It was an overcast, dismally grey Thursday morning when Barnes’ name lit up on her cell for the first time.
Natasha told herself that she really should have been expecting it, hence her heart had no reason for jumping out of her skin at her like it was. He’d been out of debriefing and staying with Steve for weeks - Steve had even told her that Bucky wanted to speak to her, and she couldn’t avoid them forever. No right. She’d brought this upon herself, in some ways. She stared down at her phone for the span of about five rings or so – at which point she snatched the device up from the coffee table, knocking over a stack of unread magazines in the process. (As they went flying across the hardwood in several directions, she mused that if she had a cat this would be the moment it hopped down from whatever perch it had claimed and proceeded to sink its claws into the magazines, ripping them to shreds. She didn’t have a cat, however, so no such thing happened, but it was all beyond the point in hand. Hah.).
She stared a bit longer before she finally pressed answer, psyching herself up for what she was certain was going to be the most awkward conversation in her comparatively short life. (Hah, she thought, Steve still thought she was an eighties baby. What was a twenty-year difference at their collective age though?)
“Romanoff”
Her eyes were scrunched shut and remained so while she heard him breathe down the line, short and ragged like he’d been for a run.
“Natalia- ” his voice was deeper than she remembered, and oh she’d remembered him often. She took an inhale as he spoke again. “I remember everything, Natalia, all of it, I remember all of it. ”
-
Natalia turned thirteen in the early winter of 1956. She knew it was winter because she remembered the snow on her pillowcase when she wakes up in the morning. They watch her through morning warmup, and then they take her to her present. It could’ve very easily not been winter, though, there would be snow on her pillowcase from early September to as late as May the next year, it didn’t mean anything, (as to the reason why the snow would fall on her pillowcase instead of the roof had entirely to do with the smashed glass sat behind the bars above her bed. It had been smashed when she arrived, she had not asked why, she was not told, and it would not be fixed).
So, no way to be sure it was winter, yet she’d always felt as if it was the dead of it, looking back. The dead of winter. The snow was always fluffier in the wintertime. It had been fluffy that morning, settling on her hair.
Whatever it was she’d been expecting for a present, it was certainly not a person, and definitely not a man at that. He was a fairly tall man, with an arm made of silver, and an accent that didn’t quite curl at the edges like it should’ve. The light bouncing off the snow glared off of the metal into her eyes. She’d felt as if she should’ve been frightened. She was not, she was never.
It had to be winter, logically, because they – Petrovitch and Matron, that was, - they called him Zimniy Soldat, the Winter Soldier. It fit. She remembered her hands were always cold, fingers discoloured at the tips, and that the air around him was freezing, almost like he was a sculpture made of ice. And when he’d looked at her, his eyes were frosted and the colour of the sky out the window. When he landed his first punch, her whole-body shivered from the impact. She didn’t let him get the chance to land a second.
She’d thought it had made sense, at the time, but she was thirteen and a little naïve. Not when it came to killing people without blinking - but naïve all the same. She’d justified to herself that it must’ve made sense, later on, lying in bed with fresh snow falling and melting, on the bruise blooming across her left side. It was Winter, so he was here, and when the snow was not so fluffy anymore and Spring came, he would go.
Natalia may have been young and naïve, but she was not stupid, never stupid. Most of the time, her assumptions were correct.
She and the soldier trained until the snow thinned, and then he was gone, melted away like the snow on the ground.
-
“Have you ever been to Portugal?”
“Once,” she replied in Portuguese, lifting her head from the arm of the sofa and looking over to where Barnes was sitting at the worn kitchen table. She refused to meet his gaze, instead watched his hand on the table as it flexed and then moved to his leg under the table.
Down the corridor, a door shut, and Natasha heard heavy footsteps on the floor outside the room. Her eyes flicked to the clock on the wall and then to the barred window, where a larger shadow passed and kept on walking down the hall. She dropped her shoulders, relaxed her posture again and turned back to Barnes. It was a little embarrassing, really, that she was more jittery than he was. He was the one being kept locked in a room day in day out.
