A/N: Hello, BuckyNat. This ship has torn my insides out, and my outsides in, and I don't know how to live with myself anymore. I regret nothing and everything. Enjoy.
"I've been watching you for some time,
can't stop staring at those ocean eyes.
Burning cities and napalm skies,
fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes,
your ocean eyes."
Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish
In a sea full of red, she has come to learn that contrary to popular belief, red is not the warmest color. It is by far the furthest.
Being born into the Soviet-era, she has learned from a young age that the color red is held in such high regard. Krasny is considered empowering, and bold. Krasny represents strength, vigor, courage. Krasny ties into fire, bleeds into warmth. It's furious, and sometimes, it's infuriating.
Because of how the words are so similarly derived, krasny sounds very much like krasivy, and that's why her mother had always told her as a young girl that red was a beautiful color. She remembers how her mother had gotten her a set of scarves on her seventh birthday, in a pure and elegant crimson color, and found ways to style it into her outfit one way or another.
Red is the color of violence, of destruction. It's the color of a city on fire, and how the clouds that hover over a burning city at sunset seem to take on the same vibrant crimson hue. All the way till the sun rises again, and sets again, and rises again until the dust settles, one can smell and taste the napalm in the air and only pray that nothing else catches fire.
Red is also the color of the blood that she's been getting on her hands these days, much like the blood of her own mother at target practice. She hasn't been able to wipe the blood off since.
The facility is packed with grey walls and mahogany architecture, and she doesn't quite know why it's called the Red Room. Nothing here is red, not even the food, or the doors, or the clothes.
Maybe it's because of all the bloodshed that happens here, all the injuring and all the killing, all the pain.
Either way, red has become the coldest color on the wheel to her. Red is the color of a cold-hearted aggressor, an antagonist. Red is the color of a killer, and killers aren't the least bit warm.
Red is the color of her hair. It's the color of her.
In a world full of red, where she exists as red, she is convinced that blue is by far the warmest color. It's because it's the color of his eyes.
When Natalia jolts awake at three in the morning, she's plagued by nightmares of gushing red up to her elbows. It leaves her uncomfortable, and unsettled, but she calms down as soon as she feels the warm brush of his thumb over her skin.
The soldier sits cross-legged and quiet by the foot of his own bed; she knows him as James, just his first name, but he had liked the way she'd once referred to him as Яша (Yasha) by accident in a purely native Russian manner, and the pet name had stuck ever since.
While he likes the way it sounds on her lips, she feels the opposite. She knows he isn't Russian and she doesn't enjoy dumbing down his identity just because neither of them knows who he really is, or where he comes from.
As James works his right thumb in circles over the base of her ankle, his eyes never leave the document in his lap. He's sitting with his back against his desk; a dim yellow table lamp shines just over his left shoulder from the side, positioned in a strategic way that provides ample lighting for him to read the file and observe the room, but not bright enough to bother her sleep-swollen eyes.
With her chest settling down, and sleep still fogging up her mind, she rests her chin on her own shoulder groggily and gazes across the length of the bed to watch him at work.
James sits shirtless at the foot of the bed, clothed with only a pair of grey sweatpants resting lazily by his hips. Though his eyes are well hidden away under his half-open eyelids and the wisps of shoulder-length dark hair that frame his face, she knows that grey, alongside white, is a color that complements the electric color of his eyes.
As opposed to his usual black attire during the day, he always looks calmer when he's wearing something else.
It's reassuring to look at him when he's calm. She isn't sure if it's his entire demeanor, or his eyes, or if it's just a game of tones that leaves her feeling absolutely safe by his side. This is even after they might've tried to kill each other in his close-combat class just earlier that same morning.
She's enamored with the way he's essentially ruthless in class, in front of Madame Belova and the other girls, and doesn't think twice about the bruises that he inevitably gives her in class because he doesn't ever pull his punches. Neither does she, though, and these days it only gets easier and easier to pull him into a chokehold at the end of a sparring session. It's what he'd taught her, and she had since learned how to hold her own, even against a force like him.
That's what makes him even more intriguing, because when they fight, they're lethal. But when they come together, they melt and meld into and unto each other. He's a different man in class in the day, only to come home to her in the night, painfully guilt-ridden. He caresses and plants gentle kisses on her wounds, both the ones from his hand, and the ones from another's.
The soldier always apologizes to her and confesses that it's yet another part that he hates about himself. She doesn't see which part, or why. He doesn't ever talk about it.
