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domarzioneSleepers of Ephesus (chapter one)
6k | PG-ish | Peggy Carter
Peggy woke up in a heap, a tangle of limbs she'd never have settled into on her own.
"Oh, Christ on a cracker."
The soreness as she sat up confirmed that she'd been thrown wherever she was now and her right shoulder popped loudly as she rolled it; it was probably only her imagination that the noise echoed throughout the room.
It was too dark to see anything, no windows or lights, not even a glimmer of a glow anywhere, and so she didn't know where she was or how she'd gotten here. She heard nothing, no breathing, no distant voices or music or airplanes or subways, no scrape of furniture against floor, nothing that could give her a clue where she was or if there was anyone with her. She sensed something solid behind her, which proved to be a wall, and leaned against it as she stretched her legs in front of her and tried to figure out what the bloody hell had happened.
The last thing she remembered was going up to Groton with Sousa at the Navy's request... Daniel. Was he here with her? Was he hurt?
She whispered his name a few times, then pushed herself to kneeling to feel around in case he'd been knocked out as she'd been. But she heard and felt nothing and accepted that if he'd been caught along with her, whoever had them had likely separated them. And if he hadn't been caught with her, he was either already sending for reinforcements or he was dead and beyond her concern, at least for the moment.
Getting out of here, wherever here happened to be, remained her first and foremost task.
With her right hand sliding up the wall for guidance, she stood up carefully, then started walking slowly counterclockwise around the room. She hoped to find some sort of obstacle she could use as a weapon -- a chair, a table, a convenient pry bar -- or toward an escape. There had to be a door or a blacked-out window somewhere; she hadn't been spirited into a room with no exit. She had lost her shoes somewhere along the way, so she padded silently along the cold tile floor in her stockings, counting her steps so she'd have a sense of how large the room was. Nine steps into the second wall, she felt a window ledge. But when she felt along the ledge to the window itself, there was an iron grate over it. She felt along the grate to see if there was a lock she could maybe pick -- there were still some pins left in her hair -- but she couldn't find one.
"Damn it."
The third wall had nothing, the fourth wall had a seam that should have meant a doorway, but she couldn't find a knob or a handle or, when she felt further along the wall, any hinges. The door opened outward, but not from the inside. A prison cell, then, either purpose-built or something else like a retasked walk-in meat locker. There would be no escape without knowing more. So she sat down next to the seam, waiting for whoever had put her here to return, and tried to piece together how she'd gotten here in the first place.
The Navy had called the SSR because there had been three attempts to break into one of the experimental submarine propulsion labs and the third attempt had left some 'peculiar' evidence behind. Post-war, the SSR had become the clearinghouse for anything too weird to be easily explained by the military's own investigative services, mostly because it shifted the blame off of their shoulders. In this case, the Navy had reached out because the would-be thieves had tried to cut their way through steel doors with something that might have been a blowtorch but had left a scorch pattern more like what HYDRA's blasters had done at close range. Whether it would be better for it to be a HYDRA blaster in some criminal's hand, a fragment of HYDRA itself, or some new danger with some new weapon was up for discussion. Blasters were hard to come by even for the most enterprising of criminal organizations, so the thought had been that it was either a surviving HYDRA splinter cell or something new. Howard had been consulted for the latter and had dumbfounded them all with the breadth of possibilities, but half of what he'd told them about hadn't been invented yet and he wasn't sure when it would be. The other half... Howard was the smartest boy on the block, but he was hardly the only genius and the Soviets had taken their share of the intellectual loot as a prize of war.
That the Soviets were trying to steal submarine secrets from the Navy was a more comfortable notion to those in charge than the idea that HYDRA had recovered well enough to make itself a force again, so that had been the angle Peggy and Sousa had been told to follow up first. Peggy hadn't been so sure and had said as much to no effect, but Daniel, away from the office and its politics, had been willing to listen and admitted that they could not go about looking to find evidence that fitted the conclusion they hoped to reach. Nothing they'd looked at so far, which had just been the Office of Naval Intelligence's files, had been definitive one way or another and so the only way forward was with an open mind.
All of which had led her to a closed room, it would seem. She hoped Daniel was all right, wherever he was, and admitted that, just this once, she would not mind being the damsel in distress rescued by the knights in shining armor, even if it meant being told that her place was in the office making coffee. (She had no intention of listening or obeying, but she'd be willing to bite her tongue just this once.)
Her first visitors were not the cavalry, however, sneering or otherwise. She had dozed off at some point -- constant vigilance was exhausting -- and woke up to the sound of the door being unlocked. She slid up the wall to standing and pressed herself against it, waiting to strike as soon as someone came through. The door opened silently and the light that came through was blinding after so much darkness, but she pounced on the first man through the door and brought him down to the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of her victim and cause herself some pain as her left knee hit the tile floor hard. They wrestled and she maintained her position on top -- once upon a time, she hadn't watched the Commandos tussle purely for the aesthetics -- but that only left her primed to be dragged away by the others who'd followed, pinioned to the wall at the armpits by two sets of strong hands gripping tightly and her legs held fast by those of her captors.
The lights flicked on and burned her eyes with their brightness, making them tear. She blinked to clear them, but still couldn't see the owner of the voice who spoke first.
"Considering what the old lady did," a woman said somewhere to her left, "you should have been more careful. Gonzalez, Reitman, make sure you've got a good grip before you move her. Lindberg, get off the floor and go put your dignity back together somewhere else."
Peggy's eyes had cleared enough to see that the woman speaker was a tall colored woman dressed in men's clothing and she was holding a pistol of some kind in her left hand.
"Good morning, Agent Carter," the woman said with a smile, putting a curious emphasis on the 'Agent' as Lindberg scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off before stalking away without a word of protest. "So glad you could join us. If you'd please come with us, this can all be taken care of with the minimum of fuss."
Peggy had no idea what 'this' was, but it undoubtedly was nothing good. The colored woman had an accent Peggy couldn't place; it wasn't any kind of Slavic, but that didn't mean that she wasn't a Soviet spy. It perhaps made it less likely that she was HYDRA, however; Schmidt and his followers hadn't hewed as closely to the Aryan purity dreams of Hitler's inner circle, but that didn't mean they'd put an untermensch in a position of authority even in these desperate times.
"And if I choose not to?" Peggy asked, entirely to gauge her situation. She was immobilized apart from her head and resistance was clearly rhetorical.
