A/N HALT! If you haven't read the other two chapters released today, you might wanna do that!

2000, October, Red Room Facility, Russia:

Natalia pulled the trigger one last time and stepped back, lowering her pistol and falling back into a waiting position. Head trained forward, chin up, back straight. The woman behind her stepped forward and partially around Natalia, her metal arm coming to take the gun from Nat's hand. She gave it up - as she always did - without resistance, gaze still trained on the target down the shooting range.

"Лучше. Спарринг сейчас. Прийти."

[Better. Sparring now. Come.]

The woman's accent was dead-on, Nat had to admit it. The Soldat was not originally Russian: or at least, that was what the rumors said. Where she was actually from, no one at her echelon seemed to know. Natalia would probably never get high enough to know things of that ilk, but damn if she wasn't going to try.

She nodded at the order and turned to follow the other redhead out of the room, The Soldat walking ahead, taking the familiar left hand turn towards the sparring room. The gun was gone, tucked into some holster or another. The Soldat wore several.

It was only this absent studying of the other woman's back that gave her the warning she needed to drop as The Soldat whipped around, metal arm first, and sent a punch into the spot where Natalia's head had been a second beforehand. The woman followed up with a kick down, forcing Nat into a roll that just barely took her out of harm's way, and she jumped quickly to her feet, keeping on her tiptoes. This was a new test, she knew (she hoped ) and she had to prove she was ready for it. The living weapon came at her again, this time metal arm first, and Nat leaped into action. A foot there, a hand there, and she was using The Soldat's momentum against her, slinging up onto the woman's shoulders, and after flicking the garrote out of her sleeve, went to strangle her. The metal hand was immediately between the wire and the woman's neck, and she felt The Soldat relax a little.

"Хорошо. На сегодня хватит. Уволенный."

[Good. That's enough for today. Dismissed.]

Natalia dropped off The Soldat's back, garrote disappearing back up her sleeve, and she nodded, took a few steps backward, and turned to go.

She could feel the weapon's eyes on her all the way down the hallway.

She returned to her quarters - a terribly insulated room at the top of the building, on the hall with the rest of the remaining trainees, overlooking the woods that backed up onto the facility. She was the only one with a window on this end of the building, however. Unfortunately, most of the time the best thing she saw out the window was a songbird that nested in a nearby tree.

Today was going to be different.

She was sat by her window, an hour after she'd been dismissed, reading a book she'd been assigned, when movement caught her eye. She was not trained to ignore movement. Quickly, she looked up, setting her book in her lap. Through the bare tree limbs, a flash of silver and bright crimson red. Then the figure moved out into the clearing, and she drew in a quiet breath. It was a man with long, dark hair, a mask covering half of his face, his shoulders broad - and one of them silver, just like The Soldat's. Another, different flash of movement, and there was The Soldat herself. The two figures stood across from each other in the clearing for a long moment, as if sizing each other up, the moment tense.

Then the man lifted his non-silver hand and pulled off the half mask, and the redheaded woman stepped forward, closing the distance between them until they were standing right in front of each other. No words were exchanged, not that Natalia could see, but after a moment, The Soldat raised her metal hand and touched the man's face. Tenderly, gently, but with a strain of caution that spoke of past problems. He stood stock still, and she could not see his face well enough to see if he was receptive or not, but some signal passed between them and the woman's hand dropped again. He looked at her for a moment, then brought the mask back up and secured it again, and they both turned and walked towards the facility's main office.

Natalia sat back away from the window as soon as she thought it safe to move, taking a deep breath now that she felt like The Soldat wasn't going to hear it from a thousand paces. Who was that man? She'd never seen him before, but he had the same (if not significantly more massive) metallic arm that her temporary mentor had. That, and they obviously knew each other. Given the blank, robotic personality The Soldat had, she wondered how that worked. It was said that she had handlers on the base, just like all agents on a mission except much more invasive - it was also said that when she was done training the Black Widow program, she would be 'put on ice' until she was needed again. Natalia did not know what that meant, but it didn't sound friendly.

Now was the question of whether to report the interaction. There was a chance that for some reason they had a sanctioned relationship, but the meeting in the back woods by themselves spoke otherwise. Still... Nat hesitated to interfere. The Soldat, although not a joy to be around, had so far been one of her less cruel mentors. Where other teachers taught with a heavy fist, the metal-armed woman merely corrected posture with a touch, told her when something was wrong and often supplied the method for how to fix it. She wasn't sentimental - she hadn't gotten to nearly sixteen being sentimental - but she believed in fairness. Her mentor had done nothing to deserve being tattled on.

Nat picked her book back up and returned to it.

2014, Washington D.C., Safehouse

Natasha woke up from her dream with a start, and then slowly relaxed back onto the sofa, rolling a knot out of her neck. Another vivid one. Annoying what dredging up the past tended to do. Still... She stared up at the ceiling, her hands resting on her stomach. The Winter Soldiers... Another memory played out as a dream. One she'd nearly forgotten about, it seemed. She'd done her best to block out her formative years, and The Soldat had just been another in a long line of people brought in to make her into the weapon she was. True, she'd never forgotten the woman entirely, but knowing who she was had brought back some detailed memories she'd thought she'd repressed or forgotten.

At the time, she'd thought the arms to be part of the puzzle, but the mystery had faded when the man (Bucky, she knew now, and another Soldat like her teacher) had disappeared after the meeting in the woods. Her life had been enough to worry about without adding a stranger she'd only seen once into the mix. And then she'd seen him again, years later, and he'd put a bullet through her to get to his target. Still, he'd been a ghost story. No one knew where he'd come from or where he'd gone, or why there were sightings of him dating back fifty years. Nat hadn't known until a few years into her time with S.H.I.E.L.D. that The Soldat was a similar case, and even then, she hadn't made the connection.

Then again, no one did. How could they, without all the information? The only people that would have seen her face and connected it to Captain Steve Rogers were mostly dead, or in the rare case like Peggy, in a nursing home. Nobody had seen her in years, anyway. She could have been dead. Nat looked at the coffee table, where Katherine Lewis' file was laid out next to a dozen others, most with no name attached. They were all still hers, of course, but her name had been lost to all but the U.S. Military's bureaucracy. The price of history neglecting to write it down in the books, Nat thought. Steve had been quietly furious to find Kat mentioned nowhere in his Smithsonian exhibit, even if he was reluctant to discuss her much.

Steve was certain she was alive - she thought maybe it was less certain, but she wouldn't take his hope. He needed it. Bucky was in the wind; untraceable, for the moment. Evidence that Katherine was still alive after all of these years, just like Bucky, was what was fueling Steve's current Hydra base sweeps with Sam. Most of them were empty, so she didn't worry about them too much, but she did occasionally wonder if maybe she should be helping them.

She sighed, sitting up and brushing red curls out of her face before leaning forward and jotting down a note on the edge of the main folder with a half-blunt pencil she'd been wearing down off and on all night. Katherine & Bucky in same place in Russia in 2000. KGB should have files.

She sat back again, running a hand over her face, and then stood to drag herself to bed. She would call Steve with the news that they'd been in the same area during that month at the very least, but for now, she had to rest.

A/N Last one for today, guys. Let us know what you're thinking!