Natalia breathes deep and stretches in bed, shifting from her current position. She pulls the duvet that had ridden down to her waist back up to her shoulders again. When he feels her move, he gently squeezes his barely-there grip on her ankle.
"You okay?" He asks quietly. He doesn't look up at her though, his eyes still focused intently on the document in his lap.
The redhead nods into the pillow, a stray whimper escaping her lips as she works to get comfortable in her new position. This time, his gaze strays from the papers and onto her, and the corners of his mouth quirk up. The contours of his cheeks when he smiles form crisp lines down both sides of his face, set against his strong jawline, and they lose themselves to a well-trimmed layer of scruff.
She can't help but think that the man is absolutely stunning, where the light gets onto his skin and into his azure blue eyes.
The color of his eyes work on a spectrum, and the detail of how it feels to look into those very eyes can't even begin to be explained by something as basal as words. She likes to equate the feeling of them to texture boards.
His eyes resemble the body of water that makes the ocean an ocean. The tide is calm now, when he looks at her with nothing but pure admiration and compassion and love. She can recall earlier days where his eyes constantly resembled troubled waters crashing against the shore, with nothing to hold the waves from causing ruin to everything and everyone around it, and him.
But the early days don't matter anymore, not here.
When she looks at him now, she's left suspended in that very moment; she can feel the force of his sway as his ocean eyes pull her in towards the depths of the sea. It's a serene calling, and she's so completely lost in it.
That's why Natalia feels as though she's just been pushed back to shore when he gives her ankle a warm and endearing rub and reverts his eyes back to his work.
She shifts in his bed again, this time bringing her chest closer to her stomach, an arm over the pillow but tucked under her head. "What are you doing?" She mumbles into her arm. It's followed quickly by a subtle yawn.
"Homework," he jokes. The redhead glares at him in squints and nudges him with a foot. He smirks in return. "It's... it's nothing. Go back to sleep, Talya. You still have a couple of hours before class."
"And you have a couple of hours before teaching that class," she adds. "Come here. I miss you."
"I'm right here."
"But you're so far," Natalia grumps. She pulls her lips into a pout, and he's clearly trying to not be won over by any of her fussing.
James eventually sighs, unable to resist her pout, and sets his documents to the side. She shuffles herself to one side of the bed, making space for him to slide in right beside her. He does just that.
The man leans into her, foreheads touching and a warm hand cradling the side of her face. His lips gently brush over hers, and the way she closes the gap between them is instantaneous. Even though it's just mere seconds, the way that his lips completely envelop hers in a tender warmth leaves her heart feeling fulfilled and full.
Natalia's lips settle into a content smile as their lips stay touching, just the way that she knows he enjoys. She can feel him exhale in a chuckle, his breath sticky on her lips as he pulls away. He then adjusts himself to lie down beside her.
She rests her head over his chest, and he embraces her with his warm flesh arm. She enjoys the warmth to his flesh just as much as she enjoys the biting cold on her fingertips as she walks her fingers up and down the plates to his prosthetic.
Long ago, he had hated to let her get anywhere near it. He had favorited his human arm then, and had felt that the metal contraption attached to his other shoulder was some kind of weapon of mass destruction. He still does, these days, but he never fails to fall head over heels for her all over again whenever she proves to him that his arm isn't the weapon that he thinks it is.
Natalia thinks of the prosthetic as an extension of the man, something that completes him. She likes to believe that if she proves to him enough times that his arm is anything but weaponry, maybe he'll finally start to realize that for himself too.
The soldier presses another tender kiss to her forehead. This time, he lets his lips linger along her hairline.
"Thank you," he whispers into her hair, voice low and husky. His warm fingertips brush over her shoulder in repeat gentle, sweeping motions.
"For what?"
"Just for being you," she can hear the smile in his voice. This quickly dissipates, and he pulls her closer into their embrace. "There's something I have to tell you."
"I know. You have to go," she affirms, her gaze flickering back to the files by the foot of the bed. Feeling him leave is always hard for and on her, but he always tells her that his missions are fine, and that they go well. He's not always convincing enough. "Where are you headed this time?"
"Istanbul."
"For how long?"
"Two weeks," he grimaces. "I'll be headed back to Kiev to prep this Friday."
Natalia bites back another yawn that creeps up upon her unsuspectingly, and it comes through as a yelp. The way his thumb strokes the crown of her head, at the tender spot just above her right ear, doesn't help in keeping her sober enough to hear him mince his words.
