Well this was written pre-movie, so you can either take it as AU or just that they've been wiped. Thanks to Bess and the others at TBB for looking this over - if you're interested in finding a beta, just google thebetabranch and check us out!
war and vanilla
She smells like war and vanilla. War, because she comes home after cleaning her guns and still stained by her victims. Vanilla, because she uses it to keep herself soft and supple, its gentle scent just another facet of her persona. It took him a while to notice and it remains something neither of them bring up. It's just a small comforting thing that he lets stay between the pair of them in the Red Room, a small mixture of the innocence and death that makes Natasha Natasha.
It's not until he finds himself distracted in the midst of a particularly vigorous spar and thrown roughly on his back for the first time in months with Natasha sitting on his chest, her knife at his throat, that he wonders if she's duplicitous enough to for the distraction her scent provides to be entirely on purpose.
The answer is a resounding yes.
The Soldier smiles at her, all white teeth and razor steel, and she grins back as he surges underneath her. Then they're slithering again, twining in a dance of blood and rage and he doesn't let himself think of sharp vanilla or quiet war as they lose themselves in the violence.
Eventually, as he breaks and remakes her, as he tears her to pieces and stitches the ragged fragments back together piece by piece, he realizes the vanilla has begun to fade. She layers over it and comes back from missions smelling of cologne rather than perfume more often than not. He's her trainer and not her friend, he tells himself fiercely, but he can't help but care.
Natasha stands perfectly at attention before him, her ornate hairstyle slightly coming out at the ends. Even as he notices this, she brushes one blonde strand back from her eye and watches him as cautiously as he watches her. For a long moment, silence stretches between them and they both wait. They're hunters, the pair of them, and for the time being they can afford patience.
He looks at her, the Black Widow, in her bloody heels and slightly torn dress, ignores the copper and dead man's fear perfuming the air. His head tilts slightly to one side, and she mirrors him. If this were another day, another age, he may have made an exasperated sound at her minicry of one of few tells he allowed to slip through the cracks. Instead, he inclines his head to indicate at the door behind her.
"Shower," he orders simply. He's not used to needing words between them, not now that he's molded her into precisely the missile his superiors made him into.
She makes a movement that may have been acquiescence, may have been capitulation, or may have simply been acknowledgement. When Natasha walks off, it's in the direction of the shower and, for now, he has no reason to doubt her obedience.
She smells like fear and blood, and the Soldier can't help but wonder if somewhere along the line it's become as much a part of her as the violence and vanilla.
He finds her on the roof and it's not the first time she's taken him by surprise. He's always considered this area – forbidden to trainees under the worst threats the trainers could give voice to – as his sacred space.
But she's not a trainee anymore, so perhaps it's fitting that he finds her perched on the edge, feet dangling over the world below. He settles down comfortably beside her and waits, content to let the silence between them speak volumes. She covered in sweat and dirt, but he doesn't let that deter him as he draws back to study her profile. He can see fire burning in her, a simmering rage that threatens to erupt and consume all in her path.
"Do you ever…" she trails off. He can sense what she wants to say and has a terrible, foreboding feeling that leaves him feeling like he should cut her off. They're not young anymore, either of them. The Red Room can't keep tearing them down, can't keep pressing reset each time they begin to harvest seditious thoughts. Curiosity or condemnation, perhaps both, keeps him silent as she collects herself. "Doubt?"
The word is a soft drop in a bucket of growing rebellion, but he doesn't move. He doesn't pull her to the ground and bring her in for interrogation, doesn't bring her back into the room where her memories will be smashed apart put together like the building blocks he's seen children play with. He thinks of the mission their commanders send her on, thinks of the bloody child's doll he saw smashed on the ground.
He doesn't speak, can't bring himself to say a word – they've had decades to work on him, rather than her years – but his head tilts, ever so slightly. He lets his silence be his answer and she accepts that.
Natasha leans against him, red hair tipping over his shoulder. He catches a faint taste of that smothered, vanquished vanilla and closes his eyes.
They stay like that the rest of the night, sentinels against a war they refuse to fight.
"Your name was Bucky Barnes," Natasha tells him one day, voice cool and impassive.
The words hit him with the force of an anvil and he flinches, the strike resonating throughout his body. He doesn't turn from the balcony, doesn't take his eyes from the sky to watch her face. She's toying with him, he knows. He's heard her use that tone before, heard it wielded against other marks to coerce and convince. She's lying, he whispers to himself, even if he knows it as truth.
"You served as a soldier under Steve Rogers, then known as Captain America. You were captured by the Red Skull and submitted to human experimentation. That's why they wanted you, you know. When you fell off the train, they had a premade puppet."
Puppet. The word makes him seethe, makes him want to drive his knife deep into someone's chest and twist. Instead, he simply loosens his surprisingly tight grasp on the metal railing and continues a steady rhythm of breathing. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.
Still, he refuses to face her, refuses to admit the truth Natasha wields with her words.
"What do you want, Widow?" he asks from the hotel balcony, tone flat and bored. His eyes drift aimlessly through the stars, trying to find some constellation he can recognize. But his memories… they aren't of the sky he stands below now. They're of another one, one that he's tried his hardest to forget, one the Red Room has tried its hardest to erase.
"I'm leaving," she tells him, words evenly tempered and with the bland tone of one of her reports.
The statement should be a surprise, should strike at him, but it doesn't. He turns to face her then, turns to let Natasha see the complete lack of discord and distress in his eyes.
"Why?"
He's always thought her to be pretty, a dainty creature hiding death in its feathers. Natasha moves toward him with a ballerina's grace and he moves to meet her, aware of the precise distance the railing is from his back and how easily either of them could be sent over.
"You don't care who you used to be," she tells him, almost sadly. "You don't care that they tore out your memories and gave you new ones. If I stay, I'll never know what's real."
I don't want to be like you, he hears.
He doesn't tell her that he's tried this before, that he spent the first five years of his captivity escaping until they took him apart like they did her (there's holes, holes everywhere, and someday there's going to be no one to patch them over). He doubts that Natasha could understand that she's never seen the worst of the Red Room, doubts that she can comprehend the punishments reserved for traitors.
"They'll find you if you run," he warns, because there's really nothing else to be said. It's a warning and a promise, a threat and a vow.
"Not if I run faster than them," comes her ready response. "I have safe houses and-"
"You've been thinking about this since the fire," he realizes slowly. Three months and not a word? He can't bring himself to acknowledge the small sting of hurt.
"Yes."
The word falls, another drop in the wave of sedition flooding the world around them.
"Will you stop me?" the Widow asks, and then she's drawing closer. She rests his head against his shoulder, suddenly seeming vulnerable, and he can't help but sigh.
"No," he says, and he knows that he, just like all the others, has been caught in her web. He won't come with her, can't walk away from the only life they've ever let him know. He knows he's damned, with or without her, but she doesn't need to be.
Before Natasha can ask him to come with her, before she can look at him with pleading, innocent (false) eyes, he kisses her. It's not the first time, but he knows with sinking finality it'll be the last. He can taste vanilla and almond, like sweet cyanide cloying his senses. She seems surprised by his interruption, but then he's kicking the door shut behind him and it's her, not him, pulling him close.
She'll be gone in the morning, he knows. She'll walk away without a second glance, secure in the knowledge that he won't be the one to chase after her. He lets her use him tonight, lets her become safe in the knowledge that he's another asset enticed by the Widow's promises.
This is their good-bye and it tastes like war and vanilla.
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