"Is something wrong? she said.

Of course there is.

You're still alive, she said.

Oh, and do I deserve to be."

-"Alive" -Pearl Jam

Kate did not uncuff the Huntress, but she brought her some hot tea and some things to snack on. Until now, she hadn't realized how hungry she was, and so she dove in. With her hands cuffed in front of her, it was awkward and almost embarrassing. Still, she ate until she felt the ebbing hunger disappear, and then she drank the hot liquid carefully. It was all new to her; flavours her palate had never been exposed to. Her eyes darted graciously up at Kate, who was staring right through her, probably wondering what she was going to do with this HYDRA affiliate in her apartment. Only after the Huntress felt her basic human needs reached, she realized that they were still in danger. "We should not be here, he will come back."

"Who?" Kate's eyes focused on the Huntress instead of through her.

"The one who shot Fury." In truth, the Huntress did not want the Winter Soldier to get hurt, so she disclosed his name although it was completely irrelevant. He could handle himself, but the name was of no importance right now.

"I'm going to call this in." Kate rose, slightly aggravated by the open-ended answers she was getting.

"The Captain said not to trust anyone."

"I have to trust someone." She pulled out her phone and dialed, disappearing for a minute.

The Huntress looked around for something to pick her handcuffs with, a bobby pin or sewing needle, but she saw nothing in the living room that would serve. Next, her keen green eyes scanned for a gun or any type of weapon. Though she had no intention of harming Kate, she would need protection if she was going to escape. Or if she was going to be caught in this apartment. The Winter Soldier couldn't be far. Being restrained like this was justified, but it reminded her of a time that sent shudders down her spine. Memories of being tortured in order to comply, vague details of who she was flitted in and out of her mind.

Giving up on trying to break free, she decided to do something she knew she wasn't allowed to do; already captured by Captain America, she could afford to make one more mistake now. It took everything inside of her to push out memories of pain. So much pain.

She decided to link with the Winter Soldier, to see how close he was. Not only did her power serve as a hunting technique, but it also worked well as an evasion technique. She could hide from someone with ease as long as she knew exactly where they were at any moment.

Unfortunately, she could only link to one person at a time, and they would send more than the Soldier after her, if they even sent him. She was a high risk person on the loose, but she was not incredibly strong or capable of understanding the world and how it worked. Yet part of her only wanted to know where the Winter Soldier was; if they sent anyone from HYDRA, Kate could likely handle them, and if Kate ever let the Huntress off of her leash, she would help her, and whoever was left to trust.

It was just a matter of trusting herself, and getting them to trust her. She had waited years to escape. The agony HYDRA put her through did not serve them anymore - it pushed her out.

After a few minutes of trying to link with The Winter Soldier, she realized that there was a mental block preventing the bridge to form. Frustrated, she knew that she could not just sit around and wait to be killed, so she tried to piece together what she knew about him. Steve knew him as Bucky from his youth. They had been childhood friends, but that hardly helped the Huntress as that was long in the past.

She and Bucky alike had been stuck in time multiple times, she knew that much from memories that had not been wiped clean. Without thinking, she reached her fingers down and under her tight fitting shirt despite how awkward it was with the handcuffs. She began to trace the HYDRA symbol on her stomach as if it would bring memories back. It almost did, but not of the ones she wanted to remember. The wound had never healed nicely, leaving ugly purple scars all around, some areas thicker than others. When she heard footsteps approaching, she pulled her fingers away from her scars, covering them up.

"What should I call you?" Kate asked, entering the living room again.

The Huntress thought for a minute; she knew her name was somewhere in her mind. Telling Kate that her name was Huntress probably wouldn't sit well. So she pulled from the deepest corner of her mind that she could vaguely remember. "Uhm... O."

"Did you forget your name?" Kate asked, more than a little stressed out with the whole situation.

"Someone used to call me O," she confirmed, feeling confident about the fact, and feeling joyous that she was getting somewhere.