She then smiles. "Sounds like a huge assignment for you, Yasha. That's a good thing, right?"
"Yeah, I suppose it is," he responds quietly.
"That's nice," Natalia hums. "I'm really happy for you. The people you work for, it's nice that they value you."
"Yeah," the soldier sighs, and says nothing else.
Albeit the perfection that Natalia sees in him on most days, she knows that James is a liar by condition, the exact way that she is too. She knows he lies to her, maybe far too many times than she can count, and far more than she probably realizes.
James lies about his work, his assignments, where he goes when he leaves, the time he needs to come back, the people he works for, and maybe a million other things.
She knows his work is shit; he's always sleepless when he comes back from an assignment, and sometimes when he thinks she's asleep, he quietly escapes to the bathroom to have a meltdown. She can hear him lose his bearings for hours, but somehow he always comes through the next morning looking whole again.
He doesn't eat for days, or throws everything up whenever he does. His behavior comes with chronic aches and splitting migraines for days at a time, from the day he returns. There are always dark halos beneath his eyes whenever he returns home, but she never ever points them out regardless of how prominent they may seem at times.
The people he works for, HYDRA, she knows they aren't any better than the Red Room itself. She doesn't know the things they put him through while he's there, but she's heard of their methodology. She's heard of Faustus, and evolutions of Faustus, and she can't imagine what else they could possibly have that would be more effective than the Faustus method itself.
James never says it, never shows it, but the redhead can sense his panic and his dread in the way that his stomach clenches by default when she chances on the topic. It takes a certain kind of practice to leave a well-trained assassin to be paralyzed in fear at any mention of the name, HYDRA.
Still, she plays along. His mind is minefield that she has spent years navigating through, a place that she doesn't want to take chances on.
She does believe with all her heart that he is a good man, though. The only reason why he ever lies is to protect someone, or something, and she knows that his lies are an attempt to shield her from the horrors of the reality that he probably lives in whenever he's away from the Room. It's evident. So as much as she hates this, she respects it, and she respects him.
Natalia walks her fingers along his bare chest, from the waistband of his lounge pants to his ribs, to the space between his collarbones.
"Just remember to come home," she tells him what she always does, whenever he has to leave.
Because home isn't a place or a destination to either of them; they find homes in the crevices of each other.
The wholesome area underneath his chin are the doorways and her resting head is the door. Her lashes are the fluttering blinds, and his eyes glisten like window panes under the sun. Her fingers are porcelain decor to the marble countertop that is the skin on his back. His lips are the lock, and hers are the key. And in the homes that they find in each other, day or night, cold or warm, she's convinced that it's all they ever need.
Playing house is the single, utmost easiest way to escape from the reality that is their lives.
The soldier usually reassures her with things like 'I will', or 'I promise', or 'you know I always do'. Today, he only tells her that he loves her too, more than she could ever, ever know.
Whenever he says things like this, it just feels like he's cleaning out the home made of them and getting ready to leave for the last time. She's convinced that it's just her paranoia and her worry, and she repeats it to herself over and over in her mind to will her heart to believe it too.
He presses one more kiss just above her brow and pulls away and back to his spot at the foot of the bed, and he tells her to sleep.
Instead, she props herself up from her lying position and sits cross-legged across from him now, simply enjoying the view as sleep leaves her completely. He feels her shift in his bed, but he doesn't look up. His eyes remain trained on the work before him, and like how his eyes are texture boards, his entire being is a personal work of art.
She has never been much of an artist, but the portrait of him is one she engraves into the forefront of her mind for when she's so desolate that she lives for nothing else but him. She sees his beauty in her chaos, his blues in all her reds, his calm streams and rivers and expansive oceans that reflect her sirens and her flares.
Natalia feels most at home, in even the worst of places, whenever she peers into the oceans of his eyes. Tonight, against the warm, yellow light from the lamp, the texture to his focused gaze resembles an afternoon at the beach.
She's had mornings, and afternoons, and evenings and nights with him before, in the span of the years they had been together.
She remembers how the water had been cold at first touch, and how it tickled her toes. It tickled her toes getting to know him, she remembers; the man had been rough around the edges, both rash and brash, and he had been an addict to anything that came in a prescription bottle. To silence the ghosts, he'd said.
Till date, he hasn't told her what ghosts he'd been referring to then, but she's willing to take a guess.
