Hey y'alls! This is a one-shot I wrote for winterwidow. It's probably not accurate but that's okay =) Merry Christmas! I don't own Tasha or Buck or anyone really.
"We need to go. Now. People need our help." Steve said, opening the door to the aircraft and handing a parachute to Natasha before jumping out into the war-torn sky. They had to protect the innocent people caught in the crossfire between HYDRA and SHIELD at all costs.
Natasha quickly strapped the parachute to herself and dove after Steve, with the rest of the Avengers and Bucky following suit.
As they landed, Steve yelled orders over the coms. He had already taken off to clear the homes.
"Tasha, Thor, you guys are on slowing down HYDRA. Don't let them get in here. Bruce, Bucky, you help me get these people to safety, and Tony and Barton, you're on aerial." Each Avenger followed Steve's instructions without question, but not without a few grumbles. "Come on, Capsicle, I want to play with the big kids too…" Tony whined as he flew up above the fight.
Natasha and Thor ran towards the police barrier where the civilian law enforcers were trying to hold back the HYDRA forces.
Natasha jumped on a middle-aged bald man and broke his legs, but by doing so drew four other agents onto her. She spun around in a high kick and smashed one's nose before punching another and putting a fourth in a headlock.
"Natasha!" Thor yelled. "Get down!"
She complied and a few moments later Mjolnir came hurtling through the air and knocked out the HYDRA agent next to her.
Looking up at Thor, she saw him surrounded by agents, having drawn attention to himself. Without thinking, she picked up Mjolnir and darted out of the ring of agents to Thor. "Duck!" she yelled before swinging the hammer and knocking out six agents.
Thor looked at her with a slightly surprised smile and her eyes widened as she realized what she had done. She dropped the hammer and backed away in shock.
"It appears that you are worthy, Natasha. I always knew you had it in you but I couldn't find a way to convince you." he said softly, placing his hand on her shoulder.
"No, I-I'm just strong. I never have been and never will be worthy of anything." she said, shaking her head and pulling away from his touch.
A small boy looked up at her in terror. His piercing eyes suggested that he knew far more than his suggested. She'd been sent to the holding cells to kill him and his family as a test of her ability to discard emotion. She had to do it or be killed herself, and even if she didn't, they'd find a way to kill them as 'prisoners and traitors'.
She grabbed his arms and held them behind him with one hand and whispered, "sorry", then put the gun to his head, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
A shot rang through the air and Natasha snapped back into the present. An agent had shot at them. She threw herself at Thor and knocked him out of the way of the bullet.
He pushed himself up and extended his hand to her.
"Mjolnir only chooses those who are worthy, and it is a good judge of character. You are worthy, Natalia Romanoff."
"No, Thor, I've done too much. There's too much red in my ledger - I'll never be able to wipe it out," she said softly before changing the subject. "Let's go back to Steve. These agents are controlled."
For just a short second, Thor had seen a look of helplessness on Natasha's usually unbreakable face, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come and he knew better than to pressure her. Instead he sighed, reached for Mjolnir, and followed her back to where the team was.
Her face was beginning to go numb from the repeated blows, but she knew the end was nowhere near.
"You are a worthless excuse for a soldier. You will never be good enough. You wasted an innocent life for a completely failed killing. You are worthless…
worthless…
worthless…"
Natasha sat up straight, silent tears running down her face as she cringed, waiting for the inevitable yelling that was always the result of weakness - but no one came. She was alone in her dark bedroom.
The memories that she'd been trying for so long to suppress had come back stronger than ever after the Mjolnir incident, and she could barely breathe under the weight of them.
She needed to be near someone, to feel the human contact that she'd been starved of for so long, but she didn't deserve it. She had only ever caused pain for those around her.
Bucky was walking downstairs getting a glass of water when he heard a gasp coming from Natasha's room. He paused - he knew that sound.
The young redheaded girl sat up in her bed, crying silently. He knew he should punish her for her weakness, but he was curious. This girl had struck his interest. She was the top of her group but seemed to hate that fact. To everyone else, she seemed frozen and cruel, but he understood her. She was broken.
He walked closer, trying to act like he didn't see her - maybe this way he could avoid alerting people to her. She still hadn't noticed but he had no way to warn her. He didn't want to see her hurt again as the cuts and bruises on her face from a few hours earlier were still barely beginning to heal. So he walked past her, pretending not to notice the fact that she sucked in her breath and curled back into her bed when he walked by.
Pretending not to notice the glint of metal handcuffs slicing her wrist.
Pretending not to notice the fact that she grew increasingly sullen and violent.
Pretending not to notice that she no longer hesitated before killing, as if she had let their cruel words define who she was - a worthless monster.
In secret, he went out of his way to make sure she got the best of everything. He didn't know why, but the redheaded girl had captured his heart.
Until one day, it was time to take the final test before sterilization. The girls had to fight each other to the death, and only the winners would move on to the next stage of training. The redheaded girl passed every level of the fight until the last one. As he watched her climb into the ring for the final match, he saw something break behind her eyes. All the emotions that she had kept hidden since that night came pouring forth and she backed into a corner, her first time backing away from a fight. One of the officials prodded her back into the ring with a white-hot iron, forcing her to fight, but though she was physically engaged, he knew her mind was trying to find a way out. A way to escape the inevitable pain of what would come next if she won. The pain and fear she was feeling flashed in her eyes before turning to steel once again.
