She's there when they bring him out of the ice. The machine hisses and steams, and the cold cracks across the glass in the faceplate. She can see him, see his face. Eyes closed. Sleeping. Sleeping Beauty.
The scientist moves in, trailed by his armed guards. Guns up and at the ready. Natalia should know better, but it strikes her as strange, because out of all the people in this room, he seems the most vulnerable, lying there shrouded in cracked glass. Commander Vetrov briefed her on his background, and she knows that he's older than he appears—sixty-five, Captain Vetrov had said, but he still looks the same age as when they brought him here during the war, the big war, the last real war, forty years ago. In forty years he has been frozen and revived, frozen and revived, and so he hasn't lost his youth yet. Natalia wonders if there are other effects they can't see. A piece of meat thawed out in a microwave and refrozen might look the same, but it won't be edible the second or third or seventh time around.
The guards lift up their guns and point them at the machine. Five in all. Natalia feels a brief tightness in her chest, nothing major, just a bit of pre-mission jitters: she still gets them sometimes. Wouldn't be human if she didn't, that's what Dina told her.
The scientist glances over in her direction, although he's not looking at Natalia; she doesn't have the power to grant this particular permission. Commander Vetrov steps forward. He gives a single nod. The guards tighten their stances. The scientist turns to the machine.
Natalia does not know what to expect, even with the debriefing. She expects the worst, as she's been trained. The scientist toys with the machine, twisting knobs and pressing buttons. It seems random. But then, with a loud, groaning clank, the machine slams open. Steam pours out into the warm room. The scientist jumps back, wary like a cat. Natalia can feel Captain Vetrov stiffening beside her.
There's a long pause. The entire room is holding its breath.
He sits up.
His movements are jerky, strained. Natalia reminds herself he's been asleep for nearly eight years. He brushes one hand back through his hair. Peers around the room. His eyes are dark and shadowed, and when his gaze lands on Natalia she's startled by a stab of pity. She hasn't felt pity in a long, long time.
He turns to the scientist, who takes a step back, shaking. He doesn't say anything. He's naked from the waist up, chest gleaming with melting ice. And his arm, that gleams too, silver metal smoky with condensation.
Funny. She noticed his eyes first. But then, she's been briefed on the arm. She hasn't been on the eyes, on that flash of pain lurking inside them.
"Winter Soldier," says Commander Vetrov. "Today's date is November 16, 1983."
He looks over at them both, hair swinging into his eyes. His eyes. There's that stab of pity again; Natalia pushes it away. It won't do anything to help her, to help him, to help the mission.
"Your handler will brief you on your mission," continues Commander Vetrov. "You will report directly to her. This is the last time you will see me during this activation."
Winter Soldier lifts his gaze to meet Commander Vetrov's. The entire room is silent.
"What happened to Gray Foxglove?" he says.
"He's dead," Commander Vetrov says shortly.
Natalia doesn't move. She doesn't let her mask slip. She's been briefed on that, too: she saw the videos, the footage grainy and discolored with age, flickering against the screen. Winter Soldier, eight years ago but looking identical to how he does now, the silver hand of his silver arm crushing Gray Foxglove's throat. Natalia watched Winter Soldier's last handler die, eyes bulging, face slick and shiny and red, so she would know the full risk of the operation.
"Dr. Babkin." Commander Vetrov snaps his fingers. "See to Winter Soldier's needs. Then send him to the briefing room."
The scientist nods. Winter Soldier looks at Natalia. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. It's only his job to listen.
"Black Widow." Natalia turns toward Commander Vetrov. "Let's leave the doctor to his work."
She nods in reply, follows him out of the room. When they are in the hallway, alone except for the blank-faced guards, she says, "He doesn't remember what happened."
Commander Vetrov strides forward, the heels of his shoes clicking against the tile.
"Sir?" Natalia catches up with him. "Why doesn't he remember?"
"That's not your concern." Commander Vetrov stops and looks over at her. "He has his job and you have yours. And what's that job again?"
Natalia steadies herself, angry at the reprimand. She doesn't need reminding of her job. "To serve as liaison between the Winter Soldier and the KGB," she says, because she aways knows what to say.
"Very good." Commander Vetrov turns and continues walking down the hallway. "Now do it."
The mission requires travel to the United States, and Natalia suspects that is at least part of the reason she was selected: she has the best American accent in the KGB, the result of a talent for mimicry and a willingness to record herself and listen to her own voice. Getting Winter Soldier on American soil is the real trick. She can't just hand him a forged passport from some Western country and board a plane in Paris and play-act at being a couple coming home from their honeymoon. The arm is a bit conspicuous.
