. Cross. Jab. Cross.

The rhythm changed, and she could almost feel the burn in the spots where they used to hit her in training. She remembered those days when she would disobey orders and they would strike her until she yielded. They would threaten more than once to send her into the Red Room. Or ask a former student to teach her manners. Said the girls there were marble, never disobeyed and were the best when they came out of graduation. They never ended up doing it. The threat alone was enough for her to become more compliant and obey every order. Part of that was the conditioning they did to her, but that's another story. She did end up training with a Red Room student, close to her age, to test out the effectiveness of the brainwashing drug, so technically they didn't send her there for obedience reconditioning, but to be a geaney pig. And she was compliant, she really was. Until she grew more resilient to it, that is. After their alliance with the Red Room stopped, she was put back on the old brainwashing techniques, with the electrocution and trigger words. They would always bring her back to the little pet weapon that they made her to be, but each time it would take a shorter amount of time for her to come back to her normal self, become more immune. She was far more trained than her younger self was when they would threaten her with bodily harm or with making her into marble. With each memory coming back to her, Daisy grew more aware of how to act while simulating still being under their command. It had become useful until she kicked everyone out and the previous times she came back to herself faster than anticipated.

Cross. Jab. Hook. Jab. Cross. Cross. Kick.

Jab. Jab. Kick. Cross. Jab. Kick. Cross. Jab.

Cross. Jab. Kick. Jab. Cross. Cross. Kick.

Jab. Jab. Cross. Kick. Jab. Kick. Cross. Cross.

She dropped the rhythm and started a dance of unpredictability. As she punched and kicked, her mind began wandering into her memories, basically reliving the moments, with the lack of emotion they brought.

Showing or even having emotions was a sign of vulnerability. Crying was worse. She never cried, but the tears that could have leaked from her eyes were beaten out of her. She was only allowed to show emotion in manipulation training. And those were fake.

Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook. Hook. Uppercut. Cross.

Cross. Jab. Cross. Kick. Jab. Hook. Kick.

Jab. Cross. Uppercut. Cross. Kick. Hook. Cross.

Cross. Cross. Jab. Kick. Jab. Kick. Jab.

Now they were gone, and she was free, but she didn't feel free. Daisy technically wouldn't be free until she was able to act like a normal teenage girl. If she was found by Hydra while in the outside world, not acting like she belonged there, she might as well sign her own death certificate. Daisy wasn't scared of death, however. No, she didn't care about death. She was trained to serve, and if that meant dying in the process, then she was alright with it. She didn't mind death, she just would prefer to not die before experiencing the thrills of the real world at least once.

Even if she managed to get to the US safely now, which she could, with the jets that were left in the hangar, she wouldn't be free. No, they would find her fast due to her not understanding normal human interactions. She was trained to make herself disappear, blend in, but how was she supposed to do that if she wasn't even aware of what to expect. Without proper knowledge of a target's environment, any assassin or spy could be found and killed. Daisy didn't want to die knowing she could have remedied the problem before even leaving. Dieing was not an option. Survival was the only possible scenario, no matter how long it took her to learn.

They used to train her in manipulation and mimicry, bringing her targets to practice on. They'd give her a file on the target so she would know whatever she needed to for her mission. The person was usually sitting on a chair with a hood, so they were unaware of where they were. Daisy could hear begging once she cocked her gun, or held the knife too close to their skin. She didn't care for begging, it was like a fly buzzing in her ear; annoying. It was weakness, as was hesitation, that was why she showed neither. Death was inevitable. If she was the one to deliver it upon someone, then so be it. The Winter Soldier was an angel of death, and so would be Quake. She would have been, if she hadn't started to remember, again, but she guessed it was better that way. She was trained to be a killing machine, a good soldier for Hydra. She just didn't want to be that for them. She knew she wasn't supposed to be wanting things, but the more time she spent outside their control, the more she discovered that she actually wanted things for herself. Like not being a killing machine for Hydra. Or being more normal. But that couldn't happen, not while she was still a prisoner to this base. She may be free of her handler, but she would never truly be free of Hydra. Not while she stayed in that base.

Jab. Cross. Jab. Hook. Kick-

The bag flew off its chains and onto the ground. Her enhanced strength or vibrational powers weakened the bag, but she couldn't tell which one did it first.

She kept her eyes on the bag for a little while before she unwrapped her hands and moved to the weights, placing some on the bar above the bench. Once she was satisfied with the amount she placed, she laid on the bench and started lifting. Her superior strength let her lift more than people without the serum would. A lot more. She was a 16-year-old girl who could bench heavier weights than fully grown men.

