[1] hostility ▷ bucky barnes [✔]

[23] ▷ one batch

"ONE batch, two batch, penny and dime," Artemis whispered quietly to herself. Memories flooded her head as she rocked back and forth with her knees digging into her chest, her wild, blue eyes staring forward at the bars of her confinement.

She remembered the blind man, — Matthew, as she could decipher now, — and the lady dressed in black robes that always kept her in line as a child. She remembered Matt calling the woman in black "mother" once or twice in the nostalgia of her flashbacks. She remembered another woman, a young one, with long, black hair and a crimson red suit. Matt was always with her, she knew for sure. Out of that, though, she never caught her name.

She also remembered the black clothed men bursting through the doors of the cellar beneath the Catholic Church with loud scary guns, shooting Matthew's mother as she shielded the young child behind her, launching crimson blood splatters onto Artemis's face. The men pulled her to her feet, and that's as far back as she could remember. All the rest was clouded with the cold feeling of a machine gun in her hand, or the pain of being trained until her bones felt like jelly.

The murders of innocent people, begging for her to give them mercy now came back to haunt her in her time of solitude. She never had this much time to think to herself, and this was hitting her hard. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she still rocked back and forth, the bags under her eyes sagging with the redness of them, sleep depravedness was scratching at the back of her head and it irked her nerves. Ann and Alice had never shut up for this long and it scared her.

"One batch, two batch, penny and dime," She said now, the whisper clouded by her choking sobs. She remembered a tall man that used to visit her a lot from the darkness at the place with Margaret, Matthew's mother. She never knew his name, but he always wore black and carried machine guns wherever he went. The man visited her every Friday, bringing a child's book that was charred from flames but still readable.

"One batch, two batch, penny and dime," He would say, his deep voice echoing from the small side of the child's bunk. He had said that this particular child's book used to be his daughter's favorite, and Artemis never figured out why he always began to tear up while reading it to her. "Three batch, four batch, make them in time." He would say after flipping a page.

After his visit he would leave until the next Friday, and then, he stopped coming after a while. She never figured out why but it broke her heart. That mysterious voice from the darkness that she always wanted to call "dad," had given up on her.

And now, after all those years she finally realizes who that man was, and who Matt was, and who that girl in the red was. They were Hell's Kitchen's heroes, and even anti-heroes, still looking to do the greater good for their city.