Don't You Worry Child

No Surrender

Soundtrack: No Surrender by Bruce Springsteen

Samantha wasn't a big fan of stakeouts, she'd been lucky enough to avoid them more often than not; modern technology and a near-permanent surveillance state had meant it wasn't necessary. She supposed that Orwell had been write when he wrote 'Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres in your head.' He was right, Big Brother was watching you and modernity – or post-modernity, whatever you wanted to call it – had assisted that and Big Brother made going on the run far more difficult than it needed to be.

The woman tapping her pen on the steering wheel beside her was unbelievably frustrating and Samantha slammed her copy of 1984 on the centre console in disgust. "Do you have to do that?" she asked, feeling slightly adolescent in her annoyance.

"Is that any way to talk to your mother?" the woman responded somewhat daringly and definitely with a degree of impertinence.

Samantha scoffed "Mother? You think you're deserving of that title?" she exclaimed, giving herself a feeling of déjà vu as she remembered saying something similar to Audrey "A proper mother would have been there. You know, Audrey was many things – a liar, a murderer, downright cruel at times – but at least she bothered to raise me," she yelled, ensuring each of her words had an impact on the Goddess who now looked as though she'd been physically wounded.

"I've told you and your friends, I had no choice," she replied through gritted teeth as though she'd been forced to say such a thing. She was infuriated, the kind of infuriation that only seems to arrive when dealing with a toddler who has been given the same instruction ten times over and they still choose to ignore it.

"There's always a choice. Yes or no; good or bad; right or wrong. There is always a choice," Samantha responded before turning away to look out the window just in time to spot the short, portly man she'd been waiting for. "Right, I'm going to see if I can get him on side," she announced before pulling the hood up on her jumper and running off.

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Sam and Billy Koenig were two thirds of a triplicate of brothers and – intriguingly – quite possibly one of the best kept secrets S.H.I.E.L.D. had. They were also incredibly obsessed with giving S.H.I.E.L.D. allies lanyards. So getting them, or at least one of them, on side was expected to be exceptionally difficult. However, the moment Samantha got Billy into a quiet, hole in the wall bar owned by one of Natasha's contacts – the kind she kept off S.H.I.E.L.D's books – he was like putty in her hands. "So how's it going over there?" she asked casually as though they were old friends. They weren't, they'd only met a handful of times, one of those was at Fury's funeral and she kept confusing him with his brother, but he seemed a nice enough guy which was good enough for her – the existence of trust had stopped entirely for her the moment she'd gone on the run.

"Honestly, I don't know what's going on – not the way I used to anyway. Thompson says jump and Coulson says how high. All of our resources are focussed on finding you and Maximoff which is ridiculous because everyone knows you both have solid alibis. Two of our best assets are in custody and all they're doing is starving them in the hope that they'll break and give something up for food," Billy explained, occasionally sipping on his scotch as a form of punctuation, then adding "I should not have said that," in a fashion that could only be described as Hagrid-like.

She smiled politely, trying to hide the guilt she felt for putting everyone in that position. She sipped on her vodka-tonic, plucking up courage and asked "Is Emma okay?" softening the, normally, hardened look in her eyes.