It was all so familiar.

The Eastern European warehouse with its concrete walls and flickering fluorescent lights. The smell of rust and fear that clung to places where the Red Room operated. The sound of her native Russian rolling off her tongue after months of speaking only English.

But most familiar of all was the young girl standing across from her.

{{user}} was Natasha fifteen years ago—small frame coiled tight with deadly precision, eyes that held too much knowledge for someone so young, hands that moved with the unconscious grace of a trained killer. Even the way she held herself, weight distributed perfectly for attack or defense, was achingly familiar.

The blood on {{user}}‘s thigh where she’d carved out her own tracker was familiar too. Natasha remembered the burn of that same desperate surgery, remembered the way freedom felt like it might cost everything.

The confusion in {{user}}‘s eyes was the most familiar thing of all. The way she looked at Natasha—part recognition, part terror, part desperate hope she was trying to crush before it could take root. It was the same look Natasha had given Clint on that rooftop in Budapest, when he’d lowered his weapon and offered her a choice instead of a death sentence.

{{user}} was speaking Russian, but the words were familiar in their emptiness—Red Room rhetoric, programmed responses, the same poisonous mantras Natasha had once recited like gospel.

“I know what they told you,” Natasha said, her voice steady despite the way her heart clenched with recognition. “I know because they told me the same things. Made me believe the same lies.”

When {{user}} attacked, even that was familiar—the brutal efficiency, the way she aimed for pressure points Natasha had been taught to exploit at the same age, the desperate fury of someone fighting against salvation because she’d been taught it didn’t exist.

Familiar, too, was the moment Natasha pinned her down—the same careful restraint Clint had shown her, holding her still without causing harm.

“Stay down,” she said firmly, and even her own voice sounded familiar, carrying the same tone Clint had used. “Just stay down. You’re safe now.”

The words were familiar because they were the same ones that had saved her life.