Natalia Romanova knows three things for sure. The first is that she was born with a soul. In spite of everything she has seen, she still believes that everyone is. She was born with the mark to prove it: a huge white Adonis blossom that appeared in the center of her chest the day she was born in the bathtub of a beaten down Stalingrad apartment on November 10, 1928. She began to think it ironic, as she grew older, that anything white could grow from a soul so black.
The second thing she knows is that, whatever the flower means for her destiny, fate has taken her on a different path. The Red Room takes so much from its girls, but it especially prides itself on taking their souls. Natalia may have a strong will, but it is not strong enough to stand up to the Red Room. Her flower has disappeared by November 10, 1943.
When it comes time for her graduation, Natalia knows the third thing: her flower is gone because she does not deserve a soulmate.
-
“The ceremony is necessary for you to take your place in the world.” Natalia’s hands do not shake. They never do. She feels Vanya’s eyes on her, though she does not know yet that his name is Vanya. She knows him only as soldat.
“I have no place in the world.” Her voice does not tremble. Her eyes do not move from her target. She still feels Vanya watching her, but she does not look to him for solace. She knows that her flower is gone for a reason. She keeps her terror locked inside and pulls the trigger.
Two shots ring out. Bang, bang. They pierce through her target’s chest. She knows that she pulled the trigger, but she cannot feel her fingers. The headmaster looks pleased.
“Exactly.”
-
Natalia wakes abruptly from the nightmare, but she does not shoot upright or gasp for breath. She knows better than anyone that sudden movements get a person killed - knows it even in her sleep.
I’m a traitor, she thinks. I loved him, but I abandoned him. What did they do to him?
She is not supposed to feel such loss or such remorse. The Winter Soldier was her partner for fifty-nine years, but he was just that - a partner. He was not her friend, and he was certainly not her soulmate. That was programmed out of her well before she met him - more than seventy years ago. It has been a decade since she saw him, so why is he still right there in her thoughts?
She can feel his dark eyes on her back like it was yesterday.
Where is he now?
“Natasha.” Nick Fury steps into her room, and she steadies her breathing. “I’m sure someone of your superior intelligence and discipline hasn’t forgotten that your college orientation begins today.”
“Oh, Christ,” she mutters. In fact, she had forgotten. Why on Earth Director Fury keeps trying to send her to a civilian university is beyond her. He says that all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents must have a bachelor’s degree, but she has had no issues operating within the organization without it.
“Yeah,” Nick says, crossing his arms. “That’s what I thought.”
“You’ve been trying to make me go to college for ten years, Nick. What are you gonna do if I don’t? Fire me?’
“No, but the counsel might just decide to put you on trial if you don’t comply with their terms. If I recall correctly, you’re responsible for over a hundred political assassinations, and S.H.I.E.L.D. is the only thing standing between you and Guantanamo.” Natalia frowns and rubs her hands over her face. “This isn’t my call, Natasha. I can’t hold them off any longer.”
Natalia sighs. Well, she thinks, resigning herself to the inevitable. I’m not getting any older.
“Can I at least take my bike, or do I have to be chauffeured like a child?”
“Free goddamn country.”
Ten years later, and Natalia is still trying to get used to freedom.
-
Natalia pulls into a parking spot at University of D.C., and another bike pulls in beside her almost immediately. Its driver practically swoons over her bike and begins babbling excitedly as soon as his helmet comes off.
“Whoa, cool bike! Is that the new Kawasaki?!”
“2008,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Steve Rogers,” he says, reaching out with the hand not holding his helmet. Natalia shakes it, and she is impressed by his grip. She has nearly crushed the hands of almost every civilian she has ever met.
“Natalie Rushman,” Natalia says. The lie slips off her tongue like second nature. Steve smiles brightly at her, and she tries not to allow herself to feel sad. She can already tell that Vanya would like him.
“Transfer, I assume? Are you living in the res hall?”
“Freshman, actually, but yes. Are you?” Natalia asks.
“Nope. I have an apartment in Dupont Circle. This is my third year.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Your soul flower is covered,” Steve says bluntly, and it is only thanks to decades of conditioning that Natalia manages not to react. Yes, she thinks. Vanya would love him. “Sorry, I… I didn’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean, you know… It’s warm. Most people like to show off their flowers when it’s nice out.”
“It’s okay.” She smiles at him, and she finds that it is actually genuine. “Yours is covered, too.”
“Yeah. Call me old fashioned, but I like to keep mine private.” He shrugs and pulls the key from the ignition of his bike. “C’mon. I’ll show you around.”
-
Natalia finds that she likes Steve very much. He is nice, and he has a quiet confidence that she respects. It is purely because she likes him that she agrees to meet his friends. She really just wants to go to her room and sleep, but she can manage a few minutes in the dining hall. Steve says he has a friend named Sharon who will really like her.
“Winghead!” As soon as they enter the dining hall, a tiny, young-looking kid is tackling Steve in a hug. It looks almost comical how much smaller he is than Steve. Natalia fixes Steve with an incredulous look. He just shrugs and smiles fondly at the boy currently latched to him like an amoeba.
“Hi, Tony,” he says. “Let me guess… You miss Rhodey already?”
