Rani Barnes, the daughter of Bucky Barnes, was raised in the shadows of Hydra-trained to hunt, obey, and survive. Now 19 and rescued from that life, she's thrown into a quiet existence she doesn't understand, living with a father still grieving the...
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HYDRA
YEARS AGO.
She was 5 when they put her in the room with no lights and no name.
It had no windows. No clocks. No voice that sounded like comfort. Just cold concrete, a drain in the middle of the floor, and walls that never echoed—because sound didn’t carry when there was no one to hear you scream.
They called it conditioning. Rani didn’t know what that meant, not really. She just knew she had failed. She had flinched—hesitated during a training simulation when her target looked like the nurse who once smuggled her half a piece of chocolate. A face too soft, too familiar. And Rani had frozen for just a breath. One heartbeat too long.
So they put her in the room.
She didn’t know how many days passed. Time wasn’t a thing in that place—it bled like the skin on her wrists where the shackles rubbed raw. They didn’t feed her at first. That was the point. She was meant to be emptied—of fear, of hesitation, of weakness. A soldier doesn’t flinch. A soldier doesn’t feel.
And yet… in the quiet, in the dark, she did.
At night—or what she assumed was night—she would curl into herself on the freezing floor, arms around her knees, rocking gently like she remembered her mother doing long ago. Or maybe she imagined that memory. Did she have a mother? Why she can and can't answer that question? Hydra liked to blur those lines, or even create them. Sometimes they showed her things, fed her fragments of her own past like they were test results. Sometimes they made her watch her own life out of order, like scrambled film reels. It made it easier for them to rewrite her.
The worst part wasn’t the hunger or the darkness.
It was the sounds.
They played recordings in the walls. Whispers. Screams. Sometimes the screams were her own. Or what sounded like her. Crying. Begging. She remembered, once, curling up and sobbing into her hands, not because of the noise—but because she couldn’t tell if the voice was really hers anymore.
One day—they opened the door. Light hit her eyes so violently she cried out, like an animal. Her hands flew up to her face, filthy and shaking. And they laughed.
She heard their boots before she saw them. Three guards. One handler.
“Reset her,” the handler-Brock Rumlow- said coldly. "She’s too soft.”
Reset. That meant another injection. Another session. Another memory erased—or worse, twisted.
But this time, something broke in her. She wants her father, despite how broken they both are.
As one guard approached, Rani lunged. Starved. Weak. Barefoot. But her instincts kicked in—the ones they taught her, the ones they carved into her bones. She went for the neck, just like they trained her to.
They beat her unconscious for it, but when she woke up back in her cot, cleaned and patched, something in her felt proud. Just a flicker. A small, dying ember of self.
They could steal her time. Her body. Her thoughts.
