The White Queen (S.Rogers)

Chapter 42

She sipped her coffee, watching the people walk past the steamy window. Everyone had places to be, things to do, and she was just waiting. Waiting for something. Anything. Usually, that was what she was waiting for. She was especially good at waiting. A sniper had to be patient, her father had told her, when he had trained her. You might spend days in one spot, waiting for the perfect shot to line up. You had to endure rain, sun, cold, heat. Wind that tore at you. Ice that sliced through to your marrow. All for that one shot. And that meant waiting.

Sometimes, it felt like she had spent most of her life waiting. Waiting for her father to be returned to her. Waiting for a meal. Waiting for wounds to heal, bones to mend. Waiting for the moment when she would be allowed to go out of whatever facility they had been storing them in. Waiting for the moment when she was given an assignment.

Waiting for the moment when she could escape her captors and topple their regime.

And now, she was waiting for Sam Wilson.

Sighing, she took another sip of her coffee, before checking her phone. Sam was rarely late for their meetings. She could only assume that he had been held up by Steve. They had planned to meet up before Brooklyn and Wilson's meeting. The idea was that the boys were going to go over whatever leads that might have popped up over the week, in regards to finding her father. And it was quite possible that they might have gotten a little friendly, together.
It was good that Steve had friends, outside of the Avengers, in her opinion. Too many work friends meant that there was always conflict of interest. People often had the inability to separate work from personal. She had often saw it, while in the different facilities. Even during her time with SHIELD. That had been the worst. Too often, in the pursuit of mating, personal would drift into professional. It would usually end in there being some sort of conflict, and missions being compromised, due to people not being able to separate the two. Too many people had been killed because of being emotionally compromised. Hell, even she was occasionally emotionally compromised.

The conversation she had messed up, on Friday night was proof of that. She had upset Steve, and hurt him, because she had been too compromised by him, emotionally and physically, to actually pay attention to the words that had been coming out of her mouth. She had been trying, in a very mishandled sort of way, to convince him to be more than, in her opinion, he pretended he was. He could be so more. Too much more, if only he would allow himself to be the man that she believed he was, deep inside. God knows, the things she had seen her father do, before his programming was fully in place, had been amazing. And that had not been Erskine's original serum. Her father had been given one that Zola had been working on, trying to make the one Erskine had created. She was blessed enough to have been born with enough of it in her DNA, to have given her the jump start that was needed to accept the formula, when she was old enough.

Zola had once told her, when she was young, that while she was already dosed, due to the circumstances of her birth, she needed to be fully infused with it, to make sure that she was secure in her place in HYDRA. To make sure that she would be able to pass it on to her possible future children. He had told her, while she was being dosed, one time, that Grant had been the disappointment. He had shown no signs of having the serum encoded into his DNA. That he had rejected the dosing, post birth. Grant had been weak. But he had been smart. He soaked up information like a sponge, and had been able to learn battle plans as quickly as she had learned to read and remember things. Grant had been valuable, in that he would be able to plan the attacks, while she would have been able to survive the execution of them. He would have risen in the ranks of HYDRA, until he could have become one of it's leaders. She would have been the muscle.

She tightened her grip on the ceramic mug, frowning.

She had derailed those plans, when she had chosen to save her father, by sacrificing her twin. Zola had not been pleased, apparently. Because the guards had disobeyed orders. Zola had not wanted Grant and Brooklyn to ever interact, unless it was when they were ready to move forward with HYDRA's grand scheme. Not only had they disobeyed orders, but they had put her into a position that had set HYDRA back decades. By forcing her to choose between her father and her brother, they had made her lower the chances of them ever having the perfect pair, ever again. And god knows, they had tried, for decades after that, to replicate it. To have the brains, along side her brawn.