“Rhodey is a traitor for leaving me all alone.” The boy - Tony - pouts, and Steve ruffles his hair amicably.
“But you’re not all alone, Tony! I’m right here!” Steve says, a big smile spreading on his face. “Anyway, Natalie, this is Tony. Tony, Natalie.”
“Nice to meet you, Natalie.” Natalia’s eyebrows shoot up when she sees the bare patch of skin exposed by Tony’s partly-open button-down shirt. He has no soul flower. Instead, there is a round blue light surgically planted where his flower should be.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she says.
“I’m gonna run to the bathroom,” Steve says. “Tony, will you introduce Natalie to the others?”
He does not wait for an answer; he just runs off. Tony narrows his eyes.
“You don’t have to stare, you know,” he snaps, crossing his arms over his chest defensively.
“I didn’t mean to stare, it’s just…” She has never told anyone. The only people who know that she does not have a flower are the girls from the Red Room and Vanya. Vanya knows everything there is to know about her. Look how that ended. “Never mind, I’m sorry.”
He looks her over analytically, and then he smiles brightly.
“It’s okay. Come with me. I’ll introduce you to everyone else!” He runs off, and she follows about ten feet behind to a long table in the middle of the room. “Everyone, this is Steve’s friend, Natalie. Natalie, this is Carol, Sharon, Clint, Jan, Pepper, Bruce, and Ty.”
Tony points rapidly around the table, and Natalia tries to keep up. At the end of the introductions, though, the only name she remembers is Ty. He looks disturbingly out of place to her. The top four buttons of his shirt are undone, exposing the purple aconite on his chest. Many people believe that a person’s soul flower means nothing about their personality, but Natalia is not one of those people. She narrows her eyes at Ty. He smiles back at her. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, she thinks.
“Hi, Natalie, you can take this seat.” One of the girls - the redhead sitting next to Ty - pulls out the chair beside her. Natalia sits, and she watches as Tony perches on Ty’s lap. Ty plants kisses down Tony’s neck while he giggles youthfully. Natalia finds herself scowling and feeling an inexplicable protectiveness over Tony. What’s wrong with Ty’s perfectly good soul flower? she thinks, irritated.
“Okay, boy genius, find your own chair, why don’t you?” One of the girls speaks up in a sweet and strong voice. She has shoulder-length brown hair, and she is dressed in yellow and black. Her disdain is clear.
“You’re no fun, Janet,” Ty says, and Janet glares at him.
“Not with you, Tiberius,” she says sharply. Tony snorts and pulls up a chair from another table.
“Ladies, let’s save the catfight,” he teases. “So, Natalie, where are you from?”
-
It is the dead of winter, 1995, a few hours outside of Odessa, but Natalia feels warm. She presses against the warm expanse of Vanya’s back on his bike, holding onto his hips for support. She has a heavy jacket zipped up over her torso, and her legs are covered by fleece long underwear and snow pants. They speed recklessly around the curves of the highway, and she looks over the cliff’s edge - stares down at the dark shapes of tiny houses and the dim light of a few streetlamps. Vanya’s long hair whips around his masked face in the wind, and she thinks that she has never seen him without it.
How odd, how dysfunctional, that she could know a person for fifty years without ever seeing their face. Still, she thinks that this might be what love could feel like if she still had a soul.
-
“How old is Tony?” Natalia asks one day. It is the middle of October, and the air is unseasonably warm, so she and Steve are studying on the quad, soaking in the sun. Steve has his American Literature textbook spread out on the grass in front of him, but his eyes are on Tony, sitting in Tiberius’s lap and playing with his phone on a bench across the quad. Tiberius is frowning and looking up at the sky. Natalia has realized in her two months here that none of their friends like Tiberius, but the topic is off limits.
“Nineteen,” Steve grumbles, like he is mad about Tony’s age rather than Tony’s boyfriend.
“Jesus,” Natalia mumbles. He may not be all that much younger than most of her own classmates, but he is way too young to be a second-year graduate student. She looks down at her own reading material, a tragically boring Interpersonal Communication textbook. She glances over at Steve to find him still watching Tony and Tiberius. She looks up at them and then back at Steve, whose face is twisted in discomfort. “You know, Rogers, you could at least try to be subtle.”
“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head and looking back at his book.
“Something on your mind?” Steve does not answer, and Natalia sighs. “Why are they even together if Tiberius has a soulmate and Tony doesn’t?”
“They’re together because Rhodey isn’t here to knock some sense into Tony,” Steve says sourly.
“You’re such a jealous fuck. You could just tell him you love him” Steve shakes his head, but he makes no effort to deny it.
“Wouldn’t that be the same thing? I have a flower, and Tony doesn’t.” Steve glares at the couple for a long moment.
“You’re such a drama queen. Besides, with how well you keep it hidden, I’m not even sure you do have a flower.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Steve frowns. “He’s committed to only dating men who hate him.”
“Well, he doesn’t have a soulmate. That can make a person desperate.”
-
Not having a soulmate never makes Natalia desperate before she is taken by S.H.I.E.L.D.. She has no time for desperation between missions, and besides, she has Vanya. They may not be soulmates, but they are something. Allies, partners in crime, friends - at least she sometimes allows herself to believe that he is her friend. She has no idea if he has a flower until one July evening in 1996.