The woman held up the pistol. "Then this will light you up like a Christmas tree and the next time you wake up, you'll be covered in your own piss. And then we'll have this conversation again, so I really do recommend the path of least resistance. You did not travel with a change of clothes."
Peggy didn't struggle as she was peeled off of the wall, the grips on her armpits transitioning smoothly to ones capable of dragging her along the floor if she so much as stumbled in her gait. They moved through a brightly-lit hallway devoid of signage or identifying characteristic. Cinderblock walls painted beige and fluorescent lighting along the ceiling; they could have been anywhere or nowhere and it wasn't until they had paraded to the metal door at the end of the hall that she picked up on any kind of clue: there was no smell of cigarettes. Not the heady fug of freshly burned tobacco, not the stale odor of old smoke, nothing at all. In Peggy's experiences as spy and spy-runner, she'd come across very few places where this was the case -- the Project Rebirth scientists had thought nothing of dangling half-ashed cigarettes near open flames and bottles of dangerous reagents -- and none of them were good.
The room was a plain interrogation room, unadorned walls and bare table and uncomfortable chairs and a two-way mirror along the back wall. There was no tape recorder, but that only meant that she couldn't see it. She was directed to the chair facing the mirror and sat down on her own, smoothing her wrinkled skirt like this was an interview and not an interrogation. The image in the mirror was a mess, hair and makeup mussed and ruined, and she carded her fingers through her hair to make it less wild (without disturbing any of the pins, which might be useful later) and using her thumb to minimize the wreck of her lipstick. And then she looked over to the colored woman and smiled. "Shall we begin?"
The woman did not smile back. She watched Peggy carefully as she sat down opposite her, still obviously in control but less absolute about it. Like Peggy was somehow a much greater threat now sitting docilely at a table than she'd been when she'd attacked Lindberg in her cell. It was an interesting reaction, one to consider at a later time, but right now, there was an interrogation to manage. She'd had lessons in this, first from the British SIS and then later from the Americans when she'd been seconded to the SSR, and there'd been the post-war refresher course once the language of their enemies had switched from German to Russian. The basic premise was very simple: there was very little information actually worth dying for and she was not in possession of most of it. Therefore, her objective was not to go to her death without breathing a word, but to instead tell her captors as little as possible without sacrificing either her life or her honor. There were many tricks and tips for accomplishing this and they'd been encouraged to pick a few and practice them so that they would feel natural should they actually need to be applied.
There was little need to prevaricate or dissemble for the first question; her ignorance was unfeigned when the woman asked her where Shield had hidden HYDRA's maser.
"Who is Shield?" Peggy asked because "what on earth does that mean?" would have been too strong, if more accurate. The other half of enduring an interrogation in captivity was learning as much about your captors as possible. The questions themselves were valuable information; she could ask Howard what a maser was later on and if he'd ever known that HYDRA had had one. She presumed more than a few of HYDRA's toys had disappeared into Howard's playrooms after the war, but if he didn't have it, then he'd know where it was. But the mysterious Shield... was this the name of a clandestine agent? A double for HYDRA or a triple for the SSR? Was this someone they thought she knew about because of her war work? Nobody they'd run had carried that codename and she didn't remember it being used for any other agents, but that didn't mean it hadn't been. She'd carried a spectacularly high clearance during the war, but that clearance hadn't gotten her too much from other agencies; the OSS could have had a Shield and they'd have never have told anyone even if asked.
Her interrogator sighed. "That is your opening gambit? To profess ignorance of the organization that you lead, Director Carter?"
Peggy laughed to cover her confusion. Shield was not a person, then. A working group? It couldn't have been anything the SSR had run during the war; she'd have known. The Commandos weren't the only ones bringing back HYDRA toys for the scientists and analysts to play with, but it hadn't been such a large operation that she would never have heard of a find so great that she'd be kidnapped years later to acquire it. Howard would never have let Steve and the boys live it down if they'd been scooped so badly at the time.
"I'm sorry," she said, since a response was required in situations like this. "But if you think I'm the director of anything other than my own booster club, you are sadly misinformed."
The answer to that was the firing of the fat pistol, which carried quite the electrical shock that had been promised and sent her headlong into darkness.
When she awoke, she was not covered in her own urine, but that was only a technicality brought on by dehydration and hardly a complete blessing as a little went a long way. She felt truly revolting as she slid along the tile floor of what was probably her earlier prison cell, away from the damp spot. She was scared, yes, but she was not broken. Not even a little cracked. She'd experienced something painful and horrible and did not relish going through it again in the slightest, but she knew she could survive it just fine.
She revised that conclusion slightly as she wobbled on her feet once her captors had come to drag her back into the light of the hallway and the interrogation room. She was twitchy and weak, the after-effects of the shock, no doubt. But she'd seen Howard and Abe and the others electrocute themselves a dozen times as they'd built the machine that would transform Steve and she knew it wouldn't last.
The first question today was the same as the previous day's -- Peggy assumed it had only been a day, the hair on her legs was still prickly and itchy -- but, small mercy, the response to her identical answer was not. Her interrogator nodded once and then asked her about a magnet the Commandos had brought back from Pontarlier, which Peggy responded to with complete honesty because she knew it didn't matter much -- the magnet had been made of an interesting material that nobody had been able to identify, but it had otherwise just been a magnet. Anything Howard had let the Commandos play with as a toy would not have had strategic value and the boys had spent most of a week pranking each other by magnetizing various articles of their kits before Sergeant Barnes had put a stop to it after finding his razor stuck to a steam pipe over Colonel Phillips's office door.
Her cooperation got her a bottle of Saratoga Springs water, which startled her for being made of plastic and not the glass that it had looked like when it had been set down in front of her. She drank it anyway, desperately thirsty and not caring if it were drugged. Truth serums were mostly fictional and the ones that could do some harm, well, if they were going to keep asking her about things she knew nothing about, having her inhibitions lowered far enough would only make her that much cruder in her ignorance.
But the water was without adulteration and the next question was about Project Rebirth. Peggy lied about the answer because it was about what happened after Abe's murder and that, at least, neither HYDRA nor the Soviets had ever figured out. She thought she'd been quite clever about it, substituting a plausible falsehood in the middle of a largely truthful statement, but her interrogator stood up angrily and ordered Peggy returned to her cell.
"This was to have been yours," the colored woman said as she held up a clear bag full of fruit and what looked to be a wrapped sandwich. "But I will not reward lies."
