Joana

"Joana?"
"What?" 
"Pierce wants to see you."
"That's good for him." 
"Give me that. Pierce demands to see you, now."
"I refuse to be in a room alone with that Devil." 
"You won't be alone. I'll be there."
"What does he need me for?"
Natalia paused, pressed her lips into a thin line. She turned Joana's handmade shiv in her hands. 
"He wants you to be there for Doctor Salazar's execution." Natalia expected Joana to shut down, to look away from her, to restate that she didn't want to go. Instead, she perked up like a dog that just caught the scent of a wounded fox. 
"Well then, what are we waiting for?" Joana stood, but Natalia grabbed her wrist and pulled her back to her bed. 
"Can't you think about this for a second, Joana? Doctor Salazar was your friend-"
"No, he wasn't, Natalia. A friend would never do what he did."
"You have to understand, Joana, he did what he had to do to survive. Not everyone can survive just because the head of HYDRA has taking a liking to them. Salazar had to do what Pierce told him to, otherwise he would have died. You understand that, don't you?" Natalia was hoping to force some kind of emotion on Joana. Joana spent the last two weeks in this cell, alone. Natalia was her only visitor. For the past two weeks, Joana had shown little in the way of emotion. 
"I would never do what he did. I would never knowingly destroy a friend's life for my own," Joana told her, jaw tight. Natalia sighed, a gentle smile on her face. 
"Not everyone is as selfless as you. Some of us have to do nasty things to survive, even to ones we love," Natalia told her. Joana scoffed. 
"As if I haven't shed my amount of blood, Natalia. You and I, we have killed people, sure. Some of them didn't deserve it, but would you ever, ever betray Barnes. Or me?"
"No." 
"No, you wouldn't. Exactly. I don't care that we weren't friends when he did it. I don't care that Pierce would have killed him. I. Don't. Care. I want to see him dead." Natalia knew, from the determination in Joana's voice, that there was no way she could sway her from going.
"Alright. Follow me."
Natalia lead Joana out of her cell. Joana squinted against the bright lights as she left. Walking down the halls, Joana got every kind of look; admiration, hatred, disgust, fear. She paid no mind to any of the other people as she passed them, no matter how they were looking at her. Natalia opened the door to the torture room, which apparently doubled as an execution chamber. As she entered, painful memories of her beating flashed across her mind. She cringed and marched forwards.
Pierce stood in the middle of the room, Bucky and Karpov by his side. Doctor Salazar was on his knees in front of Pierce. Tears made streaks down his face. He looked worse than he had when Joana last saw him in the training room, the day he told her all the damage he had ensued. He was thinner now, stripped of his lab coat and most of his clothes for that matter. He was bleeding from more places than Joana could count. She couldn't possibly imagine what he had told them.
When he saw her, his eyes lit up.
"Oh, Joana. Please, please, tell him not to kill me. Please." Spit mixed with tears and blood and snot as he begged for his life. Joana clenched her jaw. She thought seeing him like this would give her some kind of emotional response, but all she felt was revulsion. She took her gaze away from his, and directed her attention to Pierce.
"Why did you call me here?" She asked, deadpan. He held out a gun. 
"I thought you would like to do the honors," he said, an almost apologetic half smile on his face. If Joana thought him capable of any kind of apologetic feelings, or any feelings at all, she might have seen the gesture for what it was, a peace offering. However, she only saw it as an opportunity. She took little to no time to stride across the room and take the gun from his hand. She pointed the gun against Salazar's head. He blubbered something incoherent, tears running down his face. It was nice to see someone else crying for once. 
"Joana, please, think about this!" Natalia said from across the room. Concern was written all over her face. "Revenge won't change anything."
"True. But it sure as hell will feel good." She cocked the gun. 
"P...please...Jo...Joana," Salazar begged. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back so he was looking up at her. She was going to say something, but nothing came to mind. She had spent a majority of the past decades crying, but right now, with the tip of a gun pointed at the head of someone she thought was her friend, she found that she had no tears to shed. 
"Joana." Natalia's voice was soft, but shaking. Joana didn't dare look up at her. "Please, listen to me. If you do this, you will regret it forever."
Joana looked at Salazar's pitiful, sobbing face for a few more seconds. 
"I don't care." 
Natalia gasped as the gun went off, the sound ricocheting off of the walls. Salazar's body jerked to the side, his blood and brains exploding out of his head. Blood splattered against the floor. No one was looking, but had they been, they would have seen Bucky flinch, his eyes closing for just barely longer than a blink as he turned his face away. His hands were clamped tightly together behind him. Karpov had a cruel smile on his face. Pierce wiped a few speckles of blood off of his grey suit jacket. 
"Well done, Joana," he said softly beside her. 
Joana was stone faced. She lowered the smoking gun to her side. She let the blood on her face burn her skin. Her chest tightened. Natalia was right, it didn't change anything. She still didn't care. She pressed the gun into Pierce's chest, her smoldering eyes meeting his. 
"Don't think for a second that this changes anything," she seethed. She stepped away from him, over Salazar's body. She didn't even stop to notice that she had stepped in his blood and every step she took left a crimson footprint behind. Natalia followed her as she left the room. 
On her way back to her cell, the looks people gave her were now all the same; complete terror. She stared straight ahead, her eyes as dead as the man she had just executed. They saw the blood on her face and on her shoes and on her clothes. They smelled the gunpowder. They had all heard the gunshot. They knew what she had done. 
No one stood in her way as she walked. 