Natalia checks into a motel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, and when she returns to the parking lot, he is waiting for her. They cannot seem to get inside fast enough, and they strip off their clothes feverishly. It is unlike every methodical mission they have been on, every controlled training session. It feels like the open road. In moments like these, Natalia feels like they could break through their programming and disappear together.
Even in July, the motel has the radiator running. The open window does nothing but invite in the sweltering desert air. Sweat drips down their backs as Natalia kisses down Vanya’s blank chest and heaving stomach and swallows him whole. It is nice to know that she is not all alone in the world of the soulless.
She has always thought that you cannot miss something you never had, but being with Vanya tonight feels like coming home. Maybe having no soulmate can make two people soulmates after all.
-
Some days are very bad. Today is one of those days, but Natalia knows how to become a ghost. She knows how to go inside herself and let autopilot take over. She goes to class, but she skips lunch. At dinner, she laughs at all the right times and responds when it is appropriate. She says nothing wrong, but Steve still notices. He is too much like Vanya, she thinks. She looks at Steve, and her heart breaks all over again. But also not enough like Vanya.
She cannot believe it took her so long to realize that Steve has a secret of his own. How else could he know that she has been lying all day? She is a very good liar.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” he asks. She refuses to meet his eyes as he catches up with her on her walk back to the residence hall.
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Natalia says after a brief pause. She knows better than to give him an opening to tell her what he thinks is going on, but she cannot think of what else to say.
“Nat,” Steve says firmly. He grabs her by the shoulder to stop her, but she shakes him off. “Something is bothering you. What is it?”
“It’s nothing, Rogers,” she says. He sighs.
“Fine, don’t talk, but I’m here if you need me.”
He leaves her at the door of the residence hall, and she watches him mount his bike and speed off.
-
The moon is full the night Natalia is taken by S.H.I.E.L.D., August 3, 2004. The window is shut tight when she falls asleep beside Vanya, and she awakes to the sound of glass shattering inward. Her eyes dart around frantically, and she grabs the dagger on her nightstand. When her eyes find Vanya again, she realizes with a shuddering horror that the arrow has pierced straight through his left thigh.
It is the first time since she was a child that she has felt anything but numbness at the sight of blood.
Vanya is awake now, staring blankly down at his leg. He blinks, and then he looks up at Natalia. He grabs her by the wrist and places her hand over his heart. She shivers, stunned by the tenderness of the act. She can see flashlight beams searching outside, and she can hear voices growing closer.
“Run,” Vanya says, and she shakes her head viciously. “Natalia, run. I’ll find you, I promise.”
“Please, don’t make me,” she pleads, and her upper lip trembles. Until now, she did not know that she was capable of feeling grief. She knows that it would be naive to think that he could promise her that. She knows that if she leaves, she will probably never see him again.
-
“Hmmph.” Natalia rolls over and buries her face in her pillow. She has no idea what woke her until she hears her phone ring again. She lets out a long groan and rolls over again, feeling around blindly. She cranes her head back to read the upside down neon numbers on the alarm clock on her desk. It is just past midnight. She fumbles for her cell phone and brings it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Agent Romanoff, it’s Maria Hill. I have some bad news.” Natalia sits up and rubs her eyes.
“It couldn’t wait until morning?” she asks.
“Director Fury’s been shot.”
Natalia only freezes for a moment, and then she jumps up and starts getting dressed in her tactical gear.
“Where are you?” she asks, sitting down on the floor to pull on her boots.
“D.C. Memorial Hospital. They’re getting ready to operate.”
“I’m out the door already. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The door slams behind her.
“If you could not slam your door during quiet hours, that would be great.” A perky blonde RA walks past Natalia with a basket of laundry in her arms.
“Sure,” Natalia says as politely as she can manage. “Sorry about that.” As soon as the RA turns her back, Natalia rolls her eyes. “Fucking dorm,” she grumbles to Hill. “I’m on my way.”
-
When Natalia arrives at D.C. Memorial, she jogs right past the nurse’s station, but no one tries to stop her. She finds the operating room quickly, but Hill is not there. Someone else is, though. Captain America is standing there with his back turned, watching Fury as the doctors operate on him behind the glass observation panel. He, like Natalia, is dressed in full tactical gear. He is holding his cowl in one hand, and his blonde hair is sticking up in all directions. Huh, she thinks. Blonde. Wouldn’t have pegged him for a blonde.
When the door clicks shut behind her, Captain America turns around, and Natalia feels like her brain is rebooting. Her eyes widen, and all the training in the world could not have changed her reaction.
“Steve?!” she asks. “Holy shit.” Steve’s jaw falls slack, and his eyes narrow appraisingly, but he remains silent. “Shouldn’t you be studying for midterms?”
“Nat,” he finally says, and his voice is cold.
“To be fair, you didn’t tell me you were Captain America.”
“I couldn’t,” he says. “I’m not allowed to tell anyone outside of S.H.I.E.L.D..”
“But Tony must know,” Natalia realizes aloud. “He called you Winghead the first time I met him.”
“Yeah, well Tony is a S.H.I.E.L.D. consultant.” Steve is still staring her down, but he finally cracks a smile. “So, I’m guessing Natalie isn’t your real name.
