Author's Note: This chapter title comes from Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed.

Chapter Seventeen - Let yourself be gutted (start there)

Danielle woke to the sound of the tumblers moving. She stayed completely still, eyes closed, and just listened as the door opened and feet shuffled. She heard whispers: heavily accented, though different from Strucker's, with one male and one female. There was a creak of a bed. New roommates, then.

Logical conclusion: the Maximoff twins had passed stability tests three days earlier than estimated.

The door closed and she waited for the sounds in the room to settle. Then she waited a bit more. Danielle opened her eyes and let the small sliver of moonlight through the window give her at least some ability to see. There was a larger figure occupying the bed directly across from her; that had to be the brother. The bed on off to the right of the first had a smaller figure.

Danielle didn't close her eyes again. She wouldn't sleep. Not around strangers that could be a threat like them.

Strucker dragged her from the room before dawn, before the twins awoke, and spent the next few hours making her set and control fires until her skin split. As a reward, she got a small breakfast—far smaller than what Sunil had ensured she was provided with—before being thrown into spars against three or more opponents at a time. She broke six bones by noon and had to struggle through her bland lunch with two fractured wrists. After that, Strucker made her heal her own bones and she passed out from exhaustion, just like she had when healing Bucky. Strucker made a comment about the additional stress that put on her body, out loud noting that it could have long term consequences.

And then he broke both her knees and made her heal herself again.

By dinner, she'd killed one Hydra traitor and interrogated—violently—a second. Then Strucker locked the collar's control over the Tesseract and made her lift thousand pound weight after thousand pound weight with her bare hands until her left ulna finally cracked.

At that point, Strucker seemed to have finally tired of her presence and he sent her away, alone, to return to her room. Danielle clutched her broken arm to her chest and shambled down the hall. The guard opened the door at her approach and she stepped into the room, the soldier in her head immediately noting exactly where the twins were in the room and how many potential weapons were within their reach.

The boy shot to his feet the moment the door closed and in a grey blur was standing next to her. "I'm Pietro," he offered up, smiling cheekily. And there was anger in his eyes, not directed at her but there nonetheless. "That's my sister, Wanda."

Danielle didn't say anything, glancing over at Wanda. While there was anger in Pietro's eyes, Wanda had something wicked in hers. She sat on her bed and began running her fingers up and down her left forearm, gritting her teeth as the Tesseract began to stitch her bone back together.

"Wow," Pietro said, crouching down in front of her and staring at the blue wisps around her fingers. "That's pretty cool. You know what else is pretty?" He looked up and winked.

"Pietro," Wanda said reprimandingly, though she sounded more amused than anything.

Danielle still didn't say anything. She pulled the energy back inside herself and gave her arm a few test turns. Satisfied that she was properly healed, she laid down and pulled her blanket up over herself.

"Huh. Fine then."

"Maybe she can't talk?" Wanda asked quietly

Danielle kept her eyes closed, but she was turned out to face the room and she could hear every word they said and, if she listened close enough, she could hear the way that Wanda's heart constantly skipped at irregular intervals and the way Pietro's heart was way to fast.

The only reason she got any sleep was because, eventually, healing herself caught up with her.

It was Strucker who discovered that they weren't sure if she could die. She'd already broken every bone in her body at least once, suffered internal damage to every possible organ, and bled out more times than was really socially acceptable.

But it was when she slipped up on a dodge and ended up with a bullet lodged in her skull that she realized the full extent of what all of that could mean.

She came back to reality slowly and bit back a whimper at the marching band bashing around in her head with white hot instruments. Danielle listened to the noises around her before identifying the voices of those that she recognized, including Strucker directly to her left. He said something about marking down the time—forty-eight minutes and seven seconds—and then her collar gave her a slight jolt.

"Up, Four Blue, we are not done."

Danielle forced herself to move as if she was a machine on autopilot. She stumbled to her feet, blinked through the red staining her vision. Strucker pressed a gun into her hands and turned her toward the range. Down at the end stood three shivering agents.

"Follow the heartbeats," Strucker ordered. Then he blindfolded her.

Complete silence fell in the room, which was the only reason she could strain herself to listen. Her targets' hearts were easy to identify, beating ten times faster than anyone else's. She took three quick shots and then reached up, pulling off her blindfold. Two were down, the last one was holding his shoulder and screaming. Danielle frowned.

And she shot him again.

She woke up to escape the avalanche burying Bucky alive to find that she'd put herself wrist-deep in the wall and the twins were staring at her with wide eyes, the whites clearly visible through the dark. Danielle pulled her lips back in a snarl until they dropped their gazes. Danielle pulled her fist from the wall and brushed off the crumbled plaster and concrete stuck there with blood. Frowning, she grabbed her sheet and scrubbed her hand clean.

"You good?"

She ignored him and leaned over the side of the bed, retrieving one of her books. Danielle sat back and flipped open to the last page she'd been on, studying plants indigenous to India. She held her left hand over the page and a soft blue glow illuminated the words.

"Right. Okay. You know, if you can't talk, fine. But you're obviously not deaf. You don't have to ignore us."

She flipped him off and then turned the page.

"How do you do that?" It was Wanda this time time. "The light? How?"

Danielle looked up and closed her hand, the light shutting off. She shifted around so her back was to them and then drew the light up again.

"You know, you'll have to talk to us eventually."

Strucker started bringing the twins on combat training, citing something about how they could learn from her. But when Danielle won the first match in fifteen seconds by breaking her opponent's hip and Strucker turned expectantly to the twins, the two of them just dumbly shook their heads. So Strucker ordered Pietro up, reminded him not to use his powers, and set him against a different agent.

Pietro started losing shamefully quick. His opponent moved in to finally sweep his feet out from under him and Pietro blurred, reappearing behind the guy and decking him. Strucker hissed. "I said no powers. Smith, out." His gaze cut to Danielle. "If you're so insistent on using your powers, then go against someone who can match you. Powers allowed. Fight until forfeit. Begin."

Pietro grinned and blurred. Danielle sighed and flickered three feet backwards. When he predictably stopped in front of her, she swept his feet out and caught him up in a choke. Almost immediately, he tapped against her arm until she let him go. Strucker frowned.

"Disappointing," was the assessment he came up with. "Four Blue, show them again how it's done."