“A long time ago,” she continued in Portuguese and then swapped to English at his slightly puzzled look “- why do you ask?”
He stared at her for a moment or two, and then.
“I remember a promenade, and there were these doughnut things, with icing,” He sighed, a little frustrated, “– Cavacas, and you had a yellow dress with white polka-dots on it,”
She flipped over the page in her magazine, skimming the paragraph with a forced air of boredom as she replied.
“Lisbon, I was eighteen, we were sent to kill the representative for Portugal at the UN,” she smiled to herself a little, "He’d been sticking his nose in some very precious foxholes, Petrovich was not best pleased,”
“Huh,” she looked up again when he spoke, and caught the moment when his brain ticked over and caught up, the memory fully unlocking itself. He was remembering small things, but there were obvious memory blocks over a lot of it, thick ice that showed little sign of cracking just yet. He still had little clue to who the hell she was most of the time. He nodded and leant back against the wall.
“Where did I learn to speak Portuguese, anyway? ”
She smiled at him and his atrocious accent and frankly awful vowels. She shook her head a little and continued to flick through her magazine, replying in French, testing him.
“The same place you learnt to speak French, mon cheri,”
“Hah! I may have forgotten well, everything, but I know for a fact Denier didn’t know one word of Portuguese,”
Her mind briefly ticked at the name Dernier, recalling Steve talking about someone of the same name, briefly remembered seeing his name at the Smithsonian exhibit. She laughed at him anyway, getting caught up in it enough that the guard posted outside had to come in and escort her out for ‘inappropriate behaviour’. As if lounging round reading OK! magazine was what she was supposed to be doing in the first place, not debriefing him as Fury had explicitly ordered- oh who cared? She’d been bullshitting her paperwork for years, what was one more?
(She ignored the blatant nagging in the back of her mind, there goes another New Year’s resolution, Romanoff while simultaneously ignoring the fact the nagging voice in her mind sounded awfully similar to one Steven Rogers).
It took her until she’d reached her flat before she realised that she’d let her guard down around him. For the first time since she’d seen him again, she’d let the shadow of the girl he knew out, and it had felt utterly natural. Her heart sank into her stomach a little.
-
There was blood everywhere.
On the sheets, on her clothes, splattered on the bathroom tiles, even a streak running across the far wall by the door. This didn’t bother Natalia much, she was used to blood. What was bothering her, was that most of it was her blood. Dark rivulets of it stemming from a nasty cut running from under her left armpit to the back of her right hip, warm and sticky on the back of her arm. It wasn’t too deep, luckily - otherwise she would’ve probably been in a lot more trouble, as in paralysed. She’d be paralysed.
The thought was not all that comforting to her.
It was her seventeenth winter, and she was in Paris, in a shabby hotel somewhere off a back alley in the 2nd Arrondissement. It could’ve been her birthday, for all she knew. The snowflakes that were falling outside the window were certainly fluffy enough, and he was with her, so it must’ve been close.
She’d caught a glance at a newspaper earlier that day, while they were on their way to the restaurant that their target was at, and in the top left corner it had said Décembre 23rd. She’d ran the date over in her mind, and decided that yes, she liked this date for her birthday. She must’ve said it out loud at some point, her mind muddled by the pain and morphine because the soldier told her to be quiet from where he was kneeling over her, stitching up her wound. She supposed it must’ve been the morphine talking, a luxury she was not usually afforded.
The morphine spoke again, in hushed Russian.
“When is your birthday, soldat?”
He sighed, impatient and she felt a sharp tug of pressure in her lower back as he tightened the thread.
“In French, vdova,” He replied, his French accent starkly better than his Russian, “We need to practice your pronunciation,”
She shivered a little when he moved away from her back, and she heard the tap run at the little sink in the corner of the room. She gasped initially when she felt a wet towel pressed against her arm, the water cold against her flushed skin.
“Okay,” she sighed when he moved back again, having to force her mouth around the vowels, “When is your birthday?”
