Who: Natasha Romanoff and Bucky Barnes What: Meet you in the Red Room. When: 15 October, afternoon. Where: Steve's quarters in Avengers Tower. Warnings: Living war crimes. A little language.
The changing of the guards was a thing so familiar, so regular, that the measured fall of booted feet as the security personnel made their hourly rounds was noticeable only when it was absent. Then, silence, though the alertness that sharpened through James as he quantified and qualified the seconds was often dampened down by the recognition of the belated sound of Steve coming down the hallway (the guards stayed back when he was around, for Steve Rogers was assurance enough that the asset was well contained).
When the pattern of movement that was all Steve’s did not filter through, James felt that readiness grow tight around the base of his spine. Not Stark, maybe Barton (for Barton moved like a person who knew how to step silently, and that he had not the other day was by choice) -- or, more likely, someone else entirely.
He leveled himself at an angle by the door and waited.
Natasha presumed the Soldier--Bucky--James--whoever he was at the moment was going to be paranoid and unnerved about everything. She had been for a time, before she'd remade herself into Natasha Romanoff, Agent of SHIELD, the identity that she was in the process of sloughing in favor of the Black Widow, Avenger. So she didn't try to disguise who she was or what she was, didn't change her normal tread, didn't make an effort other than flashing her ID at the security and waiting for a little privacy before knocking at the door: a sustained, steady rhythm of three taps. It was enough, she thought, to get his attention without serving as an alarm in and of itself.
It was sort of like what normal people would do for normal people, and Natasha imagined that was how she and James ought to start.
A glance at the intercom’s screen confirmed the identity of his latest guest as she swung into the camera feed’s limited radius. Her. The woman he was meant to remember from before, from his time as the Soldier, from the encounter under the bridge, where nearly every strike was blocked by her, as if she already knew how he thought, how he moved. The Soldier had needed to fire into her chest just to keep her pinned down.
At the memory, pain, gratingly sharp, almost phantom-like, swept across the arm now kept strapped against his chest.
-- well, there was nothing else for it. James opened the door.
“Hi. I’m James.”
This was, if Natasha had come to find out anything, what she wanted to know most about the man who had been the Winter Soldier. She dropped back into her native language, not bothering to disguise her accent. "Zdravstvujtye, James. Myenya zovut Natasha. Ochyen' priyatno." She offered him her hand, American-style, and waited to see what he'd do with that, if he even knew himself.
Not so much instinct, but the memory of muscles that had had to be beaten into submission (and again, and again) had a reply ready at the tip of his tongue. Mnye tozhye would have been bitten out, flat, terse, Soldier... He recoiled from it, even as the headache bloomed somewhere behind his eyes.
“Steve’s not here right now. Natasha.” A careful utterance of her name. He stepped back, avoiding the proffered hand but giving her room to enter -- or to turn and leave, if that’s what she wished.
The expression on his face and the lack of acceptance of her hand were answers to two different questions. Natasha didn't like either one of them, so she ignored them both for the moment, along with the urge to apologize for some things she wasn't entirely sorry for. "I didn't come to see Steve. I came to see you." Not repeating the name, this time, though she had the urge to call him Yakov and use his patronymic. Though she bore no weapon but herself, she had not come to this meeting unarmed in any of the important ways.
He'd left her enough room to pass him by, but, still: "May I come in?"
He was being studied, like an insect held in focus; her gaze was meant to be the pin holding him down, and with a measure of difficulty, he reacted the way he should do, a nod and a stiffly sweeping gesture with his hand indicating that she was to cross the threshold into the apartment at her own leisure.
He was being studied -- fine, so was she. James’ gaze was unfiltered and attuned to her movements, her gestures, what she did with the rejected hand.
“I know we met before the events on the bridge.”
(There. Smalltalk.)
Natasha came in, then, passing him by, the movement showing him enough of her back that he could see she did not need to keep that gaze on him. She was confident enough for that. The room was not unfamiliar, but she settled at the edge of the sofa rather than seating herself, leaning a little and resting her arm on the sofa's arm to balance her weight. A glance or two around took in the changes that Bucky's--James'--arrival had brought.
"You shot me." It wasn't an accusation, simply a statement of fact, delivered neutrally. "You were assigned a target I was protecting. I covered him with my body. You shot him through me." It was not, exactly, a meeting, but. Natasha left that there to see what James would do with it.
