Experiment 346 Released
“No fair!”
“Is, too!”
“You’re faster than I am,” the little girl whines to her friend.
“Max!” An angry voice bellows, the owner of the voice bursting from the small apartment door. “Get in here!”
“I’m sorry,” Max whispers to his friend as he walks back to his dad.
“It’s okay,” she says softly, understanding.
According to Max’s dad, filthy Germans should not play with the Jews.
She’s used to it now, even with her young age, as the looks that are aimed at her back and the insults hurled to her face are not unnoticed. Hitler is hated in America, and the ones who surround her, the citizens of America, some of them hate Germans.
But she is American. Her mother was German, and her dad was Jewish. She wants to be pure, so she tries to keep on the right side, against hate and cruelty, no matter whether anyone thinks that has to do with heritage.
She hops over a rope strewn on the street, passing two young men who are playing around.
“Come on, Buck,” one says.
“They’ll let you in the army eventually,” the one who has to be Buck says. “But until then, quit picking fights.”
“They swung first.”
“And harder. Why are you letting yourself get beat to a pulp?”
“Somebody has to.”
“Then come find me first, and then we can beat the…”
The little girl turns a corner, the men’s voices fading, and she passes a bakery that is closing, slipping into the alley on the way to the orphanage.
Maybe I won’t have to see Mrs. Hattie, she thinks, stepping over a pipe. They fixed the drain pipe. I could climb to the room.
“Little girl,” a raspy voice says, a uniformed man leaving the shadows to stand in front of her. “Where are your parents?”
She turns and runs, but a hand on her arm yanks her back, a needle puncturing her neck, a scream lodging in her throat as her sight blurs, blackening.
~
The years were cold and dark, training for four years until she was sent on a mission, and by then, she had no freedom.
Her mind was taken over with a device that gave her owners control of her.
She was trained as a soldier, and treated as a weapon, just like the other three-hundred and forty-five Experiments.
By the age of twelve, she was the last one alive.
The missions came when they saw the need to use her, sometimes with years in between, her body put in cryofreeze.
With every mission, every brainwashing, every serum dose, every time they took her memories away, she became more and more a soldier.
Experiment 346.
~
“Rogers, hurry up,” Nat’s voice orders over the coms.
“I can’t find my shield!” Steve says, searching under the couch. “I just saw it before lunch.”
“Where’d you see it last?”
“In my room, on its shelf.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure! I don’t just misplace huge metal disks!”
“I doubt he could misplace it,” Banner comments.
“Has anyone seen Cap’s shield?” Natasha asks, and is met with no’s and nuh-uhs. “Stark.”
“What?”
“Give it back.”
“Who says I took it?” He says defensively, his face contorted into an innocent look.
“You took Clint’s bow last week.”
“That’s because he’s a-” Clint says, but Tony cuts him off.
“Okay, okay,” he says, grinning. “I hid it in the pantry.”
“How’d you know it was hidden enough? I go in there all the time.”
“Look up. I stuck it to the ceiling.”
Steve walks into the pantry room, looking up to see his shield. Rolling his eyes, he grabs the stepstool—the shelves are high enough that unless one can fly, the Hulk is the only Avenger who can reach the top—and he tugs on it, expecting it to come down easily, but it stays stuck, the sticky almost webbing keeping it up there.
“What did you do? I can’t get it down.”
“Try the can of spray I hid behind the flour.”
By the time Steve gets back to the Quinjet, Bucky and Nat have already warned Stark enough that Steve doesn’t have to say anything.
~
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’ll hold them off,” Natasha says, talking about the goons that just popped up like something in a Whack-A-Mole game. “Go when you’ve got a shot.”
Before Steve can object, she’s in the middle of about twenty guys, all of them holding weapons of some kind, and Cap sprints to the entryway into a room with dimmed red lights.
“I’m going to need some help,” Cap says into the coms, after he sees how many containers are in the room.
“Little busy,” Natasha grunts.
“We’ve got about thirty of Hydra’s goons following us,” Stark replies, and then there’s a big crash. “And the Green Giant just took out a wall.”
“Uh, guys?” Clint says. “There’s more.”
“More files?”
“No… I take it you found them. I’m more worried about who’s coming than the files.”
“More Hydra?”
“Lots more. And they’ve got what looks like a highly explosive canister.”
Something explodes beyond a wall, and Cap goes soaring into files, the papers flying everywhere as the cabinet-wall breaks apart.
“That hurt,” he mutters as he gets up on the other side of the wall, having crashed into a cement one.
He had assumed that the cabinets were against a cement wall, but that idea is quickly proven incorrect, as Cap stands in front of a capsule—cryofreeze, it looks to be—a sleeping young woman with no hair, wearing a hospital gown, inside.
It looks and operates like the one Bucky was let out of about a year ago, and Cap was there when the doctors and nurses turned off the machine. It’s not that he didn’t trust them, but he did want to make sure that his friend was safe. So, he watched how they did it.
After a minute of figuring out the machine, he turns it off, and opens the door after it lets him. He immediately checks her vitals, the machines that are hooked up to the capsule beeping.
“Intruder alert. Experiment 346 released.”