Be Still My Heart

Level Seven

Wanda POV-

Y/N places her hand down onto my thigh carefully holding onto me as the van pulls away from the curb. This situation is new, out of her control, and I can tell she is trying to hide how anxious she is feeling.

It is reassuring knowing that Stark, Nat, Steve, and Peter can hear us and the conversations around us. They are tracking our locations and Stark claims that the tracker is undetectable. For our sake, I hope he is right otherwise that will be fun to try and create a convincing lie about it on the spot. I'm not as worried about the earpieces because Stark has used that tech before and evaded detectors.

I tune back into Drew's ramble about Hydra. He is mainly looking at Y/N but will glance at me every couple sentences as well. "So, when we get there which should be," he looks down at his watch then through the front window of the van, "in about forty five minutes I think, boss wants us to check you for weapons and run you through a metal detector just to make sure you aren't lying about anything."

He pulls his phone out from his pocket to check a message before setting it down on the seat next to him. "To save us some time, do you guys have any on you? We won't need to confiscate them unless you give us a reason to though."

Drew is too excited about all of this. He has all of his memories from his childhood with Y/N while she doesn't. Although, his deteriorated mindset could also be feeding into this false positive attitude.

Y/N kicks her bag over towards Drew, "I have my handgun, 9mm. That should be it." She turns to look at me for confirmation, "Yeah, I don't have anything."

Drew leans down and unzips Y/N's bag to see the pistol resting on the top of her clothes with extra rounds of bullets, her strap to carry it, and magazines. "Perfect. So, yeah. We'll just have you pass through the metal detector when we get there and you're all set. You'll get your identification and chip as well."

Y/N's head cocks slightly at his last couple of words. "I'm sorry, chip?" Drew nods his head. "Yep, goes in your forearm. Gives you access to certain areas of the building and can't be as easily swiped from someone like an access card. Your badge is just to quickly identify you."

Another damn needle. I lift my hand and place it on top of Y/N's for comfort. She spreads her fingers allowing me to lock ours together. Y/N looks up from our hands to meet Drew's gaze again. "When do we get to meet the boss man?"

Drew lets out a small laugh, "Boss woman. And you both will get to meet her later. She wants to run a quick test on your abilities. Easy day. Get chipped, I'll show you to your room, abilities test, and you're done."

He makes everything sound easy like this is some camp instead of Hydra. Why are they just taking Y/N's word that we want to be here? They have to suspect that we have an ulterior motive. And Y/N gets to keep her gun? We're going to need to be super careful.

I think Y/N has the same thoughts as me. She glances over at me briefly, a nonverbal question of are you okay? I lightly squeeze her hand, an action that has turned into common practice in our relationship to communicate with each other.

Drew and Y/N make small talk the rest of the short ride as we leave the town and drive into the woods. We pull up to a tiny grey guards shack. The driver rolls down his window and flashes his badge to get us past the guards.

The dirt road we are traveling on now turns to pavement as we pass through some kind of invisible barrier. It reveals what looks like a college campus. There are one and two story buildings that look like they would hold classrooms, lab like buildings, a cafeteria, and buildings surrounding the area that look like apartments.

I beat Y/N to asking first, "What is this place?" Drew gets a proud look on his face as he watches just like us out the front window.

"Hydra has an immense amount of resources. This small makeshift town is one of many across the world. It is blocked to satellite cameras and undetectable from above. We had a former scientist that was able to replicate the shield that Wakanda uses. It can't prevent people from coming or going but it looks like we are in the middle of a forest with nothing for miles and miles around us outside the bubble."