Over the next few days they had a lot of those quiet moments that they normally didn't get to have. Katya had Peter download that chess app she'd found on her phone that provided some short-lived entertainment, but she essentially obliterated him each time so it didn't last very long. There was a trivia game they played together, too, that was much more evenly matched, which they played side by side in bed sharing Peter's phone. Sometimes they'd take naps- sometimes she'd wake up before him, and get to watch his even breathing and creaseless face, and sometimes she'd wake up after him, and get to wake up to that glowing smile. The moment she was cleared for solids Peter came back with a bag full of bodega bagels, which they ate whilst playing ratslap way too competitively for the bedside table's structure- they ended up cracking it, to the nurse's dismay, but a new one appeared soon after.

Finally, after a few days, Katya was well enough to start practicing walking again with the medical assistants, which she took as her cue to practically push Peter out of the compound- "You've missed patrol for three days, the world still needs their Spiderman"- which he eventually, reluctantly, agreed to. He'd still visit her afterwards, late at night, to fill her in on how Queens was doing in her absence, which she'd exchange for the information she'd gathered that day on Aneszka's whereabouts.

Katya had briefly worried that the tracker had stopped working, but it did just seem like the woman spent the majority of her time in her apartment, doing who knows what. Without the drone, they didn't have eyes on her actions, so she could have very well either been fashioning new weapons or watching reruns of sitcoms- Katya'd never know.

But as long as she knew where she was.

—- — —-

It was coming up on a little over a week, now, since the incident, and Katya was able to walk around unassisted, as long as she promised to keep her heart monitor telemeter with her and take her medication- pain meds, only- on time, which meant she got to water her plants, and spend time in her room. Ned came over, and after ogling the entire compound for a while ("Does Mr. Stark have a secret lab?" "It's not really a secret, it's in the basement and there's one on the third floor" Katya said flatly) and they had a movie night, where they watched Attack of the Clones and Katya finally got to try buttered popcorn. School was out for the semester, so there weren't any assignments she was missing, and it wasn't until Peter brought it up the next day that she realized Christmas was just around the corner.

They were sitting in her room, the credits of a television show rolling across her laptop screen, when he asked her, "Does Mr. Stark usually do anything for Christmas?"

Katya, who'd been spinning around in her desk chair, shrugged. "I don't know, I only got here this semester." Yet it felt like she'd been there for years. "I've never really had a Christmas before, anyway."

Peter balked. "You've never had Christmas?"

"Not really. I've seen a bunch of Christmas movies though- and Russian Christmas is different than American- or more, Christian- Christmas, anyway."

Peter raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Yeah, it's on a different day- it's church stuff. The Academy was really big on….I guess you could call it-" she fumbled for the word, "when you don't believe in a God?"

"Atheism?"

"Yeah, that- kind of a holdover from the USSR, I think. Same ideology, so there's no distractions. Russian Orthodox is a separate religion- we only really learned about any of this in our Culture classes."

There was a beat where neither of them said anything. Katya returning to spinning in her chair, and Peter was flopped over on her bed, head now hanging off the side.

"Why do you call it The Academy and not the Red Room?"

Katya stopped spinning. She didn't know why, but the question made her nervous. "It's just like…that's what I grew up calling it, and that's what they always referred to it as, so…I guess it's kind of ingrained. I've only ever heard it called the Red Room after I was Woken."

Peter flipped over so he could prop himself up on his elbows. "So shouldn't you want to call it the Red Room now?"

Shouldn't she? It was the proper term for it, after all- it's what everyone who wasn't indoctrinated into the operation since infancy called it, and she was trying to break away from that, she had broken away from it, she'd been Woken, she was free-

So why did the words Red Room feel so uncomfortable in her mouth?

"I think…" Katya resumed her spinning, but much slower this time, more to give her body something to do than anything else. "I think I use it as a way to placate myself. You know? Something like "Red Room" sounds so…hostile. Merciless. Unforgiving. And that's what it was, but, saying something like' The Academy'- academies are everywhere. It's a lot more vague. It makes me feel…" she trailed off, not knowing how to formulate her words. Like less of a monster? Less of a machine? That was the entire reason the people behind the Red Room used terms like that, to humanize it, to make it sound less horrifying. So by avoiding it, wasn't she playing right into their hands?

— —

"Again."

The rest of them- the fourteen that were left, anyway, Katya'd been forced to snap Vera"s neck that morning and another girl, Tasiya, had met the same fate against someone else on the other side of the mat the day before - repositioned themselves across from the pistols that lay in the middle of the mat and, when cued, somersaulted forward, grabbing the pistol on the way up, turning when their knees made contact with the mat to face the opposite position, pistol ready. They did a few more coordinated turns before somersaulting again, into a standing position, posed thrice more, and then somersaulted back down, depositing the pistol exactly where it had been in the first place- not a single degree of an angle off.

"Again."

—-

Think of them as skills. Knowledge isn't inherently good or bad- it's what you do with that knowledge that makes it such. Think of them as gifts.

"...like I have more options."

