So I was writing, as usual, and I scrolled past this little segment. It sits quite nicely as a taster for what's to come.

This particular scene is set just after the events of Captain America- The Winter Soldier. Hopefully this gives you a nice little insight into who Lily is, and what her story has developed into.

Thank you for your support.

Never trust a survivor until you know what they did to stay alive.

Lily groaned as she cracked her eyes open, rolling onto her side and shoving her hand up under her pillow. Why she was awake again, she couldn't understand, but she was more irritated that the same damn sentence was turning over and over again in her brain.

It was her stepfather who first said it to her, one of the days where he'd been stressed at work and she'd asked him why. He was always busy, and he had good ways of looking at things, so whenever he gave her advice she was always sure to pay attention. It made sense, she thought, because who can possibly know the full story if there's no one left to tell it?

Even now, Lily still held onto the words as a mantra, still thought 'what would Daniel do?' every time she was in a questionable situation. The only difference was that the phrase was never supposed to apply to her.

Never trust a survivor until you know what they did to stay alive.

Now, in this new millennium, she was a survivor. She knew that now. She'd hurt more people than her poor young mind could process, and been 'reset' more times than that. Sure, she'd only been woken up for good after the battle of New York, but her army of SHIELD-turned-Hydra scientists had to run tests, didn't they?

Tests that left scars in her psyche, no matter how many times they burned her brain with electricity. Tests that twisted her body to breaking point and back again, tests that measured her reaction times by giving her targets that fought back with advancing levels of training.

These were the tests that broke every inch of her so that her handlers could put her back together stronger and more lethal than before, all locked into place with a cruel repetition of riddles and words that triggered something in her mind that she would never learn to live with.

Lily now lived in fear of being sweet-talked out of self control, and it was breaking her.

Frustrated, the girl clenched her fists and threw the sheets off of herself, sitting up and twisting to get out of bed. As she padded through the darkness to the door she checked the watch she'd forgotten to take off. Three-thirty in the morning. She huffed and twisted the doorknob silently.

It had been weeks since the helicarriers had been destroyed. Zola's algorithm was now a pointless reel of data, and Steve was fighting fit again, but the fight between the world and Hydra was far from over. Steve and Natasha had done their parts, sure, but the battles raging inside Lily's mind were not the kind her 'parents' could fight with guns and combat strategies.

This was her own battle, and she was losing drastically.

The teenager tried her best to silence the pessimistic thoughts as she trudged down the short hall from her bedroom to the living room, taking extra care not to make any sound past her father's door. The man was a surprisingly light sleeper, used to catching naps in transport vehicles and bases, and to Lily's great amusement he appeared to be even more sensitive to sounds of movement made by her. Mother's instinct, he'd called it with a wry smile when she'd confronted him about it one morning.

She smiled to herself, clinging to the slight joy the memory brought her, before she walked out towards the kitchen and caught sight of the bullet holes her dear Uncle Buck had left them in the wall.

Oh, right. There's the reason I'm up again, she thought bitterly. Can I not get more than an hour of sleep without being reminded of what we are?

Slowly, though her movements were still effortlessly calculated, Lily took out a glass and filled it with water. Her thoughts incoherent, she put her back to the counter and slid to the floor, cross legged in the corner with her glass cradled carefully between her fingers.

God, life wasn't supposed to feel like this. Was it?

After a moment of silence, Lily decided she should at least pinpoint what was causing her to sleep so badly. Not quite brave enough to close her eyes lest she see the faces, she picked one of the bulbs in the light fixture on the ceiling and stared at it intently.

Hydra had overthrown SHIELD- that much was a given. Lily nodded to herself as she ticked it off the metaphorical list. The Algorithm had been intercepted, and catastrophe averted. That was a win, for sure. But it had also become apparent that Hydra was more widespread than the team initially thought, so their working lives for the next few whatevers would be spent tracking and destroying whatever they could find.

Lily gnawed on her lip slightly, eyes darting to the next bulb as she took a sip of her water. Her career options weren't what was losing her sleep, though. That's where it got more personal.

In the many years before her revival, Lily knew she'd been subjected to levels of programming that surpassed the limits of being humane. She was aware that she'd done missions, been examined and experimented on initially for the good of humanity under SHIELD, but eventually under the sick control of Hydra. She knew she was somehow linked to the Red Room, where Natasha was trained, but as of yet she wasn't sure she wanted to know exactly how.

The fact was that Lily didn't know enough about her own behaviour to trust herself, and somewhere out there were people who held the key to her innermost potential. She was a killing drone that could be activated at any moment, and there was nothing she could do to fight it. She'd passed the scientists tests at all costs because she'd been programmed to survive.

Without thinking, Lily crushed the glass in her hand and jumped when the shards clinked against the tiles and the water bled all over her lap. She yelped as she noticed the blood that followed, and scrambled across the icy tiles to the cupboard where they kept the first aid kit. Tears blurred her vision and her hearing went fuzzy as she fumbled for something to stop the bleeding, so she barely noticed when Steve came looking for her with worry in his eyes, his voice falling on deaf ears as he watched his daughter violently shaking her head and repeating what she believed to be true.

She was the survivor, and she could never be trusted.