I'm updating again, after a very, very long time. I'm so sorry. I really need to get a hang of this prompt updates thing. Ugh.

CW for violence against inanimate objects, medical stuff(mild), and intrusive a-hole psychiatrists.

They arrive in America after some insurmountable stretch of time. Hanna had found she loathed flying, but managed to fall asleep to the hum of the motor and the feel of Sophie's fingers plaiting her hair; when she awakens, Agent Romanoff hands her a paper dress. "S.H.I.E.L.D. medical facilities. They're going to take DNA samples and some scans, and then psych. is going to ask you some questions."

Hanna sits up, braids sitting on her head like a crown. She remembers her mother's book of Grimm's Faerie Tales, of girls with flower crowns and crowns of gold, glass slippers and work boots, and her shoulders straighten out. "What am I supposed to let them know?"

Agent Romanoff looks almost shocked, but her face is so well-schooled that it barely shows. "Answer their questions as honestly as you can, and if they ask something you're not comfortable with, tell them to skip it."

Hanna nods, strips out of her clothes, dons the paper dress. It itches, crinkles when she moves.

"Hanna!" Sophie shrieks. Her pupils are dilated, Hanna notes, but she acts like I've done something I shouldn't.

Agent Romanoff just looks amused.

"What?"

"Don't take your clothes off in front of people," Sophie instructs, rolling her eyes. "Privacy."

Hanna just sits back down against her side, relishing how soft and warm she is. A wide-jawed agent enters the Quinjet, and asks, "Ms. Heller, we're ready to see you now."

They take eight blood samples, two cheek swabs, a urine sample, a lock of her hair, fingernail clippings, and the skin that hangs off her cuticles. She's thankful for the last one; it always catches on her sleeves, tugs, hurts.

After that, they give her a plastic cup of orange juice(burns on the way down, gritty texture, yellow in colour despite its name) and a cookie(oatmeal raisin with little bits of caramel, chewy, a hint of cloves) to raise her blood sugar, then shuffle her off to an X-ray machine, a CAT scanner, every possible piece of applicable lab equipment.

She remembers this from the CIA, remembers rubber-gloved hands trying and failing to leave bruises with too-tight grips. She remembers breaking necks and breaking out of their facility in Morocco, remembers Marissa Viegler - the body double, the fake - cracking down the spine between her hands.

She wonders if it would take longer to break out of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The same wide-jawed woman shuffles her off to collect clothes - S.H.I.E.L.D. issue sweatpants and t-shirt - before shepherding her to the Psych. department.

"My name is Dr. Roth," says Dr. Roth, bald spot shining under too-golden fluorescent lights. "Would you like to talk to me?"

Hanna, reflexively, looks for cameras, finds one in each corner and two on the desk. She wants to crush them, hates the invisible gremlin GIs watching her remotely, hates the invasion. All this was supposed to be over. "Not particularly."

"That's fine. Most people here respond to that effect." Dr. Roth smiles, like it's funny that he's paid to invade the minds of the people who defend him. "Our files on you say that the CIA began following you a week before your sixteenth birthday. Why then?"

"I told my father I was ready." Truth.

"What does that mean?"

What it sounds like. I was ready. Hanna says as much, tone coolly polite in the way that Agent Romanoff's is when she's particularly scornful. "If you'd like, I can speak louder so you can hear me."

"I have no trouble hearing, Ms. Heller. What did being ready entail?" His pen is running out of ink; he presses down too hard, and the scratching is audible above the sound of his white noise machine.

"I could carry a two hundred pound deer over a hundred kilometer distance. I could awaken when attacked and best my attacker. I could best my father at sparring. I knew my cover back and front. I was ready."

Scratch scratch scratch.

"Ms. Heller, what do you mean by attacked?"

"My father would act as if making an attempt on my life, and I would respond."

"Do you think this is normal parenting behaviour?"

"It was the parenting I required."

Scratch scratch scratch.

"Required to what end?"

"Once I was ready, we would signal Marissa Viegler. She would track us down. I would kill her. I would meet my father at Willhelm Grimm's house," and Hanna resists peeling off the address as well, because that's not normal, and something about this man in this office makes her wary of being too different, "and then we would be free. He trained me. He raised me as his flesh and blood."