“No, it’s Natasha. Is Steve yours?” she teases.
“Well, I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. would go to all this trouble to protect a fake identity.”
They stand in silence for a moment before Natalia speaks again.
“Is he going to make it?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Steve answers. His expression is tight, pained. “You two are close?”
“Tell me about the shooter,” she says instead of answering.
Steve looks at the ground and then back up at Fury on the operating table. Natalia follows his gaze, looking over Fury’s unconscious and bloody body. He’ll be okay, she tells herself. She wants to believe it, too; she really does.
“He’s fast and strong,” Steve says. His posture is stiff, like he is putting every ounce of effort into keeping his composure. His hands are folded behind his back, his feet planted. He really does look like a soldier, she thinks. “Had a metal arm.”
Her heart sinks. There are not many metal prosthetics in circulation.
“Ballistics come back?”
“I haven’t heard.”
Natalia hears the door open, and she turns around in time to see the door shut behind Maria Hill. Her eyes look heavy and tired. If I didn’t know better, Natalia thinks, I’d think she’s been crying.
“Three slugs, no rifling,” Maria says. “Completely untraceable.”
Natalia freezes, and her breath catches in her throat. She can feel her head becoming light as all the blood drains from her face. She feels cold all over. No, she thinks. It can’t be him. Then she thinks, Of course it’s him. Who else could it be?
Natalia almost asks. It’s a simple question—Soviet made?—but she cannot say the words. The consequences if she does will be anything but simple. Even if she did want to know the answer, and she is sure she does not, she has no time to ask. A loud, high-pitched tone resonates as Fury’s heart monitor flatlines. The sound of doctors shouting over one another crescendos, and Natalia steps closer to the window as they attempt CPR. Compress, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… Natalia counts compressions, and then watches tensely as the lead surgeon places a mask over his face and pumps air. Her face feels to open and exposed, and she cannot school it because the doctors have started charging the defibrillator.
“Clear!”
“Don’t do this to me, Nick,” Natalia pleads. The doctors administer a shot of epinephrine. “Don’t do this, Nick. Don’t do this to me.”
“Clear!”
The line on the heart monitor remains flat, and Natalia hears a minuscule hitch in Steve’s breath as he turns his back to the window.
“What’s the time?” the lead surgeon asks.
“2:33 AM.”
Natalia turns and bolts from the room.
-
“Hold your hand steady,” the Soldier says. His voice is low and rough, like a sound put through a blender. His tone is cold and unfeeling. Natalia tries to hold her hand steady, but the man tied to the chair in front of her is crying out, writhing in his bonds like a caged animal trying to get free. She has never killed a human before.
Natalia’s hands shake, but she pulls the trigger anyway. Two shots ring out. The slugs punch into the wall, cracking the brick and mortar behind the man’s head. She freezes and drops the gun, and then she vomits on the floor. Her face feels wet with blood.
“Now, Natalia,” the headmaster says. Her voice is admonishing, strong. Natalia feels ashamed. “You’ll have to learn to control your emotions.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“These are for you.” She places a box of slugs in Natalia’s shivering, sweating hand. Natalia opens the box with her other hand. “They are to be used on missions. Let them remind you what you are working toward.”
“Thank you,” Natalia says, and her voice sounds weak even to herself. The headmaster frowns. Natalia looks at the Soldier, but he is staring somewhere very far away. Where did he go?
-
After Natalia has had a chance to regroup for the night in her room at the Triskelion, she returns to the hospital. She promised Maria last night that she would come back to tie up any loose ends. She paces the hall as she waits to hear from a doctor. As she walks past the vending machine, the fluorescent lights catch on something silver. Her eyes narrow. There, behind two packs of bubble gum, is a S.H.I.E.L.D. flash drive. Specifically, there is the S.H.I.E.L.D. flash drive Natalia recovered from the Lemurian Star.
She buys the gum and retrieves the drive, and then she waits.
Steve, of all people, comes back for the drive almost an hour after Natalia finds it. As he stands, looking at the vending machine with a perplexed and panicked expression, she steps up behind him and pops a bubble in his ear. He spins around and glares at her, then he pushes her back into the empty operating room. His face is pinched with rage.
“Where the hell is it?” he hisses.
“Safe,” Natalia says.
“Do better.” He leans in close enough that she can feel his breath on her nose, pure rage in his eyes, but she does not cower. “All you’ve done since I met you is lie. Why don’t you try telling the truth for once?”
“Where did you get it?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Fury gave it to you. Why? Why was he in your apartment last night?”
“What’s on it?” Steve asks, and Natalia is becoming impatient with his habit of answering her questions with his own.
“I don’t know.” Natalia sighs and looks down. She really does not know, but she has ideas. More accurately, she has fears.
“Stop lying!” Steve is practically baring his teeth at her. She suspected he would have an aggressive side; this is just her first time witnessing it.
“I only act like I know everything, Rogers,” Natalia says calmly.
“I bet you knew Fury hired pirates to take the Lemurian Star, didn’t you?”
“Well, it makes sense. The ship was dirty; Fury needed a way in. That’s none of your business. You weren’t even there.”
“I’m not going to ask you again.”