The hours passed uncomfortably in the darkness; she was desperately hungry to the point of being weakened by it and she stank and the floor was cold and hard and she was sore. She still didn't understand why she'd been taken or by whom, even as it was obvious that they had wanted her and not just the first SSR agent they'd come across. But there'd been no communist propaganda, no ranting about the proletariat or the evils of capitalism. There'd been no blithering on about HYDRA, either. Who else it could be, she had no idea, not yet. And until she did, it was largely pointless to speculate and so she tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in... until the lights turned on and loud noise and screaming filled her cell. It was some sort of music, she realized, rhythmic without being melodic, but the vocals were growls and muttering and it could have no other purpose than its current one. There was no more sleep.
Dizzy and disoriented and weak, she was dragged back to the interrogation room however many hours later. She forced herself to focus and to look at her reflection in the two-way mirror and adjust her hair as best she could; she looked a fright, but she would be a fright with some dignity and so she finger-curled the lank tresses that fell into her eyes.
She got through her bottle of water and then an apple before it was all taken away again and she was returned to her cell. This time, there was no darkness, just hours with the blaring noise and bright lights. The cell stank -- she had a bucket to use as a chamber pot, but it was not emptied out -- and she stank and she was exhausted and so hungry that she didn't even feel hunger anymore, just lassitude and light-headedness made worse by the inability to fully rest. She wondered where Daniel was, what Dooley thought had happened, whether anyone would find her now or even later, if she died here. She might, she understood, although probably not by intent. She appreciated the interrogation techniques on an intellectual level, could see how subtly dangerous they really were, even as she appreciated what her captors were and were not doing. They were making sure she did not die by giving her just enough water and food to live, which was significant. As was the fact that after the initial electrocution, there had been no physical violence. Her interrogator expressed dismay and disappointment verbally and did not even threaten to bring out the weapon again. Which did not mean that physical torture was off the table; quite the opposite -- by bringing it out so quickly and then shelving it, they had made sure she understood that they would not hesitate to return to it later on and that there would be no mercy once they did.
It was an effective threat in that it was something she'd have to keep in the back of her mind, whether she wanted to or not. But after days of little sleep and less food, it did not keep her from passing out in her cell.
The next day, almost giddy with exhaustion and hunger, she was asked about Shield again and HYDRA's maser and when she still did not know what either of those things were, she was struck across the face.
"This has gone on long enough," the colored woman told her in her lilting voice as Peggy fought the urge to either strike back or hold her burning cheek. "You will tell us what you know about where your organization has hidden the maser prototype. You cannot expect us to believe that you do not know anything about the agency you founded or what it has done. Or what you yourself have done, Director. We know you took possession of the maser on the fourth of March, 1949. And you will tell us what you did with it or you will suffer greatly."
Peggy took a moment to gather her racing thoughts before giving in to the urge to laugh hysterically. "My god," she wheezed breathlessly, lightheaded and giggling from the utter ridiculousness of what she'd just heard. And of her situation -- she'd been captured, quite efficiently, by lunatics who'd read too many space serials. "You people are all mad. How on earth am I to know what I did in March of 1949 when it hasn't happened yet?"
The woman looked horrified and furious, but not entirely at Peggy and not, Peggy thought, for being called a madwoman.
"What is today's date?" the woman asked Peggy sharply.
"I have no idea," Peggy retorted, feeling a surge of energy for unsettling her opponent. Let them be off-balance for a minute, although it appeared that the lack of balance was permanent. Really, a director of an agency in 1949 when Dooley wouldn't even let her run a full caseload now. "But you grabbed me on the twentieth of April, 1946 and you'll have to do the reckoning from there on your own."
She didn't think it had been much more than a week, although she also wouldn't have been that surprised to find out it had only been a few days. Time had no meaning in this place, at least not to her, and her captors had been quite effective at keeping her from marking its passage. Which was perhaps embarrassing now that she knew that they were all barmy, but their tactical capacity did not seem touched by their collective insanity.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," the woman spat out, looking first at Peggy and then turning around to whoever was behind the two-way mirror. And then she abruptly started walking toward the door, slamming it shut behind her.
"Was it something I said?" Peggy asked cheerfully to the unseen faces on the other side of the glass.
After a few minutes of waiting, Peggy got up from her chair and started walking around the room. She put her nose up to the glass to look behind it -- she'd done it in the SSR offices and knew that it was possible to see through it if the light was right on the other side. But either the light was too dim or this glass was made of other material because she could see nothing. So she turned away and investigated the rest of the room, finding the stash of water bottles -- she drank two and opened a third -- and then a brown paper bag that had a turkey sandwich in it. She was finishing off both the third water bottle and the sandwich when the door opened again and a man entered. He was followed by two other men, burly and tall, and Peggy resigned herself to a return to her cell.
At least the cell had been cleaned in her absence. The lights were off and remained off, which almost felt like a reward -- which in turn was part of the process. But it did not matter much to her right now and she took the opportunity to rest on a full stomach. When she woke up, it was still dark in her cell and she went back to sleep because she could. She woke a second time to the lights turning on and the door opening and the phalanx of guards that was her escort to the interrogation room.
When she arrived, the colored woman was there, as usual, but the questions were new. They had nothing to do with HYDRA and were about regular events, like who was the mayor and how much it cost to ride the subway and what office James Mead held. They were testing her on events of 1946, she understood, not by whether she knew the answers, but how quickly she knew the answers. After a few years, memories of unimportant things grew indistinct and if she'd been lying, she'd have had to think about her replies. But since she wasn't the lunatic in this asylum, she did not have to do any such thing. Although she had no idea how the Giants were doing in the pennant race; Howard rooted for them with a casual interest, so unless they were doing spectacularly well or spectacularly badly, he rarely mentioned them.
She apparently knew her current events well enough to be given food and water, which she swallowed quickly, before any answers could displease them into taking it away.
The questions eventually circled back to HYDRA, but instead of asking about the maser, the questions were about the organization and who had survived and that was less dangerous ground. Or at least it should have been. She lied about Johann Straum, who'd been taken prisoner in the raid that had cost Steve his life, because he had been HYDRA's best physicist and had been taken out to Los Alamos to work on the nuclear program unbeknownst to the Soviets -- or anyone else not the Brits. Straum was officially listed as deceased and she told her interrogators that, only to be screamed at for her falsehood. She'd been startled by the shouting, but also by the concern that these people weren't taking a wild guess or making another flight of fancy, as they had about the future. Straum, as far as she knew, wasn't subject to the same kind of conspiracy theories that followed Schmidt -- or Steve. Nobody wrote letters to the newspapers insisting that Johann Straum was alive and well and living on a farm in Iowa, or whatever the latest one was. So either these people were the first Straum conspiracists or they had knowledge that Straum was alive and well and living in New Mexico and that was a dangerous thing.
