A/N: Post Cap 2: Cap Harder. A brief oneshot with nods to adapted canon from the comics, fueled by my persistent poking at my Winter Soldier feels, which remain difficult to explain, but certainly involve some WS/Natasha shipping.
In From The Cold
She says, "Are you hunting us down?" before she turns on the light. When she flips the switch, she catches the look of confusion still on his face, though he smooths it away almost immediately, replaces it with something like anger, except more complex.
"'Us?'"
She folds her arms, leans in the doorway. "You know. Whoever random access memory says you were fighting most recently."
His brow clears. "No," he says. "That would take too long."
"And time is an issue for you," says Natasha, but there's pain on her face before it shows in his. It's true, after all. All he ever emerges for is a mission, a season. Then back to earth, to frozen ground. She can see it all too clearly, and it's reflected in his frostbitten eyes. He doesn't reply to this. "So. Not all of us. Just me? You put a bullet in me already. Again. Come to finish the job?"
"If I were here to kill you, you wouldn't still be talking."
"Maybe through a Ouija board," she suggests. "None of us are strangers to ghosts, now, are we." She can talk all she wants, but she can't distract him. She thinks of how to handle this situation: the Winter Soldier, or what used to be the Winter Soldier, standing in the middle of her living room. Clothes torn. Face lacerated, bruised, unmasked. Hair still wet, strands of it plastered down his neck. There's a buckle at his waist that dangles by a thread, useless. The fingers of his left hand twitch arrythmically, a nervousness that shocks her, it seems so familiar. "So, just me," she says. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I found you," he says. This is so obvious, such a pointless thing to say, that she wonders for a brief moment if he sustained a blow to the head. But that's ridiculous, too. Of course he sustained a blow to the head. He sustained multiple blows to the everything. Some of them from her.
Then it hits her— he found her. Why had he been looking? Natasha feels a curl of excitement in her belly, the metallic taste of adrenaline at the root of her tongue. Biting a penny.
"Do you want to come in from the cold?" He doesn't answer, just watches her, warily. She sighs, and shrugs with one shoulder. "Too bad, anyway. There's nowhere to come in to."
"I want answers," he says.
"Sure you do. I can't give them to you."
"You," he says, and stops. Starts again. "You knew me."
"I did," allows Natasha, though she's straightened up, her arms have tensed. That taste of excitement has unfurled in her mouth, and she feels as though she's been fed.
"I knew you."
"You thought you did," she says. "I let you think you did. I'm not the same person you thought I was, anyway, so it doesn't matter. We might as well start over, James."
He doesn't react to that at all. Just stares. Just stares at her, and his eyes are wide, untrusting but open, he's taking her in. It hits her then, what it was that made her so sick before. It wasn't the attack in itself— she was used to that. It's the blankness, something more than what would be caused by the conditioning, the wipe. It isn't that he's hiding the things he's feeling; its that he's feeling nothing at all.
She tries to find a comfort in this, for herself as much as for him.
"You don't know who you are, who you were," she says. "It doesn't have to be more of the same."
She holds out her hand. He doesn't even look at it. She thinks of Steve, back into practice for the first time since the Forties; she thinks of soldiers, back in the real world, after the war.
"I don't want to hurt you," she says. "I can't promise that I won't. But it won't be by choice."
"Start over," he says, keeping himself to himself.
"Start again," says Natasha, and she closes her eyes for a moment, to prove to herself that she can. In the silence and the dark, she feels the rough tips of his fingers, the ghost of them, slide across her palm and away.
He says, with a hint of wonder, "I'm in the history books."
Natasha opens her eyes, and smiles.
"You know what they say," she says. "History is written by the victors. You've won every war you've ever been in, and you've been in more than most."
Suddenly he looks awkward, standing in the middle of her apartment, dripping on the carpet; his eyes lose their guarded look, and he appears very young.
"James Buchanan Barnes laid down his life for his comrades," he says. "He was killed in action at age twenty-seven. He was mourned by his parents, by his friends."
Natasha pushes away from the doorway, makes her way to the armchair. She settles herself, crosses one leg over the other, and looks up at him. His mouth twitches.
"This is familiar," he says. "I know this."
"You know the facts," says Natasha, and the excitement surges inside her, turns into something like joy. "Let me fill you in on the fiction."
He lets her speak. He listens. He drips a pattern on her carpet, till he's warm and dry, and his eyes are open, and she can see it on his face: everything he feels.