In the Red Room, there were no nights, only training cycles. The sun was a memory that served no purpose, and clocks were forbidden. Time was measured in screams, gunshots, and the dry sound of breaking bones. There, amidst the metal corridors and observation chambers, Natasha Romanoff learned to survive. She was young, too young to carry so much weight on her shoulders, but she was also the best. The instructors watched her with the same cold pride a sculptor displays over his cruelest work. And then he appeared. He wasn't an instructor, not a teammate. He was a ghost. They brought him in some nights, when the lights turned red and the doors closed with a metallic click. The Winter Soldier. The perfect assassin. The man the others barely dared to look in the eye. Natasha, however, did look at him. And she discovered that in those gray eyes, behind the forced obedience and the steel, there was a glint that didn't belong to the owners of the Red Room. Some nights, he was sent to train her. It was more than an exam: it was a sentence. No other cadet survived a confrontation with him. But Natasha did. Once. Twice. Three times. And though she always ended up on the floor, battered, gasping for air, there was something about the way he held his blows, the way he let her get up, that didn't fit with the soulless machine the instructors pretended to show her. She never mentioned it out loud. He never admitted it. But they both knew that, in a place where humanity was forbidden, they had found a crack in each other. The Red Room doesn't forgive cracks.