Her dishonestly about Straum got her sent back to her cell. She went to sleep straightaway in case they were angry enough to start blasting noise with the lights on again, but was woken up instead by an alarm of a different sort -- blaring and high-pitched. Was it the SSR come to rescue her? She had wondered and maybe even prayed, but that was different from pinning her hopes high; she had faith in her colleagues and knew they wouldn't abandon her no matter how little they respected her as an agent, but she'd had to focus on her own survival. Now, however, with the alarm blaring, she desperately hoped that they were here to end this ordeal. She didn't hear shooting or shouting, which didn't mean that there wasn't any, but she also knew that the walls of her prison cell weren't as completely soundproof as she'd first thought and she allowed herself to worry that this was not a rescue and the SSR still didn't know where she was. After a week of keeping a stiff upper lip and hoping to be strong, she wasn't sure how she'd handle the disappointment.
The longer the siren was the only sound, the more she wondered what was going on. Was the building on fire? Would they come get her if it was or would they leave her to burn? The door had no way to be opened from the inside; she'd seen it in the light and knew it for fact.
There was something that sounded like an explosion, which could fit either scenario, and then some screaming that sounded more fearful than angry. A fire, then, in a place where nobody dared smoke. There was another explosion and then what was definitely machine gun fire and Peggy had no more time to speculate because the door to her cell flew open and the lights turned on and there were five burly men, two of whom were Gonzalez and Reitman, the latter of whom was carrying a black cloth sack and a large pistol. The sack was a hood and it was pulled over her head as her arms were yanked behind her and tied too tightly with something that bit into the flesh of her wrists.
"Let's go," one of them said. "Before he gets down here."
Whoever was coming had nothing to do with the SSR, whoever he was; Dooley wouldn't countenance a solo adventure. So maybe this was an attack by an unknown third party and her being here was coincidence. Which was disappointing but not crushing. She would take the opportunity presented to her and make the best of it. She let her captors half-drag and half-guide her along the hallways, away from the noise and the smell of acrid smoke. She stepped on sharp bits of something and it hurt, but nobody slowed when she cried out in pain. Finally, they did stop while someone was trying to enter a combination to unlock a door, which they did not seem able to do, and as everyone's attention focused on that, she inched further away until she couldn't feel the proximity of her guards, and then she doubled over violently in an attempt to shake off the hood. It worked only partially, but partially was enough to see out of one eye completely and the other partially and so she could see where she ran as she retraced their steps. She'd rather face the mysterious attacker, who would hopefully not shoot someone in the captivity of his enemies, than risk getting taken further from where she might be found by her own people.
She turned a corner too sharply and nearly slipped to the floor; her stockings were still mostly intact apart from holes at the big toes and she had no traction. Also, running with her hands bound behind her was much harder than she'd imagined it might be and it slowed her down even more. Her captors were in pursuit -- not all of them, but at least two -- and they had both proper attire and much longer legs and it would be a matter of when and not if they'd catch her. She barreled through a set of double doors shoulder first and heard the shouts close behind her, but she could see smoke and fire ahead and if she could get into that chaos, maybe she'd buy herself some distance.
The rubble of an explosion was indeed good cover to hide, but stepping on burning bits of debris hurt like hell and it was hard to breathe where the smoke was thick enough to be useful. She pushed through, eyes watering and fighting for balance and breath, until the smoke started to thin out again, enough to see that the hallway in front of her was deserted. She ran, feet screaming with every step, but when she looked behind to see if anyone was following, she saw that she was leaving a trail of blood and soot for anyone to follow if they tried.
"She's over there! Get her!"
She ran, tears streaming down her face, toward an illuminated sign marked EXIT. She never made it, getting half tackled and half lifted up off the ground and she screamed at the frustration of it more than the pain. She kicked out wildly, but all it did was stub her toes and get her shoulders wrenched even further back. She was turned around and dragged back the way they'd come, her stockinged feet doing nothing to slow their progress. She screamed again, fury and pain given voice, and she was clouted on the back of her head to silence her, but it didn't. She kept screaming -- her throat was raw already from the smoke and chemicals -- if only to keep herself from crying as they went back into the smokiest part of the corridor.
She didn't hear the first shot, didn't know that there had been a first shot, just that Gonzalez stumbled and nearly took them all down with him as he fell. Peggy wound up face-down in charred debris before she was dragged away, rolled over as she did so so that her hands were pinned beneath her. The other one was bigger and burlier and he only needed one arm around her neck and one leg thrown over her thigh to keep her in place -- in front of him, as a shield. Chivalry had never been more dead.
The second shot she saw as a muzzle flash from a few feet away and she flinched, bracing for a pain that never came. The weight behind her and over her grew heavy and limp and it took a moment to realize why. She shimmied on her backside to get her head free of the lax hold, using her chin to knock the limp hand off of her face and kicking free to get out from underneath the dead weight of the corpse behind her. She rolled to her belly and then used her forehead to balance so that she could draw her feet up to kneel as a first step to standing, but that's where she froze because standing in front of her was a longhaired man with a metal arm and two rifles. It was too dark to see his features, but at this point, he could look like Gary Cooper or the Phantom of the Opera and she would not care.
"I appreciate the assistance," she said with as much control as she could muster. Her voice was rough and raw and low and possibly not even audible. But she thought the mysterious attacker -- for who else could this be? -- could hear her. "But if I could impose on you once more to free my arms, I would be very grateful."
He didn't move for a long moment, long enough for her to wonder if he'd heard her after all or whether he'd understood or, if he understood, whether he planned to kill her after all. But then he shouldered one of the rifles and pulled a combat knife out of his belt and walked behind her. She felt two tugs and then her arms were loose and her shoulders protested vehemently at the freedom. She rolled them anyway, hissing at the pain, and moved to stand up. She was surprised to feel a gentle hand at her elbow to steady her, even more to see that the hand was chrome and not flesh.
"Thank you," she said, but any quip she might have made died on her lips. Their proximity now that she was standing brought her close enough to see the man's face. See his eyes.
"Sergeant Barnes?"
