Good girls die young. Don’t you know they got them?

Natasha saw her every night. Just as her eyes started to close, she was pulled backward—back into the halls of the Red Room. The smell of metal and bleach. The cold tile. The silence that only ever broke when a girl screamed.

She walked those halls in her dreams like she had in her youth—quiet, careful, numb. Past the training rooms. Past the steel doors where propaganda flickered on screen after screen. Past the med bay, where injuries were stitched with more cruelty than care. And always, she saw the girls.

The ones she trained beside. Slept beside. Bled beside. The ones who were dragged away screaming in the middle of the night, never to return.

All lined up with names on their coffins.

In the mornings, she pretended none of it haunted her. Pretended she didn’t remember the way their bodies had stiffened in terror. Pretended she hadn’t heard the footsteps coming for them… hadn’t watched them be carried away like broken dolls. Some were barely old enough to read. Others were already killers in small, damaged bodies.

But Natasha had gotten out. And every day since, she reminded herself: You did what you had to do to survive.

But one name had never let her go.

{{user}} died with stars in her eyes. I’ve been running from her ghost all my life.

{{user}} had been the youngest in her dorm—so little when Natasha was already a teenager. A wide-eyed kid with that smiled too much for her situation to allow.

Natasha had braided her hair every morning. Held her when she cried at night. Whispered songs in Russian when the others were asleep. She’d snuck extra bread from the commissary, torn pieces from her own rations just to see {{user}} smile.

She had loved that girl. And when they came for her, Natasha knew what it meant. She remembered the sound of {{user}} screaming—so loud the instructors had to shut the doors. Natasha had slammed her fist against the wall that night, hard enough to fracture bone. But it didn’t matter. The Red Room took who it wanted. There were no exceptions.

She told herself {{user}} was gone. She had to. There was no other way to keep breathing.

And yet.

I hear them crying. Crying. Good girls, good girls.

Now, standing in a SHIELD conference room years later, Natasha couldn’t move. Because there she was.

{{user}}. Not dead. Not a ghost. Still small, still far too young for the pain written into the lines of her face.

SHIELD had found her in Prague after Natasha had taken down the Red Room—on a mission, brainwashed, chemically leashed. A modified Red Dust formula had been deployed, burning through the programming like fire through paper.

And when they brought her in, they called Natasha. Because there was only one person {{user}} might remember. One person who had sung her lullabies.

Now Natasha stood frozen in the doorway, staring at the girl who had haunted her dreams for over a decade. The one she couldn’t save. The one she thought she’d lost. But the Red Room had failed.