The deeper she'd went, the more days she'd spent, her toes had started to adjust to the temperature until they were deep enough to dip into a pocket of water that was completely unaffected by the cool surface breeze. It was warm there, a warm and cozy center compared to the surface, and that's where she is now with James.
She doesn't exactly know if it's only warm because she'd just adjusted to the coldness of him, or if he'd been the one that had warmed up to her.
Either way, it's warm, and nice. It's not cold like the surface, or sub-zero freezing like at rock bottom - which she prays they never get there - and she could soak for hours, and days, and years. It's the only place she wants to be.
Here, she feels like she's hundreds of miles away from a god-forsaken prison in Belarus, letting her toes dig into the sand and enjoying how freedom feels beneath her feet.
Here, she feels like she's holding her breath, not because she's waiting for a bad thing to happen or for the other shoe to inadvertently drop, but because she wants to dip her head under to feel the warmth and the weight of his water.
Here, she feels safe.
Natalia watches as the soldier pens down notes into the blueprints in the file, marking x's and circling o's in a way she has yet to learn. Based on what little she can understand, he's probably working on an assassination. Based on the majority that she can't, he's probably orchestrating an ambush, or perhaps a massacre.
With the tension that has returned to his shoulders, and the frown that has reclaimed its spot on his wrinkled forehead, she can expect the weight of his work to be devastating, far more devastating than a simple mercy killing.
"Yasha?" She murmurs, watching his tongue slide over his bottom lip and pull the flesh under his teeth, deeply engaged in thought. When he hums in response but doesn't raise his eyes to her, she calls him again. "James."
James glances at her now, a vague semblance of concern in his gaze. His hands stop working. "You okay?" He asks for the second time that night.
"Yeah." She nods. She breathes. She tries her luck, "you know that you can tell me anything, right? No matter how bad it gets. It won't change things. It won't change us."
He scoffs to himself silently, chest swaying with a small chuckle. He looks back to his papers. "I wouldn't be so sure about that," he admits. The upward quirk to one end of his lips is a little sadder than it seems on the surface.
"But I am. I don't think you'd be capable of changing my mind. I'm stubborn."
"You really are," he laughs, agreeing. He then sets his papers down in his lap, pushing the cap back onto his pen. "Talya, the-"
The soldier pauses. His face crumples to a frown, as if he's trying different variations of words in his head to see which one sticks.
He then continues, "the world is cruel, and I... I play a role. I contribute to that."
"I don't care."
"But you should," James sighs, giving her a knowing look, as if to tell her, 'you know that'. And to be fair, she does know exactly that, and she still doesn't care.
His favorite compliment for Natalia is that she always sees the best in other people, and his favorite insult is that she always sees the worst in herself in comparison. He enjoys describing the former as her most humanizing quality, and the latter as further proof that she's all the more human.
He likes to say that she's not all krasny as she constantly believes herself to be. And even if she is all krasny, he still loves her in her entirety. He just can't not.
She, on the other hand, can see the absolute double standard that he carries between his crimes and hers. It's as if her sins are elementary compared to his, though they aren't that much different.
"You're the only thing that's keeping me here," he says. "I don't want that to change. I don't want it to be another reason pushing me to leave."
His eyes flicker to his fingers, and Natalia's eyes follow. She can feel a breath catch in her throat, and the awkward shift mood in the air as the realization dawns on her moments later like a slow burn. She's beginning to realize that she can't decide if him leaving here means leaving the compound on foot with bags in his hands, or if him leaving here means leaving the compound off the roof of a six-story building. She must admit that she's been there, and the impulse doesn't scare her one bit, but the inconclusiveness of his words still leaves a pang in her chest.
"It won't," she promises with conviction. "You're a good man, James."
"I'm not," he shakes his head.
Natalia wants to protest, but he runs his fingers through the red in her hair, and her thoughts leave her in an instant. It's after some time that she realizes that he looks to the color of her hair like it's the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
She sees it in the way his lips twitch into a slight smile as he watches the warmth of the light reflect against the amber hues of her locks. She sees it in the way his eyes are absolutely lost on her too.
"Not really, no," he repeats. "But you're the only one who understands that, and that means everything to me."
In a world running on a spectrum of colors, Natalia is still convinced that blue is the warmest color, because it's the color of the oceans in his eyes. But she has come to realize that despite all things, red is still the warmest color on his spectrum.
That's because it's the color of her.
This honestly started off nicely and then I don't know what happened, but I hope it wasn't too terrible. Should I do more Buckynat even though it just hurts my soul?