Chapter 26
The next morning, after picking at her breakfast, Frankie was back in the interrogation room. This time, however, Fury sat across from her. Tired from another long night interrupted by conflicting dreams, she just wanted to go back to her room and back to bed. Throughout the long morning, she had to go back over the same details she provided Clint the evening before. The director made her repeat herself multiple times, trying to catch her in a lie and she found her patience wearing thin as the morning wore on.
The fourth, or was it fifth, time he asked her about the location of the compound, she shoved her chair violently away from the table as she stood, making it slam loudly against the wall behind her.
"What part of 'I don't know' do you know get?" she yelled. "I don't know. I don't know. I. DON'T. KNOW!"
The door swung open and the two agents escorting her today swept into the room with their weapons drawn.
"It's okay, agents," Fury told them calmly, never taking his eye off Frankie.
"You're sure, Director?" one asked.
"Yes," he nodded. "Ms. Cabrini is just a little excited, that's all."
Eyeing her suspiciously, the agents holstered their guns and left the room. Once the door clicked behind them, Fury raised an eyebrow. Under his scrutiny, she pulled the chair back to the table and sat back down, with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands.
"Anything else you'd like to add?"
She shook her head, not looking up.
"Let's stop for lunch, then. We'll pick back up afterwards."
"Lovely," she muttered into her hands.
"What?"
Sighing, she looked up, "okay, sounds good."
After lunch, she was back in the room. The door opened and Clint walked in instead of Fury.
Frankie snorted, "time for the good cop?"
"Am I?"
"Are you what?"
"The good cop?"
"Compared to Fury, everyone is the good cop," her lip twisted in a wry smile.
"Can't argue with that," he smiled back.
She leaned back in her chair, "so, what do you want to know?"
"Tell me what happened at the prison."
She was ready for this question and wondered how long it would take them to ask about it. Again, she stuck to the truth as much as possible. She left out the parts about Jeri Hogarth helping to keep her alive for Rory. She just said Melissa and her group befriended her because they didn't like the Hydra bunch.
"I don't understand. Why were they targeting you?" Clint asked, his brow furrowed. "Why didn't they just fold you into their group?"
That's when Frankie told him about Glenda and her power struggle for control of the cell. How that tied to the vendetta against her was a bit sketchy, but Frankie attributed it to internal politics within the Hydra cell.
From there, she described her encounter with the leader of the gang in the gee-dunk room and the death of her cellmate, being shanked, nurse Evil, walked out of the prison by Leena only to escape later. In this story, there were a lot of parts that needed revision.
"So, she just walked you out of the prison and nobody stopped you?" He asked.
"Oh, we were stopped. Twice," she clarified. "Once inside, but with the riot, there was just too much going on. I was obviously in bad shape, so they let us continue. Then we were stopped by the FBI, I think, outside. Again, they let us go, because the ambulance was right there, and I needed help."
"Sounds like a lot of dominoes fell just right for you," he mused.
"My shoulders and cracked ribs disagree with your assessment," she shot back.
"Let's go over it again, starting with the death of your cellmate," he looked down at the notes he was taking.
Frankie sighed, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Don't let him trip you up, she coached herself silently.
"Okay, so this junkieā¦," she began.
The next morning, Clint was back. Frankie breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't Fury again. Not that Clint was any easier on her. In fact, he made her repeat herself even more than Fury. But, for some strange reason, she didn't feel as threatened by him as she did with the director.
He took the chair opposite her, but instead of opening the file he brought in and starting up on the questions, he looked at her quizzically.
"What?" she asked shortly.
"You aren't eating."
He was right, she could only force herself to eat a few bites of each meal they set in front of her. She started to shrug but stopped herself in time. Instead she pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, "I haven't been hungry."
"You aren't sleeping well, either."
"Wait, are you guys watching me sleep?"
"You didn't expect us to just leave you alone in a room, unmonitored?"
"I didn't expect you to be spying on me without warning!" she snapped, angrier at herself for not suspecting. Had they seen her talking to Rory the other night? If they did, they probably thought she was crazy and rightly so.
"You're a confessed Hydra operative. What did you expect?"
"Common decency?"
"Again, you work for Hydra," he let the statement hand in the air between them.
"Point taken," she huffed, slumping in her chair.
"Want to tell me what's wrong?"
She didn't look up to meet his eyes.
"You look like hell," he continued when she didn't respond.
Frankie debated what to tell him. The more she veered from the truth, the more likely she was to get caught in a lie. But she wasn't sure she was ready to tell him about the dreams and her memories. Or Glenda for that matter.
"You want to know what I think?" he asked.
"Do I have a choice?"
"I think they did a pretty good number on you."
"And what makes you think that?"
"Bucky Barnes," he said simply.
"Come again?"
"Bucky Barnes," he repeated. "You might know him better as the Winter Soldier. He spent a lot of time under the control of Hydra."
Oh, shit. She'd forgot about him and what he'd told her on the jet.
"He says you were more than likely tortured, and they probably did some cognitive re-conditioning involving drugs. Does that sound right to you?" He leaned forward in his chair, watching her reaction closely.
Frankie swallowed keeping her eyes on her hands clasped together on the tabletop.
"Frankie," he said softly, "there are a lot of holes in your story. A lot of things that just don't add up. We know you're leaving something out, hiding it from us. But there's something else I know," he paused.
"What?" she looked up at him briefly, then looked back down at her hands.
"You might not believe this, but I don't think you're a bad person. Angry? Yes. A survivor? Yes. But you're not bad. You've just had a rough life. I get it. I really do. But know this: the only way you're going to get out of this mess is by trusting someone. You can't do it on your own. You need us."
