I was a one man army

That seemed to be enough for Tony to stand there and practically shout.

"What the hell is going on?!" 

Ah, they'd both forgotten momentarily that they were not alone much to both of their dismay. He momentarily regret giving her something so personal in front of everyone else, so much for that secret relationship thing they had going on before tonight. He released her from his embrace but her hand held onto his.

He looked at her for direction because these were her friends. This was her life and her world; he still didn't feel like he belonged here but she did. She definitely did, or at least the side of her they knew did. He offered her an apologetic look but she just smiled at him and shook her head. 

"I think you should all sit down, we have a lot to tell you." Natasha looked at her friends then.

She breathed out a deep sigh almost as though she were trying to find enough internal calm to begin to explain all of this in a way that made any sense to anyone. She had been contemplating for weeks how she'd tell this story because she didn't want it to be another lie. She didn't want to say it was just something that happened through a natural evolution of friendship which she was contemplating wholeheartedly. She wasn't sure how to explain this.

Hell she wasn't even sure she wanted to, not yet. She thought about sitting them down away from here one by one and telling them her story because she wasn't ready to discuss it yet which was exactly why she turned back to James and mouthed not yet to him knowing that he'd understand.  

"Y'think?!" This time Barton spoke. He sounded somewhere between confused and hurt.

Hurt that his best friend had kept secrets from him, it was the same wounded expression Bucky thought Steve would've worn but he looked something else entirely, something indiscernible. Something in between sort of smug and slightly confused. Wanda was simply smiling and Bucky could tell he was right, she'd suspected as much. Thankfully everyone did as she asked and she tugged him over to a chair where she sat on the arm beside him, he could tell the closeness was an anchor and a safety to her.

"It's okay." He reassured squeezing her hand.

"James and I are... " Natasha's expression became contemplative, neither were entirely clear on the term.

"Dating I suppose would be the word? Though by now I'd say that's kind of obvious." She looked around then. She held to his hand like a lifeline.

"It's a very long story." She inhaled a deep breath as she flicked her eyes back to him for a moment, he offered her a calm smile and nodded.

It was okay. It was okay if she told this story.

"He and I knew each other when I was-" She looked pained.

"As most of you know by now I was raised in a Russian underground operation known as The Red Room, trained would be more accurate than raised but- that was where he and I met. First it was when I was 17, he trained me for a mission; he was still relatively new to the whole thing but he showed so much promise that they couldn't wait to pair him up with their best student. It was the first mission we'd work together so I guess they wanted to know how we'd be as a team."

She hated how they were used but she didn't regret meeting him.

"We worked well, a little too well. He and I became the best of the best, their two most deadly weapons... I'd been on over a dozen missions on my own before that but they seemed to think there'd be something about the two of us that'd work well and they were right." 

She squeezed his hand for support. He knew how much she hated this story. She was struggling and he could see it.

"HYDRA loaned me out to the program because they knew if they did, they'd have better allies. They worked with one another to create perfect little monsters, girls like her and people like me. They had me train her because they needed to know if she'd survive and if I was as good as they thought they'd made me. She was their best graduate, their most promising little star but they needed to know if she could stand up against people like me, they programmed me to make sure I didn't go easy on her, none of us knew that she'd break through my programming or I would hers."

He glanced sideways at her with a smile.

"She reminded me that I was human. She made me feel something. We found something human in each other and we tried to hold onto it. After the mission they put us in separate places again until-" He cut off and looked at her off not wanting to say too much if she wasn't comfortable with it.

"Until about 2 years before Clint convinced me to defect." She offered James a small smile and squeezed his hand.

The two of them would sit everyone down one by one and explain the truth behind their story but it couldn't be today and it couldn't be like this. She was already feeling overwhelmed and uncomfortable enough. She didn't need a million questions about why she hadn't mentioned that she was over 90 years old or why she'd spent the last few years lying to everyone about it...

Or the last 15 in Clint's case.

She had spent so long keeping up this pretense now that it was just as hard for her to say as it would be for the rest of them to hear and so she'd decided it would be a story that she wouldn't tell right now. There were many many reasons that Natasha kept the secrets that she did but the main of which was - and always would be - to protect herself and the people she cared about. She had too many enemies for exactly who and what she was to be public knowledge.

The last thing she needed was for them to be targets used to hurt her.

"I tried to look for him over the years but I couldn't find anything, not until Odessa. The first time I saw the man I loved again in 15 years he put a bullet through me." Natasha watched Bucky wince out of the corner of her eye, she laughed slightly.

"Hey, you could've killed me if you wanted me dead. I take comfort in that. We both know you only miss when you want to." There was a soft fondness in her voice as she squeezed his hand.