"We need to talk about what you did, Joana." 
"No we don't, Natalia. I did what I was told to do, just like you would have."
"But you weren't told to do anything, were you? Pierce offered you the gun and you willingly took it. You killed Doctor Salazar, and you didn't even blink."
"Is there something wrong with that?" 
"There is everything wrong with that, Joana!"
"I thought HYDRA agents were supposed to be ruthless killing machines. By their terms, I just exterminated a mole." 
"You're not a HYDRA agent!"
"I'm not? You should tell Pierce that, maybe this time he'll understand what I've been trying to say for the last 30 freaking years."
"James was in that room."
Finally, Joana paused. No automatic response came to mind. She lowered her head, staring at her blanket. 
"So?" She finally said. Natalia stood, hurt written in every crevice of her face. 
"'So?' Who are you?" Natalia turned away from Joana, running her hands over her face. She sat back in her chair. "You know what you did was wrong. You're shutting out your emotions now because you're afraid to feel it. I know, because that's what I've been doing since I got here. Please, Joana, don't turn out like me."
Joana clenched and unclenched her jaw. Natalia stood again, this time prepared to leave. 
"I've been reinstated," she said. Natalia froze. "That's why Pierce put me back in here." She looked around her old room. Natalia turned towards her. 
"You're going back to training the Widows?" Joana shook her head. 
"Nope." Bitterness clung to that word. "I'm officially a HYDRA agent." She pulled something out of her back pocket and threw it at the ground beside Natalia's feet. "Got my own ID and everything." 
Natalia bent down and picked up the piece of plastic that held Joana's face. Her birth name, birth date, and code name were printed just below her picture. 
"The Nagrada?" Natalia asked. Joana tightened her jaw and cocked her head. 
"It means 'prize' in Bosnian." Natalia sat beside Joana, hands in her lap. "I know what I did was wrong. I know it was wrong." 
"Then what's the problem?" 
"It didn't feel wrong." 
Natalia didn't know what to say. 