Scratch scratch scratch.

"Are you aware that he is not your biological father?"

"Yes."

"Do you know who your biological mother is?"

"Johanna Zadek. Born 1970, died 1996. She was a singer."

"Yes, at the..." Flipping through pages, disinterested. "At the Berlin Opera. Chorus, working her way up the ranks until she disappeared and then died."

"Mr. Grimm said my father was a fool to keep me from magic and music. He promised to teach me."

"What happened to Mr. Grimm?"

"He was beaten to death and hung from the ceiling by his ankles to bleed out."

Scratch scratch scratch.

"Are you self-aware?"

"In what way?"

"Do you know what the CIA did to you in utero?"

"I know what they did to my body. Increased muscle and bone density, increased flexibility, increased reflexes, heightened senses, lessened capacity for pity and fear. Why?"

Scratch scratch scratch.

"What training did Erik Heller put you through?"

"I speak twenty languages. I know everything from our encyclopedia. I am trained in all martial arts, boxing, hand-to-hand combat, riflery, and archery. I know which parts of the human body can be used to induce paralysis, great pain, and death. I can withstand every torture dreamed up by every government. I can best a man twice my size in any fight."

Scratchscratchscratch.

"What are you writing?"

"Just some notes to put in your file."

"You don't need notes. There are six cameras in this room, recording everything."

Dr. Roth looks up, blinking wildly.

"S.H.I.E.L.D. is not so good at hiding things, is it."

"What is your relationship to Sophie Fox?"

"That's..." Hanna grins, Sophie's indignant words on her lips. "Private."

"We need to plan for every eventuality - "

"Plan for this: Sophie is my friend. Anyone who attempts to use her will not like the end result."

Scratch scratch scratch.

"Do these violent outbursts scare you, Ms. Heller?"

Something sick and sour coils in the pit of Hanna's stomach. "Violent outbursts?"

"Yes. You attacked your own father, you're threatening S.H.I.E.L.D. - why do you think that is?"

Stunned. That was the best word for it - stunned.

"I think it's because of your father's training. You were raised with violence, and so when confronted with a situation you don't have a plan for, you react with what you know - violence."

Hanna's throat convulses. She hasn't killed anyone - anyone - in years! How dare this stranger, this invader, make decisions about her?

Faster than Dr. Roth could draw breath, Hanna stands and vaults over the back of her chair, working at the lock. It doesn't give and she lets out a frustrated growl.

"See? That's not a healthy reaction."

"I don't want to talk to you," Hanna says, voice flat. "I want to leave now."

"Disengaging from this conversation doesn't mean I'm not right, Ms. Heller."

With a scream and a kick, the steel-reinforced door falls out into the hall, and Hanna dashes out through the halls, back towards the landing bay on the roof. The Quinjet is gone, but the door inside is recently used, and she runs back through the building, looking for a waiting room, quarters, something.

She finds Sophie within five minutes and, in lieu of a greeting, asks, "Am I violent in situations I don't have a plan for?"

"Only when called for," Sophie replies, looking up from her waiting room magazine. "Why? What's happened, Han?"

"I do not like Dr. Roth. I do not like talking doctors. If I have to talk to one more government talking doctor, I will tear the door to their office off its hinges and wrap it around them so tight they cannot move, let alone ask stupid, invasive questions."

Sophie just nods, tugs Hanna down to sit by her side, and rests her head on Hanna's shoulder. "I had to see a psychiatrist after we got home from Spain. Vomitorium."

Hanna giggles, resting her head atop Sophie's. After a few minutes, Agent Romanoff comes back into the waiting room, Hanna's clothes and a manilla envelope tucked under her arm.

"I hear you made Dr. Roth cry," she says, grinning. "Half the staff is gonna want to buy you a drink."

"He was very rude. And his door was poorly constructed."

Agent Romanoff huffs a laugh. "Six inches of reinforced steel, Ms. Heller. You're a Successful if I've ever seen one."

With that, she led them to a nearby hotel, booked them a room, and promptly left them to their own devices.

Sorry this took so long, and sorry it's so short. It feels weird. I kind of don't like this chapter, but I figured I ought to post it. Feel free to review and tell me what I ought to fix.