“I don’t know,” He was silent for a few moments, and she moved to turn her head to look at him, stopping when a shooting pain ran down her back. He dropped a light kiss to the back of her head, so light she almost didn’t feel it, and fell down on the bed beside her, his shirt hanging off the chair by the window. There was a little dire blood on his collarbone. Natalia wondered if it was his or her own. The snow was still falling. “-I think that - I don’t have one,”
It was easier to meet his gaze from where he lay, to see how his eyes had fogged, like the cracked pane of the window.
“Me too, soldat,” Her mind was slow in providing the words, her eyes shutting on their own, “We are the same, yes?”
His hand was pushing back the hair from her face when she forced her eyes open again, and he always made her feel like such a child. A child caught in a snowstorm. She hated herself for it, that underneath it all, she could never be anything but a child to him, the same naïve thirteen -year- old he’d met in the wintertime.
“No, ma ange déchu, we are quite different,”
Natalia passed out before she could reply, barely catching onto the realisation that his French was outdated, almost, like he’d learnt it a long time ago.
She didn’t understand how they could be so different, she and he, thought they were kindred spirits lost in a blizzard together. Perhaps she was more naïve than she thought she was.
She dreamt more vividly than she had in years, yet when she woke, all she could remember was the soldat repeating desyatoye marta– again and again against her skin like a prayer, clear as day. Desyatoye marta, the tenth of March.
She did not ask him what it meant, and it was forgotten by the time the snow stopped falling.
-
When they first brought him in, he was under for what felt like years in the hospital. Steve stayed by his side for practically every second of it, predictably. Natasha couldn’t stand hospitals in the best circumstances, though, so she tended to spend a few hours there every other day or so just to keep Steve company. She’d seen Sam wandering up and down the corridor a few times too, usually with some sort of hot beverage or vending machine snack and dark circles under his eyes. She let him hug her tightly whenever she saw him, thought he needed something solid - Steve too, Steve more than anyone.
When the ten-day mark hit and Steve still hadn’t been home to shower, or slept properly, she called time out on leaving him to it and hosted an intervention.
By intervention, she meant trying her best to herd him back to his apartment for a shower, or at least a nap, but preferably a shower – for everyone’s sake, really.
As she approached Barnes’ room, she heard the familiar crackling sound of Steve’s gramophone, whatever record he’d been playing had obviously ended, but when she entered the room Steve was making no move to turn it off. She thought he must’ve been sleeping, he was sitting so still, so she moved around the room silently, shutting off the gramophone and tidying up any clutter that had acclimatised in the day or so she’d been gone.
She didn’t look at Barnes, not properly, so it made sense that she started a little when she did.
His hair had been cut.
The cuts on his face and neck had mostly healed, too, resulting in him looking like the young man she supposed he was (if you took away all the interruptions and interventions and 70 years). Or at least, he looked so much younger than she ever remembered him looking. He still hadn’t woken up yet, but they’d propped him up, and covered his left arm with a blanket.
She approached him cautiously, throwing a glance at Steve as she went, who was - like she expected - passed out against his fist in the chair. Her hand reached out before she could think, and she was pushing back Barnes’ hair from his forehead and tracing a line down from his temple to his jaw. His eyelids fluttered a little, and she drew her hand back, realising how cold her fingertips must’ve been from the November air.
Her eyes dropped to the blanket, and she was pulling back the top corner without a second thought. It looked the same, the glare almost blinding in the clinical harshness of the hospital lights. She traced the red star on his shoulder softly and inhaled sharply at the feel of the cold metal against the pad of her forefinger. She snatched her hand back again and pulled the blanket back up, putting on her warmest smile when Steve’s breathing shifted behind her.
“Hey there, sleeping beauty” she turned to her bag, pulling out the water, blueberry muffin and the mountain of protein bars she’d bought for him, guessing that he had probably forgotten to eat for the last 5 or so days. Even super-soldiers needed a proper hot meal every now and then, but the high protein was a good as any place to start.
