Author's Note: Zhiguli was the domestic name for the Lada. This piece was inspired by and best accompanied by 'Your Ex-Lover is Dead' and 'One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)', both by Stars.
I don't remember if Bucky's rank was even stated in either Captain America or the Avengers so I've just guessed and made him a lieutenant.
Eau de Cologne does in fact have a history of being used as a surrogate alcohol among poor alcoholics in Eastern Bloc countries due to its comparative cheapness to vodka.
She's walking down the street in the middle of December, snow dusting the pavements of New York. The baby, carefully bundled up in layers of clothing, is strapped to her chest in one of those frontal slings for carrying babies, perfectly normal to the untrained eye but he can tell that it's reinforced with Kevlar panels. Roman Bryusovitch, the file says the baby's name is, she always liked that name, said it was noble. She walks to a red Zhiguli, stooping to unhitch her offspring into the rather hellish looking carseat in the back. The watcher laughs when he sees it, the car's the same crappy one she drove whenever she was off-mission back in Russia. He remembered kissing her in the back of that car (It's 1974 and it's snowing in Moscow. There is sticky red blood in her hair and on his hands. She tastes like vodka and he thinks he might love her.). She lets out a cooing sound, tickling her son's stomach and he thinks she looks, for one solitary second, like a human.
The watcher remembers when she was his and he was her's, before Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gouzenko and democracy and the Perestroika. During the good old days of the Cold War when everything was clear-cut, East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism, Superpower versus Superpower, Spy versus Spy, Missile versus Missile. The days when, to get drunk, they drank Eau de Cologne when vodka was too expensive, when televisions caught on fire, when you went to the depot to get what you needed, waiting hours in line only to find they had run out of everything. That was a long time ago, he thinks.
A man walks up behind her wraps and the watcher can feel himself tensing up, ready to spring on this threat, but she smiles and sinks into the man's embrace. They make a handsome couple, he decides, much better than she and the watcher ever were (They were never really a couple though, were they?), or perhaps not better, simply more real.
She and the man climb into the car, the man tightly strapping on his seatbelt and clutching slightly at the bottom of his seat, looking vaguely worried as she puts in the key to start the engine, which sputters for several minutes before stalling. The man smiles and tosses his hands up into the air, muttering something which makes her laugh the way he used to make her laugh.
Her husband opens the hood with some effort while she gets a small tool box from the trunk and they both start to poke at the various components, screwing, tapping, testing, and wiping, trying to determine the cause of the car's trouble. The man makes one last adjustment and she is able to start the car. She giggles like a child as the climb back into the car and she wraps her arms around her husband's neck and kisses him like a teenager.
He leaves her with her husband and baby. His Vdova is dead, or at least has been encompassed into a greater whole person who has likes and dislikes and loved ones and possessions. This is Natasha, a woman with whom he shall be perpetually strangers.
He walks into the police station three blocks down and holds his hands in the air.
'My name is Lieutenant James Barnes and I'm here to surrender myself to the US government.'