𝗗𝗜𝗚𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗟 𝗦𝗜𝗟𝗘𝗡𝗖𝗘

Eat Your Young

Isabell Hansen cannot sleep.

She hasn't been able to in a while, in fact, and although she has James fooled, she really wishes she could get some real rest, for once.

Every night, she curls up in the back seat, listening to the sound of James' breathing, but she doesn't really fall asleep. She just lies there, eyes tight shut, and waits for the morning to come. No matter how tired she is, there is always something stopping her.

When she's sure James is asleep, she wriggles out from his grasp and perches in the front, watching the rise and fall of his chest. She'd like to say he looks peaceful in his sleep, but really, it's anything but. He twitches and groans and thrashes around, crying out in languages she doesn't understand and dragging his nails down the seats in front of him.

When she can bear it no longer, usually when his crying becomes particularly frequent, she plasters on a smile, shakes him awake, and then she feels better again.

It is easy to be happy when James is awake.

When he's out, however, lost in his memories, Isabell's own come back to haunt her. She sighs as he tosses and turns, and sometimes, she thinks about what life was like before him.

She thinks about being The Faceless Girl.

Because Isabell has killed people before. Thousands, she's sure of it, and she's done it by herself, too.

When they put her with The Winter Soldier, those solitary missions seemed to fade into the background of her files, but she was one of the greatest assassins in the world, once.

James took her legacy away.

She has never been quite sure of how to feel about that.

Before him, she was ruthless. She was the leader of her group, because yes, there had been a group, and she had been flawless. Bodies fell at her feet as if bowing down to her, and the droplets of blood that stained her skin were like diamonds. Isabell was the queen of her profession, a sole survivor of brutal experiments and trained in death like it was an art. The tale of HYDRA's 'Indestructibles' project had become infamous and gruesome because she had made it so. She had simply been that evil. She had been worse than anyone could imagine.

Sure, she may now be Iz, forever curled up and coddled in Bucky's arms, protected rather than the protector. She is free to be childish, free to whine and laugh and smile at strangers, but that is all recent. Before James, Isabell's life was bleak. If she could've died, she would've put her gun to her head and pulled the trigger in an instant.

HYDRA destroyed every possibility of her happiness, and then, when there was only one thing left, they made her tear it to shreds herself.

There are things that James doesn't know. There are things Isabell has done, things that they made her do, that would make him sick to his stomach. She knows they make her feel like that, anyway.

Her life before The Winter Soldier is a time she would die before reliving. And yet, watching James sleep on the seat beside her, Isabell can't help but cast her mind back. Back, back, back, before they locked her in a cell with him. Before she completely lost her mind. Before she got it back again.

Moscow, 2011.

Isabell closes her eyes and lets the memories pull her under.

⋇⋆✦⋆⋇

Moscow, 2011.

There were seven of them. There always had been.

Stephen, Flavia, Annalise, Jakob, Aleksander, Kitty and Isabell. Not that their names really mattered. They were numbers to HYDRA, ghosts in the streets, and with each other, there was no need to refer to one another. They were each other's competition, their only friends, the only scrap of comfort that seemed plausible in a situation such as theirs.