“Hey, Nat,” She handed him the water and 3 of the bars, putting on her best stern face when he regarded it disdainfully, making him smile weakly. “– thanks for the supplies,”
He turned and looked again at the man lying in the bed next to him and sighed, running a hand through his hair.
“How are you holdin’ up, Cap?”
He sighed again, and she almost couldn’t bear to look at him. It was almost too much for her, sometimes, how obviously he wore his emotions on his face all the time. She sat on her hands on the bench seat by the window, kicking her legs a little in front of her.
“I’ve been better, I’ve been much worse,” he chuckled through a yawn, dropping a wrapper in the bin behind him, “I could still think he’s dead, for one thing,”
She didn’t reply straight away, watching him for a moment in silence, calculating her next move.
“No chance of you going home and having a hot meal and a shower, then?”
“Not a single chance in hell, Romanoff,” he met her gaze, his eyes were bloodshot, it threw her off balance a little. “I’m not leaving him to wake up without me here,”
She watched him as he watched Bucky, he shook his head at her. “I won’t leave, not this time,”
Natasha nodded, deciding it wasn’t the time to be stubborn. She pushed herself right against the far wall of the bench, curving her legs up and under her cross-legged, and patted the spot next to her.
“At least try and have a proper sleep then, I’ll wake you if he so much as breaths differently, pinky-promise,”
He looked at Barnes for a moment, then the bench swallowed, and then stood up, walking over to her stiffly. He lay on his side, and she manoeuvred him until his head was resting in her lap, his own legs curled up in the limited space.
“Thank you, Natasha,”
She ran her hands through his hair gently, as greasy as it was, and his breath evened out in minutes. She evened out her own breathing to match his, and relaxed her shoulders back. She kept one hand in his hair, curling around the strands, and the other picked up her e-reader.
She’d been reading for an hour or so when the air shifted in the room, she flicks her eyes up immediately and saw Barnes with his eyes open, watching her curiously. She took a shaky breath and went to wake Steve.
“Wait! -”
Natasha froze, her hand still curled in Steve’s hair. She relaxed after a moment, and though he shifted a little, Steve remained asleep. When she looked up Barnes was watching him, eyes wide. He swallowed. “- he looks tired.”
She nodded, but stayed silent, trying to gauge how much he did or didn’t know, how stable he was.
“Where am I?”
“New York”
She hated how shaky her voice sounded, and clenched the hand not resting in Steve’s hair, the nails pinching into her skin.
“Oh, right,” his eyes flicked to the window and his jaw shifted, “- and who are you?”
It shouldn’t have stung, really, not as much as it did.
“A friend of Steve’s,”
He swallowed again, watching her sceptically for a moment, eyes narrowed, before nodding, taking in her and Steve’s position. He smiled at her, boyish-like, sincere but not utterly genuine. Her breath caught in the back of her throat.
“Well, any friend of Stevie’s, is a friend of mine,”
Steve woke up after that, and suddenly it was a flurry of nurses and hugs and apologies that were never needed between the two of them but were said anyway. Natasha turned her head away and looked out the window, snow had started to fall at some point, and it was beginning to stick to the pavements, the flakes large and fluffy.
She did not visit him there again.
-
The year she turned eighteen was the year soldier kissed her for the first time. Granted, the first time it was to keep a cover, and granted he probably (definitely) wouldn’t have done it if the cover hadn’t required it, but he had, and it was her first kiss, (and then her second, and third, and …).
Or at least she’d decided to count it as her first kiss, purely because she didn’t want to count the 50-year-old man she’d been forced to kiss when she was fourteen. No, she thought that the soldat was a much better choice, much nicer to look back on, too, in that hazy romanticised world she kept in her head.
He was gentle with her, gentle in a way she had only seen once or twice from him, usually at the end of a training season – right before the snow stopped and he left for the spring. The ice behind his eyes had generally melted by that point, and he couldn’t go as long without getting headaches or getting tucked away in that spot behind his eyes like he was reliving a lifetime. She was never sad when he left, though - she knew he always came back with the snowstorm, he’d promised her he would always come back to her.