The one good thing about becoming an official HYDRA agent was the privileged she got of carrying a gun around with her. She felt powerful with the gun at her hip. Well, protected, at least. She didn't feel powerful anywhere. She could go places she wasn't allowed before, just by showing her ID. She got personal exercise time, a new and improved physical therapist who was determined to beat her in hand-to-hand, and meals that were at least 50% better than before. 
Of course, there was the issue of her missions. She would often be gone for weeks at a time on some mission or another. Sometimes they were recon missions, sometimes she had to retrieve information from one building or another, sometimes she was assigned to help STRIKE team with whatever it was they were doing. Every mission involved her killing someone. 
She thought, when Pierce sent her on her first mission, that she would get to see the sun or at least the moon and stars, but she went on the plane with a bag over her head and only every did things once she was inside. It seemed to be one of the many things Pierce kept her from seeing. 
Bucky was the other thing. She hadn't seen him since she shot Salazar in the head. She couldn't tell if he was avoiding her or if it just ended up that way. Either way, his absence was the only thing that forced any guilt into her heart over what had happened. She missed him in every way possible. She was desperate to even get a glimpse of him, but she was hardly ever back at the Red Room for more than a few hours before she went on her next mission. 
So, after landing back at base, sometime around 12:00 at night, Joana skipped her late meal and whatever comfort a shower would provide and went straight to the training room where she knew Natalia and Bucky would be. 
When she came upon the room, she was disheartened to see her wrapped in his arms, their lips pressed lovingly together. All excitement in her heart faded. She coughed awkwardly and knocked her knuckles on the door. Bucky and Natalia separated. Natalia turned red and looked away from Joana, but Bucky just smiled. 
"It's been a while," he said. His smile nearly looked forced. She nodded. 
"Yeah. A few months, actually." 
The three of them stood in the room, the once romantic air now suddenly full of tension. Joana opened her mouth to say something when the door behind her burst open. She turned, pulling her gun, cocked it, and had it aimed at the door before whoever opened it entered the room. Bucky pushed Natalia behind her, hand in hand as swarms of HYDRA agents came rushing into the room all carrying Zastava M70s. Joana backed up until she was close enough to Bucky. He and Natalia put their backs to hers, effectively making a triangle of defense. Once the room was filled with agents, Pierce and Karpov came waltzing in. Pierce's lips were pursed. One hand was in his pocket, the other swinging a crowbar in his hand. 
"You know, you three almost had me fooled," he said, a chuckle passing his lips. He pointed the crowbar at them as if it was all some kind of joke. Joana kept her gun trained on him. 
"What is this?" She asked him. 
"You know perfectly well what this is, Joana," he snapped at her. "You, who pretends to be oh-so-righteous, but in reality, you're just like the rest of us. Keeping secrets, lying to my face, betraying your friends."
"My only friends are standing behind me and I haven't done anything to them," she retorted. Pierce laughed, walking up to her. He walked until the end of the gun was pressed against his forehead. 
"I know that your only two friends have been screwing each other silly the past year and a half, and you knew about almost the entire time." Joana dropped her guard long enough that when Pierce raised the crowbar to strike her, she didn't have time to respond. He hit her in the knee with such a force that sent her to the ground with a cry of anguish. He crouched down in front of her. "See, this is why I have trust issues. I could have tortured you for years and you wouldn't have said a single thing." 
She huffed at him, clutching his knee in one hand, holding tight to her gun in the other. He moved around towards Bucky and Natalia, who were glaring daggers at him. 
"Of course, we knew you were sleeping together. That much was obvious, but it wasn't until recently that we learned that someone had broken through their mind control. How convenient." He turned to look back at Joana, who was slowly standing up. "How did you do it?"
She smiled at him. 
"You don't pay attention very well when he went through his wiping sessions. I just skipped a word," she told him, the smug look on his face more than he could bare. He rushed her and went to hit her again, but Bucky's metal arm shot out and grabbed the crowbar before he could do anything else. He wrenched the crowbar from his hand and threw it across the room with so much strength that it stuck into the brick wall. Pierce swallowed, suddenly afraid under the hateful gaze of Bucky Barnes. Natalia and Joana smirked. 
"Take them," Pierce said, his voice clear and clean, loud enough for every agent in the room to hear. He and Karpov exited the room as a black swarm of agents closed in on the group of three. 

***

Y'all, I got two chapters done in one day. Claps for me because it's super late and I should have gone to bed like an hour and a half ago. Whatever. 
Thank you for all yalls support and love, much appreciated. You guys mean the world to me. I spend so much of my time writing this story when I should honestly be writing productive, i dunno, maybe a story that could actually be published? Idk. Anyway, it means so much that you sit there and read my ramblings and the inner corners of my mind. I don't know why you would because I honestly find it boring in here. Haha i'm funny. 
anyway, you guys are my world and the only things that keep me going through each day, honestly.
 
peace and grace to you,
authorsbane