In the end, Commander Vetrov comes through with passage aboard a shipping liner coming out of China. It's an old-fashioned smuggling, the two of them hidden in a narrow, short-ceilinged room at the bottom of the ship. The walls drip and the floor is constantly wet with seawater, but there are a couple of cots and a trunk to keep their supplies dry, and one of the crewman brings them food twice a day. They eat in silence. They do most things in silence.
They are allowed to leave the room at night, creeping through the narrow corridors to breathe fresh air up on deck, and to have a chance to train and exercise in the open space. Natalia takes the opportunity but Winter Soldier does not.
"You need to leave the room," Natalia tells him one night, as she prepares to slip out into the ship, changing into her dark clothes. She doesn't feel any shyness around him; it's a worthless emotion and anyway, even if he looks at her, at her body, he looks straight through her. In some ways, that's more unnerving than lust.
"No, I don't." He peers up at her through the matted tangle of his hair.
"You need to keep your strength," she says. "Which you won't do sitting in here."
"That's not something I have to worry about." He stretches out on the cot and stares up at the ceiling. "Just get me to the fucking mission. That's your job, isn't it?"
Natalia glares at him. "No, my job is to make sure you don't get killed. We've been out at sea for nearly two weeks. You can't expect me to believe you're at peak condition if you've done nothing but lay around in this room for all that time."
He laughs, sharp and barking and bitter. "I've been lying in that god damn freezer for eight years. This is nothing."
Natalia watches him for a few seconds, nettled. She thinks about the video of Gray Foxglove. Commander Vetrov had been cagey about why Winter Soldier killed him; something about a mission gone bad, about Gray Foxglove turning on the Motherland. She wonders if Winter Soldier would kill her.
And then she lunges at him.
Natalia's fast, lightning-quick, but he responds instantaneously, catching her by the foot and flipping her over so she slams hard onto the cot. It was a kindness on his part; he could have easily slammed her into the floor.
She arches her back, leaps up, gets a leg around his neck. He grabs at her with the metal arm; she can feel the cold of it through her clothes. He heaves her off of him; she shifts her center of gravity, manages to land in a crouch a few paces away from him, chest heaving.
He looks at her, not sweating, not breathing hard.
"Is that enough proof for you?" he says.
She jumps at him again. This time, he catches her at the waist and whirls her around, and for one delirious moment it feels like a dance. Something old-fashioned, meant for flared skirts and high heels. Charleston. Rumba. Lindy hop.
He drops her, takes a step back. Confusion flashes across his features. Disappears.
"This would be easier outside," she says. "More room to maneuver."
"I told you, I don't need it."
"But you want to." She smiles slyly at him. "Don't you? Better than being trapped down here. C'mon." She tilts her head back. "We can spar for a bit. See the stars."
He doesn't answer. She watches him. Watches his eyes. That's where the real story is, she's learned. She wonders if Gray Foxglove ever saw it.
"I don't give a damn about the stars."
She thinks he's going to skulk back to his cot, but then he says:
"How do we get up there?"
Natalia grins. "I'll show you." She tilts her head back toward the door. "The whole ship is riddled with secret passages. We've got to be quiet though. The crew's not going to give us up if they know about us, but keeping ourselves secret—makes it easier for them to lie."
He grunts in acknowledgement, slicks his hair back from his face. "Lead the way, then."
Natalia slides the door open. The corridor is dank, dripping. Like everything on this boat. She skitters through the darkness, aware of Winter Soldier gliding behind her. He moves as gracefully as she does, like the liquid shadows of car beams shining through a late night window. It doesn't take them long to get up on deck. When Natalia pushes the door open, a cold, damp wind greets her, blowing her hair away from her face. She breathes deeply, turns to face him.
"Much better than that room, don't you think?"
Another grunt. He pushes past her and stalks out to the open platform. The wind stirs his hair and in the moonlight his metal arm seems to glow. Natalia eases the door shut behind her. She watches him. Something stirs inside her chest. She thinks it's pity again but when he glances at her over his starlight shoulder, she realizes with a jolt that it's attraction.
Now that—that's a dangerous emotion. Maybe sparring was a bad idea. She knows the sort of thing that can come from it. Although she wonders if that happens to him, the dark desire that can only be conjured up with violence. Maybe they took it away from him, the way they'd taken his arm and his old life, whatever that had been.
"Well?" he says. "You got me up here."
"Just giving you a chance to rest up," she says.