“I don’t know what’s on the drive, okay?!” Natalia remains neutral through Steve’s questioning, but she is terrified. She cannot tell him about Vanya. They’ll kill him, if he’s not already dead. How the hell is he not dead? “I know how we can find out, though.”
Oh, Christ, she thinks. I’m going to lead them right to him. She hopes Steve has a forgiving side.
-
Steve and Natalia miss the group tradition of watching Sunday night football while they follow the trail of the flash drive. They drive on back roads to Wheaton, New Jersey in a stolen truck, and Steve keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead. His phone chimes with a text.
“Will you read that to me?” he asks. Natalia picks up the phone and snorts.
“It’s from Pepper. She said, ‘He can’t even pretend to watch the game when you’re not here.’ with an angry emoji and a picture of Tony sucking Ty’s face.”
Steve groans, and Natalia checks her own texts. She has one from Sharon.
Think Tony thinks you and Steve are off somewhere having hot sex lol. He’s jealous :( Where are you?!
Sorry, had a family emergency, Natalia replies. Don’t know about Steve, though.
Steve takes his phone back and glares at the screen.
“I hate to say it, but I wish technology would go back to the way it was in the 40s,” he says. Natalia sighs. You’re telling me, she thinks.
“Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?” she asks, effectively changing the subject.
“Nazi Germany,” Steve answers. “And we’re not stealing, we’re borrowing, so get your feet off the dash.”
Natalia chuckles but puts her feet back on the floor.
“So, Steve, I have to ask…” She trails off and fixes Steve with a teasing grin. “Back at the mall - was that your first kiss since 1945?”
“That bad, huh?”
“No! Not bad, just… I wondered how much practice you had had.”
“I don’t need practice,” Steve says incredulously.
“Everybody needs practice.” Natalia says. “I feel like you’re kind of answering by not answering.”
“No, that wasn’t my first kiss since 1945. I’m ninety-five; I’m not dead.”
“You ever think about settling down?”
“Hard to find someone with shared life experience.” Steve laughs bitterly as he says it, and Natalia frowns. She has no idea what comes over her - maybe she just desperately wants to feel the kind of kinship in Steve that she has never felt with anyone since she was separated from Vanya - but she asks the question that has been on her mind since she found out Steve’s secret.
“Your soulmate...” she says, then trails off. “Was it someone you left behind?”
He shakes his head, and Natalia feels her heart sink in spite of herself.
“No,” he says, and then, much more quietly, “Tony is my soulmate.”
“Tony doesn’t have a soulmate.” Natalia furrows her eyebrows. Steve laughs, but clearly, it is not funny to him.
“He thinks I believe that bullshit, about him not having a flower.” Steve stares straight ahead with his jaw set. “When he had his accident, it didn’t go away, it just… moved. It’s on his wrist now, and he thinks I don’t know that he covers it up. He just doesn’t believe that he deserves me, so he thinks he has to be with someone like Tiberius instead.” He says Ty’s name like a curse. “But I’ve seen his flower. Besides, I’m not stupid. Everyone has one. Even I know that.”
Natalia’s face falls, and she looks down at her feet.
“I don’t have one,” she admits.
“What?!” Steve sounds truly taken aback, and the truck even swerves minutely.
“You heard me.” She turns away from him to hide the way her cheeks have turned red with shame. “Look, it’s not a big deal. None of the girls I trained with had them.”
“So you just - what? Don’t have a soulmate?”
“I didn’t say that,” Natalia answers without thinking, and then she berates herself in her head. She sighs and corrects herself. “No, I don’t have a soulmate.”
Steve takes his eyes off the road and looks at her analytically. He tilts his head to the side, and then he smiles sadly.
“But you did have someone, didn’t you?” he asks, and Natalia thinks that she really should not have opened that can of worms.
“Let’s not do this, Rogers,” she says softly, staring straight ahead at the road. She manages to curb the tears that threaten to come, but she will not be able to hold back if she tells him about Vanya. Steve must realize that she means business.
“Sure, okay. We’re almost there, anyway,” he says.
Natalia nods and stares out the window for the remainder of the drive. When they pull onto an army base in Wheaton, New Jersey, Natalia can hear Steve’s breath catch in his throat.
“Familiar?” she asks, and his eyes look sad, nostalgic. She thinks she actually understands that feeling, strangely enough. She has had a hard time relating to the feelings of most of the other people around her, but she understands Steve. She wishes she could tell him just how much she understands.
“Yeah,” he says softly, then shakes his head. Again, stronger this time, “Yeah. Just… A lot of memories. This is where I was trained.” He laughs, but she thinks it might not be as funny as he would like her to think.
They get out of the car and walk around the barracks. When she looks over, Natalia can practically see history flashing behind his eyes.
“What exactly are we looking for?” she asks, trying to distract him from whatever it is he is remembering. He frowns and stares miserably off into the distance. She wishes, once again, that she could tell him how much she understands.
“I don’t know,” he says, and he sounds far away, distracted. Then, she sees a spark in his eyes and he points at a building a few hundred feet in front of them. “Army regulations forbid storing munitions within a hundred feet of the barracks. That building is in the wrong place.”
He takes off toward it, and Natalia follows after him. He breaks open the lock, and the doors open, and then they just stare.
“This is S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Natalia finally says, stepping inside.
