Author's Note: This chapter title comes from Charlotte's Web by E. B. White.

Chapter Nineteen - You have been my friend (that in itself is a tremendous thing)

Pietro clutched his broken arm to his chest the entire way back to their room. Wanda fussed over him, helping him to his bed as if he couldn't make it on his own. Danielle hunched over a book on poisons and did her best to ignore them.

But then Pietro laid down and whimpered as his arm jolted. Danielle groaned and snapped her book shut. "C'mon, seriously?" She slammed the book down. "Next time, don't rely on your speed as your only skill."

Pietro jerked and turned his head to stare at her. Wanda's eyes went wide. "You . . . actually can talk?"

"Of course I can. I was just hoping that if I shut up long enough, you two would go away." She dropped her book to the floor and shoved herself to her feet. "Sit up. I'll fix your arm."

Pietro moved hesitantly. Danielle stopped in front of him and bent down to run her fingers along his broken skin. "Hold still. This is going to hurt."

"How bad can it—" He broke off with a scream and jerked away.

Danielle pulled back and scowled. "I said hold still. If you move, I could permanently remove half your bone. Is that what you want?"

He whimpered and shook his head.

"Good. Now hold still. I won't be long." She pushed the Tesseract energy into his arms like a needle and dragged it through his bones. It was different than helping Bucky; there was resistance here, a lack of trust that made it almost like she was trying to wallow through mud to her goal. She heard Pietro whine and he threw his head back, eyes screwed shut. "Don't think about it," she ordered, brow furrowed. "And next time, pay attention. Wilkins likes to feint with a kick so that you're distracted while he goes for your weaker arm."

"I've never seen him do that with you," Wanda commented.

"I don't have a weak arm. Ambidextrous." She finished and straightened. "Why are you two here? How'd they get you?"

"We volunteered."

"And? What do you want?"

Wanda's lip curled and Pietro's eyes darkened. "Tony Stark's head on a platter."

Danielle paused. "Ah." A part of her was relieved that her father was already dead, though she hated it. Because if he was still alive, she would feel disgusting doing nothing but sitting back and watching his murderers get trained to kill him.

"And you? Why did you volunteer?"

Danielle looked up and let her lips curl into a sneer. "I didn't volunteer. They stole me from my home, from my family. There was no volunteering." She snapped around and marched back over to her bed. Knowing that she somewhat looked like a petulant child, she flopped down with her back to them, though keenly aware of exactly where they were.

"Aren't you at least going to tell us your name?"

"No."

Abruptly, their simultaneous training sessions—Wanda and Pietro were practicing power-influenced combat while Strucker had Danielle practice use of her serum-enhanced brain in solving puzzles and problems and questions just by looking. An agent entered the room, leaned over to Strucker, and whispered in his ear. Danielle kept her eyes ahead, but her serum-enhanced ears heard it.

"The helicarriers have fallen. Hydra is exposed."

"Hail Hydra," Strucker murmured in return, nodding and watching as the agent left. Immediately after, he excused himself and order for them to return to their room. The twins rushed to obey. Danielle paused in the hallway, letting the chaos of anxious Hydra workers running around her. She frowned and turned, marching after where Strucker had gone. She slammed open the door to the security room he'd entered.

He looked up and narrowed his eyes. "Four Blue, what are you doing here?

"My helicarriers failed?" she asked doubtfully.

"Your— No." He straightened and adjusted his monocles. "The helicarriers worked beautifully. Unfortunately, that bastard Captain and his team worked better, even against the Asset?"

"The Asset?" She stiffened. "And what happened to him. Did he stop them?"

Struck frowned. "No. The helicarriers fell, and so did he. Now I believe I ordered you back to your room."

Obediently, she backed out of the room and wandered blankly down the hallway. Pietro and Wanda tried to speak to her when she got there, but she slumped into her bed and fell into disturbed nightmares instead.

"You did better today," Danielle murmured, an arm around Wanda to keep her supported as they walked down the hall. "Much better."

"Thanks to you." Pietro winced, entire body shuddering in pain. "You can fix me, right?"

"Of course. I'll fix both of you up. But then—"

"You'll have to take a nap forever. Yes, I know the pattern."

Danielle shoved open the door and let them inside. "Sit down. Wanda just has a sprained ankle, so I'll fix her first." She helped the girl to her bed and gently eased her down. "How do you feel?"

"Tired," Wanda murmured.

"Well, you can get some sleep as soon as I'm done, okay?" Danielle knelt down and gently worked off the woman's left shoe. "I'll try to make this quick. There wasn't too much damage." She ran her fingers over the red skin. "The swelling is making it look worse than it is. Got something to bite down on?"

"Um, yeah." Wanda dragged up the corner of her blanket and folded it before sliding it between her teeth.

"Good." Danielle closed her eyes and focused on gluing the ligaments back together. She heard Wanda start moaning painfully and frowned, trying to keep back the heat from the Tesseract. She finished with the ligaments and gently soothed the swelling down a bit before opening her eyes and pulling away. "How do you feel?"

Wanda pulled the blanket from her mouth. "Thank—" She lost the words in a yawn.