He was right, she knew. But she wasn't willing to trust him. Trusting someone is what got her in this position. She had trusted Rory and look at her now. Still, she wasn't ready to give up on him. She still needed to save him from himself and Hydra.
"What did they do to you, Frankie?"
She shook her head, her lips pressed together in a thin line.
The rest of the day was a repeat of previous days. Giving up on getting her to talk about what was going on, Clint focused on finding cracks in her story. And cracks he found. Her muddled brain was slowing down and there was nothing she could do to stop the downward spiral apart from the one thing she didn't want to do: tell him everything.
"Why would they murder your cellmate and not you?" he asked, referring to Leena and her gang in the prison. "That doesn't make sense."
"Why? It's obvious Glenda wanted me framed for the murder."
"Glenda? I thought it was Leena."
"Glenda was orchestrating the entire thing," she covered her slip quickly.
"But why? Why not just kill you and be done with it?"
"I'd not the super-evil mastermind," she huffed. "How would I know what her reasoning was?"
Then later, going through her and Melissa's escape, he asked, "how did you two get through all the check points?"
"I guess Melissa got keys off a guard," she shrugged. "I don't know, I was bleeding and going into shock at the time."
"How did you find a car with keys in it for your escape?"
"Why would they go through all the trouble of getting you out of the prison instead of just letting you bleed out during the riot?"
"How did you escape from Leena?"
The more he dug, the more she struggled. By the end of the day she was exhausted and not sure of any of her answers.
Shutting the ever-growing file on the table in front of him, Clint rubbed the back of his neck.
"This isn't getting us anywhere."
She was too tired for a snappy comeback and just put her head down on the table, glad it was over for the day.
"I'll get your escorts to take you back to your room."
She listened to the door open and when it didn't click shut behind him, she raised her head. It stood ajar with two inches of open space between it and the door jam. Through it, she could hear voices. Standing, unsteadily, she walked around the table to stand by the opening.
"She's not going to last much longer," Clint was speaking.
"You don't sound happy about it," Fury replied.
"She needs help," he growled.
"You seem to be forgetting that she stabbed you and works for Hydra. Hell, she might have killed that guard and nurse at the prison."
"You don't know that."
"No, but we don't know that she didn't. You admit her story is full of holes. She's either leaving a lot out or flat out lying to you."
"That doesn't mean we should let her suffer. Have you seen her today? She can barely put together complete sentences at this point. She's not eating. She's pretty much a zombie right now."
"That seems to be going around," Fury answered.
Fury said something else, but movement on the other side of the door had Frankie scrambling back to the other side of the table. She didn't make it back to her chair before the door was pushed open and an agent stepped through.
"Ready?"
She shrugged, "yeah, I guess."
As the agent cuffed her, she pondered what she had overheard. So, they thought she was close to being broke, did they? She wondered how she could turn that to her favor.
Back in her room, Frankie searched for the hidden camera. Unlike the one in her room at the Hydra facility, this one didn't reveal itself readily. The light fixture held nothing out of the ordinary nor did any of the electrical plates. Not having any tools, Frankie was forced to use her fingernail to unscrew the tiny screws that held them in place. The unadorned walls were uniformly painted, and her fingers couldn't find and textural differences that would suggest a lens. The panels for the drop-ceiling popped up easily, revealing nothing buy wire bundles and ducting in the space between them and the true ceiling.
The desk was her next victim. Every drawer was pulled out and searched, the undersides of all surfaces scrutinized, every crack checked. Frankie thought she had found it when the laminate along the edge lifted, but when she ripped it off nothing was concealed underneath it. The desk chair fared no better. As she tore apart the cushion, she didn't question the unlikeliness of a camera being hidden in something a person would sit upon. She attacked the bed next. Starting with the headboard, she dismantled it piece by piece, barely stopping herself from ripping apart the mattress.
Throughout her frantic search, shadow Rory mocked her from his corner.
Standing in the middle of the destruction, Frankie cast about for another place to search. She had searched every surface, every piece of furniture, and every fixture in the room to no avail. A snort from Rory brought her attention back to him. She met his shining eyes and narrowed hers. His corner was the only place she had not searched. Shadow Rory grinned ferally at her, daring her to invade his space.
"Challenge accepted, asshole," she snarled back.
The door swung open behind her, flooding the corner with light from the hall. Shadow Rory evaporated.
"Frankie, enough!"
She spun to confront Clint, "where is it?"
He held up an object in the palm of his hand.
She stepped towards him, stepping over the discarded footboard of her bed. Closer, she could see that he held a miniature drone smaller than his hand.
"We're not watching you 24/7, Frankie," he explained. "The agents heard you talking to someone two nights ago and then heard you calling out in your sleep, so we deployed this drone last night to keep an eye on you."
At his mention of her talking to someone, she looked over her shoulder at the corner. Rory was still gone.
"Who were you talking to?" Clint said softly, stepping deeper into the chaos of her room. "Is there someone there now?"
She shook her head, "no."
"Let me help you," he held out his hand to her.
She chewed the inside of her lip. She wanted all this to stop and to just be normal again. She wanted to sleep without fear of dreaming. She wanted to eat without her stomach churning. She wanted her mind back. Maybe that and what she needed to do for Rory could work together to her benefit?
"You have to trust someone, Frankie," Clint cajoled taking another step. "Take a chance. What have you got to lose?"
"Only myself," she murmured.
"From where I'm standing, it looks like you're already lost."
She glanced back at the corner and thought she caught the glint of shadow Rory's eyes mocking her. Turning back to Clint, she nodded.
"Okay."
Frankie reached out and took Clint's hand. Please, don't let this be a mistake, she pleaded silently. As they left the room, she heard shadow Rory laughing
