All Along - Steve Rogers {1}

Chapter 11: Broken

February 1945

The wind howled around them, sending a shiver right down Nellie's spine despite the multitude of layers she had on her body to keep the cold out. The sun was still low on the horizon, hidden behind the snowy, jagged rocks that jutted up into the sky. They were surrounded by the high rises, low valleys, and vast drops all across the Austrian Alps which meant one misstep could send you tumbling to your death. If the team were successful today, they were one step closer to finding the last HYDRA base and they would have Schmidt's scientist lackey in their grasp.

This was Captain America, The Siren and the Howling Commando's tenth mission together as a team, spanning across just over a year together, taking part in the ultimate goal of taking down HYDRA once and for all. In December 1943 they took down the HYDRA facility in France, then the same in Belgium in January 1944, and Czechoslovakia in February 1944.

From then on their missions became much more than seek and destroy. In March 1944 the team were sent to London to infiltrate stolen SSR files that had found their way into the hands of HYDRA agents. Nellie took point on that mission, fitting back into her espionage shoes once again and she loved every moment of it. Her team got to see The Siren in action, to see the fear on men's faces when they realised the seductress before them was the femme fatale that had struck fear across all the Axis forces.

The HYDRA agents attempted to hide in an air raid shelter in the centre of London and Nellie and the team managed to track them down after interrogating one of their colleagues. They had originally agreed to let the man live but with the consequence of spending the rest of his life in a prison. He lost his chance when he took a short but quick journey out of the window to the concrete when the group was distracted for a split second.

The team made it to the shelter just as the doors were about to close but there was no way of telling who were civilians  and who were the agents. Steve encouraged the citizens with a speech of heroism and strength in numbers to find the agents hidden in the crowd. They were found easily and brought to justice once the blitz had ended for the night.

In April 1944, the next seek and destroy mission was successful despite the whole facility being set up as a trap to take down Captain America and The Siren for good. The HYDRA facility in Denmark that was occupied by Nazi and HYDRA soldiers were excepting the attack and the team were faced with offensive weapons that they had not seen before. Nellie and Steve had to take take down soldiers wearing battle suits powered by the Tesseract, flanked by tanks powered with the same energy in order for the rest of the team to escape before Schmidt's Tesseract bomb was detonated. The team escaped alive, taking prisoners of war with them to be interrogated back at the SSR bases.

The mission in May 1944 hit a little too close to home for Nellie. Herself and Steve captured the HYDRA submarine called Leviathan whilst the Howling Commandos attacked the U-Base that the Leviathan was trying to escape from. The U-Base had minimal guards as it was mostly used as a laboratory for human testing. It seemed HYDRA's scientists had been trying to perfect their own serum, along with the Tesseract infused serum they had injected Nellie with back when she was captured. The experiments had gone horribly wrong and had left the test subjects deformed and mutated. The team tried their best to get the victims back to the safety of the SSR scientists but the men died in transit, the effects the serum had on them had weakened their immune systems too greatly.

On June 6th 1944, the team put aside their hunt for HYDRA and took part in the biggest Allied attack the war had yet to see. Upon their own landing craft, led by Nellie and Steve, the team landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France along with over 150,000 other men. Nellie created a force field as wide as she could to protect the men as they crashed through the waves and onto the beach. She charged up the beach, the men rallying behind her as she pushed the force field forward, allowing it to collide with the bunkers the enemy was hiding in, creating explosions and killing those inside.