Peter'd pressed his lips into a thin line watching her struggle to answer. For some reason, she felt ashamed, but she couldn't identify where that was coming from.

Then he nodded a bit. "Yeah, that makes sense. It just kind of seems like exactly the reason they'd call it that in the first place."

"I know." Katya mumbled into her knee, which she'd brought up to her chest. She'd since stopped spinning again. "But I feel like I'm using it differently."

"One word can mean more than one thing, myshka, it's okay-" Katya could tell from the look on his face that he felt bad for asking in the first place.

Katya shook her head. "I just mean like, "Red Room' sounds like a bad place, and anything that comes from there is inherently bad. And I'm trying not to believe that about myself anymore, so even if it's 'playing right into their hands' it just….makes me feel better."

Peter nodded. "I know, I know. And that makes sense. Hey-" he got up from the bed and wrapped his arms around her in a hug. "It's okay."

She hadn't even realized it until he'd hugged her, but she'd started to cry at some point. Godammit. She could feel emotions she didn't know how to name start to bubble up, but she was in no place to go down to the gym- no way would they let her, yet- so what the fuck was she supposed to do with them now?

So she dropped the subject- or more, pegged it at the floor. Sniffling, she pulled out of Peter's embrace. "So, tell me about Christmas."

Peter looked pained, but did his best to soften his features back to neutrality. He went back to sit on the bed, tugging her, chair and all, with him, so that he could prop his feet up on the seat on either side of her form. He moved them side to side, rocking the chair a bit as he did so. Katya didn't know why, but she found it soothing, so she didn't question it.

"Christmas is like…well when you're a kid, like a little kid, it's magic, right? Because you wake up in the morning and there's tons of presents under the tree- you decorate a tree for it beforehand, I forgot about that part- oh, and there's cookies, too, that Santa- the guy that gives you the presents? He eats them-" as he spoke, his voice sped up, and his face began to light up. Katya smiled into her knee.

"-But after you grow up a bit, and you find out Santa isn't real- oh, sorry, that's a spoiler-" He joked, which got a genuine laugh out of Katya. She swatted at one of his feet. "-you just start giving presents to your friends and family like, from yourself. But you still get to do the tree and the cookies and all that, it's great. When my Uncle Ben was alive, it was always this big thing- but I was little, too, so I was still in the Santa Claus phase for most of it- but now it's just me and May, but we still put up a tree and have presents."

"Could you imagine how extra Tony could get if he had a tree to decorate here?" Katya asked, following Peter's lead in keeping the mood light by glossing over the whole Uncle Ben thing. "It'd be nanotech, probably-"

"-One push of a button and then the biggest spruce you'd ever seen-"

"-He could program each leaf to light up in colored patterns-"

"-He could set it to music!" Peter finished, laughing.

"Yeah, probably like AC/DC though. I can't imagine Tony singing Christmas carols," Katya giggled. Peter made a face, as if trying to picture it himself, before bursting back into laughter.

"You can come to Christmas with me and Aunt May, if you want." Peter said casually, but his pink ears begged to differ. "You know, in case Mr. Stark doesn't do anything with…everything that's going on." He must've been referring to the mysterious rift between the rest of the Avengers that Katya had yet to piece together- although she did know that half of them were imprisoned somewhere, and that Natasha was on the run- but she still didn't know exactly what had caused it, or who was on what side. It clearly still bothered Tony more than he'd ever admit.

The compound was huge, after all, and just felt even bigger with how empty it was. Katya didn't know any different, as she'd gotten there after it'd all but emptied out, but she could imagine people bustling through the halls that were clearly built to hold more than the five or so Katya saw regularly. Between her, Tony, Peter, Happy, and occasionally Rhodey, it felt enormous and….cold. The only bright spaces were the gym, where she felt most at home, and now her room, thanks to Peter's presents.

They watched another episode of the show they'd been on- something called The Office, which didn't make much sense to Katya as she had no idea what went on in a typical office other than the occasional reports Peter'd made back when their drone was active- but she liked how sarcastic everyone was, and how they'd stare directly into the camera. Peter said it was a 'basic show, something everyone knew', so Katya figured she may as well familiarize herself with it, before she began to yawn.

The two of them lay in her bed as she began to waver in consciousness.

"There, do you see that?" She pointed, up towards the German ivy, that was reflecting the moonlight. "Look at the leaves." Each little one still caught the light, each leaf independent, yet woven together in their own symbiotic way.

Peter nodded beside her, and she snuggled deeper into the crook of his arm, her head on his chest. "I want to be like those leaves."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. They're their own selves, each of them, but…they're together. With all the other leaves." Katya yawned. "I just need to find the rest of my leaves. I've got you, and Tony, and Aunt May…and Ned…and Yelena and Natasha…" Her voice trailed off, as the fuzziness in her brain from her pain meds was beginning to turn into less of a fuzziness and more of a blanket. "So I guess I've got some."

"You can have as many leaves as you want, myshka," Peter replied, stroking her hair. "It's up to you to choose them."