You walked without direction, hands in your pockets, breathing in the smell of concrete dust and fresh paint. Five years since HYDRA. One month since you'd been free.

You'd been learning to exist again. Learning that the world had moved on without you. That there were new coffee shops where the old ones had been bombed, new people filling the spaces where familiar ones used to stand.

And then—

A flash of red hair.

A woman, crossing the street ahead of you, coat billowing at her ankles. She moved like she was still fighting something, even in the mundane act of stepping off a curb. Like the war was still in her bones.

You knew that walk. Knew the tilt of her head, the way she held her shoulders like armor.

She hadn't seen you yet.

Six years. You'd counted them every single day in that cell. Every shadow you dissolved into, every hour you spent listening to the world through the veil of your own darkness—you'd been listening for her. For any sign of her.

And here she was.

Twenty feet away. About to cross your path.

The streetlight flickered as you stopped breathing.