His mouth twists. In that glimmering, windswept moonlight, it almost looks like a smile. "I'm rested."
She waits half a heartbeat, and then she attacks.
They arrive in Seattle a week later, pulling into the docks in the middle of the night. It's raining, the drops small and sharp and stinging with cold. Winter Soldier wears a long raincoat, a pair of black gloves—one too big, the other too small. His shoulders tilt asymmetrically beneath the coat, but at least the disguise doesn't give him away completely. When he goes out on the mission, he won't cover the arm, she knows that—but they aren't ready for the mission yet.
A contact is waiting for them with a car and new documentation: an Arizona driver's license, a passport, a purse with a pair of credit cards and a billfold full of cash. Natalia slides into the driver's seat of the car and watches the contact scurry away underneath his black umbrella. Back to wherever he came from.
Winter Soldier climbs into the backseat.
"You can sit up front." The heat's on high and the air in the car feels steamy and dry at once. Rain sluices over the windows.
"Not protocol," he says.
"No one's going to know." She feels easier around him. They sparred every night the past week, dancing dangerous across the deck of the ship. He went easy on her; she could tell, but she didn't complain, since even when he pulled his punches he still won. Natalia suspects they engineered more than the machinery in his arm. He didn't use it much in their fights. Just his natural strength was enough to overpower her.
Still, she'd enjoyed the sparring. It had been—well, fun's the word that comes to mind, even though it doesn't feel as if it should be appropriate, given their relationship, that of handler and agent.
She drives away from the docks. The streets are mostly empty, but there are lights everywhere: street lamps and stoplights and neon signs burning in the windows of buildings. The rain looks like falling moonlight.
"Do you want to go over the mission?" Natalia asks him.
He doesn't answer. There's just the whump whump of the windshield wipers.
"Well?" She glances at him in the rearview mirror. He's staring out the window, colored light moving across his face. "I'm happy to go over it again."
"I don't need you to do that." He meets her eye in the mirror. She flicks her gaze away, back to the empty road, and that makes his voice seem louder. "They're all the same, you know. Find the target. Kill him."
Natalia doesn't say anything. His voice has the flatness of someone who doesn't enjoy killing. It's not what she expects. She thinks about the film of Gray Foxglove's death again. For the first time she wonders if there was more to that incident than Commander Vetrov led her to believe. If Winter Soldier had been ordered to kill his handler.
She feels cold despite the hot blast of the heater.
They drive through the night. Natalia asks Winter Soldier if she can turn on the radio and he says he doesn't give a damn so she turns it on to one of those college stations and listens to the mournful midnight singers, their voices crackling with static. She can feel herself falling into the lull of the road, wheels spinning against cement and the tunnel vision of the headlights. She's grateful when they finally arrive at the safe house just outside Tacoma. Someone's hung it with Christmas decorations, multi-colored lights around the windows and a plastic illuminated Santa statue sitting in the empty flowerbed. The decorations smear in the rain and they look like fragments of a dream.
Natalia pulls into the driveway and cuts off the engine. She wishes the contact had thrown an umbrella into that purse along with the money.
The back door clicks open. Winter Soldier steps out into the rain. Natalia has the sudden, stupid thought that it will make his arm rust, even though Commander Vetrov told her it was not made of ordinary metal. Winter Soldier walks out into the yard and looks up at the Christmas lights. Natalia gets out after him and watches him through the rain. He's frowning, staring up at the lights around the windows like he's trying to see something in them.
"Everything okay?" Natalia calls out.
"Yeah. Fine." He blinks, cuts through the grass up to the front door. "You got the key?"
Natalia nods and follows him up to the little cement porch. The Christmas decorations make her feel woozy. Or maybe it's just the sight of him, leaning up against a support beam, his wet hair hanging in his face. He crosses his metal arm across his chest, grabbing his opposite arm. For a moment she thinks she can almost see the little boy he had to have been. She knows he's not Russian. His accent isn't right; there's a flatness in his vowels. And so maybe that unimaginable childhood of Winter Soldier had contained multi-colored Christmas light, tacky plastic Santas.
Maybe.
The mission in Washington goes as planned. No complications. Natalia watches from the window of a nearby building, crouched low in an empty storeroom. Winter Soldier works under cover of darkness and that cold northwest drizzle, face covered, assault rifle strapped to his back. He works neatly, efficiently, although the assassination lacks the grace of their sparring.
