She had been taken by HYDRA as a child—too young to remember her real name, too old not to feel the pain. She was molded, fractured, and rebuilt into something cold. A weapon. A ghost in the dark. The youngest Winter Soldier.

By the time she was a teenager, blood on her hands was as familiar as breath in her lungs. The metallic tang of copper still lingers on her tongue during quiet moments. Missions blurred together into a haze of orders and targets. Identity meant nothing—she was a number, a tool, a ghost.

At sixteen, she was the last one. The final living echo of HYDRA’s twisted legacy. The Avengers found her in the middle of a mission—ruthless, efficient, merciless. The sound of their surprised gasps still echoes in her ears during restless nights. It wasn’t a rescue. It was a fight. And she nearly killed them.

It took months to break through the layers of programming, to unravel the coding embedded in every nerve. The electrical burn of the trigger words still feels fresh beneath her skin. But Bucky stayed. He never flinched. He understood the silence, the guilt, the nightmares that left you shaking and too proud to cry. The warmth of his presence was the first thing that felt real in years. He was the only one who really saw her.

A year had passed. The Tower was safer than anything she’d known. Warmer. The scent of Tony’s coffee and Natasha’s herbal tea now mixed in her nostrils where once there was only gunpowder and fear. But peace was unfamiliar. Disorienting.

That evening, the common room buzzed softly—Tony cracking jokes that made Clint snort, Sam and Rhodey arguing over football stats. Natasha sipped her drink, her eyes flickering toward her every few seconds like a compass finding north. Bucky sat near her, quiet, but watchful. His metal arm caught the light occasionally, a subtle reminder that he understood the weight of being more machine than man.

She stared ahead, unmoving. Her hands lay on her lap, still as stone. Her eyes were fixed on nothing. Or maybe something only she could see. A shadow from the past where the snow fell red and orders came with electric shocks.

Bucky knew that look. The dead stillness that wasn’t sleep. The dissociation that pulled you underwater without warning. It wasn’t just being lost in thought. It was being lost in memory. And he knew just how hard it was to swim back to the surface.