Disclaimer: Clearly still too broke to own Marvel.
They were not murdered in their beds. Or at least, she wasn't.
Nineteen woke the next day after a pitiful two hours of sleep with a pounding headache, dry mouth, and a pit in her stomach. Apparently, the serum that she had been injected with did nothing to combat the general effects of sleep deprivation.
While she was not convinced that The Soldier still possessed one-hundred percent of his sanity, she was, on the other hand, convinced that their plan was undoubtedly going to be a Very Bad Idea.
But she was alive.
Maybe HYDRA was just waiting to kill her after she had finished breakfast.
Words couldn't describe how nervous she was.
When breakfast didn't come, but The Soldier did, she realized that something had definitely gone wrong.
She had remained in bed all morning, unusually still, and alone with her thoughts. There was no way they were going to pull this off.
Surprisingly, the wall had slid open and there he stood, unannounced, dressed differently than she had ever seen him before, with a handful of weapons strapped to various parts of his body and a slightly frantic look in his eyes.
"We need to go. Now."
His urgent tone sent Nineteen's already high levels of anxiety skyrocketing. She sensed his distress and her brain filled itself with a thousand questions about what prompted The Soldier to make such an uncharacteristically impulsive and hasty decision. The look of sheer horror and confusion that had undoubtedly made its way onto her face seemed to speak volumes to him, allowing him to answer her questions without her saying a single word.
"The plan's changing," he said with finality. "We need to go. Right now."
She felt ill as time slowed down. His original carefully thought out and almost immaculate plan was already near impossible to pull of as it was, but now they were completely diverting from it. Her mind raced and her thoughts were battling with each other over which one would gain prevalence, but one question stood out over all the others. What happened?
"Okay…" she muttered as she threw her hair up into a ponytail and shoved her feet into her boots, still unable to form coherent sentences.
His patience waned. Out of all of the people in the world, she was moving too slowly for him.
"You," he said roughly, gripping her upper arm hard enough to bruise and all but yanking her out the cell, "fucking come on!"
She had never had high hopes for any sort of rescue, nor wasted her time wishing for an escape from HYDRA's facility before he'd proposed his plan to her, and now, with the panic in his eyes and the absolute terror in his voice, she was certain of one thing.
Their plan had failed before it had even begun, and this was no rescue mission, nor wish come true for her sake. This was an escape.
He kept up with her, but barely.
Fear had put down its sinister roots into Nineteen's brain, working its way through the previously muddled thoughts that clouded her mind, blazing a trail through her circulatory system, muscles, and bones, and allowing her to run. Heedless, legs working in overtime, feet pounding against the tile floors. She wasn't simply afraid for her life. She was utterly terrified.
The Soldier was barely a step behind her the entire time as they raced through corridor after corridor. He spoke only to give her brief directions. Left. Straight. Right. It would have made much more sense if their roles were reversed and she was following his lead, but the fear coursing through her veins made it impossible for her to slow down. Her panicked brain hadn't even recognized it as an option.
Fight or flight.
That phrase played in her mind on a constant loop. She wasn't sure where it had come from, or where she had ever heard it before, but it seemed incredibly fitting for their current situation.
Based on the way The Soldier had been acting, she had expected the two of them to be met with a firing squad of eager HYDRA agents as soon as they had left her cell, but instead they were met with no response. The hallways were eerily quiet and still, absent of the typical characters that often traversed throughout them on a normal day. A small part of her dared to hope that he had taken some sort of precautionary action and created a diversion somewhere else in the facility, but the odds were definitely stacked against that scenario.
She gulped air to soothe the foreign burning sensation in her lungs.
They reached a literal fork in the road that yielded to only two options. Left or right.
"Go right." There was a miniscule hint of fatigue in his voice.
She obliged, and when she saw the black garbed and heavily armed individuals waiting at the end of the hallway, goosebumps perforated her skin and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
"Shit."
His voice came from behind her as they both skidded to a stop, looking frantically in both directions and seeing more men at the other end of the hallway as they were met with an army eager to perform. Some of the HYDRA agents wore smirks on their faces, and the hallway echoed with the sound of multiple guns cocking.