“Maybe where it started,” Steve says. They stop in front of a wall with two portraits hanging, and Natalia laughs.
“That guy kind of looks like Tony,” she says.
“Yeah.” Steve still does not smile. “That’s his dad. Howard. Died a few years ago in a car crash.”
“Well, shit. Who’s the girl?”
“Let’s just focus on the mission.” By the look on Steve’s face, she knows that was the wrong thing to ask.
-
Natalia assumed that the flash drive would lead to the rogues’ datapoint, but what they find at the bottom of the hidden elevator is almost as old and dusty as she and Steve. This has to be a dead end, and she says as much to Steve, but she stops halfway through her sentence. On the desk in front of her, there is an external USB port plugged into an ancient desktop computer. She plugs in the flash drive and takes a step back when all of the monitors in the room start to whir.
“Initiate system?” the computer asks in a heavily accented voice. Natalia leans over and types yes into the keyboard. A green light scans Steve and then Natalia. “Rogers, Steven Grant, born 1918, Brooklyn, New York. Romanova, Natalia Alianovna, born 1928, Stalingrad, Russia.”
Steve’s whole body jumps as he turns to look at Natasha with stunned, angry eyes. She cannot say that she does not feel the same shock. Even S.H.I.E.L.D. knows little of the details of her past life. They know where she was born, but not her true age or name.
“It’s… some kind of recording,” she says, clearing her throat and attempting to keep her composure.
“I am not a recording, Fräulein,” the computer says defensively. “I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am…”
A photo of a round-faced man in circular glasses appears on all of the monitors in the room, and Natalia squints at it, unsure of who she is looking at. Steve finally peels his eyes from her face and looks at the screen. When he speaks again, his voice is cold.
“Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He’s been dead for years.”
“First correction,” the computer says. “I am Swiss. Second, look around you. I have never been more alive. In 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body. My mind, however… That was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain.”
“How did you get here?” Steve asks authoritatively. It is his Captain voice. Natalia has a sneaking suspicion that she will be the subject of that voice when they finish here.
“Invited.”
“It was Operation Paperclip,” Natalia supplies. “S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited German scientists with strategic value.”
“They thought I could help their cause,” Zola says. “But meanwhile, I helped my own.”
“That’s impossible,” Steve says, and his voice is beginning to sound more and more distressed. This, killing HYDRA, was the cause he died for, after all. “HYDRA died with the Red Skull.”
“Cut off one head, two more shall grow in its place.” Zola’s face is momentarily replaced by the HYDRA symbol.
“S.H.I.E.L.D. would have stopped you,” Steve argues.
“Accidents will happen.” The monitors show a photo of Director Fury, and then two side by side photos, one of a man - Howard Stark - and a woman. The other is a car wrapped around a tree. Steve turns away, and Natalia can see tears pooling in his eyes.
“Oh, no,” he mutters.
“What’s on the drive?” Natalia asks.
“Project Insight requires insight, so I wrote an algorithm.”
“What kind of algorithm?” she asks.
“The answer to your question is an interesting one. Unfortunately, you will be too dead to hear it.”
The doors begin to slide closed, and Steve finally comes back to his senses, throwing his shield to stop them. Unfortunately, he is too late. Natalia barely ducks to avoid being hit when it ricochets. She looks down at the holographic display on her watch, and her eyes widen.
“Steve, we got a bogey. Short-range missile. Thirty seconds tops.” She grabs the flash drive from the port, but Zola does not stop talking.
“Admit it, this is the best way,” he says. “We, all of us, are out of time.”
Just in time, Steve grabs Natalia and dives into a hole in the floor, shielding the two of them when the explosion comes.
-
“Steve, please,” Natalia pleads once they are back in the stolen truck driving toward D.C.. “I need you to keep your head on, or you’re going to get us killed.”
“I have to get to Tony. Oh, Christ. He’s going to be devastated.” Steve keeps his eyes fixed on the road.
“And get him killed, too?” she hisses, trying to get him to come to his senses. “You can’t share this shit with civilians. He already knows his parents are dead; this doesn’t change anything. Let’s be smart about this. We need to get somewhere safe.”
Steve is completely silent for a moment, and Natalia thinks that maybe he has lost all reason. Finally, he speaks.
“Okay,” he says, and Natalia sighs her relief. “I think I have somewhere we can go.”
-
Steve knocks rapidly on the sliding back door of a house in Columbia Heights, and a man in a purple shirt answers. He frowns at Steve, both concerned and confused.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “We didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
He is clearly distracted, and his explanation has not done much to clear up the confusion, so Natalia speaks up.
“Everyone we know is trying to kill us.” The man nods.
“Not everyone.” He steps aside to let them in. “I’m Sam.”
“Natasha.” Steve is too distracted to care that she is lying. In fact, he has not said a word about her lies since he found out, which is certainly concerning.
“Can I use your phone?” Steve asks. “Mine kind of got… blown up.”
“Of course. You guys can use the guest room to get cleaned up.”
-
Natalia has no intention of eavesdropping, but it is in her nature. While she takes a shower, Steve is on the phone with Tony, and… well, he has a loud voice.
