Hey Sailor || Steve Rogers x Reader

|••• The Pirate's Life •••|

The hefty weight of the rifle in my hands is barely noticeable; years of workouts and training helped ensure that.

I had entire control of the situation and I loved every bit of it. Piers of mine lined the mob of people that were being holding hostage, and everyone in this room, and on the ship that we had overtaken, were under my leadership. Even thinking about it, the surge of power was almost corporeal in my veins. I loved it.

"Bouge et je te tire dessus!" I ruptured, flexing the muzzle of my gun close to one of the many people's faces. The woman in front of me, who was cowering as far from me as her bindings would allow, was not one I was familiar with. Of the twenty or-so captives that were in my care, only less than a quarter were strangers to me. She was one of them, and I felt a fleeting wash of sympathy upon seeing her panic-filled eyes, but quickly stifled in into submission. There was a time and a place for everything, but only the truly skilled and adept can responsibly handle their emotions with punctuality.

There was a rapid-fire of speech going on all around me, the French that I had opted to primarily speak in clashing with the Russian and German and dozens of other languages that my colleagues chose to communicate in. Most of the people aboard the ship, almost all of which were restrained in the kitchen that we currently occupied, were American or also spoke English, but it was always safer to unnecessarily do the maximum than to be caught unprepared and vulnerable. Assumptions get people killed in this line of work, so even the most insignificant details cannot go unnoticed.

That's a recurring problem when the two intelligence superpowers of the world go against each other: Everyone knows everything, but also nothing at all. SHIELD's technology, their only strong-suit, was nothing, personal biases aside, against Hydra's intel and communication, but vigilance was always a must-have.

Nick Fury, who has been holding the impossible burden of directing SHIELD for the past 30 years, claimed to be the most vigilant and intelligent man on Earth. In a way, perhaps he was right, but a more fitting title was Naive. This naivety is exactly what has lead to this moment, when the culmination of lifetimes of distrust and untruths come to a head on a cargo ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Half of the SHIELD officials on board currently were not that at all, instead, they're Hydra trustees that I've know for as long as my mother has been a partner with Hydra, which is to say, my entire life. Admittedly, it's weird being able to boss around the people that used to babysit me, but at the same time, such an extreme power complex is like a drug fix.

I was Hydra's little girl. Not some freak from a test tube or an inhumane experiment: I was a perfectly normal child that had the most elite murderers, hackers, assassins, and warlords wrapped around my finger. Though my days of toddling about the science labs or paying visits to my mother's office and having playdates with her assistants were long over, everyone there still saw me as that same child back in the 90's. It's just that now that little girl was wielding a litany of lethal weapons and threatening to shoot innocent people in the head like it was second nature.

Which, to me, it was.

Voices continued to ramble in my head as the guards, some of the lowest-ranked yet most crucial members of the team, spoke through the earpieces. I had trained myself to filter out the white noise over the years, only taking in the vital information and making more space for my thoughts. But a glaring problem presented itself to me, one that I have rarely ever seen in the field:

Silence

"What is this about?" I mumbled to the agent nearest me, a man with greying hair and a harsh face. His confused expression told be that he had picked up on the change too too, but was only able to offer me a shrug as neither of us had any idea as to what was going on in the hull of the Lemurian Star. "Keep them here, I need answers." I demanded to the rest of my men that were standing in various places around the spacious room, all wielding rifles of their own.