Author's Note: This chapter title comes from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Chapter Sixteen - I worked hard to please you (I hoped you'd love me)

The first time Danielle won a match again Bucky and had him pinned down, she felt her heart soar at the pride she saw in his eyes. But then Sunil called her his sweet girl and told her he knew she could do it and she just wanted to undo the entire fight. When Sunil leaned it to press a slimy kiss against her forehead, she threw a panicked gaze at where Bucky was across the room and wanted nothing more to be near him instead.

And then the Tesseract flickered along her skin and she felt a slight ache that was growing familiar and she stumbled forward into a wall that hadn't been there before. Danielle caught herself and her brain began to race as she tried to figure out what had just happened. She could hear a sudden surge of confusion and chatter behind her. She turned to find Bucky standing right next to her, wide eyed. When had he moved?

But then she looked around and found Sunil still in the same spot. And he was grinning like a madman. "Incredible! Immediate teleportation wasn't even something we'd considered. Fascinating!" He waved the the guards and scientists in the room aside and slipped out a pen. He bent down and marked an X on the floor. "Do it again. Move here."

"I—" Danielle blinked and stared at the X. If she could teleport, if she could improve it, that was good for her, right? It meant it would be easier to leave, easier to get out. She could escape. She just had to learn.

She drew up on the Tesseract and focused on the X and . . . nothing.

Sunil frowned. "What's different? How did it work before?"

She hesitated. "I . . . ." She swallowed thickly and prayed that her words wouldn't bring a punishment on her. "I wanted to get away from you. I wanted to be by Winter."

He frowned and nodded. Sunil moved across the room and pointed at Bucky. "Go over there." Then he took Bucky's place beside her. Sunil put a hand on her arm, rubbing circles. "Alright, focus." She wanted to smack his hand away. His thumb rubbed up and down against her skin and he dropped his voice. "I know you can do this. I know—"

And then Danielle was stumbling forward again in a different spot than where she had been before, though this time Bucky caught her. Sunil let out a cry of delight and he hurriedly started speaking about contacting Director Pierce immediately. At that, Bucky's hold on her got tighter. The last thing she wanted was for him to let go.

Sunil and Rumlow took two difference approaches to training her teleportation. Sunil would plead and sooth and wheedle his way to success, and most of the time it only worked out of her pure annoyance. Rumlow's approach was much more direct.

He leveled a gun at her. "You have five seconds."

She did it in three.

Rumlow's method was far more effective, though she hated it more and had the bullet scars to prove it. She would flicker and flicker and flicker, squeezing herself through that odd dimensional space that was becoming more and more familiar until finally she would pass out and her trainer would drag her back to her room, where Bucky would be waiting.

Bucky was there with her the day that they decided to incorporate her flickers into combat. She beat sixteen different opponents and it was taking everything in her not to beg for a break when Rumlow stripped off his jacket and stepped forward. Danielle steeled herself; she'd beaten him before and she could do it again.

Only, this time it took less than a minute before she had him pinned to the ground, foot on his head and arm wrenched dangerously behind him. Sunil called the match and announced they were done for the day. Danielle let her shoulders slump in relief and she released Rumlow, stepping over him with her focus set on the door. The only warning she got was the way Bucky stiffened out of the corner of her eye.

She heard the gunshot at the same moment that pain exploded in her abdomen. She saw the crack develop in the door ahead of her and then slowly looked down at the red soaking her shirt. Before she could have any sort of reaction, she heard yelling. Danielle absently pressed her hand against her stomach and looked back to find Bucky trying to throw off the dozen guards that were holding him back from Rumlow.

Sunil stepped forward with a small device in his hand. He reached out and pressed it against Bucky's neck and her heart jolted at the sound of buzzing electricity. Bucky crumpled.

Danielle was vaguely aware of herself trying to say no as the world began to fade away. And she was vaguely aware of Sunil leaning over her.

"We've gone as far with the two of them together as we can. Time to move on."

When she woke up, she didn't open her eyes because she was missing one very important thing: Danielle couldn't hear Bucky breathing. The blanket over her was heavy and thick, but not scratchy. There wasn't the hum of the lights, though she could see some through her eyelids. She wasn't in her room. Danielle took a long sniff. It didn't smell familiar either. Danielle shifted. She wasn't tied down, she wasn't injured. Her abdomen was a little sore, but it had to have been around two days for the pain to be down to that.

She opened her eyes and that was definitely not her ceiling. It was lacking the normal clinical white, instead a sickly grey. There were two other beds in the room, neatly made with clean and un-rumpled sheets. Stiff. Brand new. They hadn't been slept in, so she was the room's first occupant. She sat up and scratched at her collar, eying the rest of the room. The stall here had a door, at least. And there was a window. A small, tiny thing up near the ceiling that would be hardly big enough for a cat to squeeze through.

Danielle studied the main door and climbed to her feet. She pressed her hand against it and felt out with the Tesseract. It was thick and she felt tumblers. Her heart skipped and she yanked her energy back when the tumblers suddenly moved. She flickered to the other side of the room.

The door swung open and she glanced across the man standing there. Not Pierce, not Rumlow, not Sunil.

"You know, monocles aren't really in style anymore."

He just smiled. "Take a walk with me." Then he turned and strode off.

Danielle hesitated. She flickered out into the hallway and stumbled into step beside him. As she followed him, she started building a map in the back of her head.

"My name Is Wolfgang von Strucker."

"You've got a whole 80s movie villain vibe goin' on."

"Ah, yes, your humor. I have heard tales." He glanced at her and adjusted his monocle. "I am not as kind as your previous employers." That term made her scoff. "Here, I get results." He stopped. "Behold, my results."

There were two glass boxes, each exhibiting a human being like a zoo animal. In one, a young woman was waving her hands in the air as loose, airy red twisted around the objects floating in front of her—a water cup, a pen, a piece of paper. Her eyes were glassy and absent. The box next to her contained a man. He was pressed up against the wall, his entire body vibrating and his head shaking so quickly that all she could see was an abstract blur. Then his body flashed and he thudded against another wall and started all over again.

"What did you do to them?"

"In a way, I tried to recreate you." He smiled. "And yet, I'm not sure their potential could match what you've done on the surface. They were built by a stone; you are one."

"I feel like I should make a pot joke."

He turned to her, brow furrowing.

She raised an eyebrow. "Marijuana? Stoned? Really, what are you, ninety?" Danielle shoved her hands in her pockets and only half listened to him firmly state that her humor would have to be curbed. Instead, she spent most of her attention studying the two people in the cages. "Where'd you get them?"

"They volunteered."

"Hmm." Danielle drew back and turned to look around. "Where's Winter?"

"You don't have to worry about him. He's certainly not worrying about you."

She stilled and hot angry boiled up in her lungs. "You wiped him again?"

"Well, not me personally. But yes, the Asset has been reset."

"He has a name," she hissed. "His name is James Buchanan Barnes and he's not an asset, he's a human being and—"

He lifted his hand and thumbed the remote he was holding. "He has no name, he has a title. Just as you have no name."

"I have a name," she growled. "Danielle Maria Stark. You can't take that away from me."

"You have no name," he repeated. "You have a title, Four Blue, and that is all."

"Winter's not here. You can't make me do anything."

"You have no idea what I can make you do." He clicked the remote and Danielle's hands snapped to her collar as electricity buzzed through her skin. She bit through her tongue to choke back a scream. Strucker let up on the button. "Good, good. Let's begin. We'll start with the distance of your spatial jumps. Once your progress is satisfactory, we will move on to precision."

"I'm not doing shit for you," she rasped out angrily.

He clicked the remote again.