Before he knew what he was doing, he threw himself into the ring and killed the other girl himself. The redhead gasped and tried to stop him, but it was too late - the other girl was already dead. Officials swarmed him and pulled his hands behind his back, and he tried to resist, but he was berating himself for recklessly ruining her chances. The rules not only stated that whoever killed a final opponent would be sterilized, but also that anyone who received outside help would receive additional testing and punishment to ensure loyalty - and he wasn't there to minimize her pain anymore. Throwing his head back, he saw the redheaded girl staring at him in shock, but it wasn't indignant shock - she was surprised that anyone cared. But then it turned to sadness. He knew what that look meant.
"Natalia!" he yelled as they dragged him to the operating room. He could only hope that she heard him and that he hadn't pushed her over the edge, but he would never day they upped his cryo treatments and stripped him of emotion, and the next time he saw the redheaded girl would be years later.
He walked to her door and quietly listened for a moment to be sure he wasn't imagining things, but when he heard her almost-silent cries, he knew he wasn't. "Natasha?" he said softly.
Damn it. She'd attracted his attention. He was the only one who seemed to be able to hear her crying, and although she wanted so desperately to be near someone, anyone, she didn't want to have to explain herself. But he knew and he wouldn't go away.
"Yes?" she responded, trying to keep her voice steady.
"Can I come in?" the voice from the other side asked.
"Um… yeah, sure." she said, quickly wiping away her tears and fixing her hair.
Bucky gently opened the door and walked inside, shutting the door behind him and then walking to the side of her bed where she was still sitting.
"What's up, Buck?" she asked, faking a jovial tone.
"Natasha… I heard." he said. "I just wanted to make sure that you were okay."
"Y-yeah, I'm fine." she replied, her voice wavering a little.
"No, you're not." he said, sitting on the very edge of her mattress. "You're not okay."
He inwardly cursed his lack of eloquence, but he didn't know how else to put it.
She could barely hold the tears in - but she had to. Emotion showed weakness. So all she said was, "Oh."
"Natasha, I'm not going to go away. What's going on?" he said.
She wanted so badly to tell someone, anyone, just to know that there was someone beside her. Bucky placed a hand on her shoulder. "You're safe, Tasha."
With that she broke down, knowing she was being weak but being too broken to care.
"All I can see is th-the first time I killed. They told me I was wrong, that I was too weak to ever be a soldier, and so I tried harder to be good enough. I pushed the pain down and focused on training but they kept telling me I was worthless. An-and then…" she paused to collect herself.
"Then on the day of the final test when you tried to save me from having to finish the training… you were the first person that seemed like you cared. But it didn't work and they took you away and made me kill someone else and told me never to show emotions again." She started to cry again. "Th-that was when I became a m-monster, Buck, and every n-night all I can think about is h-how terrible I am! And then I picked up Mjolnir so Thor th-thinks I'm worthy b-but he doesn't know!"
Bucky gathered the weeping redheaded girl into his arms and held her tightly. When she'd started to calm down he spoke.
"Natasha… you're not a monster. The things you - we - did back then don't define us. We have to believe that we are more than what they made us. I've seen you go out of your way to save people at risk of your own life and you can't tell me that's something you were trained to do because we both know damn well that's not part of their training. They are the monsters; we were just the tools they used. Mjolnir saw your heart, how you would give every bit of yourself to help another person, and that's why you are worthy - and you are." Looking down, he brushed the hair out of her eyes, and when she looked up at him, he continued. "And I'm not going to leave you again. You don't have to be afraid of the nightmares anymore."
Her tear-stained eyes broke his heart as he pulled her closer to his chest, and they sat in the peaceful silence for a while. He thought she'd fallen asleep when her voice broke through the darkness.
"Thank you." she said simply.
"I love you." he replied. She blinked in surprise but then smiled a bit as she repositioned herself to see his face better.
"Come and get it then," she said teasingly.
And he knew that Natasha was going to be okay.
The next morning, the Avengers were downstairs eating breakfast when Natasha and Bucky entered the kitchen together laughing. All of them stopped and watched in shock as the two made their food, neither looking away from the other the entire time - until Tony began clapping slowly.
"Nice job, Tin Man, you cracked our ice wall." he said. Bruce shook his head at Tony from across the table, expecting Natasha to get angry with Tony, but instead she just laughed and smiled at Bucky, who was grinning from ear to ear. Steve's jaw dropped - he knew that grin. That was Buck's "she-kissed-me" smile that he used to have back in the 40s, but this time it was larger than normal. He raised his eyebrows at Bucky, who just shrugged and chuckled.
Later that day, Tony caught them kissing, and signaled Jarvis to post a live feed to everyone's phones. When Steve showed Bucky, he laughed and looked at Natasha mischievously. "Can't stop now, can we?" he said, backing her up against a wall. She laughed and pushed him backwards into Steve.
Maybe… maybe she could finally relax.