6k | PG-ish | Peggy Carter
Peggy Carter is far from home...
Peggy woke up in a heap, a tangle of limbs she'd never have settled into on her own.
"Oh, Christ on a cracker."
The soreness as she sat up confirmed that she'd been thrown wherever she was now and her right shoulder popped loudly as she rolled it; it was probably only her imagination that the noise echoed throughout the room.
It was too dark to see anything, no windows or lights, not even a glimmer of a glow anywhere, and so she didn't know where she was or how she'd gotten here. She heard nothing, no breathing, no distant voices or music or airplanes or subways, no scrape of furniture against floor, nothing that could give her a clue where she was or if there was anyone with her. She sensed something solid behind her, which proved to be a wall, and leaned against it as she stretched her legs in front of her and tried to figure out what the bloody hell had happened.
The last thing she remembered was going up to Groton with Sousa at the Navy's request... Daniel. Was he here with her? Was he hurt?
She whispered his name a few times, then pushed herself to kneeling to feel around in case he'd been knocked out as she'd been. But she heard and felt nothing and accepted that if he'd been caught along with her, whoever had them had likely separated them. And if he hadn't been caught with her, he was either already sending for reinforcements or he was dead and beyond her concern, at least for the moment.
Getting out of here, wherever here happened to be, remained her first and foremost task.
With her right hand sliding up the wall for guidance, she stood up carefully, then started walking slowly counterclockwise around the room. She hoped to find some sort of obstacle she could use as a weapon -- a chair, a table, a convenient pry bar -- or toward an escape. There had to be a door or a blacked-out window somewhere; she hadn't been spirited into a room with no exit. She had lost her shoes somewhere along the way, so she padded silently along the cold tile floor in her stockings, counting her steps so she'd have a sense of how large the room was. Nine steps into the second wall, she felt a window ledge. But when she felt along the ledge to the window itself, there was an iron grate over it. She felt along the grate to see if there was a lock she could maybe pick -- there were still some pins left in her hair -- but she couldn't find one.
"Damn it."
The third wall had nothing, the fourth wall had a seam that should have meant a doorway, but she couldn't find a knob or a handle or, when she felt further along the wall, any hinges. The door opened outward, but not from the inside. A prison cell, then, either purpose-built or something else like a retasked walk-in meat locker. There would be no escape without knowing more. So she sat down next to the seam, waiting for whoever had put her here to return, and tried to piece together how she'd gotten here in the first place.
The Navy had called the SSR because there had been three attempts to break into one of the experimental submarine propulsion labs and the third attempt had left some 'peculiar' evidence behind. Post-war, the SSR had become the clearinghouse for anything too weird to be easily explained by the military's own investigative services, mostly because it shifted the blame off of their shoulders. In this case, the Navy had reached out because the would-be thieves had tried to cut their way through steel doors with something that might have been a blowtorch but had left a scorch pattern more like what HYDRA's blasters had done at close range. Whether it would be better for it to be a HYDRA blaster in some criminal's hand, a fragment of HYDRA itself, or some new danger with some new weapon was up for discussion. Blasters were hard to come by even for the most enterprising of criminal organizations, so the thought had been that it was either a surviving HYDRA splinter cell or something new. Howard had been consulted for the latter and had dumbfounded them all with the breadth of possibilities, but half of what he'd told them about hadn't been invented yet and he wasn't sure when it would be. The other half... Howard was the smartest boy on the block, but he was hardly the only genius and the Soviets had taken their share of the intellectual loot as a prize of war.
That the Soviets were trying to steal submarine secrets from the Navy was a more comfortable notion to those in charge than the idea that HYDRA had recovered well enough to make itself a force again, so that had been the angle Peggy and Sousa had been told to follow up first. Peggy hadn't been so sure and had said as much to no effect, but Daniel, away from the office and its politics, had been willing to listen and admitted that they could not go about looking to find evidence that fitted the conclusion they hoped to reach. Nothing they'd looked at so far, which had just been the Office of Naval Intelligence's files, had been definitive one way or another and so the only way forward was with an open mind.
All of which had led her to a closed room, it would seem. She hoped Daniel was all right, wherever he was, and admitted that, just this once, she would not mind being the damsel in distress rescued by the knights in shining armor, even if it meant being told that her place was in the office making coffee. (She had no intention of listening or obeying, but she'd be willing to bite her tongue just this once.)
Her first visitors were not the cavalry, however, sneering or otherwise. She had dozed off at some point -- constant vigilance was exhausting -- and woke up to the sound of the door being unlocked. She slid up the wall to standing and pressed herself against it, waiting to strike as soon as someone came through. The door opened silently and the light that came through was blinding after so much darkness, but she pounced on the first man through the door and brought him down to the ground with enough force to knock the wind out of her victim and cause herself some pain as her left knee hit the tile floor hard. They wrestled and she maintained her position on top -- once upon a time, she hadn't watched the Commandos tussle purely for the aesthetics -- but that only left her primed to be dragged away by the others who'd followed, pinioned to the wall at the armpits by two sets of strong hands gripping tightly and her legs held fast by those of her captors.
The lights flicked on and burned her eyes with their brightness, making them tear. She blinked to clear them, but still couldn't see the owner of the voice who spoke first.
"Considering what the old lady did," a woman said somewhere to her left, "you should have been more careful. Gonzalez, Reitman, make sure you've got a good grip before you move her. Lindberg, get off the floor and go put your dignity back together somewhere else."
Peggy's eyes had cleared enough to see that the woman speaker was a tall colored woman dressed in men's clothing and she was holding a pistol of some kind in her left hand.
"Good morning, Agent Carter," the woman said with a smile, putting a curious emphasis on the 'Agent' as Lindberg scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off before stalking away without a word of protest. "So glad you could join us. If you'd please come with us, this can all be taken care of with the minimum of fuss."
Peggy had no idea what 'this' was, but it undoubtedly was nothing good. The colored woman had an accent Peggy couldn't place; it wasn't any kind of Slavic, but that didn't mean that she wasn't a Soviet spy. It perhaps made it less likely that she was HYDRA, however; Schmidt and his followers hadn't hewed as closely to the Aryan purity dreams of Hitler's inner circle, but that didn't mean they'd put an untermensch in a position of authority even in these desperate times.
"And if I choose not to?" Peggy asked, entirely to gauge her situation. She was immobilized apart from her head and resistance was clearly rhetorical.