It meant he was still in there somewhere. It meant there was still a chance to get the person she knew back but she'd never ever have been the one that put pressure on him to remember anything because she knew already just how damaging that was, she wouldn't cause his mind to fracture more no matter how much she might have wanted him to remember the decades they were still hiding. She'd loved him for as long as she could remember now.

Both of them looked at Steve. He spoke and there was a confusion in his voice that made both of them feel terrible. None of them wanted to lie to him or anyone else in this room but the whole story right now would cause more harm than anything else.

"Why didn't either of you tell me? I mean, I kinda figured something a little more recently but you could've told me."

"Because it took me a while to remember who she was or what she meant to me; I didn't know her as Natasha I knew her as Natalia. It started when she and I fought the second time around. She said something to me that made me start to think about it. I couldn't make sense of why she'd said what she had but the more I thought about it the more I started to remember something. I just wasn't sure what that something was at first. It made no sense to me because it seemed impossible."

She had been the hero, she was one of the good guys; he hadn't put it together that she'd been the girl trapped in hell with him all those years ago that against impossible odds had made him fall in love with her. He hadn't remembered at first, he'd started to remember things with Steve before he'd even remembered a damn thing about the woman he loved and he hated that in his own way.

"We wanted a little time without everyone else knowing so we could find our way back to each other properly. We wanted a chance to rebuild." He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap.

He was glad he had started to remember his best friend, of course he was but he hated the fact that something so important was still lost to him even with his fight to bring it all back again. She'd made him start to remember with six little words.

You could at least recognise me.

"She's tough. She never did like to give up and I'm glad she didn't give up on me despite having every reason to do just that." He turned to look at her then and he smiled. 

After a moment though he turned to look at Steve again. A part of him expected someone else to say something but no one did, he supposed they were waiting to hear whatever explanation they had to offer in whatever way they chose to deliver it.

"And honestly I couldn't make sense of what I was remembering so I couldn't find a way to explain any of it. I was trying to figure everything out and see if any of it was even real. She was - she is - the only part of it I wanted to remember aside from you." Bucky spoke quietly.

He still couldn't make sense of half of it because it seemed so impossible to him that she could be the girl he knew from back there. He held to Natasha's hand and he found some calm in knowing she was there with him and just like she always had before she held him grounded there and kept him safe. He was safe because he had people around him that cared and he knew that but he was afraid of losing them all over again.

"I didn't wanna tell you how much he and I were..." Natasha sighed as she spoke. "I didn't want my pain to be a thing. When you saw him that day seeing your pain was bad enough so I decided then to bury my own."

She wanted to give Bucky a break from dragging everything out that he was trying so hard to fight through even now. He didn't deserve to struggle through it alone while she sat silently and allowed him to drag himself over broken glass. She loved him too much to let him do that. Steve and Clint already knew her birth name so hearing it out loud didn't bother her too much. She hadn't ever said it herself out loud to anyone but the two of them.

Steve offered her a small look that told her he understood. He was somewhere between happy for both of them and shocked. Steve Rogers was definitely shocked. Definitely something else too but he wasn't quite sure what that something else was just yet.

She never had. She'd never been particularly open with her emotions; she acted most of the time like nothing at all bothered her around most people but so rarely around Clint, Steve or even Tony. They'd been through too much together to hold to her bravado. Clint was her best friend so she'd never really held to her coldness around him after that first year but she'd lied to him and she'd get it if he was pissed.

"I'm sorry, Clint." Natasha glanced at her best friend. "I get it if you're pissed."

"Naw, not pissed. You're good. You wanna be happy that's cool with me as long as soldier boy takes good care of you." He almost sounded like a protective brother.

Trust it to be Clint to be the one to keep the lightness; she smiled at her best friend. She knew that he'd be on her side no matter what, he'd have questions but Clint had never been the prying type. She loved him for the fact that he was content to let her be. He knew she'd talk to him in her own time because she had so far. She'd opened up about little things, she'd hinted once or twice toward having someone way back when.

She'd never given him specifics but she hadn't told him just how deep that ran. 

"I love you too." She spoke directly to her best friend.

Clint smirked at her and nodded his head. He knew already that she did, she'd been probably the one person in Clint's life that knew his whole story besides Bobbi and she loved him anyways. She didn't judge him just like he didn't judge her; she just cared about whom he was now and he owed her that same thing, it was why he had never pressed her and it was why he didn't ask her too much. He knew she'd been through so much already.

"Thank you, Clint." Natasha studied him as she spoke. "Thank you for just... Being you."

"Yeah well, someone has to keep your ass in line." He grinned then ignoring her glare.

