"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty."

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated"

         Ophelia had hardly made it out of the room when the crashing and yelling filled the previously silent base. For years it had been vacant, empty, only a holding cell for the terrible elite kill squad. Through her tear-filled eyes, she spotted a swift movement going around the corner, and something drove her to follow. Her feet picked up the pace as she darted down the hall, her gun at her side as she figured she no longer needed to protect herself. The fight behind her was not hers to intervene anymore, to risk her life in, and yet the more she thought about it, the more she hated herself for not defending Bucky. But it was his wish that she leave, to wait for him on the other end of this hate-fueled strive for vengeance.

         Tony had a right to be angry, to be devastated, Ophelia knew that. Trauma worked differently on each individual. But Bucky hadn't been in control of his life for seventy years; Ophelia knew exactly how much every single death at his hand haunted him. She knew he lost sleep over what he had done. But he had never done any of it with consent.

         Now Tony wanted to take the one person in this world who mattered to Ophelia. The first person to ever show her an ounce of compassion when she had not known what compassion had meant. The person who saw her for more than a chrysalid, more than her power. The one person she would not live without.

         She had never hated Tony Stark more than she did in that very moment.

        But in that very moment, she was distracted. As she turned around the corner, she spotted him. T'Challa was almost out of sight, about to turn around another corner when Ophelia called out to him. She was surprised to see him there, but she had an unsettled feeling within her. T'Challa had wanted Bucky dead more than most, so his presence here was unsettling and though he was walking away from the fight, Ophelia had to wonder why he was here. He hadn't shown his face and he was distancing himself from the fight; she needed answers.

        "T'Challa, stop, please..." 

         The man ceased his movements, muscles rippling in his vibranium suit. He turned and looked at her with movements that resembled the flawlessness of a feline. "You should not be here."

         "I was just about to say the same thing," she replied sternly, standing tall and making sure he knew that her weapon was simply in her hands and that she had no intent to use it. She had it for protection against the Death Squad, and now that they were gone, she had hoped she wouldn't need it at all.

            T'Challa walked closer to her, leaving only a few feet between them. "I am sorry that I tried to kill him. I was wrong."

            Ophelia blinked, cocked her head to the side.

           "They are going to tear each other apart," he informed her.

           "No." She shook her head, she refused to believe that. She turned her head back as if she could see the fight, but from all the way down here, there was only a distant crashing and banging of metal and bullets. "Help me, help me stop them from doing that."

           He shook his head. "This is not my fight."

          Feeling a rage build up in her even though she knew that he was right, she said, "It was your fight when you wanted to kill an innocent man."

            Even with his mask on, she could tell that T'Challa was jarred by her words, but they were not wrong. "Get out of here, while you can."

           She watched with a rage building up inside of her as he walked away from her. He was gone in seconds, and time was ticking. Ophelia threw her head back and wanted to scream, but instead she found herself looking up at the dusty ceiling, the exposed pipes and wires. Clenching her eyes tight to fight the tears, she knew that she couldn't go back in there and face that fight. She couldn't put herself at risk of death, because she knew that would be the final straw that would break Bucky. Together, they held each other's pieces so that they would not crumble. Without each other, they would fall apart. Ophelia threw her gun to the floor so that she would not be tempted to unload the clip upon Tony Stark; it would have been idiotic to do so in the first place, as his suit was built to withstand far more than a few bullets from a handgun.

            She found herself within the dusty, paper-smelling backlog room. Her hand fumbled upon the wall as she searched for the switch; less than half the lights came on, half of the ones that did were buzzing and flickering. But it was light enough she could see, she could search for what she was looking for. Years of being unknown, years of being suppressed and held down. It was time that she discovered who she was, and so that when this was all over and she walked out of this base, she would never have to look back. She would never have to think about this place, they could burn the whole thing to the ground and she would be okay with it.

            Her Russian was rusty, even though it had been her first language alongside English, she had not used it in so long. The only Russian she knew to her core were both her and Bucky's trigger words. The thought sent a vicious shudder down her spine that left her head a bit light for a few minutes. Her fingers ran over the files, large boxes with names or words upon the front. There were so many, she would never have the time to go through them all, but to her luck, they were all organized. She had no last name to go by, only a first name, a code name, and a birth year. She decided to try with her birth year, which was 1922. There were not a ton of files for that year, but she began to pull out boxes and swiftly scan through the files inside. Leaving a pile of discarded papers upon the floor around her, she paid no mind to the mess she made.

             And then she found it.

            A file with her name upon it. No last name, once again, but at this point so many years later, what did it matter? Her parentage hardly meant anything to her. As she opened the manila folder, the edges frayed and soft, she held her breath. This was really it, she was really going to finally lay this all out for herself. When she scanned it, she saw her name, her birth date. She had never known that actual day of her birth, it had been written down in scratched pencil that it was August eighteenth, 1922. Bucky once decided to celebrate her birthday in November, and that particular date meant more to her than the one she was looking at. According to the record, she had arrived in the HYDRA base December fourteenth of that same year. She ran her finger over the photo of herself, she looked like a rat in a cage with her off-white outfit, her starved looking figure and jutting out cheek bones. The image had been taken not long before Bucky had appeared in her life, and how things changed after that day, it almost made her smile in these dire times.

           But that was all there was.

           Not even a list of her abilities or the toxins and serums she had been exposed to.

          All she had learned was the actual day of her birth.

          She threw the file to the ground and wanted to scream; the page flipped and she noticed a second page had originally been stapled to the first one. It was obviously torn out, the fragments of a second page lingering. Frantically, she dug through the box hoping that it was in there, but there was nothing else on her. HYDRA wanted her to be nothing, and so they kept nothing on her so that she would never know. But what they didn't know was that she had made something of herself, she was known to many, she was loved by many. If HYDRA had known that, if they had known that she could overcome what they had done to her, they would have known that they failed.

           She stood up with the force of a hurricane; she was not nothing. She was something, and she had a fight to face. Bucky was in there fighting for his life, Steve was fighting for Bucky's life. Ophelia would do anything to keep Bucky alive and well, and it was her duty as not only a lover but as a decent human being to try and stop the chaos within. 

          This HYDRA base had caused too much turmoil, ripped too many lives apart, and she wasn't going to stand there twiddling her thumbs while she waited for the three men to exit the base as though nothing happened. It wasn't a fight that was going to be won by words, and it wasn't going to be a fight that had any one true winner, because it was a fight among friends. She wasn't going to let the doctor win, they could not rip each other apart. She had the ability to try and stop this from happening, to get into Tony's head and force him to stop, to listen. She didn't have to get close, she didn't have to risk her life. 

             She could do it from that room.

             She kicked the box of papers, the files that contained nothing important, she decided she would make her own fate. The box skidded along the floor towards the door, but it stopped so suddenly that it made Ophelia's heart skip a beat or two. Her eyes darted up to where the box had been stopped, a black boot upon the top of it. She looked up and her eyes landed on the doctor, and in his hand was something that made her stomach twist.