Natalia. It would have been a trespass of unimaginable proportions to hear that name come from anyone else; Natalia was the monster she had been, not the woman she had built herself into being. A person she even liked, most of the time. From anyone else, it would have been a slur, a slap, and in the mouth of Bucky Barnes, it was a caress. It had been so many years and oh, they had been very, very long ones. She hadn't known how much she had wanted to hear it until he'd said it out loud.
It was different, to look at him and know that he remembered.
Well - it would have been different, anyway, five years ago, Bucky Barnes had died in Wakanda with so many other people she loved that it came to a point where it felt almost impossible to pick individual losses out of the crush of them. It was like a ghost had stepped through a wall and shown up alive again on the other side of it. Though - not so different than what she'd done, she supposed.
Still. This was the first time she'd seen him since 2014 without carrying the memories all by herself. This was James and not Steve's best friend Bucky, the way she had always tried to split them into separate categories in her head. He knew. And what's more, he would know that she knew, and it would throw a lot of her own past actions into a different light for him. It would hurt him, now, to know about Odessa, the scar on her belly, that day on the bridge. She'd never wanted to be something that hurt him.
"It wouldn't have been hard to find. Carol let me stay with her. She's missing an entire wall," she told him, and then the decision was made. Almost as though it was taken out of her hands entirely.
This was a meeting that could be tragic, or it could be happy, and Natasha was done with allowing tragedy to keep its hands on the wheel of her life. Done. Done, and instead, she threw herself forward on the expectation that he would catch her. The second time she'd taken a leap like that with someone in this world and the mirror of it didn't escape her, but she wanted to hug him, and so she did.