“Tony, I’m so sorry.” His voice is sad. “I know this is hard to hear… I would have told you sooner if I’d known… I do, too… I promise, we’re going to get whoever did it… I…” Steve cuts himself off, but Natalia knows that he wanted to say I love you . “I’ll see you soon.”
Natalia sighs and dries off with the towel Sam gave her, and she gets dressed slowly. When she walks out, Steve is lying on the bed in his undershirt and uniform pants. His eyes are shut tight, and he looks like maybe he has been crying. She cannot blame him. He cannot avoid feeling what his soulmate is feeling right now.
“Steve,” she says softly, and he jumps, like he did not hear her come out of the bathroom. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, Natalia .” Steve glares at her. There’s the anger, she thinks.
“We can talk about this, if you want,” she says. “But you’re gonna have to get over it if we’re going to work together.”
“Then tell me why you lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie to you, Rogers. I kept a secret. That’s different.” Steve is up in an instant, crowding her against the wall just like he did in the hospital, fire in his eyes. “Is this your default state? Big man, trying to make me scared? I’m not intimidated by you. I’m a much better fighter. If you want to know something, you’re going to have to ask nicely.”
“Who are you, really? What else haven’t you told me?” Steve growls. He does not back off.
“My name is Natalia Romanova, and I was born in Stalingrad in 1928. In 1948, I was injected with a variation of the serum that Dr. Erskine used on you, along with the three other girls that graduated from the Red Room with me.”
“What is the Red Room?”
“The Red Room was a Soviet project to train young women as super-spies during World War II. I finished after the war ended, so they sent me on political missions until the Union fell. After that, I worked for the KGB, a covert organization that sent me out to assassinate enemies of the state.”
“Do you know anything about the man that shot Fury? I’d suggest you don’t lie to me again.” Natalia’s heart skips a beat, but she knows she has to tell the truth. If Vanya is the one who killed Tony’s parents, Steve will never forgive her for lying about it.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“What? So confident about everything else, but this is what breaks you? Why are you protecting him. He killed Director Fury, Natalia!” Steve’s voice is getting progressively louder. “He killed Tony’s parents!”
“They called him the Winter Soldier. His name is Vanya,” Natalia finally says. “He trained me, in the Red Room, and then we worked together when I graduated. He must have been captured by HYDRA after I got taken in by S.H.I.E.L.D.. But it wasn’t really him, Steve, you have to believe me. They brought him in in 1945, and he was brainwashed up to the gills. Whoever he was before, they made him into something else.”
“And what about you?” Steve says venomously, and that is the real question, is it not?
-
After they argue in the guest room, Steve and Natalia do not talk any more than they have to. They interrogate Sitwell together, but they say no more than maybe two or three words to each other. Everything about this situation fills Natalia with a sick, sad feeling, and now she is going to have to kill the only person who ever loved her. That knowledge makes her feel a righteous anger toward Steve, because he can be as pissed off at Natalia as he wants, but at the end of the day, he still gets to see Tony whenever he wants. After this mission, Natalia will never see Vanya again, and maybe that is fair. Maybe she could see it as karma, but that does not make it any less painful.
As they drive down the interstate, she cannot stop strategizing in her head. She tries to shrink Vanya down to just another threat that she must neutralize. She tries not to think of his big brown eyes looking into her own. She tries not to think of the sound of his heaving breaths filling a motel room, drowning out the hum of the radiator. She tries not to think of his hands in her hair, or the look on his face when he came. She tries not to think of the love she felt - the love she still feels - for him. She tries not to know what she knows: that he is the only one she can ever love.
“Carsick?” Sitwell sneers at her from his seat, but before she has a chance to say anything, he is being torn from the car and thrown into oncoming traffic. Natalia catches a glimpse of silver metal, and she does not allow herself to think before she dives into Steve’s lap in the passenger seat. She pulls his head down, and she uses her foot to push Sam’s head to the side moments before a bullet flies through the headrest of his seat.
“Shit!” Sam shouts. Only moments later, a metal arm punches through the windshield and rips the steering wheel from the car. Sam stomps on the brakes and they skid to a stop.
Natalia points her gun at the roof. She knows that she is unlikely to kill Vanya that way, but it will distract him. Before she can shoot, though, they are being hit violently from the back. The collision knocks the gun from her hand, and she cannot reach it on the floor. When she looks up again, Vanya is standing in the middle of the road. Natalia’s eyes blow wide. Momentum sends them flying, and the car is flipping.
“Hold on,” Steve says, bringing Sam in close and holding him and Natalia to him tightly. Then, he knocks the door off of the car and they fall out. The impact of their landing is muted by Steve’s shield, but Sam goes flying nonetheless, rolling across the pavement. Natalia is up in an instant, bolting for the edge of the overpass and jumping over. She catches herself with a grappling hook and lands running on the road below just as Vanya’s face appears above her. He takes a gun from a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent beside him and points it at Natalia. There is no recognition in his eyes.
In the end, Sam is the one who has to take Vanya down. Steve and Natalia are both frozen, stuck in a different time.
-
“She needs a doctor,” Sam says. Natalia feels herself fading in and out of consciousness as blood gushes from the bullet wound on her side, but she forces herself to stay as alert as she can. She counts herself lucky that the bullet only grazed her. “She’s going to bleed out!”
