Give and Take

Musical Inspo: "I Found" by Amber Run (I used this for the last half of Part 1 and first half of Part 2)

Disclaimer: I don't own Marvel blah blah.

Part 1

He's going to be okay, she told herself. Natasha ran her fingers through her hair, feeling the light build-up of grease from not showering since the day before yesterday. She was wearing street clothes - her jumpsuit was in the locker at the now-defunct SHIELD headquarters. As she had uploaded the HYDRA files she knew that it would be time to put the suit away for a while, to build up a few new covers. But all of that had fled her mind when she'd gotten the call that Steve had been found bleeding out on the bank of the Potomac River.

She had sat in the waiting room with Fury and Sam for eight straight hours while surgeons carefully operated on Captain America, removing bullets and repairing internal organs before they could heal incorrectly. Beneficial in most cases, the superhuman strength and healing from his serum had proven a bit problematic in saving his stubborn life. The surgery had been successful, but Natasha had still waited by his bedside for him to wake up for nearly twenty further hours, until Sam Wilson had become fed up with what he called her "serial killer stance". She could be very still for long periods of time when she set her mind to it. It was part of her training, something that had never left. She could wait for as long as it was necessary. She was forced to agree with Sam Wilson when he had pointed out that Steve would be less than thrilled to see her when he got a whiff of her after he woke up. Natasha was annoyed by the sarcastic remark, but it was also ingrained into her to keep herself in peak physical shape and appearance, and she reluctantly let that trained vanity pull her from Steve's bedside.

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, barely wincing at the dull throbbing of her healing shoulder, and walked through the hospital hallway toward the exit. The bullet from her Soldat had passed clean through her shoulder and was already healing quicker than doctors thought possible. But her Corvette was buried under the rubble of the Triskelion, so she would have to walk home. Trained or not, her body ached at the thought - it had been nearly two whole days since she had slept, and over four days since she had slept well. It was this that she blamed when her step faltered upon hearing two doctors speaking loosely as she passed.

"Whoever called 911 said that someone in black pulled the Captain from the river, but then just walked away!"

Natasha's eyes widened, but she held her composure after the faltered step and continued walking. Someone in black. She could only theorize, but after what Steve had told her about the Winter Soldier, she felt completely sure that he must have gotten through to the Bucky buried deep inside her Soldat's mind. It had to have been him.

When Steve had described his best friend, the Bucky Barnes that had fallen to his death during World War II, and later shown her the pictures, she had felt something that had surprised her. Jealousy. She wanted to hate the Soldat, but he was only hers to hate. She was still struggling with the idea that Steve and Bucky, her Soldat, had a history together, a friendship that now seemed to transcend time and some of the darkest evils imaginable. He was her past, her dark side, her weakness. She knew that she shared that weakness with Steve, but not in the same sense. The Soldat made her forget everything when she should not, abandon her own sense of security in order to feel alive for a few stolen minutes. The Soldat had been her release, her guilty pleasure, her personal darkness...yet sometimes the only light in the darkness of her memories. She had watched as Steve had struggled with the knowledge that his best friend was still alive, now apparently in the grips of the evil organization that he had fought against for so long. What would Steve do when he woke to find that Bucky was still gone?

Natasha knew, having heard about Steve's rescue from the river, that Bucky might actually still be there...maybe he wasn't completely gone. Who was it that she had loved and hated all of these years? Was it her Soldat or was it the Bucky within him? She wasn't sure which one she wanted to be the answer to that question. Her Soldat was just that...hers, yet he was the one programmed to kill, and Bucky was the soldier who fought for good in the war. She found herself wishing they could be separate, that Steve could have his friend Bucky and that she could selfishly keep her Soldat, her secret, her sometimes-lover.

Could they be both? She worried that neither she or Steve would ever find the answer, and that it would torment Steve, or both of them, until the end of time.

The walk to her apartment passed quickly as the thoughts flew through her mind, trying to reconcile her desires with what was best for Steve. With one more block to go, she reached into the thigh pocket of her leggings to retrieve the small key to unlock her apartment door. The sun was getting low against the skyline of Washington D.C., the end of another hellish day that she hoped marked the beginning of a time to rest. She had come too close to dying too many times in the last four days and was desperate for a luxurious weekend of spa treatments-all pending Steve's release from the hospital, of course. In the alley between buildings, a dark shape caught her eye.

Never one to be startled, Natasha focused on her peripheral vision and the shape took focus. Dark, stringy hair framed a stubbled face, a long sleeved black shirt covered broad shoulders, and pants with many pockets covered the long legs of a man that she knew all too well. Soldat.