The woman held up the pistol. "Then this will light you up like a Christmas tree and the next time you wake up, you'll be covered in your own piss. And then we'll have this conversation again, so I really do recommend the path of least resistance. You did not travel with a change of clothes."
Peggy didn't struggle as she was peeled off of the wall, the grips on her armpits transitioning smoothly to ones capable of dragging her along the floor if she so much as stumbled in her gait. They moved through a brightly-lit hallway devoid of signage or identifying characteristic. Cinderblock walls painted beige and fluorescent lighting along the ceiling; they could have been anywhere or nowhere and it wasn't until they had paraded to the metal door at the end of the hall that she picked up on any kind of clue: there was no smell of cigarettes. Not the heady fug of freshly burned tobacco, not the stale odor of old smoke, nothing at all. In Peggy's experiences as spy and spy-runner, she'd come across very few places where this was the case -- the Project Rebirth scientists had thought nothing of dangling half-ashed cigarettes near open flames and bottles of dangerous reagents -- and none of them were good.
The room was a plain interrogation room, unadorned walls and bare table and uncomfortable chairs and a two-way mirror along the back wall. There was no tape recorder, but that only meant that she couldn't see it. She was directed to the chair facing the mirror and sat down on her own, smoothing her wrinkled skirt like this was an interview and not an interrogation. The image in the mirror was a mess, hair and makeup mussed and ruined, and she carded her fingers through her hair to make it less wild (without disturbing any of the pins, which might be useful later) and using her thumb to minimize the wreck of her lipstick. And then she looked over to the colored woman and smiled. "Shall we begin?"
The woman did not smile back. She watched Peggy carefully as she sat down opposite her, still obviously in control but less absolute about it. Like Peggy was somehow a much greater threat now sitting docilely at a table than she'd been when she'd attacked Lindberg in her cell. It was an interesting reaction, one to consider at a later time, but right now, there was an interrogation to manage. She'd had lessons in this, first from the British SIS and then later from the Americans when she'd been seconded to the SSR, and there'd been the post-war refresher course once the language of their enemies had switched from German to Russian. The basic premise was very simple: there was very little information actually worth dying for and she was not in possession of most of it. Therefore, her objective was not to go to her death without breathing a word, but to instead tell her captors as little as possible without sacrificing either her life or her honor. There were many tricks and tips for accomplishing this and they'd been encouraged to pick a few and practice them so that they would feel natural should they actually need to be applied.
There was little need to prevaricate or dissemble for the first question; her ignorance was unfeigned when the woman asked her where Shield had hidden HYDRA's maser.
"Who is Shield?" Peggy asked because "what on earth does that mean?" would have been too strong, if more accurate. The other half of enduring an interrogation in captivity was learning as much about your captors as possible. The questions themselves were valuable information; she could ask Howard what a maser was later on and if he'd ever known that HYDRA had had one. She presumed more than a few of HYDRA's toys had disappeared into Howard's playrooms after the war, but if he didn't have it, then he'd know where it was. But the mysterious Shield... was this the name of a clandestine agent? A double for HYDRA or a triple for the SSR? Was this someone they thought she knew about because of her war work? Nobody they'd run had carried that codename and she didn't remember it being used for any other agents, but that didn't mean it hadn't been. She'd carried a spectacularly high clearance during the war, but that clearance hadn't gotten her too much from other agencies; the OSS could have had a Shield and they'd have never have told anyone even if asked.
Her interrogator sighed. "That is your opening gambit? To profess ignorance of the organization that you lead, Director Carter?"
Peggy laughed to cover her confusion. Shield was not a person, then. A working group? It couldn't have been anything the SSR had run during the war; she'd have known. The Commandos weren't the only ones bringing back HYDRA toys for the scientists and analysts to play with, but it hadn't been such a large operation that she would never have heard of a find so great that she'd be kidnapped years later to acquire it. Howard would never have let Steve and the boys live it down if they'd been scooped so badly at the time.
"I'm sorry," she said, since a response was required in situations like this. "But if you think I'm the director of anything other than my own booster club, you are sadly misinformed."
The answer to that was the firing of the fat pistol, which carried quite the electrical shock that had been promised and sent her headlong into darkness.
When she awoke, she was not covered in her own urine, but that was only a technicality brought on by dehydration and hardly a complete blessing as a little went a long way. She felt truly revolting as she slid along the tile floor of what was probably her earlier prison cell, away from the damp spot. She was scared, yes, but she was not broken. Not even a little cracked. She'd experienced something painful and horrible and did not relish going through it again in the slightest, but she knew she could survive it just fine.
She revised that conclusion slightly as she wobbled on her feet once her captors had come to drag her back into the light of the hallway and the interrogation room. She was twitchy and weak, the after-effects of the shock, no doubt. But she'd seen Howard and Abe and the others electrocute themselves a dozen times as they'd built the machine that would transform Steve and she knew it wouldn't last.
The first question today was the same as the previous day's -- Peggy assumed it had only been a day, the hair on her legs was still prickly and itchy -- but, small mercy, the response to her identical answer was not. Her interrogator nodded once and then asked her about a magnet the Commandos had brought back from Pontarlier, which Peggy responded to with complete honesty because she knew it didn't matter much -- the magnet had been made of an interesting material that nobody had been able to identify, but it had otherwise just been a magnet. Anything Howard had let the Commandos play with as a toy would not have had strategic value and the boys had spent most of a week pranking each other by magnetizing various articles of their kits before Sergeant Barnes had put a stop to it after finding his razor stuck to a steam pipe over Colonel Phillips's office door.
Her cooperation got her a bottle of Saratoga Springs water, which startled her for being made of plastic and not the glass that it had looked like when it had been set down in front of her. She drank it anyway, desperately thirsty and not caring if it were drugged. Truth serums were mostly fictional and the ones that could do some harm, well, if they were going to keep asking her about things she knew nothing about, having her inhibitions lowered far enough would only make her that much cruder in her ignorance.
But the water was without adulteration and the next question was about Project Rebirth. Peggy lied about the answer because it was about what happened after Abe's murder and that, at least, neither HYDRA nor the Soviets had ever figured out. She thought she'd been quite clever about it, substituting a plausible falsehood in the middle of a largely truthful statement, but her interrogator stood up angrily and ordered Peggy returned to her cell.
"This was to have been yours," the colored woman said as she held up a clear bag full of fruit and what looked to be a wrapped sandwich. "But I will not reward lies."