When it's done, they leave the safe house outside of Tacoma. Natalia drives west through the mountains. In Ellensburg, she stops at a gas station along the side of the highway, where a new contact is waiting with a new car. They trade places. Winter Soldier always sits in the backseat, following protocol. There are no midnight sparring matches anymore. No way to do them without drawing unwanted attention in the cheap roadside motels where they sleep.
They drive and drive. Snow falls, thick and fluffy. It quiets the noise of the world, and in that quiet Winter Soldier is more willing to talk with her. There is not much to say, but they still find ores of conversation. The weather—"Always the goddamned cold, I wished they'd wake me up in summer," he says, breath fogging up the window. Or the ceaseless prairie landscape—"Everything looks the same in this country," Natalia says, which is not true but which seems true at the time, as they roar through another highway lined with fast-food restaurants and car lots. They listen to the radio and offer each other their opinions on the music—he doesn't like it, says it sounds fake, distorted, like a radio falling into disrepair. "Not like what I remember."
"What do you remember?" She asks the question without thinking. On this endless road trip their protocols have broken down. It's easy to get lost in the snow.
"Nothing," he says. Then: "Missions. The freezer. The red room."
Something about the way he says the last thing gives Natalia a chill. It's that flatness again. That emptiness.
"Sometimes I remember other things."
Natalia looks at him in the rearview mirror. He's staring straight ahead, staring at nothing.
"Other things?" she asks.
"Yeah. I can't grab onto them. Like the music. It sounds wrong. It's not supposed to sound like that."
"What's it supposed to sound like?"
"I don't know. I don't remember."
The snow is falling more thickly. Natalia has the windshield wipers on high but it's still hard to see. She's going to have to find some place to stop. A diner, a motel. She thinks she sees a light glowing up ahead.
"I remember snow," he says. "Blood on the snow."
Natalia tightens her grip on the steering wheel. She doesn't know how to respond to that.
"I remember falling. And dancing."
The light flashes through the white out. It's a motel, the Vacancy sign lit up. Natalia sighs with relief. She pulls into the parking lot and parks beside the front entrance. She can see a woman moving around inside, tidying the front counter. A Christmas glitters in the corner, an angel glowing on top.
"We're stopping here?" Winter Soldier asks.
"It's too dangerous to keep driving." Natalia turns around in her seat so she can look at him.
"We're going to compromise the time frame."
"I can compensate for us. My job's to keep you alive, remember?"
"I won't die in the snow."
He says this and his eyes glitter and Natalia wants to do something to comfort him. She doesn't understand why he's hurting; she only knows that he is. And she's his handler. This is part of her job, to keep him stable.
"Why do you think you remember certain things and not others?" she asks.
"It's the red room," he says. "That's where it all goes away."
He pushes open his door and the snow swirls in. Natalia sighs. That was the wrong question to ask; it wasn't a comfort, just an attempt to soothe her own curiosity. She turns off the engine and follows him outside. He has his coat on, metal arm hidden, but he still looks incongruous in the snow, something hulking and dark and terrifying. The woman in the lobby looks out at them through the window.
"Wait here," Natalia says, and she goes inside and gets them a room.
The storm lasts well into the night. Natalia doesn't sleep and neither does Winter Soldier, although he's always slept very little, four or five hours at a time. The phone lines are down and so she has no way of calling her KGN contact to report their delay; still, they have at least passed the border into Kansas. They're close.
The room is small and cozy. There's only one bed. Natalia flips on the television but it's all color bars and so she flips it off again. Winter Soldier takes a shower and emerges in a cloud of steam, fully dressed. He sits down on the bed beside Natalia. Something about his movements seems cautious.
"We could always spar in the snow," she says.
"They'll hear us."
"I know. I was teasing."
He gives her one of those half smiles. She returns it. They settle into a companionable silence. The snow clicks against the window. The heater blows the curtains around. Natalia draws her knees up to her chest and stares at their distorted reflections in the darkened television. Black Widow and Winter Soldier.
"It's almost Christmas," she says, thinking about the Christmas tree in the lobby. She glances over at Winter Soldier. "Sorry I didn't get you a present."
Winter Soldier pauses, and then he smiles again, a real smile, the first she's ever seen from him. It takes her breath away.
"Sorry I didn't get you one," he says. "I don't know much but I do know the date."
"Anything you want?" she says. "It'll have to be something in this room, though."
He leans his head back against the bed's headboard. His hair has dried into waves. "What have you got to give?"
She thinks for a moment. "My name."
Silence. The lights in the room are too bright, as bright as that angel on the Christmas tree.
"All right," he says.
