A/N- I have no idea what I'm doing anymore, but I got an idea that wouldn't go away, and here is the start of it.

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November 2015

"Check the papers by the doors-" Tony's voice called out as the team spread out down the hallway of what looked to be isolation cells.

"Guys, this door has four locks more than the other doors, it also has major warning signs on it," Natasha said, pulling the file beside the door and cracking it open,

"Says the prisoner is hostile and very capable of using force to subdue and kill agents." She continued, flipping to a photo of a very attractive woman with a beatific smile.

"It's a woman" Clint spoke from behind her and she flipped back to the first page with the warning.

"Tony, we're going to need something to cut the locks off to get the door open," Clint told the billionaire. Nat backed up to let Tony at the door, flipping to the page after the photo she continued reading.

"They call her Sabre, says she's a feral mutant" Steve walked up to wait for the door to be opened and looked down at the file.

"She's been with Hydra since 1949?" his voice cracked a bit and Natasha handed him the file to peruse.

"So, she's like you Cap. Not a super soldier, but look here" Clint pointed to her enhancements "says she's got enhanced senses, durability, reflexes, strength, speed. She's like you but she didn't get the serum"

"It also says she has elongated canine teeth; claws she can retract and grow at will and her bones are…bonded with adamantium"

"So; she's more animal than human at this point?" Clint cocked a brow

"We won't know until we get in there" Nat answered

"She's most likely dead, look here, it says they stopped giving her food and water nearly two years ago" Steve showed them the chart of experiments they'd conducted on her and sure enough the last entry was testing if she could die from dehydration/starvation.

Tony made an excited noise as the last lock fell to the floor and the door opened a little. He grabbed the handle and pulled it open the rest of the way and they all stared into the room in disbelief. A figure in ratty, dirty clothes looked at the height of relaxation, her arms behind her head and her ankles crossed on the wall that rested across from the door.

Without even looking up at the intruders she started muttering to herself about someone leaving her alone.

"I don't need to hear how much this is my fault, Stevie, you've told me as often as you can since they locked us in here" She spoke up and Steve froze in the doorway

"How do you know me?" he questioned

"We've been over this; I've known you for years. You were one of the only people I would actually listen to those last years of the war. Buck hated it, used to tease me about not listening to him as I did you, Dugan too now that I think about it. I think it was because they were sergeants and I didn't technically have a rank in the army. Though I'm sure I would have outranked them just by being a woman, they did technically hand out higher ranks for women so they'd be listened to." She raised herself to sit up, crossing her legs underneath herself before her hands lifted her whole body off the floor and around to face the stunned group.

"Well, this is new, you're usually alone when you visit. Who're your friends?"

Steve's mind froze, he knew that the woman he was staring at was born the same year as he was. Here she was though, not looking a day older than the last time he'd seen her.

"Charlie?" his voice broke and he felt tears burning his eyes.

"Yes Steve" she sighed and rolled her eyes, "why's your uniform so different?" she cocked her head to the side and really looked at her hallucination.

Steve ran his eyes over her, ratty clothes and awfully tangled hair, but she looked the exact same as she had before he'd put the plane into the ocean. She didn't look starved, which he knew she should be, she still had the flush of pink along the tops of her cheeks and her eyes were alert and staring straight at him.

"Charlie, how are you alive?" he took several steps into the room and finally looked at the small cell. There were what looked like gouges in rough clusters of five, looked like she was keeping track of how long she'd been there. Every inch of the room that was reachable, and even some that weren't all that reachable, had been covered in gouged doodles. Vague images of Bucky and himself, one of the Commandos, and lots of flowers and animals, it was like she'd taken her memory and used something to mark it into the cement so she wouldn't forget.

"What do you mean Stevie, you know they won't let me die. That would be a mercy, and they don't believe in that." She scoffed

"Besides, my body refuses to die, it always hurts when they try but it's not stuck yet. This was the worst way though, I'm so thirsty, lost count of how many days it's been. Who're your friends?" she rambled.

"These are the Avengers; we're here to get you out Charlie" she laughed and dragged herself to a standing position.