The hours passed uncomfortably in the darkness; she was desperately hungry to the point of being weakened by it and she stank and the floor was cold and hard and she was sore. She still didn't understand why she'd been taken or by whom, even as it was obvious that they had wanted her and not just the first SSR agent they'd come across. But there'd been no communist propaganda, no ranting about the proletariat or the evils of capitalism. There'd been no blithering on about HYDRA, either. Who else it could be, she had no idea, not yet. And until she did, it was largely pointless to speculate and so she tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in... until the lights turned on and loud noise and screaming filled her cell. It was some sort of music, she realized, rhythmic without being melodic, but the vocals were growls and muttering and it could have no other purpose than its current one. There was no more sleep.
Dizzy and disoriented and weak, she was dragged back to the interrogation room however many hours later. She forced herself to focus and to look at her reflection in the two-way mirror and adjust her hair as best she could; she looked a fright, but she would be a fright with some dignity and so she finger-curled the lank tresses that fell into her eyes.
She got through her bottle of water and then an apple before it was all taken away again and she was returned to her cell. This time, there was no darkness, just hours with the blaring noise and bright lights. The cell stank -- she had a bucket to use as a chamber pot, but it was not emptied out -- and she stank and she was exhausted and so hungry that she didn't even feel hunger anymore, just lassitude and light-headedness made worse by the inability to fully rest. She wondered where Daniel was, what Dooley thought had happened, whether anyone would find her now or even later, if she died here. She might, she understood, although probably not by intent. She appreciated the interrogation techniques on an intellectual level, could see how subtly dangerous they really were, even as she appreciated what her captors were and were not doing. They were making sure she did not die by giving her just enough water and food to live, which was significant. As was the fact that after the initial electrocution, there had been no physical violence. Her interrogator expressed dismay and disappointment verbally and did not even threaten to bring out the weapon again. Which did not mean that physical torture was off the table; quite the opposite -- by bringing it out so quickly and then shelving it, they had made sure she understood that they would not hesitate to return to it later on and that there would be no mercy once they did.
It was an effective threat in that it was something she'd have to keep in the back of her mind, whether she wanted to or not. But after days of little sleep and less food, it did not keep her from passing out in her cell.
The next day, almost giddy with exhaustion and hunger, she was asked about Shield again and HYDRA's maser and when she still did not know what either of those things were, she was struck across the face.
"This has gone on long enough," the colored woman told her in her lilting voice as Peggy fought the urge to either strike back or hold her burning cheek. "You will tell us what you know about where your organization has hidden the maser prototype. You cannot expect us to believe that you do not know anything about the agency you founded or what it has done. Or what you yourself have done, Director. We know you took possession of the maser on the fourth of March, 1949. And you will tell us what you did with it or you will suffer greatly."
Peggy took a moment to gather her racing thoughts before giving in to the urge to laugh hysterically. "My god," she wheezed breathlessly, lightheaded and giggling from the utter ridiculousness of what she'd just heard. And of her situation -- she'd been captured, quite efficiently, by lunatics who'd read too many space serials. "You people are all mad. How on earth am I to know what I did in March of 1949 when it hasn't happened yet?"
The woman looked horrified and furious, but not entirely at Peggy and not, Peggy thought, for being called a madwoman.
"What is today's date?" the woman asked Peggy sharply.
"I have no idea," Peggy retorted, feeling a surge of energy for unsettling her opponent. Let them be off-balance for a minute, although it appeared that the lack of balance was permanent. Really, a director of an agency in 1949 when Dooley wouldn't even let her run a full caseload now. "But you grabbed me on the twentieth of April, 1946 and you'll have to do the reckoning from there on your own."
She didn't think it had been much more than a week, although she also wouldn't have been that surprised to find out it had only been a few days. Time had no meaning in this place, at least not to her, and her captors had been quite effective at keeping her from marking its passage. Which was perhaps embarrassing now that she knew that they were all barmy, but their tactical capacity did not seem touched by their collective insanity.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," the woman spat out, looking first at Peggy and then turning around to whoever was behind the two-way mirror. And then she abruptly started walking toward the door, slamming it shut behind her.
"Was it something I said?" Peggy asked cheerfully to the unseen faces on the other side of the glass.
After a few minutes of waiting, Peggy got up from her chair and started walking around the room. She put her nose up to the glass to look behind it -- she'd done it in the SSR offices and knew that it was possible to see through it if the light was right on the other side. But either the light was too dim or this glass was made of other material because she could see nothing. So she turned away and investigated the rest of the room, finding the stash of water bottles -- she drank two and opened a third -- and then a brown paper bag that had a turkey sandwich in it. She was finishing off both the third water bottle and the sandwich when the door opened again and a man entered. He was followed by two other men, burly and tall, and Peggy resigned herself to a return to her cell.
At least the cell had been cleaned in her absence. The lights were off and remained off, which almost felt like a reward -- which in turn was part of the process. But it did not matter much to her right now and she took the opportunity to rest on a full stomach. When she woke up, it was still dark in her cell and she went back to sleep because she could. She woke a second time to the lights turning on and the door opening and the phalanx of guards that was her escort to the interrogation room.
When she arrived, the colored woman was there, as usual, but the questions were new. They had nothing to do with HYDRA and were about regular events, like who was the mayor and how much it cost to ride the subway and what office James Mead held. They were testing her on events of 1946, she understood, not by whether she knew the answers, but how quickly she knew the answers. After a few years, memories of unimportant things grew indistinct and if she'd been lying, she'd have had to think about her replies. But since she wasn't the lunatic in this asylum, she did not have to do any such thing. Although she had no idea how the Giants were doing in the pennant race; Howard rooted for them with a casual interest, so unless they were doing spectacularly well or spectacularly badly, he rarely mentioned them.
She apparently knew her current events well enough to be given food and water, which she swallowed quickly, before any answers could displease them into taking it away.
The questions eventually circled back to HYDRA, but instead of asking about the maser, the questions were about the organization and who had survived and that was less dangerous ground. Or at least it should have been. She lied about Johann Straum, who'd been taken prisoner in the raid that had cost Steve his life, because he had been HYDRA's best physicist and had been taken out to Los Alamos to work on the nuclear program unbeknownst to the Soviets -- or anyone else not the Brits. Straum was officially listed as deceased and she told her interrogators that, only to be screamed at for her falsehood. She'd been startled by the shouting, but also by the concern that these people weren't taking a wild guess or making another flight of fancy, as they had about the future. Straum, as far as she knew, wasn't subject to the same kind of conspiracy theories that followed Schmidt -- or Steve. Nobody wrote letters to the newspapers insisting that Johann Straum was alive and well and living on a farm in Iowa, or whatever the latest one was. So either these people were the first Straum conspiracists or they had knowledge that Straum was alive and well and living in New Mexico and that was a dangerous thing.