Anyway, they were in Stalingrad, (Volgograd, later, but to them, it would always be Stalingrad. Their city.) and they had been tasked with killing the foreign minister of all people. He was a fat, greasy-looking man of about 60. Went by the name Vladimir Mikhailov.
Of course, they managed to kill him in about a third of the time they’d been given, but they were the best the Red Room had to offer. Poison, minimal enough to have burnt through his system, but made him drowsy enough for Natalia to slit his throat.
Petrovich had told them to leave a warning. She did what he asked, left it in Mikhailov’s blood across the wall of his hotel room.
(-This would haunt her, later. The shape of her handwriting on the wall, the deep crimson stain on the mattress, the-)
They were leaving the hotel when the secret service showed up.
That was the first issue with killing well-known politicians, the government got involved. The second issue was of course, that both Natalia and the soldat were familiar faces within the government, even with their disguises - (a darker hair colour for Natalia and a beard for the soldat).
One second they were in the clear, and the next they were most certainly not in the clear, so he kissed her. He kissed her right there in the hotel lobby, stood next to the lifts, and the agents ran past them without so much as a second glance.
When he pulled back his grin was young and boyish, exhilarated, she couldn’t help but to mirror him. She allowed herself to be dragged by him outside and down the streets until they reached the square outside the Panorama Museum. It had gotten dark out, and their laughter was carried down the tucked away alleyways on the back of the wind. There were other couples there too, in woollen hats and thick boots. Natalia swallowed down a shiver, pushed herself into him a little tighter.
When they stopped, it was so abruptly that she almost crashed into him, but he turned at the last minute and caught her arms. Their grins were still mirrored, and she thought his eyes were the clearest she’d ever seen them, like the melted glacier at the top of the mountains that sat behind the Red Room. Bright blue and perfectly pure.
His right hand, the hand that was warm and real and clasped in her own just a moment beforehand, was stroking her hair, chasing the ringlets down the side of her face.
She blinked when the snowflakes start to fall, hitting her eyelashes. She laughed again, feeling lighter than she ever had before. She even contemplated sticking her tongue out to catch the snowflakes, but she was not a child. His own face was upturned to the sky, letting the snow catch on his cheekbones.
Suddenly his thumb was no longer tracing her hair, but instead her lips, his fingers framing her jaw. He searched her eyes for a moment, and then he leant down and he kissed her again. Not for the cover, but for himself, or maybe for her. It didn’t matter to Natalia, she would give him anything, everything.
His lips were cold, from the snow, and he tasted faintly of vodka, she thought to herself that he tasted like the closest thing to home she’d ever had. Natalia let him take and take, giving herself over to him freely, and boy did he take. He swallowed down her gasps and drew her closer - as if he was scared she’d vanish into thin air - one arm wrapped firmly around her waist, the other still clutching the side of her face.
When he pulled away from her it like he was ripped out of her orbit, her mouth chasing his as he leant back. He brought up his other arm and clutched at her face with both hands. The metal of his left arm made her shiver, forcing her eyes to meet his. His accent sounded stranger than ever when he spoke to her in hushed Russian.
“You cannot tell anyone about this, kroshka,” His hands tightened, she was sure there would be bruises. She shivered as he continued, voice gravelly “- no one but us can ever know about this, or it all disappears - understand ?”
“Yes, soldat,”
She must’ve looked a little startled, as he loosened his grip and dropped a kiss on her forehead, pulling her into an embrace.
“Good, little Angel,”
She obeyed him and didn’t tell a soul, not even the other girls, certainly not Petrovitch. He didn’t kiss her again, barely even looked at her, at least not until the snow fell again the next year and they were out of the country on a mission, far away from the eyes and the ears of Department X.
-
“Promise me this is real,”
London. She was twenty, maybe nineteen, she was never sure. He spoke in English, the words hurried.
