She rolled her injured shoulder in a soft shrug, "I see how it is. No time for foreplay, straight to business, huh?" Natasha shot him a smirk, "not quite the attitude I remember, but let's skip past that and onto the good part." It was the stress, it had to be, whenever life got particularly stressful the smart-ass just vied for attention. Well, it would just have to wait until later. Probably.
"I told you my name," she gave him a quizzical appraisal, hoping some science nerd hadn't been playing with his memory since the last time they'd met. "From which you have probably deduced, being a smart boy as well as a muscle man, that I was born in Russia. Hence the particularly good pronunciation," apparently the smart-ass wasn't about to wait. Hey-ho, she would work around it. "When I was a girl I was taken into a program run by the government. Namely the Black Widow program," Natasha hoped something in what she said would jar a brain-cell or two loose. She wasn't holding out hope, however. "It was the end of Stalin's reign of terror and a new force was gathering power in Germany," this was a history lesson that could easily wait, but with James every detail she left out was one more detail that might jog free something...anything. "Which is where you come in. You were an American soldier who was killed in action, at least, that's what your people thought. In truth you were captured and given..." Natasha let her fingers drift to the metal of his arm, "...an upgrade. You were put to work for my government and your memory was wiped."
Her mind drifted back to a tiny cell in the Russia Federation where a lonely boy had sought safety in her arms. Before she learned to shut her feelings out of the equation and before she had truly become the Black Widow, every bit as dangerous, in her own way, as he. When she was simply a girl, in a factory of soldiers and the one thing that kept her sane was her tutor.
"You were too strong for them and no matter how many times they tried to take away the man you were, Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes kept resurfacing." Natasha's face softened slightly, "you made me the woman I am today, for better or worse," she said with a wry smile, "and I always swore that if I had a chance to get you out, I'd do it." She turned to face him, "and here I am. Do you want out, James?"