Chapter Text
You don’t tell anyone where you’re going.
You badge in through the last security door and the sound follows you—metal clicking shut behind you like a decision you already made days ago. The hallway smells like disinfectant and old concrete, too clean to be comforting. You’ve been in worse places. You tell yourself that like it’s a spell.
The guard doesn’t look at you when he gestures down the corridor.
“Five minutes,” he says. “No physical contact.”
You nod. You always nod.
Her door isn’t a door, not really. It’s glass—thick, reinforced, floor-to-ceiling—designed so you can never forget that she’s visible. That she’s contained. That she’s still dangerous.
Natasha Romanoff looks up the moment you enter her line of sight.
Of course she does.
She’s sitting at the small table bolted into the floor, one leg tucked beneath her, red hair pulled back in a low, careless knot. She’s wearing gray today—soft fabric, prison-issued but altered just enough to fit her like she wants it to. Like she’s still choosing.
Her mouth curves before you can stop yourself from noticing.
“Well,” she says, voice warm, amused, intimate in a way that has nothing to do with distance. “They finally let you come see me without pretending it’s an accident.”
You stop a few feet from the glass.
Your reflection overlays her face for half a second—your suit jacket, the binder flattening your chest, the dark circles you haven’t slept enough to hide. A profiler’s uniform. A man’s. Yours.
“You asked for me,” you say.
She hums. “I asked for you months ago. You ignored me.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did.” She tilts her head, studying you the way she always did, like you’re a puzzle she already solved but enjoys taking apart anyway. “But you’re here now. Which means something’s wrong.”
You don’t answer. You don’t need to. She’s already leaning back, fingers lacing together, eyes bright with interest.
“Sit,” she says gently, like you’re the one in the cell.
You sit.
It’s quieter when you’re seated, the hum of the lights louder somehow. You can feel the glass between you—thick enough to stop bullets, thick enough to stop her hands, not thick enough to stop memory.
“You look tired,” Natasha says. “They working you too hard? Or is it personal this time?”
“It’s a case,” you say automatically.
She smiles wider. “It always is with you.”
You swallow.
You’ve been circling this for weeks—evidence boards, photos you won’t let yourself look at too closely, bodies arranged with a kind of intention that makes your stomach twist. The killer is meticulous. Patient. Familiar with anatomy. Comfortable with blood.
Comfortable with control.
“We can’t get ahead of him,” you say. “Every profile we build collapses. He escalates, but not how we expect. He’s… adapting.”
Natasha’s eyes soften, just a little. Not sympathy. Recognition.
“And you thought of me,” she says.
You hate that she sounds pleased.
“You understand this kind of offender,” you say. “You understand—”
“What it’s like to take something apart,” she finishes. “To know exactly where to cut.”
Your jaw tightens.
“I’m not here to reminisce.”
She laughs quietly. “Oh, sweetheart. Everything with us is reminiscence.”
There it is—the word she still uses, like nothing has changed. Like she didn’t try to mold you into something sharper. Like she didn’t love you in ways that left scars.
Like she didn’t kill.
“You told me once,” Natasha continues, voice lowering, “that you were afraid you were like me. Do you remember that?”
You do. You remember the bathroom mirror afterward, your hands shaking as you adjusted your binder, grounding yourself in the weight of your own body. In the fact that you were real. That you were not her.
“I was wrong,” you say.
She watches you for a long moment.
“No,” she says softly. “You were scared.”
Silence stretches between you. The guard shifts somewhere behind you. Five minutes feels like nothing. Five minutes feels like a trap.
“Show me what you have,” Natasha says. “Tell me where you’re stuck.”
You hesitate.
This is the line you swore you wouldn’t cross—the moment where she stops being a resource and starts being a voice in your head again. Where her insight becomes indispensable.
Where she becomes necessary.
But the faces of the victims flash behind your eyes, and you think of how the killer left them—careful, deliberate, almost reverent.
You slide the file across the table toward the glass.
Natasha’s eyes light up.
“Oh,” she breathes. “You brought me homework.”
And for the first time since you walked in, you realize something with a chill that settles deep in your chest:
She isn’t trapped in here with you.
You’re trapped out there without her.