Status: in progress and will be finished this year wohoo and will probably get a sequel

Unravel

XXXII

Whatever the nurses had given her, it had done its job exceptionally. Nothing mattered; even when it started to wear off, she didn’t feel like crying anymore. In fact, Liz felt more numb than ever before. She was perfectly content laying in bed, her gaze fixed somewhere a thousand miles off, with just the steady drone of a running TV in her room and the sound of the usual happenings in a hospital to keep her company.
Her mind could have been blissfully emptied of anything and everything that mattered, if it weren’t for one tiny thing that kept sticking like a speck of dust on an otherwise perfectly clean surface. She could still muster up the tiniest bit of worry and she loathed herself for it. Her worrying didn’t pertain to herself - she had lost most of her consideration for her own well-being when she entered the job. The worry was directed at Ewan.
Ewan, who after all of those years of being her friend, shot her and would have left her to die had people not heard the shots ring out through the stair case. Ewan, who posed as a friend and in the end turned out to be the enemy all along, causing irreparable damage to Liz’ ability to trust.. But was that really true? Was the story that she had spun inside of her head actually the reality of things? Or was she only misleading herself in thinking that people have to inherently be bad to do bad things?

Liz shook herself out of her thoughts. Nazis were bad, no matter the front they put up to hide their agenda. She couldn’t excuse that. She had seen too many documentaries, seen too many scared people and heard too many war stories from her grandfather. Her sense of ethics was also still kind of working, despite everything that had happened and what she had done. She knew working with Bucky and Steve and even Natasha was technically illegal. But still - they weren’t working towards killing people. Their main goal was helping them.

But she couldn’t shake her doubts about her friend. What if Ewan really wasn’t part of Hydra and had a different motive? Maybe he was being pressured, blackmailed, threatened… Maybe they had kidnapped his wife, Karen. Or maybe he was just a massive asshole.

Sighing, Liz shifted her gaze from the bright white ceiling of her hospital room to the open door. She would have given anything to just stand up and walk out of this hospital and to the safehouse, to the people she could tell these things to, the handful of people she didn’t have to be afraid of betraying her, but she could barely scoot up into a sitting position without breaking out in a cold sweat.
So she closed her eyes to the world, breathing in deeply and listening to the footsteps of nurses and doctors hurrying along the corridor. Only when one pair came closer, then stopped, did she open her eyes. And boy, did she wish she hadn’t.

“No,” was the first thing that came out of her mouth before she looked away again. “Just-, no.”

“Elizabeth, I was worried.”

“No,” Liz barely whispered, her eyes trained on the window and not on the man standing in front of her. “Worry for someone else is not something you are capable of.”

She felt him shift uneasily and listened for the rustle of his suit as he moved closer to her bed, a smooth sound of expensive cloth on an even more expensive silk lining, but the nervous steps of leather soles gave way to the anxious being underneath the prim and proper facade.

“Elizabeth, no matter what you think I’m capable of, you are my daughter and I was worried.”
Deciding to fall silent, Liz trained her eyes on him again, taking in his once-brown hair now greying and the deepening lines around his eyes. He had grown old since she had last seen him but he still had an air of authority around him, standing as tall and as straight as humanly possible for someone his age.
After another moment of unease, he sighed and grabbed the chair next to her bed, pulling in closer and sitting down slowly without looking at her.
Liz’ eyes had found the TV, playing a news segment, and even a politician cutting a ribbon was more engaging than the person sitting beside her.

“Elizabeth, please,” her father started but she tuned him out, letting only the occasional word slip through the news reporter’s soothing voice.

...New school…

“I know this is upsetting, but I was worried.”

...305 students for this year…

“Ryan wanted to come the moment he heard the news and wasn’t able to reach you on your phone, again. But I thought it would be best for the two of us to talk first.”

...the best of the best…

“Elizabeth, talk to me.”

...new information on building on on 74th Str...

The news anchor’s voice caught Liz’ full attention for a moment before her father interrupted again.
“You’re being a child.”

“I’m your child.”

...started on the third floor…
The familiarity of the building sent shivers down her spine, agitating her further. She knew that apartment building.

“Elizabeth, I’m being serious.”

“Father, you’re always serious.”

“Elizabeth!”

...unknown source…

“What?! Nothing I’ve ever done has sat right with you, so why even try?!”

“You know that’s not true.”

“I know it’s true, I’ve lived it!!”

...evacuated…

“Elizabeth, you’re being unfair.”

...shots fired…

“Shut up!” she suddenly yelled, her blood running cold.

“Excuse me?”