Her dishonestly about Straum got her sent back to her cell. She went to sleep straightaway in case they were angry enough to start blasting noise with the lights on again, but was woken up instead by an alarm of a different sort -- blaring and high-pitched. Was it the SSR come to rescue her? She had wondered and maybe even prayed, but that was different from pinning her hopes high; she had faith in her colleagues and knew they wouldn't abandon her no matter how little they respected her as an agent, but she'd had to focus on her own survival. Now, however, with the alarm blaring, she desperately hoped that they were here to end this ordeal. She didn't hear shooting or shouting, which didn't mean that there wasn't any, but she also knew that the walls of her prison cell weren't as completely soundproof as she'd first thought and she allowed herself to worry that this was not a rescue and the SSR still didn't know where she was. After a week of keeping a stiff upper lip and hoping to be strong, she wasn't sure how she'd handle the disappointment.
The longer the siren was the only sound, the more she wondered what was going on. Was the building on fire? Would they come get her if it was or would they leave her to burn? The door had no way to be opened from the inside; she'd seen it in the light and knew it for fact.
There was something that sounded like an explosion, which could fit either scenario, and then some screaming that sounded more fearful than angry. A fire, then, in a place where nobody dared smoke. There was another explosion and then what was definitely machine gun fire and Peggy had no more time to speculate because the door to her cell flew open and the lights turned on and there were five burly men, two of whom were Gonzalez and Reitman, the latter of whom was carrying a black cloth sack and a large pistol. The sack was a hood and it was pulled over her head as her arms were yanked behind her and tied too tightly with something that bit into the flesh of her wrists.
"Let's go," one of them said. "Before he gets down here."
Whoever was coming had nothing to do with the SSR, whoever he was; Dooley wouldn't countenance a solo adventure. So maybe this was an attack by an unknown third party and her being here was coincidence. Which was disappointing but not crushing. She would take the opportunity presented to her and make the best of it. She let her captors half-drag and half-guide her along the hallways, away from the noise and the smell of acrid smoke. She stepped on sharp bits of something and it hurt, but nobody slowed when she cried out in pain. Finally, they did stop while someone was trying to enter a combination to unlock a door, which they did not seem able to do, and as everyone's attention focused on that, she inched further away until she couldn't feel the proximity of her guards, and then she doubled over violently in an attempt to shake off the hood. It worked only partially, but partially was enough to see out of one eye completely and the other partially and so she could see where she ran as she retraced their steps. She'd rather face the mysterious attacker, who would hopefully not shoot someone in the captivity of his enemies, than risk getting taken further from where she might be found by her own people.
She turned a corner too sharply and nearly slipped to the floor; her stockings were still mostly intact apart from holes at the big toes and she had no traction. Also, running with her hands bound behind her was much harder than she'd imagined it might be and it slowed her down even more. Her captors were in pursuit -- not all of them, but at least two -- and they had both proper attire and much longer legs and it would be a matter of when and not if they'd catch her. She barreled through a set of double doors shoulder first and heard the shouts close behind her, but she could see smoke and fire ahead and if she could get into that chaos, maybe she'd buy herself some distance.
The rubble of an explosion was indeed good cover to hide, but stepping on burning bits of debris hurt like hell and it was hard to breathe where the smoke was thick enough to be useful. She pushed through, eyes watering and fighting for balance and breath, until the smoke started to thin out again, enough to see that the hallway in front of her was deserted. She ran, feet screaming with every step, but when she looked behind to see if anyone was following, she saw that she was leaving a trail of blood and soot for anyone to follow if they tried.
"She's over there! Get her!"
She ran, tears streaming down her face, toward an illuminated sign marked EXIT. She never made it, getting half tackled and half lifted up off the ground and she screamed at the frustration of it more than the pain. She kicked out wildly, but all it did was stub her toes and get her shoulders wrenched even further back. She was turned around and dragged back the way they'd come, her stockinged feet doing nothing to slow their progress. She screamed again, fury and pain given voice, and she was clouted on the back of her head to silence her, but it didn't. She kept screaming -- her throat was raw already from the smoke and chemicals -- if only to keep herself from crying as they went back into the smokiest part of the corridor.
She didn't hear the first shot, didn't know that there had been a first shot, just that Gonzalez stumbled and nearly took them all down with him as he fell. Peggy wound up face-down in charred debris before she was dragged away, rolled over as she did so so that her hands were pinned beneath her. The other one was bigger and burlier and he only needed one arm around her neck and one leg thrown over her thigh to keep her in place -- in front of him, as a shield. Chivalry had never been more dead.
The second shot she saw as a muzzle flash from a few feet away and she flinched, bracing for a pain that never came. The weight behind her and over her grew heavy and limp and it took a moment to realize why. She shimmied on her backside to get her head free of the lax hold, using her chin to knock the limp hand off of her face and kicking free to get out from underneath the dead weight of the corpse behind her. She rolled to her belly and then used her forehead to balance so that she could draw her feet up to kneel as a first step to standing, but that's where she froze because standing in front of her was a longhaired man with a metal arm and two rifles. It was too dark to see his features, but at this point, he could look like Gary Cooper or the Phantom of the Opera and she would not care.
"I appreciate the assistance," she said with as much control as she could muster. Her voice was rough and raw and low and possibly not even audible. But she thought the mysterious attacker -- for who else could this be? -- could hear her. "But if I could impose on you once more to free my arms, I would be very grateful."
He didn't move for a long moment, long enough for her to wonder if he'd heard her after all or whether he'd understood or, if he understood, whether he planned to kill her after all. But then he shouldered one of the rifles and pulled a combat knife out of his belt and walked behind her. She felt two tugs and then her arms were loose and her shoulders protested vehemently at the freedom. She rolled them anyway, hissing at the pain, and moved to stand up. She was surprised to feel a gentle hand at her elbow to steady her, even more to see that the hand was chrome and not flesh.
"Thank you," she said, but any quip she might have made died on her lips. Their proximity now that she was standing brought her close enough to see the man's face. See his eyes.
"Sergeant Barnes?"
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Date: 2016-01-17 07:58 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 02:58 (UTC)