"And I did tell you back then that you'd be stuck with me no matter what you did so, this is me sticking by you like always. You wanna tell me a story? Cool. You don't and that's cool too. You'll talk when you're ready, Tasha. You always do."

He knew her well enough by now to know that just like he knew her well enough to see she was struggling now.

Tony - listening and clearly trying to process everything - stood up and threw his hands up in the air before he walked over to the bar and shook his head as he poured himself a glass of whiskey, evidently changing his mind about sobering up. In truth he wasn't sure what the hell had just happened or what to do with it at all but he couldn't deny that he'd never seen Romanoff this happy. She deserved to be happy.

Granted he didn't like Barnes all that much but she'd been through enough. She'd always tried to help him as much as she could which - for a spy - was actually a pretty decent thing to do. She was a decent person, a trained killer and a hell of a scary person but pretty decent.

"This is way too weird for me." He piped up as he downed his drink. "I don't even know whether to be pissed at both of you or say congratulations."

Tony Stark, speechless. Natasha never thought she'd see the day that happened. Wanda offered him a sympathetic look because even she could see this wasn't easy on either of them, she hadn't particularly been very vocal at all but out of the corner of her eye Natasha watched her move small red sparks between her fingers and she saw the way she smiled and marveled at it. It was nice to see, Wanda rarely smiled when it came to her abilities, and she seemed to be trying to get a better handle on it which was nice.

She seemed calmer. She wasn't sure what it was that had made her that way but she seemed calmer which was good to see.

"You okay, kid?" Bucky looked over his shoulder at her.

Wanda smiled and nodded. 

"I knew it already." She shrugged. "The way you were when you were troubled and the way you look at her when you think no one notices, I already guessed." 

She was nice. A good person and he liked that. She didn't force herself into other peoples lives. She just let people be and he liked that. She was there if anyone wanted her for anything and she was happy enough to offer people friendship, she appeared to see Clint like a big brother which he thought was good. She needed someone. Clint seemed to have a way of collecting wayward people... Natasha and Wanda were both proof of that.

"Which are you?" Tony spoke again speaking directly to Natasha. "Natasha or Natalia?"

"Both, I guess." She frowned. She hadn't expected anyone to ask that. "Natalia is my birth name. The name my mother and father gave me."

It was one of the very few things she still had that came from her life before all of that. She didn't remember much about her parents or her family, she remembered that she had siblings once, she wasn't all that sure what happened to any of them but she did know she was an orphan by 6 and she was taken in by the program after that or more she'd taken the help offered to her by Ivan.

Hell it seemed Loki knew more about her than her own friends which admittedly made her feel ashamed. She should be more open and trusting and she knew it but she knew that trusting people could be bad for you and for them. Trusting people meant that they could be used as leverage to hurt you and she wouldn't ever allow that to happen. 

"I'm sticking with Natasha." Tony informed her. "D'you know how much work it is to update peoples crap on security around here without them changing names on me out of nowhere? No thanks. You're staying Natasha."

She laughed at that and nodded her head. She'd have it no other way with all of them if she were going to be honest, with the exception of Bucky anyway. She was perfectly happy with being Natalia. She knew that they were different. They knew each other as different people than these people knew them as and that was okay. No one needed to know them the way they knew each other anyway.

Well not yet anyway. That was a story for another day entirely.

"So you literally got busted by a birthday gift." Clint commented offhandedly. "That's actually funny."

"You and Morse got busted because she told you you had a nice ass on a mission." Natasha replied playfully.

"Okay y'got me there." Clint shrugged. "Wouldn't change it though."

Bucky looked confused but then so did everyone else.

"Does everyone have a secret significant other around here?" Tony asked clearly exacerbated.

"Naw, Bobs is my ex wife. She's cool though. I think you'd like her, she's super smart. She's a biochemist and an agent. Badass and smart as hell."

He hadn't seen her in about three years now but he missed her. They still kept in contact with calls, emails, text messages... It just depended on the day really or how busy either of them were at that point. She tried her best to make sure she knew how he was just as he tried his best to make sure he knew she was.

"So, we have happy birthday, Barton has an ex wife which shocks me because I didn't think anyone would be able to put up with your annoying ass."

Clint glared but Tony just rolled his eyes and looked back at Bucky and Natasha.

"Oh and you two are a thing." Tony recapped on them. "Since we're spilling secrets and all tonight, anyone else have anything they wanna throw out there or are we all good now?"

No one said anything though. Tony seemed relieved then. 

"Alright good, I already have a headache." He glanced at each one of them in turn.

Bucky and Natasha exchanged a look and both of them smiled. Tonight altogether had been weird as hell but they'd deflected the worst of it by condensing their story enough so that they told most of the truth without exposing themselves too much to the world.