"They told me about the Avengers, said you lost them the Asset. I got thrown back in the chair for laughing at that. Is he okay? Did you really get Bucky out?" she leaned back against the wall, eyes intent on Steve. She made no move to get out of the room though.

"I did, haven't seen him since he walked away from saving me, but he's free" a small smile formed on Charlie's face.

"Good, I never wanted this for him, it was so hard to watch Stevie, they just kept putting him back in that awful chair and he doesn't have my healing factor so his brain stayed scrambled. God, I prayed that they would kill me so I couldn't be held over him anymore"

"Charlie, we need to get you out of here" he took a step towards her and held out a hand.

"No, I remember what happened last time they tried this ploy, if I leave, I get sent back to the chair, and I can't do another round in the chair, Steve. I'd rather die." She declared and promptly flopped back to the ground.

"Charlie, they're all gone, this isn't fake" Steve placated

"Bullshit Steve, you're never real!" she climbed back to her feet and started advancing on him. Her finger jabbed into his chest,

"I am not. NOT. Going back to that chair, Steve. So, whatever fucked up game they're playing with me can stop now." She stepped away from him and lifted her face to the ceiling,

"Hear that! You win, I'll not even take the bait this time" she yelled.

Steve looked back at the team, confusion, and sadness on most faces. He walked back and while she had started spewing more nonsense at the ceiling. He grabbed the med kit and pulled Natasha to the side to have a quiet discussion. He took the syringe with the sedative that Nat handed him with a nod. He approached Charlie calmly, but she didn't even seem to know he was there, he walked up to her and gently put the needle into her upper arm. She barely noticed, too busy yelling at the ceiling, talking to HYDRA agents that weren't there. Steve stepped back and let her rant herself out, it only took another 15 minutes until she lost the energy to stand. Steve scooped her up in his arms and while surprised at how heavy she was now he carried her out of the room and back towards the jet.

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She had spent 765 days locked in this room and boy was she bored.

Years ago, when they'd first locked her in, she'd taken to scratching drawings on every surface available with her nails to occupy herself. She eventually ran out of space, and she just couldn't reach the ceiling, no matter how hard she tried. Every once in a while, a doctor or scientist would come in and run some tests quickly, she was usually sedated for that, something about not trusting her after the first six doctors she'd killed. She'd her the vents hiss and she'd start to get groggy, at which point she usually slumped over and the doctors could enter. All she would remember was the hissing from her vents and the pain that lingered.

Solitary confinement, for a run-of-the-mill human, takes 15 days to severely traumatize someone. It usually causes mental deterioration; anxiety, depression, paranoia, psychosis, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The longer someone is confined alone, the worse things become, and the max most prisons will keep someone alone is 15 days. Solitary confinement for a mutant that is already slightly psychotic from years of torture, electroshock therapy, and experimentation… took 3 days.

The first time she saw Bucky in her cell she screamed and sobbed that she was so sorry while he stood calmly, looking exactly like he had on their last date, and told her how much he hated her, that he could never really love an animal.

Steve, Peggy, Dugan, and Howard did much the same; and on and on it went.

She'd eventually become desensitized to the vitriol, and the lack of response made things shift. She hadn't had someone speak to her gently in decades, never mind someone's gentle touch. So, when Peggy's hand cupped her cheek the first time, she'd jerked and flinched so hard she'd fallen off the cot.

In a way it was worse than the hate they used to yell at her, it would pull emotions from deep inside of her chest and that little flame of hope would kindle. The happiness never lasted long, the second she'd show a flicker of hope or love she'd hear the hiss of the vents again and the begging would start.

"Please, I'll be good, please not the gas" she'd cry, and beg and get groggy and slump into whatever she was sitting nearby. A group of men would be sent in and the torture would continue, she'd wake up in pain and not remember anything after the hissing from her vent.

After a while, the things they'd say evened out to how she remembered they spoke to her. Steve was always gentle in how he spoke to her, but he could switch into his Captain America persona in an instant. Dugan and Howard would crack jokes and Peggy would roll her eyes. Even the rest of the Commando's would stop by with a wisecrack or a particularly bad joke before vanishing.