“Promise,”
A beat of silence, then, into her neck - “-you’re the only thing that’s real, I think,”
-
When he’d been discharged from the hospital, and Steve had double, triple, quadruple checked that his injuries were healed, they move Barnes to a S.H.I.E.L.D facility north of the city for his debriefing. The same place they’d taken Natasha.
She’d been kept there for 3 months, and she called it kept because being at the S.H.I.E.L.D facility was very much what she’d imagined being a house cat was like. Locked in a room with minimal stimulation - of any kind - waiting for visits from humans to deposit food and minimal required attention before leaving again.
Before, Natasha had always thought that she wouldn’t have minded if she was brought back as a cat, but those 3 months had changed her mind pretty stat, domesticated living was not on her rebirth agenda, thank you very much.
Anyway, Barnes was moved to the S.H.I.E.L.D facility, and Natasha followed at a distance. She knew her proximity had a high possibility to be dangerous, even as he got more and more coherent, he was still incredibly volatile.
He got this look, sometimes, where she thought that he must’ve remembered her, that he’d remembered all of it. But then it was gone just as quickly as it had come, and his eyes were just sliding over her like she was was part of the wallpaper.
It took almost a month for her to work up the courage to visit him, and when she did, the look was back, and firmer somehow, more determined.
She slipped into his room silently, like a shadow in the night – it didn’t matter, he was already sitting there waiting for her.
“I know you, don’t I?”
She feigned indifference, forcing her shoulders down into a relaxed position.
“We met at the hospital – my name is Agent Romanoff - Steve’s..., I’m Steve’s friend,”
He didn’t buy it; she could tell it straight away.
“No - I mean before,” he sighed, impatient with himself, “You don’t forget hair like that in a hurry, believe me,”
She remained silent, breathing heavily. This was it, the make or break moment, he would either remember it all and fall at her feet - or remember it all and snap her neck.
Or, Option C.
“Your name is- sorry, was - Natalia, correct?”
She nodded, almost minutely. He smiled. It did not reach his eyes, her stomach dropped.
“It’s like trying to pick up a thread in a dark room,” he dropped his head in his hands, laughing sardonically. The metal on his left side glared in the harsh lighting, it hurt her eyes a little. “I catch one thing and go to follow it - and it disappears - melts away like snow in the spring,”
She shut her eyes and sighed, willing herself not to scream.
Option C: he did not remember.
(I remember everything, Natalia, all of it)
“I wouldn’t worry, Sergeant Barnes, I’m sure your memories will return in due course.”
His eyebrows furrowed at the title, unfamiliar, and she had to swallow the slightly acidic taste in her own mouth at using it. It felt wrong. (He was always soldat and then, only in the dark of hotel rooms at the end of a season when the ice had melted, he was James – but only at the end, never before. Calling him James at the start of the season resulted in blank looks and that odd look behind his eyes that frightened her.)
The corner of his mouth lifted up into a smirk, mocking almost, and she clenched her hand into a fist behind her back.
“That’s exactly what I'm worried about, Agent Romanoff”
She could’ve thrown up, truly. She felt the bile rise up her throat, and her palm must’ve been bleeding from the amount of pressure she was using to push her nails into it. She hated it, hated how his mouth curved around the words, how his Brooklyn accent was creeping back in.
She wanted to listen to him speak Russian, to shut her eyes and just listen. Concentrate on the accent that was never quite fluid enough – huh, guess that made sense now, all things considered.
There was a clock somewhere in the room that was ticking too loud. Natasha opened her eyes, took one look at his blue ones across the room – like a February morning - and bolted. Right out the door, down the corridor, past Steve with a muttered apology and a squeeze on the wrist that means I’ll tell you later and all the way to her apartment in upper Manhattan.
She promptly had a breakdown that lasted 2 days, or at least it lasted until Steve forcibly broke in and tempted her out from under the covers with strawberry cheesecake ice cream and both volumes of Kill Bill on DVD. She never could resist strawberry cheesecake or Uma Thurman though - damn him for retaining information so well - so she figured no one could judge her for it. Steve certainly didn’t, didn’t ask any questions either, and god she loved him for it – his no questions asked attitude.
