Author's Note: This chapter title comes from America by Allen Ginsburg.

ATTENTION: CONTENT WARNING for the first scene involving rape/underage sex. Feel free to skip that scene if it would be triggering for you. A brief explanation of what happened will be provided at the end of the chapter if you would prefer that instead.

Chapter Fourteen - I've given you all (now I'm nothing)

Rumlow told her to kill a little boy and she said no. When he ordered her again, she pointed out that without Bucky he had no hold over her.

He responded by snapping the little boy's next and ordering the guards to dispose of the body. Then his hands wrenched her arms behind her back and he called her a whore and even the scientist couldn't stop the shudder of horror that uncurled in her chest as she realized exactly what was about to happen. Danielle didn't make a sound—she wouldn't give him that satisfaction—but she poured every available drop of the Tesseract into the hands on her as she twisted desperately away. She heard a grunt of pain, but that victory only lasted a half second before the collar suddenly seemed a thousand times tighter and absolute agony burned in her bones.

This time, Danielle did scream.

A hand clawed at her shirt and she heard the seams rip. Just a body, she told herself. Just a body. But it didn't matter how much she repeated it, because this was simply too much even for her cold, clinical side because it wasn't just her body; his body was right there. His gripped tightly at her just-long-enough hair and yanked her around. He was growling something about a lesson, a punishment, learning her place; she couldn't quite hear him.

His cock pressed up against her lips and she tried to pull back but the hold on her head got tighter, though the pain was still nothing like the ache her collar was sending shooting through her veins. His other hand came up and pinched her nose and, in a way, it was like being back in the water and unable to breathe. She let her lungs start to burn.

But then her body's natural defenses gave out and she gasped for air. The scientist made a note to work on that.

He pressed into her mouth and she couldn't do anything to stop him, or to stop the tears burning her eyes. She choked around him. Danielle screwed her eyes shut and balled her left hand up into a fist, thumb tucked inside. She squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until she wasn't gagging anymore, though her throat still spasmed a bit around him and she had trouble breathing properly through her nose.

And then he pulled back with a slick pop and shoved her down, face to the floor. She whimpered and kicked as rough hands began to pull at her pants, but a harsh shock of electricity sent her body arching and any thought of fighting back out of her mind. When the electricity didn't stop, it sent everything out of her mind and welcomed black instead.

When she came to, it couldn't have been long because she was whimpering into the concrete as Rumlow shoved into her over and over again. At some point, she'd started blubbering a request for him to stop and was reward with a hand over her mouth and nose. She tried to breathe, but all the air inside her was trapped with nowhere to go, just like she was.

Then Rumlow grunted loudly, rawly, and slammed into her one last time. She shuddered as he coated her insides. Then he pulled back and yanked her roughly around. Her ability to breathe was short lived, however, when he shoved himself back into her mouth.

"Clean me up," he ordered.

Danielle looked up at him and all she could see through her burning eyes was a blur.

"Clean," he ordered again, a hand slapping against her face.

She glared at him.

Then she bit down.

They broke both of Bucky's legs when he returned. Sunil murmured something about it being punishment for her behavior as he held her still and forced her to watch. She wanted to scream, sob, beg them to stop.

Don't give them an inch.

She instead dredged up everything from her practice torture sessions with Rumlow and remained stone-faced instead. She didn't let any of the pleas or whimpers leave her: not as they took the hammer to his shins, not as they marched her/dragged him down the hall, not when they shoved Bucky—broken bones and all—into the room, and not as Sunil asked her to behave herself in that oily voice of his.

But then the door closed and Danielle dropped to her knees beside him and began spilling out apologies. He didn't say or do anything but offer up a groan and she could smell iron. Danielle tapped his jaw. "Don't bite your tongue." She dragged her hands down and hovered anxiously over his broken shins. "Um, okay, okay, okay. Hold still."

After all, she could move and secure things with the Tesseract, couldn't she? Danielle closed her eyes and focused on the energy instead, willingly using her powers for the first time outside of Sunil's directions. She focused on the bone she could feel tangled in the Tesseract energy and on the pages of the anatomy textbooks that she had memorized. "Hold still," she ordered again.

Then she started stitching his bones back together and he screamed.

They didn't turn the lights off anymore and instead supplied her with hours of work on a helicarrier system for her to improve. She spent six weeks on it before turning the improvements in and finally getting the lights turned off at night again. Of course, with the darkness came increased sleep and with the increased sleep came more nightmares. She wanted to say she lost count of how many times she woke up screaming, but she was a Stark. And more than that, she was a Stark with a serum-enhanced brain; she never lost count of anything.

Which was why she was confused when one day she woke up to intense nausea instead of screaming.

"Nell?" Bucky asked tiredly through the dark room as she stumbled loudly around. She made it to the toilet just before her stomach decided to empty itself. "Nell?" That was definitely panic in Bucky's voice now, without a hint of tiredness. She only barely heard him move and then she felt his hand on her back. "Nell, what is it?"

"Sick," she gasped out, just before hunching over again and retching for a second time. Bucky's hand started pressing circles into her back and she relaxed into it, letting out a mild sob at the uncomfortable feeling writhing inside her. And then she leaned back. And she fell asleep.

When she woke up, she was in a clean white medical room and laid out on a table while the doctors spoke in hushed tones next to her. Danielle struggled up and threw her glance around for Bucky, but he was nowhere to be seen. She frowned and rubbed at her shirt, wrinkling her nose at the oozing feeling on her skin. And that was when she saw that Pierce was sitting next to the door, engrossed in whatever he was reading on his tablet.

"What's going on?" she demanded.

Pierce looked up and there was something predatory about his smile. "Don't worry too much, my dear. You'll have to give us a little time to decide what we want to do with the baby."

"The . . . baby?" Danielle twisted until she could see the doctors again. They were huddled around a screen and she knew exactly what that was: ultrasound. Danielle caught her breath and her hand dropped to her sticky stomach again.

"There's benefits to having the baby, of course," Pierce continued. "But there's also plenty of cons. After all, it would give us a soldier with traces of the serum and the Tesseract to mold from birth. However, in the short term, you would be particularly useless and actually more dangerous as certain methods of getting you to comply would be banned in order to protect the child."

"I—" She found that she really didn't know what to say and now she was pretty sure the nausea wasn't just from morning sickness.

Pierce nodded to the guard by the door. "Return her."

The guard moved forward and Danielle scrambled obediently to her feet before he grabbed her. "I've got it," she growled out at him, stalking past him out the door and down the hall towards her room. She stepped inside and listen to the door lock loudly.

Bucky looked up, brow creased. "Where were you?"

She blinked at him and opened her mouth to tell him, but those words weren't what came out. "I don't want them to make my baby a killer."

He stared at her for a long moment and she realized that she wasn't exactly confused by his silence and she knew exactly which gears were turning in his head. Which was why she wasn't surprise when he demanded, "Tell me what happened while I was gone. Who was it?"

And she found that she didn't ever want to hide anything from him.

"Anthony."

Bucky looked up from the armor blueprints he was helping her through. He studied her expression for a long moment and then nodded. "And if it's a girl?"

"Antonia."

"Why?"

"After my father."

"Ah. Okay."

And that was that. Or so she thought. Because Danielle had to admit that she had thought she and Bucky were mentally on the same wavelength permanently, but he surprised her when the lights turned out that night and he said, "Goodnight, Nell. Goodnight, Ant."

It was the first time that crying herself to sleep didn't involve pain or nightmares.

CW SCENE: If you skipped the first scene due to triggers, here's a brief overview of what happened so you aren't lost. Rumlow ordered Danielle to kill a little boy and raped her when she didn't comply.