She tells him. It's the ultimate break in protocol, worse than letting him ride in the front seat of the car, worse than stopping in a snow storm. But her voice rings out like a Christmas bell as she speaks. Natalia Romanova.
He doesn't say anything for a long time. Then: "That was a good present."
"Yeah? Why?"
"I don't have a name."
Natalia looks over at him, and there is the cold, shuddery realization that Winter Soldier isn't a code name, isn't a designation. It's just—the only way to identify him.
"It's another thing you don't remember," she says, her voice barely a whisper.
He nods, stone-faced. "They took a lot away from me. And they keep taking it away."
"I'm sorry."
"You didn't do it." He looks at her. "Did you?"
She shakes her head.
"I know." He pauses. "Natalia Romanova," he says, and he stumbles a little over the syllables, that reminder that he comes from some other part of the world.
They sit in silence for a few moments more. And then Natalia says,
"Would you like one?"
"Like one what?"
"A name."
He turns his head toward her. He's close enough to kiss. It's been a long time since Natalia has kissed someone because she wanted to, and not because he was a mark to be manipulated.
She wants to do it. She doesn't do it.
"What name would you give me?" he says.
Natalia studies him. In her time as his handler, she's grown used to his face, but today she's looking at those handsome features to try and glean a name like an oracle looking for truth. It's a different kind of looking.
"Fyodor," she finally says.
He blinks at her. "Fyodor."
She nods.
"It doesn't sound right." He frowns. His brow furrows.
"You can pick one you like better."
"I don't know what I like better." He runs a hand through his hair. "Fyodor—it's fine. Nothing sounds right."
"Fyodor," she says. "It'll be our secret. Just like Natalia."
"A secret," he says. "And then, more quietly, as if he's speaking to himself: "Maybe they can't get at secrets."
They arrive in Kansas City the next evening, a day later than planned but still with enough time to complete the mission. The sun is just starting to set, and they were ordered to complete their task after dark anyway. Natalia drives straight to the safe house. The sunset turns the world violet. She can't think of Fyodor in that fading winter light.
The house is empty, but the weapons are where they are supposed to be, another assault rifle, a pistol, a couple of knives for hand-to-hand. Natalia takes one of the knives and leaves the rest to Fyodor. He straps them onto his uniform. He pulls the mask down over the face. The Winter Soldier, soldiering in winter.
They look at each other, armed, enemies of the state, of the innkeepers and waitresses who have shown them hospitality these last few days. They are surrounded by cheap American furniture and cheap American paintings. They are strangest couple Natalia has ever known.
We're not a couple, she tells herself.
"I'll have your back," she tells him. "Just like last time."
He nods. The KGB probably think that in the mask he is silenced, but the mask doesn't hide his eyes, and all the stories Natalia can see there.
He turns and leaves, disappearing out into the snow. Natalia watches after him.
And then she follows.
The safe house was chosen because it's close to the mark's residence, although the residence looks nothing like the safe house. It looks, Natalia thinks, like a palace. It's lit up for Christmas with strands and strands of white lights, and so it fits in perfectly with the freshly-fallen snow, an ice palace for an ice world. There's a man living inside whose death has been strategically planned: it's impossible for Natalia to think of it as a tragedy. He's a cog in their machines, just like she is, just like Fyodor is.
She skirts along the outer fence, listening for voices or the barking of dogs. Everything is silent, the death silence of winter. Fyodor left tracks in the snow—unavoidable in these conditions, but she hopes he will be in and out before anyone has time to notice. Still, she follows his tracks, puts her foot in his. If there's a problem, she only wants them looking for one person.
She feels a movement in the darkness and she knows it's him. At the back of the house, she climbs over the fence, landing softly behind a row of pine trees. Most of the house lights are turned off—there are only the Christmas lights, and they cast just enough illumination to make her nervous.
She tries to stick to the shadows.
She would feel better if she could see Fyodor, but it's becoming apparent to her that breaking into the house after him will be more trouble than it's worth. And so she gets as close as she can, and she listens. There will be gun fire. It's not a quiet death, and the KGB wants it to look sloppy, as if it were done by a local terrorist group.
Natalia holds her breath. The air is so cold time feels frozen.
And then she hears it. The pop pop pop of the safe house assault rife. Her sigh of relief becomes a cloud.
And then there's another gunshot. Not the pistol. An assault rifle, but a different model from the one Fyodor has.
"Shit," she says, and she bounds out of her hiding places and jumps into a leaping kick. She flies through the window, shattered glass twinkling around her.