She didn’t visit the facility again for another week and only did then because Fury all but blackmailed her into it. Even then she made sure to always bring a distraction with her, a magazine or a book or something, so she couldn’t focus on how wrong it all felt.
-
It was the middle of the night – the somewhere-in-between hours before the light ticks over into the orange of the next morning. Natalia opened her eyes, and it was deep, deep blue outside the window.
The soldat shifted underneath her, his face was buried in her neck, mouthing kisses into the juncture of her jaw. She smiled, turning her head to face him. It was the last mission of the season, but somehow it felt more final than that. He looked at her with such sadness behind his eyes, and he touched her like he was saying goodbye.
She wished she could‘ve grabbed him around the face and screamed at him 'I'm twenty-one, I am no longer a child!’ until he understood. She didn’t though, just whispered into the deep, deep blue instead.
“I think I love you, soldat,”
She didn’t think, she knew.
“Say it again, but call me James,”
He spoke in English with the funniest accent she’d ever heard. She replied in all the languages her mind supplied, calling him James again and again until the blue outside turned to pink and then to red.
In the morning, their handlers came for them. She never saw her James again, and the next season the snow never melted and the ice was thicker than ever.
She wondered why they never punished her, but realised that putting him right in front of her and have him choke the life out of her when she messed up, and never come and kiss it better later is worse than any form of punishment they could’ve ever inflicted.
There were still icicles on the inside of her window when May came around and he left. She was not there to see him return, shipped off to the special operations branch with Yelena and some of the other girls.
She sees him once again before the fall of the KGB. It is 1990, and there was a blizzard in Moscow, and while running from the hotel where her target was hanging from the ceiling fan, she caught a glimpse of silver at the end of the street, where a large man in a baseball cap turns the corner. He did not look back.
The next time she saw him was almost twenty years later, but she remained visually the exact same as she had when he’d saw her last, as did he. (The Russians, as it so happened, did manage to produce their own version of the serum, and it ran through both their veins the same, like a parasite).
The snow was the heaviest it’d been in Odessa for years, and when he shot her engineer straight through her own torso, she thought back to how the snowflakes used to fall on her pillowcase right before he’d come back. She snuck out of the hospital bed that night to open the window and let the snow pour in.
-
(“Your hair,” he said, reaching out to wrap a strand around his finger, rubbing his thumb over it as if trying to wipe off the colour, “-it looked like blood, in the snow, like a halo of blood”)
-
“Don’t forget me, please ”
She whispered into the air so quietly that she was sure he did not hear her under the wind thrashing against the window panes. He whispered back to her in that funny English accent of his.
“Never,”
-
Natasha decided to walk the twenty minutes to Steve’s, when Barnes had hung up the phone, figured the fresh air would do her racing mind some good.
All it did was make her cold, in the end, but she relished in the little clouds her breath made in the air, and shoved her hands under her armpits to stop them from cramping. It ended up taking her half an hour, due to her dawdling, stopping to stare into shop windows she usually had zero interest in whatsoever, and debating whether or not to get a hot chocolate, despite knowing the sugar in it gave her migraines. It didn’t stop her from thinking about it though, and stopping outside of three coffee shops, no less, before making her mind up.
She didn’t expect to see him straight away, which was her first mistake, really. All the hours she’d spent thinking about how this moment would pan out and not once did she consider she'd get caught short, which was stupid, in retrospect.
She turned the corner onto Steve’s street and was caught short, to nobody’s surprise but her own, funnily enough. He was leaning against the lamppost outside their building, his own arms crossed under his jacket, mirroring her own position. Huh, she’d forgotten she’d picked that up from him, ironically. Her hands twitched under her coat, wanting to move, but she kept them right where they were, the spark of amusement in his eyes sending a wave of anticipation crackling down her spine.
She walked towards him slowly, trying her best to calm her racing heartbeat, or at least appear as if she was calm. The clouds of her breath obscured his face every time she exhaled, and each time he came back into focus, a few steps closer, she felt more and more like a teenager - like each step peeled decades off of her exterior.