Bucky was different, at first, he'd been flashes of the love of her life; the endless blue eyes, the sharp jaw, chocolate hair, that amused glint in his eyes with a grin that was just wicked. She'd seen him since his fall, and she wished she hadn't.

They'd done awful things to him, conveniently they'd play his screams through the speaker in her room, she'd hear him scream for her and Steve, she'd scream right back for him but he never heard her. She watched the first 10 years after she'd been captured as they tried repeatedly tried to break him but Bucky was strong and he refused to break, but he sounded close a lot more than she would have liked.

The first time she'd seen him in person was in the room that housed that god-awful chair. His eyes went wide when he saw her, he started fighting like the devil, screaming her name and threatening that if they hurt her, he'd kill them. She'd heard the men that had come to get her talk about a metal arm, but to see it in person was nauseating. Her poor Bucky had already been through hell and she wished she was able to save him.

She'd had her wrists and ankles shackled and a metal muzzle over her mouth. She'd wanted so badly to save him, before she could even think of trying, they'd shoved her into the chair and clamped her arms and chest down. They took the muzzle off of her before they lowered the electrical panels and she panicked, yelling for him to look away, to not watch.

They'd made him watch as they put her through a chair session over and over and over again until she finally stopped screaming at the pain. They released her out of the chair and she fell boneless to the floor. She had gone so deeply into her own mind it took nearly 2 weeks for her brain to heal itself enough that she came back out.

She'd been told, joyfully, that their plan had worked and the Asset was much more amenable when she was threatened. She was what was held over his head, and he was what they held over hers.

It had been years in between when she saw him, nearly 3 if her daily tallies were right. He'd done something they didn't like again, and she was told it was the chair again. When she was walked into the room acid crawled up her throat, Bucky looked like shit, his hair was nearly down to his shoulders and greasy, and his eyes were nearly wild when he finally saw her. She could feel tears slipping down her own cheeks at how they were handling him, like a wild animal. It took five men to wrestle him into the chair opposite her, and even then; they had a man holding his head up by his hair and two men with guns aimed at his head.

"Bucky don't fight, not for me" she whispered and bit back a cry when the man that operated the electricity backhanded her.

"We're here Asset, because you refused to shoot the target"

"She was a little girl" Bucky stated, he got a punch in the gut for it, but he didn't look sorry.

She was glad Bucky had some of himself left, she knew it would be hard fighting the electricity scrambling his brain. He didn't have her healing abilities. She wished this wasn't happening to him, she'd take all of it just so he didn't have to.

There was no more talking, though they did give her a bit to put between her teeth this time, she wondered why that was. She shook her head at Bucky and she shot him a soft look. The plates closed over her head; she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

It was somehow worse this time, they'd injected her with something halfway through that kept her more alert, the prolonged screaming made something happen with her vocal cords, she'd stopped making noise in the middle of a scream. She couldn't even think about that with the sheer amount of pain radiating through her head and body. When they'd finally stopped, she'd still been aware enough to feel herself being released from the chair, body twitching and jerking, her head landing near Bucky's feet with a sickening crack that she didn't react to.

She'd woken up who knows how long after, back in her cell. The doctor had told her that he'd cooperated wonderfully after they'd fried her brain.

This went on for years, she'd lost count of how many times she'd been forced into that god-awful chair. They'd taken to experimenting with her healing in between frying her brain, bringing her to the brink of death, and then leaving her to suffer until her body healed itself.

She didn't know when, but she eventually stopped seeing Bucky for sessions in the chair. She'd stopped seeing him at all. It had taken patience that she didn't usually have to find out what had happened. They'd fried his brain so much that there were able to plant trigger words that caused his body to feel like it was back in the chair, he would revert to what they called 'The Winter Soldier' and wouldn't hesitate to do whatever they asked. She'd sobbed and screamed at the people that held them for what they'd done to him, but it didn't matter to them. To them, he was just a weapon.