“I said shut up,” she frantically repeated, not tearing her eyes away from the screen, now showing an apartment building engulfed in flames. “I need your phone, give me your phone!”

“I won’t give you my phone until you tell me what’s going on!” he yelled back, grabbing ahold of her shoulder.

Despite taking notice of her heartbeat rising, Liz couldn’t bring herself to calm down. She knew that building, of course she did. Swatting his hand away, Liz clenched her teeth and swung her legs off of the bed. Frantically searching her room for her bag, she finally located it on another chair. But after the strenuous effort of dragging herself over to it and rummaging through it, the pain she was in and the emotional toll of coming up empty-handed yet again brought her feeling of panic to boil over.

Breathing heavily, she found herself scanning her room in desperation. She knew what she needed to do, her brain was streamlining the tasks already. She just didn’t know how to do them. She needed a phone. She needed to remember the phone number. She needed to make sure they were okay. She needed to make sure none of them had been in this god-damn apartment building, Ewan’s apartment building. She needed to make sure they hadn’t been involved in raiding it in the first place.

She needed a phone.

After grabbing some loose change from her bag, she tossed it aside, her things clattering to the floor. Sidestepping her father, she hobbled through the door and towards the ward’s payphone, her father following her at a safe distance, his hands outstretched, helpless, as if to catch her.

She wanted to count the steps it took her to reach the phone just to distract her from the pain. But the only numbers in her head kept repeating themselves. Oh two oh, five five five. Oh one three six. Oh two oh, five five five. Oh one three six. Oh two oh, five five five. Oh one three six.

Dialling, she prayed for the ringing to stop and for it to be replaced by a familiar voice. But it kept ringing, and ringing and- “Yeah?”

“Sam!” Liz shouted as soon as she heard him answer. “Please tell me this isn’t any of your doing. The building on 74th? Please just, you’re all safe, right? Right? Bucky? Steve? Natasha? Clint?”

“Hold up,” she heard on the other end of the line, almost too quiet to hear it over her beating heart but after a moment of rustling, she heard more familiar voices.

“Liz?” Steve’s voice rang out. “Whose phone is this?”

“It’s- it’s the hospital payphone. Steve, are you all alright?”

“You shouldn’t be using a public phone to contact us,” she heard Natasha cut in.

“I know, I just- I need to know, are you alright? What happened?” she pleaded.

“We were there,” she heard Steve say and her heart dropped. “No one’s hurt but the FBI had more intel and got there quicker. They’ve got him.”

“E-Ewan’s in custody. With- with the FBI.” Liz stuttered. “Fuck.”

“We’re thrilled, too,” she heard Sam chime in.

“Liz, I need you to hang up now,” Steve cut in. “We’ll let you know about everything as soon as we can, I promise.”

“What about Bucky?” she hurried. “Is he with you?”

After a moment of atypical silence and growing tension, she asked again, “Guys?”

“Natasha, don’t,” she heard someone on the other end.

“Don’t tell me what to do. Liz, he’s gone AWOL for the moment.”

“What do you mean, he’s gone AWOL? If anyone shouldn’t be going AWOL, it’s him!” Liz said and felt her somewhat soothed anxiety rise again.

“He was pissy before and now that Ewan’s in the custody of the FBI he freaked. Don’t worry, he’s fine,” Sam continued, doing nothing to ease Liz’ nerves, but this time she chose to comply.

“Thank you,” she told them before hanging up, right before putting her hand on the wall and letting her head hang, too, as a myriad of feelings washed over her. He was fine. Everyone was fine, everyone but her. As that thought crossed her mind, she felt the adrenaline wane off and pain made its way from the top of her head to her toes, taking every tiny bit of strength she still had. As she closed her eyes and let her body slump down towards the floor, she felt two hands beneath her arms, catching her before she hit the linoleum. Clenching her eyes shut to hold in her tears, she hissed, “Let me go.”

“Elizabeth, be reasonable.”

“I’ve been reasonable all my life, now let go of me!”

“Eliz-”

“NOW!” she ordered, finally being too angry to hold her tears in any longer. “Just leave.”

She felt her father lower her softly onto the linoleum floor with a sigh and as she finally sat, she felt herself start crying again. After a moment of waiting, she heard her father sigh again and as he left her sitting on the hospital floor, he didn’t turn around for one last look. But that was nothing unusual.
♠ ♠ ♠
not dead but in fact very much alive and still kicking, although with a shit ton of kids waiting for me to grade their homework lmao

Anyway, special thanks to Bella for kicking my ass into gear again and beta'ing this chapter and hopefully many more, you rock :)

enjoy, let me know what you think!