Natasha walked until she was right in front of him, then stopped. She pulled her jacket around her tighter, suppressing a shiver as his icy blue eyes scanned her body, his upper half still leaning back. He was looking at her like it was the first time, again, and she felt her heart sink a little lower into her stomach. I remember it all, Natalia.
“Your eyes are always so green; did you know that?” She shook her head a little, and he smiled, reminiscent and fond, “-It was one of the first things I remembered, the colour of your eyes.”
She realised she was shivering, and not just from the cold. He reached out to her, one hand on her elbow. She froze up for a moment, but he didn’t move away, moved closer instead. He stood up straighter, took a step forwards and tightened his grip. She nodded jerkily at his silent question and followed the pull of his arms to fold herself into him, arms tight around his waist and her face pressed against his chest, his heartbeat loud and steady in her ear.
Natasha shut her eyes, and it was like no time had passed, and she was still his vdova, and he was still her soldat, and they could’ve been anywhere. A Metro station in Paris, a deserted square in Vienna, a busy high street in Kyiv. It all blurred in her head, the press of his left arm against her back and the touch of his lips to her head, all made her forget where she was for a moment. For a second she felt nothing at all, just weightlessness, and then it was like she was falling six-hundred feet, and she was hit with a wave of nausea. It was his voice speaking Russian that brought her back to earth in the end, no surprise there. She could feel the vibrations of what he was saying against her cheek and turned her head to look up at him.
“Through it all, you were the only good thing.”
His hands were cradling her face, and she felt she was still falling, down the proverbial rabbit hole, only faster now. She smiled, uncertain and a little unsteady, and she was vaguely aware of the snow falling around them. A laugh bubbled up past her lips, his eyebrows furrowed. She cupped her hand, laughing fully and much louder.
“You always came back with the snow – do you remember?”
His expression cleared and a grin takes over his face, she stuck her tongue out to catch a few of the fresh flakes, and when she opened her eyes, he was watching her, his expression regretful, unsure even. Down the street a young child shrieked in delight, so loud she almost doesn’t catch his whisper.
“I love you,” His accent is no better than it ever was, he fell back to English and then again into Russian, stuck between the two, “I’m sorry Natalia, for all of it - I love you,”
She thought about running, for a second, but she remained frozen, her hand still cupped in front of her, collecting the snow. She looked down and watched the flakes piling up in her palm, fluffier then than she’d seen it in years, turning the skin of her hand pink. This is real. She let out a shaky breath, brushing her hand on her jeans and smiled at him, wide and child-like.
“Idiot, darling man,” she whispered, not even sure what language she was speaking, cupping the sides of his face and pushing herself up onto her tiptoes, “My soul has loved you from the start, and it will love you until the stars go out,”
He kissed her as if he’d never left, and she kissed like she was nineteen again.
She pulled back after what could be seconds or months or years and laughed, a little sharply to her own ears, but his arms remained tight around her, tighten a little, even.
“I don’t know what to call you – you were always just soldat,”
She was lying, of course, if he truly remembered it all, then he’d know she was lying. It was a test, and he passed with flying colours, of course. He didn’t call her out on her lie like she thought he might, which surprised her enough to keep her silent long enough for him to think about it.
“James,” his eyes softened and his hands were cradling her face tighter, the metal of his left hand sending a familiar, welcome shiver down her right side, “-call me James,”
-
“Does this mean I have to stop making Dirty Dancing jokes?”
“For the last time, Steve, Dirty Dancing was not the only movie that came out in the 80s,” she smiled at him, fond, “Also, yes,”
“The only movie from the 1960s I know is From Russia With Love,” he sighed, visibly disappointed, “-And that just seems too on the nose,”
She and James laughed at him the whole way home, and then watched James Bond films all night.
-
(She signs her texts with ‘From Russia, With Love’ for a month afterwards until Steve gets so fed up he refuses to talk to her for a week straight).
-