"O, then." Kate seemed flustered by only getting a single letter, but it made it easier nonetheless. "Agent Hill is going to come retrieve you, she will keep you on the move. Don't try to contact your friends, don't try to escape. SHIELD is prepared for problems like you. Steve said you have something important that he needs. Mind telling me what that might be?"

"I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation," O said through gritted teeth. "We are trained assassins, sent to kill before..."

"Before what?" Kate thought she was getting close, but O wasn't willing to give up everything. The woman needed time to process her decision; just because she hated HYDRA, did not mean she was willing to give this woman all the information that she had. They could be listening, they could be in her head; Kate could be one of them, hoping that O would slip up and she could put a bullet in her head. Kate took a deep breath, trying to remain calm but hating that she had no answers. "Work with me. Please."

O glanced up at her. "We go in to clear the way. For what? I don't know."

"They just send you out blind?"

O nodded. "I have pieces, jigsaw pieces, but it is as if they are all from different puzzles."

"What can you give me?" she asked, exasperated.

"Not a lot. I know my memory has been wiped many times, I've probably lost more than half of my life of memories. Which might be a good thing, given the bad that I do remember." O sighed, the words coming more easily now. She could talk a little about herself without giving away too much. Whenever she thought about saying the wrong thing, that ever ominious symphony would creep back into her head. "I don't even know my name but I knew of Captain America, Steve Rogers, before he was lost in the ice..."

"How?" she asked. "You can't be older than twenty-five."

"Cryogenics," she said, with a blatant tone.

"Tell me everything you remember." Kate switched roles, going from firm digging of O's mind, to hoping she would lay everything out on the table and the two of them could piece it together. She understood that her mind was a haze of her long past. As rushed as they were going to be, Kate needed to play nice. There was something in O's eyes that screamed she had never had anyone be kind to her, and so it would be foreign but it would hopefully be taken with open arms.

O thought long and hard, trying to piece together what she had seen in Steve's mind that would trigger her association with the Winter Soldier as he was Bucky. She knew that there was nothing left of Bucky, she couldn't even get into his head when she tried, but there was something left of her. She had something to hold onto, some humanity. The flame inside of her burned brighter with each fragment she was able to remember, and it became easier each time to remember the next puzzle piece.

"I've been trained as a weapon for the organization," she started. "For as long as I can remember, it is all that I have been. I can track people, locate them and find them. Anyone. Almost anyone. My name is O... O... I can't remember. But someone once called me 'O'. The man who killed Fury is someone Steve knew, a long time ago. But he is not the same person anymore. They wiped out any humanity left in him."

"And they didn't do that to you?"

"They did, but my ability to link minds with people prevents full deletion. They can only temporarily erase my mind, and yet..." She was aggravated that she didn't know a thing about herself.

"So connect with some of the others, try to remember something that can help us."

"You don't understand."

"What's not to understand?" Kate felt like they were going in circles; O was willing to talk, and then it came around and she clammed up.

"You don't know what they will do to me." O moved her hands awkwardly in the cuffs and lifted her fitted shirt, showing the scars of the symbol.

"HYDRA?" Kate shook her head, "I thought HYDRA went down with Schmidt... back when Steve was lost."

"Cut off one head, two more shall take its place," O uttered the familiar words wryly then covered her scars again. "I don't remember why they gave that to me, but I think it has something to do with the other assassin we should be worrying about."

A knock came on the door and O felt her heart hammer in her chest, but she knew that the Winter Soldier would not be so upfront and come knocking. He would have shot her through the window as he had done with Fury. She was, however, in a different side of the building and nowhere near the outer walls. It could be a HYDRA member disguised as a SHIELD member, for all she knew, coming to finish her off, capture her and take her back, torture her for the information she had given Kate and Steve. She shuddered as Kate pulled out her gun, nervously walking towards the thick wooden door of her apartment.

Everything fell silent as she peered through the peep hole.