The house is hot. Sweltering, desert heat. Natalia stops in the hallway, listening. Footsteps pound overhead. Another round of bullets. She runs. Someone—a man—shouts in pain. She bounds up the stairs, the blood pounding in her ears. She's a creature built of adrenaline. She wishes they had left her a gun.
Upstairs, she can hear the grunts and thuds of fighting, and she follows them to a door at the end of the hallway. Master bedroom. She kicks the door open, knife out, muscles ready to fight.
What she sees is not what she expected.
What she expected: A dead wife. A man trying to be brave.
What she sees: Agents in dark suits, a skull insignia stitched to their left arms. Five of them. Four are dead. The last is fighting Fyodor by hand, and losing—but there is blood on Fyodor's face, blood dripping into his eyes, blood streaming down his right arm.
They haven't noticed her, either of them. She pulls the knife out and throws it and it strikes the last agent in the back. He drops to his knees, topples down into the blood-soaked Persian carpet.
Fyodor looks at her.
"What is this?" she says.
He rips the mask away. "Set-up. They fucking set us up. There's no fucking senator living in this house."
"We have to get out of here."
"I'm not going back to that safe house."
"Neither I am. But we sure as hell can't stay here." Natalia races across the room to the big picture windows lined with gauzy curtains. They open out into a balcony. Icy wind blasts across her, blowing her hair away from her face. She squints into the cold. The night air buzzes. There are others on their way. They may already be here, crawling up from the first floor.
She turns over to Fyodor. He's still dripping blood.
"Can you jump?" she asks.
"Yes." He stomps over to her, clicking the assault rifle back into the holster on his back. He leans over the balcony's edge, balancing himself with his metal arm.
"It's just snow," she says. "A meter or so thick. I can't jump down there myself."
"Don't worry about it." He looks at her. "You'll get blood on you."
"I'm not scared of blood."
"Yeah. I figured that." He scoops his bleeding arm around her waist, jerks her close to him. She can feel his breath on the bare skin of her neck.
"Ready," he says, and before she has a chance to reply, he jumps.
Those seconds when they are flying through air feel like part of another world. Natalia watches the white ground rush up to meet them. It sparkles in the Christmas lights.
Fyodor lands so that his metal arm takes the brunt of the fall; Natalia feels his body shuddering at it, the transference of all that energy rushing through his body. But the machinery does it's job, and they're both safe on the ground.
Voices shout overhand. Gunfire pops in the snow.
"Run!" Natalia shouts, and they do, running in the instinctual zigzag of escape, feet kicking up powdery bursts of snow. It sticks to their clothes and into their hair, and the cold shudders down deep into Natalia's bones.
"The backyards," she says. "We've got to find an empty house."
Sometime during the fall, Fyodor slipped his mask back on, and he tilts his head down, running hard into the wind. They jump the fences. Natalia can hear angry voices behind them. But it's a new subdivision, and that means there will be an uninhabited house eventually.
They jump another fence, find an empty swimming pool. Another; children's toys and a swing set. A third: nothing. Emptiness.
"Here," she says, grabbing at Fyodor's metal hand, jerking him to a stop. She creeps up to the sliding glass door and peers inside. The walls hang open, gouging out insulation. She picks the lock easily and slides the door open. Gestures for Fyodor to get in first. He's bled all over the snow, and their footsteps glow in the moonlight, lighting the way to their hiding place. She holds the knife at her side, ready to throw, ready to fight.
But there's only silence.
They haven't been followed.
She counts to a thousand inside her head, and when nothing changes, she goes inside. Fyodor sits in the center of the half-finished living room, blood pooling around him. Natalia slips her knife back into place, locks the door, jogs over to him.
"Let me see," she says, pushing his hair away from his face.
"I'm fine."
She ignores him. There's a shallow gunshot at his hairline, fairly superficial despite the blood. The arm wound is deeper, but on quick examination she doesn't find a bullet.
"I told you," he says. "I'm fine."
"Let me dress the wounds."
"That's not exactly a high priority right now." Fyodor gestures out at the backyard. "Who the hell were those assholes? That skull—" He closes his eyes. "I swear I've seen it before."
Natalia grabs hold of that information, files it away. She'll think about its implications later. Right now she's focused on getting her agent's wounds cleaned and dressed. She'll worry about the compromised mission next.
"Wait here," she says, and she goes into the kitchen, hoping to find some kind of first aid kit—surely they'd keep one around, on a construction sight like this? But the kitchen is empty, all the pipes out in the open. She runs into the dining room. Nothing. The foyer—
She finds it there, a little white box with a big red cross. She scoops it up and takes it back into living room and kneels next to Fyodor. The first aid kit has gauze and gauze tape and hydrogen peroxide. Nothing to clean the blood away, but at least she can tend to the wounds.