Danielle smiled and pushed herself up. Putting a hand on Wanda's shoulder, she said, "Go ahead and get to sleep. Pietro will be all better when you wake up again."

"Thank you," Wanda mumbled again, pulling off her other shoe. Then she drew the blanket over herself and lied down.

Danielle pushed herself to her feet and swayed with exhaustion for a second before moving to Pietro's bed. "Sit up," she ordered. "I'll fix your ribs."

"And my hand?"

"Of course." She splayed her fingers across his chest and he hissed in pain at the contact. "Do you have something to bite down on?"

"Actually, I think just talking will help distract me."

She frowned up at him. "If you bite off your own tongue, it's not my fault." Then she pushed the Tesseract energy into his chest.

He let out a whine of pain and his words became carefully controlled. "You never actually told us your name. You know that, right?"

"I know."

"Why have—" He groaned as she snapped his sternum back in place. "Why haven't you?"

"I have reasons."

"We have to call you something, don't we?"

She stitched his last rib together and then shifted, to work on his hand, struggling to keep her eyes open at this point. "No. No, you don't."

"That's— Holy shit!"

"I told you to bite down on something," she mused absently. "Why do you want my name so badly?"

"Well," —his entire body jerked with a flinch at the bones in his wrist grinding against each other as she moved them back in place— "can't be friends if I don't know what to call you, can I?"

"Do we have to be friends?"

"Yeah, I think so." He watched as she pulled away from his hand. Pietro gave her a grin. "Well?"

She considered it for a long moment, yawning. Dragging a hand down her face, she thought though her options. Why not? "Danielle," she finally offered, shoving herself up.

Pietro's grin widened. "It's nice to meet you, Ellie."

The base was hit with a high power EMP by some Hydra defectors and the loss of power made everything resorted to its default setting. For the three of them, it meant that their door locked and wouldn't open and so they'd been left alone for going on twenty-eight hours. At the beginning, Danielle had thought that she would be able to move the tumblers and open the door using the Tesseract, but the EMP reset the remote controlling her collar and cut off all her connection with the cube. The only reason her collar survived the attack was because the Tesseract was what powered it.

So here they were, the three of them alone and hungry in their room. Pietro and Danielle, the two with enhanced metabolisms, were feeling it the worst, though all three of them were shivering from the failed heater in the midst of a northern winter. Danielle had her blanket tied tightly around her shoulders as she hunched, shivering, over a book on Xhosa and scratched out in the margins notes for her learning.

"How many?"

She glanced up at where they were huddled together under their blankets, holding each other on Wanda's bed in an attempt to keep each other warm. "How may what?"

"Languages. I mean, that's the third or fourth language we've seen you working on, and Xhosa isn't what most people would start with."

"Insightful, Wanda. And to answer your question, plenty."

"That's not a number."

"No, it's not." Danielle turned the page and then held her pen between her teeth so she could use both hands to fix her blanket.

"Why are you so uptight?" Pietro asked curiously. "What, are you scared of us?"

"No, I just don't like sharing information. Especially when I don't trust you."

"You don't trust us."

"No." She scratched out another note and tested the some of a few Xhosa syllables on her tongue. "Now let me work."

Fifty-one hours found Danielle curled up with her blanket—which had torn straight down the middle at one point when she'd yanked it a little too harshly around herself and her strength won out over the blanket's tenacity—shivering and doing her best to keep her teeth from clattering. She'd long since given up trying to study. Her stomach ached and her collar felt too tight and her exhaustion just somehow made her senses louder and stronger and the only remedy was sleep.

Unfortunately, sleep hadn't agreed with her for a long time.

"You're going to freeze."

"Your IQ never ceases to astound me, Pietro," Danielle muttered.

Wanda made a soft, worried sound. "Come join us. We still have no idea how long it's going to be for the power."

"Again. Brilliant."

"Just shut up and share body heat, Ellie," Pietro interrupted. "It's better for everyone that way."

Danielle sat up and leveled a dark glare at them, curling back her lips.

Pietro just smirked. "That would be intimidating if I didn't see you run into the wall mid-yawn the other day."

"Closing my eyes while yawning doesn't mean I couldn't still kill you without breaking a sweat."

"Intimidating, truly. I'm shaking."

"You're shaking because it's cold."

"And so are you."

Danielle frowned, weighing it all in her head. She really didn't want the physical contact—the thought made her skin crawl—and she didn't trust them at all, but they were right when they said she was going to freeze. She shuffled off of her bed and stepped across the room, eying them. They pulled apart, making space between the two of them. Alarm bells went off in her head—too contained, not an easy escape, giving them too much control—but she slid in between them anyway.

"Jeez, Ellie, you're freezing," Pietro gasped in surprise the moment her bare feet touched him.

"My serum makes me run cold," she said simply, curling gratefully into the heat they provided. She could already feel her fingers tingling as they warmed up. She cleared her throat. "Thank you."

"Of course," Wanda said softly, turning so she could run her fingers gently through Danielle's hair. "I know you don't like us, but . . . we're here for you."

Danielle didn't answer that, but she did close her eyes and press into Wanda's hand.

Pietro laughed softly. "She means it, you know. Besides, I'll do anything for a pretty girl."