Sova
The drive was long. Too long.
Not in minutes. In the way silence drags across your skin like frostbite. In the way you feel the corners of the van closing in around you with each turn. I tried to track the direction by instinct—counting curves, dips in the road, the tempo of the engine—but one too many roundabouts threw me off. They knew what they were doing. I didn't like not knowing where I was going. That used to be something I trained myself to accept. Obedience without awareness. Motion without purpose.
But I'm not the same.
Or... I thought I wasn't.
The back of the van had no windows. Just hard metal walls and colder faces. Two agents sat across from me, full black body armor, helmets with mirrored visors—faceless, wordless, forgettable. Two more in the front, I guessed, from the weight of their footsteps before we loaded in. Pierce sat beside me, perfectly at ease. Like a king being chauffeured to his private palace.
He hadn't spoken a word since I changed.
He handed me my suit—the old one. Black tactical fabric, reinforced at the joints, the signature white sigil stitched over the chest like a scar I'd never earned but had always worn. I folded the dress and left it on the rail by the alley. I didn't need it anymore. And yet, when I zipped the suit up, something felt... off. Like the seams didn't fit quite right. As if it remembered everything I had done to leave it behind.
Pierce looked at me now with that same thin smile. Not warm. Not inviting. Satisfied. A man who knew every piece of the puzzle was clicking into place, exactly how he'd planned it.
His eyes tracked me like a scientist watching an old experiment breathe again.
We arrived at the base after what felt like hours. Cold steel. Reinforced gates. Surveillance towers and white lights that burned like artificial stars. Agents lingered in the halls as we walked through, some slowing, some whispering behind their hands.
I didn't look at them.
I didn't need to.
Pierce barely spared them a glance. He called out to a man waiting at the end of the corridor, tall and broad with a trimmed beard and military stance.
"Rumlow," Pierce said with a nod, "bring our guest to the reevaluation room."
Brock Rumlow met my gaze with professional detachment. No smirk. No reaction. Just a man doing what he was told. Same sharp jaw, same calculating stare. His black shirt clung to his frame, tactical headset curled around one ear. Neat beard. Smug stillness.
He looked at me, not as a person, but as a file come to life.
"Follow me," he said.
I followed him down a dim hall, our boots echoing against the concrete. I kept my head high, back straight, every movement measured.
They would be watching.
The room was sterile. Steel walls, single table, four chairs. One camera mounted in the corner. Recording light blinking red.
Rumlow gestured to the chair. I sat.
He didn't speak at first. Just placed a black tablet on the table and tapped the screen. His questions came clinical, detached, standard HYDRA procedure.
"How would you eliminate a high-value target in a crowded market district?"
"Sniper perch, third-story vantage. Three-second window. Headshot through the canopy."
YOU ARE READING
' ' Perfect Enough To Break ' '
FanfictionOnce, they were weapons. Now, they're something far more dangerous. Trained by HYDRA. Sharpened into silence. Together, they were nearly unstoppable-until their paths split in blood and secrecy. Years later, he's with SHIELD, with the Avengers, figh...