"This is a waste of time," Fyodor tells her. "We need to contact the KGB and ask for evac—"
"And how do you know it wasn't the KGB who set this up?"
The question's out in the open before Natalia can stop it. Fyodor looks at her, his gaze steady.
"I don't," he says softly.
"Exactly." Natalia unscrews the lid on the hydrogen peroxide and pours it onto his shoulder wound. He sucks in his breath.
"Could have warned me."
"Sorry." Natalia winds the gauze around his arm and fixes it into place, then turns to his forehead.
"Don't throw that in my face," he says.
"I won't." Natalia smiles at him, even if she isn't a mood for smiling. She rips off a piece of gauze, tips it in the hydrogen peroxide, and dabs at the head wound. She's so focused on setting his wound that she doesn't notice right away that Fyodor is watching her as she works, his gaze dark and intense. She lifts the gauze away. It's pink with his blood. She lets it drop beside them. He keeps staring at her and she keeps staring at him, patting around in the first aid kit for the fresh gauze. She tears off a piece, folds it over, tape it into place. And when she finishes, she doesn't take her hand away. Instead, she slides it down the side of his cheek. His skin is softer than she expected.
"Natalia," he whispers, his voice rough.
"You," she says, because Fyodor is not his real name, and it will never be his real name. It's only a placeholder, a way for her to think of him as a human being.
He closes his eyes. Natalia hears a plinking at the glass doors—it's snowing again, coming down in thick white swirls. It won't be long before their tracks and his blood will be blanketed over.
They are alive, and in this moment, they are safe.
He opens his eyes, fixes his gaze right on her. The house is cold, unheated, but there is a heat in the way he looks at her. She's burning up from the inside.
"You," she says again.
He kisses her.
Natalia is not surprised: it feels like an natural extension of all that has come before. She kisses back, pressing herself against him, cupping his face in her hand. He wraps his metal arm around her waist and they tilt backwards, wrapping themselves together on the cold and unfinished floor. It doesn't matter. This is the perfect place to do this, the perfect time. She knows why lust always follows violence: it's because you want to celebrate the life you haven't lost. His life and her life, wound up together in an empty house in the middle of the snow.
She expects it to be the way it was when they sparred, but he doesn't fuck the way he fights. He's tentative, his touch unsure. She guides his hand over her body, showing him how to unlock desire, and he learns quickly, as if his memory is waking up. His breath is hot on her skin. His body is hot against hers. They generate their own warmth.
Outside, the storm swallows the world whole, and erases the memory of its existence.
When Natalia wakes up, she knows that something is wrong.
He isn't there beside her. It's the first thing she notices: she expects to feel the now-familiar lines of his body, and she doesn't.
The second thing she notices is that she's not in the unfinished living room of an American house, but a room with stone walls.
The third thing she notices is the bars.
She sits up, all the sleep evaporated out of her. She knows this place. It's the secret prison of the KGB. She's in Russia.
She's imprisoned in Russia.
Natalia leaps to her feet. Her muscles burn in protest and her head swims, but she pushes forward, up to the bars. The other cells are empty.
"What the hell is going on?" she shouts. "Commander Vetrov! I demand to speak to Commander Vetrov."
"I'm afraid Commander Vetrov is currently indisposed."
Natalia freezes. The voice is unfamiliar, accented in a way she can't place.
"I'm glad to see you haven't suffered any ill effects of the drugging. We've had—issues with it before."
Natalia turns, her hands still clutching the bars. She has a single thought running through her head: I'm caught. She's been trained for this but all the training has disappeared. She only knows that one fact. She is caught.
(He is gone.)
A man stands out in the corridor. He wears Commander Vetrov's uniform, but Natalia has never seen him before.
"Who are you?" she hisses.
"Vitaly Guryev." The man gives a bow. "Commander Vetrov has asked me to take over his position for the foreseeable future."
He is lying. He's lying, and he knows that she knows he's lying.
"Who," Natalia says, "are you?"
"I'm afraid I've told you all I can." He smiles. "Your service to the KGB has been impeccable, but at this point we really have no use for you. I'm sure that will change eventually, though, so you needn't fear for your life."
"Where's Winter Soldier?" Natalia says, and the name tastes like ash on her tongue. But she needs to know.
