☆*✧･ﾟ:*༄ ━━ ❛ 𝙝𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨 𝙗𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙨 ❜
" i don't fight for you. not anymore. "

"FILHO DE MÃE," Juno's gruff voice muttered under her breath with a tone of bottled-up rage, off of which the cap was about point-two seconds away from unscrewing. (Son of a bitch.)

After grappling down the side of the red bricked building, the woman had walked around to the back alleyways that trailed all throughout the mountaintop. Images flashed through her mind of a few toddlers throwing bouncy balls against the walls, and the littlest girl jumping for joy whenever she was the one to catch the most throws in a row. For some reason she remembered the number seventy-seven as her record. Then, another image of the same little doe-eyed girl handing over a single dusty, green bill in exchange for a small papaya from a fruit stand, during the humid midsummer heat. And then another image of the girl skipping down the street in a pair of worn sandals that were much too small for her, before a tall man pushed himself into view and offered the little girl a big, yellow-toothed smile, though she skipped merrily away soon after.

But Juno had no idea where any of these memories were coming from - or whose they even were, for that matter. They couldn't be hers, there was no way she was once that small and wide-eyed and innocent and . . . happy. She cleared her throat, though it resembled more of a growl than anything, and let her hand travel up to the nape of her neck for a moment. Her lungs felt as if they were working in overdrive, and each breath seemed to demand more and more oxygen. 

But Juno Eline was not having a panic attack. Panic attacks required innate emotions - like fear - which Juno Eline no longer had, or even remotely desired. She firmly slammed her fist against the center of her ribcage, letting the force of the impact shock her lungs into submission as she continued briskly walking throughout the winding alleyways of the slums. 

Her narrowed eyes focused on nothing and no one, except the long stretch of pavement beyond her. Time blended together, forming a long mudslide of existence that would only end once her targets were eliminated at the mercy of her own hands. 

The agent had no idea how long it took for her to arrive at the location, but the sun had already started to set over Rio, sending a flock of shadows towering over the main streets. 

The reverberating sound of a slamming door is what snapped Juno out of her angry haze. Her chocolate-colored eyes immediately darted to the source, like a posse of drug-sniffing dogs searching for their target. The last thing Juno saw before the figure retreated into the covert building was a loud-and-proud logo of a black, skull-headed serpent on what appeared to be a bullet-proof vest. 

"I guess I'll just have to aim for the head." A smirk crawled up onto the woman's face as she cocked her silenced Sig Sauer P226, which she often referred to as her 'pequeno bebê,' or 'little baby,' for no apparent reason. 

She had modified the soles of her knee-high combat boots so that they emitted less noise when they connected with the pavement, and gripped the asphalt with steadier force. Juno quickly crossed the street and cozied up to the back door of the building so that, to the pedestrians walking by, it looked as if she was taking a quick cigarette break from the perils of manual labor, but in reality she was just trying to shimmy a bobby-pin into the keyhole. 

Once she felt the familiar click of the lock, Juno slowly twisted the doorknob to and slinked inside without making a sound. Her hand guided the door shut, before turning around and eyeing the long, unlit corridor that she was faced with. Juno felt a burning sensation at the back of her throat and it felt like the walls were caving in on her, about to collapse and bury her in twenty feet of concrete at any second. It looked liked the exact same building, the exact same hallway, as when she was being trained by El Insolente. 'They must still use the same interior decorator,' she chuckled bitterly to herself as an acidic feeling rumbled in the pit of her stomach.

You'refine, you'refine, you'refine. Justamission, justamission, justamission.

The hallway seemed endless, but her legs continued to carry her through it, and she eventually veered left down a new one after hearing the muffled voices of what she assumed were about four or five men - large and heavyset, by the deep tones of their voices and weight of their footprints. Juno followed the voices until she was met with another goddamn door, though this one was made of steel and had a four-digit electronic padlock on it. She bit her lip in frustration, but her mind traveled back to her earlier days of training. 

The woman's forehead crinkled as her hand gently swept the bottom of the door - a trick devised purely for El Insolente's own agents, after most of them had become easily forgetful due to the years of physical trauma. Despite how excellent they were trained to be at fighting, the one fatal flaw was that the human skull would never be enough to protect them. That was why Juno was their prized pupil; her . . . enhancements never granted her the mercy of being incapacitated for too long, so she was never given an off day.

Juno's lips quirked upwards as her fingers finally grazed the faint braille outline that read 'agente um,' or 'agent one.' That was . . . her. Agent One was what her handlers had often referred to her as - their first successful experiment. It made Juno want to throw up.

However, she pushed her own feelings aside as soft whimpers emanated from behind the locked door. Her mind raced, trying to decipher what the specific four digits could be. She only had one chance, or else the alarms would certainly blare at the input of an incorrect code. Ignoring her instincts that shouted at her to take more time, she threw caution to the wind and settled on her birthdate: November 19th. 

1 1 1 9. 

The small light blinked green, and Juno knew that it was finally time to play. Her knuckles cracked as she whipped her pistol out of her thigh holster and slammed the door open.

Her heart flung itself against her chest as she was immediately met with the faces of nearly ten or eleven men, all donning vests with that same godforsaken Hydra logo, and the quivering, skeletal faces of four little girls, all chained to a different spot on the wall. 