They were so fucked.
The Soldier didn't hesitate. He tossed her two handguns and gave her simple orders without missing a beat.
"You take left. I'll take right. Watch each other's backs."
The hallway exploded into utter chaos around them.
Nineteen's brain knew enough to know that waiting meant death, so she ran towards the HYDRA agents at full speed, reaching the men before most of them even had the chance to fire their guns.
The ones that did just so happened to miss her. Whether it was by a stroke of luck or the grace of God, she didn't know.
Her body had gone on autopilot. The survival skills that The Soldier had relentlessly drilled her in had successfully taken over, allowing her to shoot at them from point blank range, making them moderately easy targets. Her bullets were gone. Twelve of the men were down.
The remaining six had gotten over the shock that had resulted from witnessing her speed, and now she had six expertly trained men aiming semi-automatics at her.
Fucking wonderful.
The world slowed down, and she saw everything with inhuman clarity. The singed-hair smell of gunpowder heavily perfumed the air, along with traces of other smells like sweat and blood. If she concentrated enough, she could spot the bullets flying through the air, all heading directly towards her.
Think.
Quick as lightning, she surveyed their attacks. The bullets were heavily concentrated towards her left side, likely aiming for her heart that was currently beating a frantic rhythm in her chest. The HYDRA agents were standing shoulder to shoulder in a line. She didn't take time to breathe as she sprinted to the right in a wide arc, reaching the first agent in line in merely seconds.
There was a searing pain in her left shoulder, and she could almost feel her individual cells being ripped apart as a bullet grazed her.
It slowed her down, but she continued with her original plan as she slammed into the agent with her full body weight, sending the two of them falling to the ground, hard, snapping his neck on impact.
It turned out to be a deadly mistake, she realized. The next thing she was aware of feeling next was pain. It exploded everywhere from hard kicks, brutal punches, and what could only have been described as a white hot burning sensation in her side. Only after she became aware of the wetness soaking into her tank top in the same area, did her mind register the fact that she had been stabbed.
The remaining agents were trying to pull her off of their dead comrade. One succeeded, but Nineteen had been rendered incapable of making rational decisions as she weakly tackled him and sunk her teeth into his arm, hard, refusing to let go even after the bitter and metallic taste of his blood had spread throughout her mouth.
He screamed in pain, and shook his arm violently, but she held fast, jaws stretched around the bone in his wrist.
She was vaguely aware of him alternating between grabbing handfuls of her hair and attempting to rip her off of him and him raining down hard punches on her ears, her head, her neck- anywhere he could reach, really.
In the midst of it all, she heard a muffled whimpering sound.
She would later realize that it had been coming from her.
The edges of her vision darkened, and a wave of nausea rolled throughout her body. The other agents were still attacking her. Mercilessly. They could have shot her and ended everything quickly, but they had obviously decided against it. They enjoyed her pain.
She was their target. She would die here.
She didn't know how much longer she would be able to hold on. The black that tinged the edges of her vision was beginning to spread, and a feeling of lightheadedness began to accompany the nausea.
She wondered how The Soldier was doing.
Five gunshots rang out, and the pain ceased. As the five agents each crumpled to the ground with a bullet buried into each of their brains, she heard a familiar voice alternating between spewing profanity and forming fragments of sentences.
"You idiot," an extremely enraged Winter Soldier was hissing as he carelessly kicked aside the corpses that had been attacking her moments ago, before pulling her to her feet and catching her as she stumbled into his chest, "Did I teach you fucking nothing?"
a/n: Their plan epically failed for reasons that are soon to be discovered and Nineteen got the shit kicked out of her, but... YOU GUYS, WE ARE SO CLOSE TO GETTING BUCKY AND HOMEGIRL OUT OF HYDRA, IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY. I'M SO EXCITED. That means that this story will FINALLY pick up.
ALSO, Major thanks to gamerchic and WriterGirl1198 for reviewing! y'all are awesome!
More thanks for the people that have favorited and followed this story as well!