The man tilts his head. "He's been frozen, of course. We certainly aren't willing to give him up. A remarkable piece of technology, that, although even your Commander Vetrov knew that keeping him awake too long was a mistake. He starts getting ideas." The man gives a satisfied nod. "A shame he killed so many of my men, but a certain amount of collateral damage was expected."
My men. The men with the skull insignia.
Natalia feels a dull, heavy dread.
"Who do you work for?" she says.
The man smiles blandly at her. "I told you, we aren't going to kill you. You have some remarkable abilities. But we will need to rehabilitate you before the freezing."
The freezing. Natalia takes a step away from the bars. Her eyes dart around the cell, looking for weaknesses, for a way out. But there's nothing. She knows how well-designed these cells are.
The man steps away from the cell and snaps his fingers. Two men appear. They wear the uniforms of KGB guards, but when one steps under the blazing fluorescent light she sees the outline of a skull in the grains of the fabric.
The guards unlock the cell.
"Don't try anything," Guryev warns.
Natalia hardly hears him. She backs away from the cell door, muscles tightening, ready to spring.
One of the guard pushes the door open. The other watches her, eyes glittering.
She jumps—
And something slams into her, a force heavier than any weapon. It's a force like the tide, like the gravity of Earth itself. Natalia screams and flies backward, hitting her head against the far wall. Her vision blinks black and white. She sees the guard slip something into his coat.
"Bring her to the red room," Guryev says.
The red room. Her head is ringing from the impact, but she recognizes those worse. She hears them in his voice.
It's the red room. That's where it all goes away.
Natalia is aware of someone grabbing her wrists, aware of the cold metal of handcuffs lashing her hands behind her back. The guards shove her out of the cell. She stumbles as she walks. She's certain she can feel the earth rotating beneath her.
She doesn't know where they take her, only that they lead her through a labyrinth of corridors she's never seen before. She doesn't have a sense of how long; the force of that attack lingers with her, leaving her weakened, incapacitated. She hates it.
And then they come to a door. It isn't red. It looks like all the other doors. It leads into a room that isn't red, either, just the same stone gray as everything else.
In the center of the room is a chair.
A man in a white lab coat stands beside it. He's not Dr. Babkin.
She pulls on her handcuffs, trying to see if she can twist her way out of them. It's a stupid move, but her thoughts are hazy. One of the guards hits her hard across the top of her back and she stumbles forward, choking and sputtering. The scientist catches her.
"Take off the cuffs," he says to the guards.
Guryev is standing in the corner, his hands folded behind his back. Natalia glares at him as the guards fumble with her handcuffs.
"What are you doing?" she hisses.
He doesn't answer.
Her hands are free. Despite her cloudy thoughts Natalia lunges to the side, aiming for the door, sweeping her legs out low so as to trip the guards. But she moves as if she's underwater, and she's hit with that force again, tidal waves and total eclipses, and it flings her back into the chair.
The chair.
She has to get away from this chair.
The guards are on her already, strapping her arms down. The scientist wheels a vicious looking device over toward her. He flips a switch and it sparks and lets out a low, whining hum. It sounds like a cry of mourning.
"What is that?" Natalia asks. She pulls at her restraints but that unearthly weapon has drained her strength away from her. She has to find some other way.
"It's perfectly safe," the scientist says. "It's merely a tool to help with obedience."
"I've never betrayed the KGB," Natalia snarls.
"You broke protocol," says Guryev from the back of the room. "You told the Winter Soldier your name. That's not even bringing up the sexual misconduct."
"Fuck you," Natalia says, one final act of hopeless defiance.
"None of this matters," Guryev says. Then, to the scientist: "Take away the last month. We want her to remember the KGB. When we wake her back up, the transition should be completed and she'll have no idea we've infiltrated."
"Who are you!" Natalia screams.
The man smiles, and when he does, he looks like a skull.
And then the scientist is lowering something over her head, he is pressing something cold and sharp against her temples, he is counting down from ten. The humming increases. Natalia doesn't know if it's coming from the machine or if it's the sound of the cells of her body trying to fight back. She's afraid it's too late to matter.
The scientist finishes his countdown.
"Clear," he says.
The humming stops, and there is only silence, and the pounding of Natalia's heart.
And then there is flash of white so bright it becomes a physical pain, and that whiteness floods into her thoughts and she thinks she's in Kansas, she's trapped in that snowstorm, and he is there, black uniform and red blood. She tries to cry out his name but he doesn't have one. Without a name he turns the color of snow. A white bird in a blizzard.
He is there, and he is gone.