Bobbi
“It’s Barbara, right?”
“Technically. But my friends call me Bobbi.”
“Are we friends?”
“I guess we’ll have to be after I pour out my inner most thoughts and feelings to you,” Bobbi said, smiling from where she was propped up slightly in her hospital bed. She looked relaxed, probably due to all the medication running through her, but her jaw was tense, leading Andrew to suspect she was wary of him and his intentions.
His suspicions were confirmed when she asked, “So what’s this all about? Did Hunter persuade you to evaluate me because he thinks I’m suffering from PTSD or something?”
“No,” Andrew replied. “Truthfully, Coulson asked that I evaluate everyone on his team. Just to make sure you’re all coping well.”
“Well, no complaints here,” Bobbi said, wincing as she tried to sit up a little more. “Still a little sore, but being tortured by a psychopath and his lunatic girlfriend will do that to you.”
So that was how she deflected: by telling the whole truth, no matter how horrific it was. By not sugar coating the horrible things that had happened to her, she was trying to discourage him from asking any questions.
Ironic that her method was honesty when she told lies for a living.
“Do you remember what they did to you?” he asked. With all the morphine she was on, it shouldn’t take much to get her to open up to him. Even if she was a super spy.
“Hard to not remember it. What with the intense pain and the needles and all,” she said, still refusing to sugarcoat what Ward had done to her.
“Needles?”
“Yeah. He stuck needles under my fingernails to try and get me to apologize to his crazy new girlfriend.”
Upon seeing the slightly horrified expression on Andrew’s face, she smiled slightly and added, “Pretty terrible, huh?”
“Barbara-”
“Bobbi,” she corrected.
“Right. Bobbi,” Andrew started, leaning forward in his chair next to her bed. “What Ward did to you… I can’t even imagine how much that must have hurt.”
“It’s not the worst I’ve ever dealt with,” Bobbi said, and from the distant look on her face, Andrew didn’t doubt that for a second. “But it did hurt like hell.”
“I’m sure it did. Were the needles worse than the bullet?” Andrew asked quietly, gesturing to her heavily bandaged shoulder. He watched as she instinctively reached up to gently touch the wound.
“Honestly,” Bobbi said, “Yes. You would think that the bullet would hurt more, but… it didn’t.”
“Why do you think that is?”
She thought for a moment, then exhaled slowly and said, “Because the bullet was for a reason.”
“And that reason was?” Andrew prompted, hoping that she would give him the answer they both knew to be true.
“To save Hunter,” she stated matter-of-factly, then looked down at her hands as the meaning of what she just said hit her. She looked up at him again as she continued, “Ward knew he would come for me. So he tied me to a chair, and set up the gun to shoot the first person who walked through the door. He couldn’t get me to apologize to Kara, so he wanted me to hurt like she did. To see what I loved most taken away… He wanted me to watch Hunter die… And I couldn’t let that happen.” Bobbi paused, taking a deep breath and leaning her head back against her pillows. He could see tears began to form in her eyes, but she held them back. Staring up at the ceiling, she said quietly, “I just don’t know how he knew Hunter was that important to me.” Her voice was barely more than whisper as she added, “No matter how hard I try to conceal it, everyone seems to see that Lance is my one true weakness.”
Andrew placed a hand on her uninjured shoulder as a single tear rolled down her cheek.
“It’s okay to have a weakness,” he assured her. “Our weaknesses are what make us human.”