The only man not wearing a bullet-proof vest let out a dry snicker. "Well, well, well-" the English words struggled to fall from his thin lips with ease. "We have been waiting for you all day, have we not, girls? Tell me, where are your other SHIELD friends? I was hoping to tell them of how much we have truly missed you and your skill set, Agente Um."

Juno's fingers traced the trigger of her gun, knowing full well that if she shot even one bullet, she ran the risk of the other Hydra agents hurting the little girls in retaliation. "Let the kids go, babaca." (Douchebag.)

The man clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "No, I do not think I will do that. You see, after you left us, we were a bit," he searched for the word, "short-staffed. We needed more innocent little girls, too afraid to resist against the harness or attempt to fight back," he laughed, as if telling one big, hilarious joke. "There is no stopping us, garotinha." (Little girl.)

Juno's teeth sank into her bottom lip and she felt a drop of blood dribble across the slope of her tongue and down her throat. "Then you can have me. Let them go, and take me instead-" her voice just barely shook as she dropped her gun with a clang. "They're so small - you know it'll take years before they're even close to being ready for combat missions, or even before their hands can wrap around a gun. You must have heard how long it took me to gather enough strength in my arms to pull a trigger - and then pull a trigger with my arm broken, and then with my fingers broken. I was, what, eight? Maybe nine? Do you really want to wait five years before these little girls are ready?" The words that fell from Juno's mouth like molten lava made her sick to her stomach, but she knew that Maria wouldn't be too far. She would lead the kids far away once they got out of the building. 

The man took a long glance at the skinny, exhausted prototypes - his eyes so dark that one could mistake them for pitch black. "You-" he motioned at an agent. "Take them outside. Don't let them make a scene."

"Sim, senhor." (Yes, sir.)

And when the door slammed shut once again, the man turned to look at Juno's kevlar-clad body, the SHIELD logo right where her Hydra one used to be. "Take it off," his thick, throaty voice commanded. When Juno faltered, he took a slow step closer to her. "Take. It. Off."

Juno took a step forward, her eyes never falling from his as she trailed the zipper of her suit down, one notch at a time. The man seemed pleased, with a devilish smirk that only increased with every second that she exposed more and more of herself. If she had been in this situation just four years ago, she would have understood his expression. She was trained to believe that women must show themselves off purely for the sake of men, as, apparently, the less clothes a woman wears, the more vulnerable she is.

But, in Juno's case, as she suddenly stopped lowering the zipper once she reached the point just below her ribcage, she was anything but vulnerable. 

She swiped her hand inside of her suit and latched her fingers onto her concealed blade. With a jolt of her leg, she kicked the man's feet out from under him and he landed on the floor with a sickening crack. Juno's empty face then turned to the herd of agents that began to lunge at her one at a time. So, one at a time, she sent them barreling to the floor - elbowing one man in the nose as a crunch sounded throughout the damp room, and ducking down to slice another man's thigh before breaking another's kneecaps.

She went through agent after agent, and by the time she was done, her knife was covered in their remains as the anguishing moans of nearly ten men echoed throughout the room. Juno walked back up to the older man of the bunch, crouching down on her knees as she wiped a bit of blood from her split lip. "I don't fight for you. Not anymore. And I never will."

And as she zipped up her suit, Juno turned around, entered her birthdate into the door, and walked the length of the empty hallway again.

-•-•-

Convincing Maria to let them walk back to the Quinjet without assistance took a bit of convincing on Juno's part, but the blue-eyed woman eventually caved in at the sight of her friend's faux puffed-out lip and blood-stained face. 

Maria ordered Clint to man the front of the aircraft while she lead Juno to the back, much to the latter's dismay. Truthfully, all Juno wanted was to lock herself alone in a room for a while and either scream her lungs out, or allow her eyes to do the 'annoying watery thing.'

But . . . for now, she pushed it all back, burying it like those familiar walls so desperately wanted to bury her. The much-welcomed numbness settled over her form like a weightless cloud - like the six-hundred-fifty muscles in her body had atrophied and all that remained was a stagnant river of blood that had nowhere to go. 

"Hey, anyone home?" Maria's soft voice piped up from in front of her as she continued to gently scrub the blood off of Juno's face.

She blinked, raising her eyebrows for a second to show that she acknowledged the words that had flown out into the atmosphere. "Yeah, sorry. What did you say?"

Maria let a small chuckle fall from her lips. "I asked if you were okay, but I now realize that you just answered my question-" she paused for a second. "What the hell happened in there, Misha?"

Juno offered her best attempt at a half-smile. "Nothing that I couldn't handle. I'll write the mission report if you guys stop asking me about it."

"Well, regardless, Nick paged me about it. He said that he has something he wants to talk to you about. From the way he wrote it, he sounded pretty giddy - you know how he is," she teased, and pulled away from Juno's face as she threw out the now crimson-colored wipe.

Juno groaned in contentment and flopped over so that her stomach was flush against the leather seat cushioning. "Maria."

The woman looked over. "Yeah?"

"Thanks," she mumbled into the crook of her elbow, eyes already closed. And the woman already knew what she meant.

Juno exhaled against the material of her uncomfortably sweaty suit, her fingers tracing the outline of the SHIELD logo. And she continued to do just that, rubbing the same circle-length pattern on her shoulder until her hand cramped up about an hour later. 

She never did fall asleep on that flight back to D.C.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ AUTHOR'S NOTE :
i kinda <3 this chapter so pls
lmk what u guys think about
it, too. i'm quite hyped for A1
to start, wooh-wee. her and
nat? a power couple.