The guard waves his electric baton menacingly at Sam, but then he swings it at his partner instead, who convulses and falls. When he takes his helmet off, Natalia can’t help but laugh, even in her subdued state. Maria Hill shakes her hair out and places the helmet on the ground between her feet.
“That thing was squeezing my brain,” she groans, and then she furrows her brow at Sam. “Who’s this guy?”
“Sam Wilson, “ Sam says.
“Great. We gotta get out of here.”
-
“Did you know?” Natalia asks softly as she lies on a hospital bed an hour later. Doctors have cleaned and stitched her wound, and now she is just waiting for them to clear her. Sam is in the bathroom, and Steve and Natalia are alone.
“Obviously I didn’t know,” Steve snaps.
“Right. Sorry.” Natalia sighs and crosses her arms defensively.
“So what the hell happened to you? S.H.I.E.L.D. never warned me that the Black Widow might freeze up on missions.” Steve is angry; she knows. His tone is cruel, and Natalia has trained her whole life to reject emotions, but Steve was her friend just two days ago. Vanya was dead two days ago—or so she thought—and that thought was hard on her, but not as hard as knowing that he is suffering alone. He is suffering alone at the hands of HYDRA, and Natalia is to blame. A million years of training could not keep tears from falling down her cheeks, and she quickly turns her head to hide them.
“You know, Steve, you can be a real asshole sometimes,” Natalia says angrily.
“Yeah, well, I hope you’ll excuse me. I just found out that my best friend was brainwashed by HYDRA, and I sacrificed my life for nothing.”
“He was my friend, too,” Natalia hisses. Steve is already halfway out the door. "I didn’t know you knew him, though, I promise. I would have told you.” He must believe her, because his face has softened, and he walks back to sit in the chair by her bedside. He stays silent. “He was my only friend. I know it’s fucked up, because we killed people together, but we spent a lifetime together. He was all I had.” She pauses to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand, rolling her eyes back to stop the ongoing flow of tears. Steve is staring at his own fidgeting hands, frowning. Natalia hates that she cannot tell what Steve is thinking. “I thought S.H.I.E.L.D. killed him when they captured me, but I guess not.”
“I understand,” Steve says, but he still refuses to look at her. “Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky.”
“This mission...” Natalia says. “Maybe we can save him. Maybe he can be that person again.”
“Well, that might be just about the most optimistic thing you’ve ever said, but no. I already talked to Sam about it. If he finds us again, we have to take him out. If he jeopardizes this mission, millions of people are going to die.”
“Okay,” she whispers.
Natalia shuts her eyes tight and tries to pretend that her heart is not broken.
-
At the Triskelion, Natalia finds it almost mindless to ignore what could be going on in the outside world. All she knows as she follows Alexander Pierce to the top floor is that she has a mission to complete. She will admit that Steve’s speech is inspiring, but she does not think of defeating HYDRA as she reveals her identity and dumps all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files onto the internet. She does not even think about her own secrets being revealed for everyone to read. She only thinks about making it through without thinking about Vanya.
She already thought he was dead once before. She can handle it again.
-
“What happened?” Natalia finally asks after almost a minute of standing in silence with Steve at Nick Fury’s empty grave. "How did you get out?"
“He’s somewhere in there,” Steve says softly. “He saved my life. When the helicarrier crashed, he pulled me out of the water.”
“There’s something else,” Natalia says. Steve sighs.
“He was wearing a vest, but I cut through it during the fight and it came off. His shirt was sliced up, too.”
“He doesn’t have a flower.”
“How did you know that?” Steve tilts his head and looks at her analytically. Natalia laughs bitterly.
“How do you think?”
“Oh.” Now, the sad expression on Steve’s face is not for himself. “Was he… Was he the person you thought might… you know?”
“I don’t have a soulmate, Steve,” Natalia says. She smiles at him, but it is not genuine. “I used to think it might be him, but just because neither of us has a flower doesn’t mean we’re meant to be.”
“He used to have a flower, though,” Steve says, and he looks like he might cry. Natalia thinks that she herself might cry. She thinks that the whole situation is undeniably tragic. “It was the biggest soul flower I ever saw. Covered his whole chest. White Adonis.”
Natalia finds herself fighting tears as she hands him the file from under her jacket.
“I have to go. Be careful, okay? You might not want to go down that rabbit hole.”
“Wait, Natalia!” Steve calls after her as she walks away. "Are you okay?”
“I'm alright. I’ll see you around, Steve.”
-
Natalia arrives in Volgograd in the afternoon. It is cold in November, and she wraps herself up in her jacket as she walks across the rental car lot. She drives East for almost forty minutes in silence, and her mind is taken over by thoughts of Vanya. He disappeared after saving Steve’s life, and Natalia, like she has every day since 2004, wonders where he is now. Did HYDRA find him again? She cannot imagine how they could have unless he wanted them to. He has always been smarter than them, and if he broke his programming, Natalia knows he could have gotten far, far away before anyone even knew he was gone.
After she parks by a chain-link fence in the middle of nowhere, Natalia kneels beside her mother’s grave and cries again, and she thinks about Steve’s words. White adonis. So it’s true that we were meant to be soulmates. She thinks maybe it doesn’t matter. Soulmates or not, life has passed them by.