What she would see were the telltale signs of a man desperately trying to fit within a close environment, trying to leave as little a mess as possible despite being welcomed with open arms and open heart by Steve. Everything was neat, strictly in its place, as though a drill sergeant had been through and ordered the barracks to be goddamn shipshape. His shoes, neatly tied and oiled; spotless. The weapons, all put away, but in an order that bordered on obsessive, just like the way he took them out every day to strip them and clean them and put them back together again could be called obsessive (was calming, was something he could fall into, the routine of it, the metallic clicks and cool, smooth surfaces something he knew intimately -- ).
“Yes,” was his initial reply. He positioned himself before the sofa, loose and steady on the balls of his feet. “He was my target --” as though that was a sufficient answer, requiring no apology.
“I’ve shot you several times.”
Several times. Not once, not twice that counted the bullet he'd put into her in DC, but more than that.
This was not the conversation Natasha had expected to have at all. This was a very different and potentially terrifying conversation, and not just because Steve was going to kill her if she fucked it up. She smiled, broadly, because doing otherwise would be an admission of fear, and despite the awareness of danger, she felt less afraid and more alive than she had since the last time somebody had really tried to kill her. (Which, come to think of it, had been the Soldier.)
"I didn't know what you remembered."
“You still don’t.” But the horror of the joke was neither did he, not in any way which could be recognised as memory. Fragments, maybe, of images in the moments before awakening from his attempts at sleep; the feeling of his skin crawling as he handled a pistol; warmth spreading up his back as he choked down breakfast with Steve. Tony’s attempt to stimulate his mind had certainly done its part to unlock things, but the act of remembering was still chaotic, sometimes overwhelmingly so.
Hair like hers was difficult to forget.
“Your real name. Not the one you use now. Your first name.”
Her voice was firm, unwavering. "Natasha is my real name. It's the one I chose for myself." Which was equally important, and the man who had been the Soldier needed to know it, for all sorts of reasons. Natasha straightened, not so much for defense or balance as because the seriousness of the moment required it. "But in those days, I was called Natalia Alianovna."
There’d been a room, once, a room lined with mirrors which reflected the gazes of children awaiting their dance master, eyes blank and hands tight around their knives. Pretty names for pretty girls.
A press of his teeth against the inner surface of his cheek helped clear the memory.
“They called me soldat.” Ubiytsa. Soldier, killer. The asset. Pain streaked down the back of his skull. “They took my name.”
Natasha shifted slightly again, probably not enough motion to set James off, but enough to suppress her first thought in response : what is the name of a child, except something you give?. She'd had nothing before the Red Room; what had come after, she had made for herself, if not without help.
The momentary irritation passed, and instead of giving into it, Natasha pointed out the obvious. "Then you take it back, or choose another, now. Neither of us is what we were then."
“What if what we were made to be is better?” The dreaded question, one which had been weighing on him through the sleepless nights and days that followed his encounter with Stark (that followed every moment spent in Steve’s presence), which begged an answer he likewise had come to dread.
Before Natasha had enough time to reply, however, he swiftly tacked on: “Anyway, like I said. I’m James. Why did you want to see me?”
The unanswerable question left Natasha momentarily disconcerted: long enough for James--for so he was naming himself--to redirect. She bowed her head slightly; her hair fell forward around the edges of her face, but not quite enough to conceal her eyes from James. "I think you know the answer to that question already. You've been very helpful in clearing an old mystery or two up for me. Spasibo." It wasn't very kind, but neither of them were.
“Stop,” he bit out, and he didn’t know if the order (the plea, really) was in Russian or English. His arm, immobile and strapped down, ached. “Stop speaking in that language.”
Natasha switched back to English, even though James hadn't. She kept her voice calm. "Why? What's wrong?"
She didn't want to use Jarvis to call for help--didn't want to think about Jarvis recording this encounter for whatever purpose at all--but James sounded like he might be in physical distress, and HYDRA alone knew what was implanted in that arm and what other technology might be intertwined with his nervous system, never mind the drugs and the psychological effects of the traumas he'd suffered. That Clint had made the call to disable the arm had troubled her, still did, but just now she was grateful.
"It..." It was the language they'd used once he was broken in, and decades -- years, minutes, fragments of time -- had been spent operating under a dialect that was not natural to him for all that he spoke it flawlessly. He knew about the Cold War. He was still learning what his role in it had been.
(Spasibo the girl had whispered before he broke her neck. Please wasn’t in a killer’s vocabulary; whether he’d done it because of her plea or in spite of it was impossible to determine.)
He was scared of it. James was learning a lot of things, and fear was one of them. And right now, it was the fear of snapping back into that vastness of a killer’s indifference. “It’s not me.”
That wasn't really an answer, and the body language she was getting off of James still screamed intense distress. "It's not you. You're James. You're in Avengers Tower in New York. You're not in the Red Room."
