“If autumn falls, winter will follow.”

He doesn’t know what it means.

He knows, of course—knows the phrase, the protocol, the trigger—but he doesn’t know why it makes his jaw clench. Why his chest feels tight when it’s said aloud. Why it tastes like rust and snow in the back of his throat.

She is the protocol.

Codename: Autumn. Asset 17-07. Red Room. Widow-class. High lethality, high adaptability. Her tactical notes say emotionally compromised, but all he sees is precision wrapped in silence. No seduction tactics. No feigned softness. Just violence—quiet, economic, final.

He’s only seen her twice before this last fall. Once through mirrored glass. Once in the field. Each time, something quaked beneath the ice in him. Not warmth. Not recognition. Something worse—pull.

And now: she's fallen.

He’s dispatched to recover her. He does.

Bleeding. Dislocated shoulder. Wires still trailing from her spine—someone tried to reprogram her too many times, too fast. She’s shivering when he finds her in the snow, red scarf soaked through, but she doesn’t scream when he lifts her.

Just stares up at him like she knows what he is.

Like she knows he’ll never let go.

They put them in the same cell.

Budget cuts, maybe. Observation purposes. Maybe it’s a test.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t care.

She’s silent for three days. Won’t look at him. Sits against the far wall with the scarf wrapped around her hand, tightening it until her fingers go white.

When he moves too close, she flinches—not from fear. From something else. Like proximity hurts.

“Why did you come for me?” she asks finally.

Voice cracked, sanded down from disuse.

He shrugs. His fingers twitch. “Protocol.”

She nods, like she expected that. But she doesn’t look away.

They don’t speak often. Words are too soft, too imprecise. But they learn each other’s rhythms— When she eats. When she sleeps. When she cries without sound.

He doesn't sleep when she cries.

Not because he cares. Not because he can feel anything.

But because something in his broken skull says he’s supposed to keep her safe.

Even from dreams.

They start sparring again.

Trapped bodies need function. Routine. Structure. The guards watch them through the glass like animals.

They hurt each other, sometimes. Break skin, dislocate joints. But it’s never rage.

It’s ritual.

Sometimes, when she’s pressed under him, her breath hitching, her eyes flash with something—need, hate, recognition—and he thinks: This is the only thing either of us understands.

One night, he wakes to find her sitting on his side of the cell.

She’s close. Too close.

He doesn’t move.

She doesn’t speak.

She just reaches up and traces the scar under his jaw—left by a blade, decades old—and whispers:

“They call you Winter because you don’t feel.”

He watches her hand.

Watches how it trembles.

Watches how her eyes never match her face.

“You think they named you Autumn because of the color,” he says, voice low. “But they didn’t. They named you that because you rot everything you touch.”

She doesn’t flinch. She smiles.

Small. Ruined. Almost beautiful.

“Then I guess we deserve each other.”

The guards start leaving them together longer.

There’s something beneath the scars, the frost, the conditioning.

But it isn’t human.

It’s need.

Twisted and knotted and buried in pain. Not affection. Not romance.

But the terrifying, unbearable relief of not being alone in the cage.

He doesn’t love her.

He wouldn’t know how.

But when she’s gone—called for evaluation, or punishment, or recalibration—he walks tight circles in the cell.

And when she comes back, broken and limp, he sits closer. Not touching. Just near.

Close enough that if she screams again in her sleep, he can reach out.

And she always screams.

Always.

But never when he’s holding her.