It would be something she was proud of if she wasn't bred to be a killing machine. She shook her head. She couldn't be proud, it would get her killed.

When she was done with the weights, she went to her duffle bag and took a handgun. She checked the magazine inside and went to the targets on the wall when she found that it was full. She held the gun with one hand and aimed it at the target.

Inhale.

Wait.

Exhale.

Squeeze the trigger.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Her speed was well practiced as she pulled the trigger repeatedly. She then switched hands.

Repeat.

Switch hands again.

And again.


An hour or two later - she had no way to tell time in the gym - she was done with her full workout and headed to the showers. They were in the locker room, at the end of the training area. She removed her sweaty clothes and walked into one of the showers before locking the door to the stall. She was alone, but it was second nature by now. She had been beaten up once by a guard when she was younger and forgot to lock the door. Not for that, however, but for failing to complete a move perfectly during training. She was 6 years old. He apparently hadn't punished her enough and followed her into the showers with his batons. Said batons had a high voltage of electricity, which he had fun using while she was soaking wet from the water falling on her skin. Her fingers traced the now stretched scars left by the electric batons, almost like a reminder to watch her back and lock doors behind herself.

The water was cold, like it always was. They never would waste hot water on such a thing as their weapon cleaning herself. That would be insane. She cleaned herself up in five minutes and dried herself with a worn towel in the drawers, before changing into a new training uniform that was on the shelves. It was her size, since that locker room was for the Soldiers, while the guards had their own locker room and showers.

Once she was done, she walked out of the locker room and placed everything back to their usual places, before grabbing her duffle bag and walking out of the training room. She dropped her duffle bag off in her cell and went to the only official office she had ever been in: her handler's. She knew he had a computer in there, and had data that even the computer room didn't.

She hacked her way through the password-protected device and encrypted hard-drive. They were the ones to teach her how to hack, so in a way, her doing this at that moment was in some way their fault.

She opened up the drive and searched for the information on the evac. There were a few files on the subject, so she read them all, taking her time so as to not miss anything. Apparently the Insight project - whatever that was - had failed due to Captain America and his friends deactivating… helicarriers… and the Captain winning a fight against the OG Winter Soldier. After the fight, it was said that the Soldier abandoned Hydra.

She closed the tabs and the computer before she decided to wander the halls of her level until she got tired and walked to her cell for some sleep.


The rest of the week was pretty much the same, she would look around the base, explore the place. She explored the third floor slowly, stopping at almost every room; it was offices and there was a cage for fighting - she guessed - and a medical room. That floor was mostly closed down, except for the medical room, which seemed more renovated than the rest of the level. She took a few days to look around that floor, take inventory of the two storage rooms and look into all the offices and bunks.

It was only at the end of the week that she finally went up to the first floor on the top. That place held a lot of bad memories, and most of the memories she managed to get back.

She went into the wipe room first, observing the equipment in there with a clear mind, for the first time. She noticed a lot of things. It was old, like it hadn't been modified in at least a decade, though since it worked there was no need to modify it further.

The device itself was not appealing at all, and for a moment she wondered how badly it would hurt to get her mind wiped with this. Her first full memory may have been from a mind wipe, but Daisy was sure that the pain she felt in the dream was nothing compared to the real thing, and she was hoping that she would never have to find out.

She spent a few more minutes looking around the room, before she moved on to the bunker.

Daisy wasn't sure what she expected from the bunker, but what she saw wasn't exactly it. She did expect a large room that could probably take a lot of hits, and she knew there were tubes from some blueprints she'd found in her search, but the size of the room and what the tubes looked like were not something she really expected. She thought the tubes would look more like the one she saw the Winter Soldier in once or twice, but they were bigger and the Soldiers inside were sitting. She could also see a viewing room of sorts up on the wall, and she guessed it was accessible from outside the bunker. To test it out, she sent a powerful vibration in the direction of the viewing room, but all it did was rattle the bunker without leaving a scratch on the wall. Hydra was always prepared for anything. That was something Daisy could expect with or without her memories of her missions.


After that, she spent the next two months falling into a routine for herself: wake up early, do her run on the treadmill for about two hours - she didn't know the time, but she took a guess - then she would make herself porridge - which was a pain to learn how to make - before going to train until she would eat again.

As it turned out, Daisy wasn't meant to have a routine, as the systems flagged a presence entering the base two months after the evacuation. She went to grab all her things, just in case the newcomer was hostile. She didn't want to take any chances, since everyone who knew about the base was Hydra or on the run.


I hope you liked this first chapter, and are as excited as me to see where this is going! I apologize in advance for all the angst to come, hehe.
Please review, those make my day!