It took Natasha a moment to add, "I can call for medical help. Someone I'd call for myself. Or Steve." It occurred to her that James might interpret that differently to how she'd meant it, but on a moment's consideration, she decided he could take it however he wanted to. She found herself leaning forward slightly: not moving just yet, but ready to come to his aid if he wanted it or seemed to need it. And definitely not breaching his personal space without some indication that she ought to.
That combination of words -- the Red Room, medical -- was a mistake. Natasha being what she was -- killer, trained -- made the tight control of her physicality a mistake. Careful, incremental, like all the best assassins; deadly sharp blades in the deepest night. Whereas he was the iron fist, the killing blow, and that fearlessness, the indifference of it, appealed when the imagery and associations her words evoked brought with them a nauseating wave of terror.
He went perfectly still. “Out. Get out.”
"Okay."
Her voice was cool and clear, still. Controlled, even if that was a mistake, because the demons might unman James--the Soldier--might make a machine of him, but Natasha Romanoff had won through hers. She had fled like a child from the Hulk and she would not do it again.
She turned slowly, letting him see her doing it, and said over her shoulder, "I'm leaving now. Goodbye, James."
Somehow, her instant compliance was suspicious. And while he hated it in degrees both less and exponentially greater than the fear, the way the Soldier thought, the way he didn’t, could be a cold comfort when his pulsing blood threatened to drown out every other sound. “Vy--” No. “Are you getting the doctors?” -- and his hand accompanied the flattened inquiry, catching her elbow as she went past him.
"Not unless you ask me to." Natasha did not wrest her arm loose, though she might well have. She looked up at him, measuring his expression and the strength of his grip (flesh, not steel, thanks, Clint) on her. "Ultimately, I'm going to have to say something to Steve. I told him what I thought was the truth at the time. Now I know differently. I owe him that. But that's not immediate; you should have the chance to speak with him first if you want."
The grip he had on her was not one meant to threaten (was not accompanied by increasing pressure which promised ill-will), but to stall -- and once James had her answer and had turned it in his mind, he released her, his arm swinging back to his side, pale and still.
“I’m trying. I don’t think it’s working, though.”
"Of course it's not working on the first try. If it was easy to throw off, the--" she almost said the Red Room again, but he'd reacted so badly to the Russian and everything she'd said about the Room and what he recalled of the history there "--they'd lose everybody. The training isn't meant to be easy to break. That's even before you get to what we know about you and HYDRA. Nobody expected this to be simple." She squelched thoughts of Steve, who wanted to save the world with noble words and inspirational deeds, and scowled. Steve's methods were remarkably effective, but they weren't called for here.
Neither, unfortunately, was kicking people off a roof, nor fast-talking her way out of a situation. She's once told Steve she didn't know everything, just acted like she did, and it was true. With James, she was a bit out of her depth; the Red Room wasn't easy for her, either. "Maybe what you need is to stop fighting yourself and start fighting something else." Jarvis might be able to read the uncertainty in her by her breath and heartbeat. James probably could.
“HYDRA,” was neither question, nor answer, but he formed the word carefully anyway, supplementing it after a beat of hesitation with, “I’ll do… what I can against them. They destroy everything.” They destroyed Bucky. They destroyed Steve -- but Steve had always had the perseverance, the goddamn pigheadedness, to pick himself up, all the shattered pieces of him, and try again.
“Better strap me down for that sort of conversation.” And with that, he stepped away, giving her the room to walk out unharmed.
"And yet, we're both still standing here." Which of James' statements that was in answer to wasn't clear, even to Natasha. She gave him a crooked grin. "Steve believes in you for his reasons. I believe in you because I know it can be done. Without straps, even." She offered him her hand, this time.
“Maybe,” he replied, and the sudden furrow of his brow was all Bucky’s you gotta be kidding me disbelief. It was directed, after a moment, to her open gesture (why would she…?), but then, she was Steve’s friend, and Steve was his, and despite his earlier display of hostility, she was still giving him a chance.
He took the proffered hand, the stiffness in his elbow, his shoulder, in the grip of his fingers, that of a feeling of awkwardness.
Her own grip was firm enough to show confidence but not so crushing as to show insecurity. Just one shake, and it occurred to her to wonder who else had touched James like he was a human being in all that time. Steve, of course, and maybe one or two others in passing? Not many compared to the number who'd handled him like meat, or a clinical specimen. "You know how to reach me when you want to talk."
It was in him to ask her how she’d done it, how she’d broken away from the limitations -- physical, mental -- of whatever history it was that they shared, how she knew of the Red Room, how she’d renamed and remade herself, how how how -- but caution and the inability to form the words dampened the words. One day, perhaps.