She whipped her head toward him and angled her body so that she was positioned defensively. It was only three nights earlier that she had bedded him in her apartment only to find that he had nearly been successful in a mission to kill Nick Fury, her mentor and friend. Then he had shot her during the fight under the causeway. She had every right to be royally pissed at him, yet seeing him standing in the alley next to her apartment building only served to bring up feelings of empathy for him. She now knew who he was before she had met him. She knew what he had lost.

Natasha also knew that she was alive because of him, if only in a roundabout way. If he had wanted to kill her, she would be dead. The only reason why she was alive was because he had deliberately missed shooting her through the heart as she ran from him that day. She had turned to see him up on the car, aiming his gun at her, but she knew it was a farce. She had seen the warning in his eye - he would not kill her. The shot had been a message to disengage, to get away from him so that they could not force him to hurt her further.

Her arm was at the ready, waiting for a sudden movement from which she needed to defend herself. He might have pulled Steve from the river, but which person stood before her now? Was it the passionate Soldat that had been her mentor and lover, or was it the brainwashed killing machine that HYDRA intended him to be all along? She took in his appearance, from the days-worn look of his clothes, including the lack of his military vest, to the way he held his right arm against his side and the pleading look he was giving her. He looked so much like himself, yet was completely unfamiliar to her in so many ways. This was not her Soldat, despite him coming to her apartment, despite the glint of metal she could see from the hand he had shoved in the pocket of his cargos. Standing before her was Bucky.

She narrowed her eyes at him. His gaze widened, and one eyebrow raised, begging the silent request. She nodded, flicking her eyes toward the building before turning on her heel to make the final steps to the building's front door. She did not look over her shoulder as he followed her inside, did not say a word as they climbed the steps. She did not pause to wait for him as she unlocked the door and walked into her apartment. He slipped in behind her, pressing his back against the wall by her front door as it clicked shut. Natasha placed her keys in a dish and took a deep breath, facing away from him. Neither of them moved for many moments.

Finally she heard his voice, quiet and unsure, but still the rich and husky melody that she often recalled in her dreams. "I didn't know where else to go," he muttered. She still did not move. Another moment passed. She felt the air move behind her as he stepped away from the wall to approach her. Anger, pain, fear, and heartache welled up within her and she turned toward him, her hand flying to meet with his face in an audible, stinging slap.

His head whipped to the side from the impact, but he did not tense or make any move to fend her off. Bucky or the Soldat, she still had two bullet holes in her body from him. This man had nearly killed Steve, Fury, and had coldly murdered countless others. Yet as she raised her hand to strike him again she froze, seeing something that she had never before seen flicker across his pale face. He winced, be it from pain or fear of her striking him, and that was not something that she knew the Winter Soldier could ever do. She lowered her hand gently, bringing it to rest against his untouched cheek as she pulled his face back for her to see him better. His eyes were pointed at the ground.

"Stay here," she whispered. The Soldat, Bucky, looked up to her face and the look within his stare was more disturbing than anything she had seen. Behind his ice blue eyes was an ocean of guilt, torment, fear, and sadness. Her heart clenched within her body-she did not know what to do in that moment. He gave a small dip of his chin and she pulled him in close to her body, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and placing a hand on the back of his neck. She felt him give way and encircle her waist with his metal arm as his face buried into her neck.

He winced when she put a slight touch of pressure on his right shoulder, and Natasha let go of him to prod the area with her fingers. He had been holding it against his body, and she could see the evident pain etched into the crinkle of his brow as she checked him. "I think it's dislocated." Her voice was soft, a deep-throated whisper. Head still down, he looked up at her under guarded brows and pursed his lips before giving her a nod. She moved against him, pushing his body down into one of the dining chairs. "Hold on to me," she uttered, but he merely shook his head and braced his metal palm against the brick wall of her dining room. Natasha extended his injured arm, noting the way that his shoulders rippled as he prepared himself for the oncoming pain.

"How did you and Steve end up in the river?" she asked as she angled his wrist and elbow. He had barely opened his mouth to speak when she twisted and pushed, feeling and hearing the pop as his shoulder socket locked back into place. The squeezing of his eyes and the lip tucked between his teeth was the only indication that he had felt the pain of the maneuver, and she let go of him, allowing him a moment to process the sensation and thoughts accompanying it. She leaned against the wall of her kitchen and watched as he lifted his hand and clenched then unclenched a fist several times to get the blood flowing through his arm.

"Thank you," he said gruffly. The tiniest smile pulled at a corner of her lips. She wondered when the last time he had said those two words together might have been, knowing that he had not only been under control but had likely not had anything good enough to thank anyone for in many years, except perhaps those stolen nights they'd shared so long ago in the Red Room.

"Come," she offered, reaching forward to take his good hand. He allowed her to pull him from the chair and be led to her bedroom, where she reached out to lay her hands on his broad chest. She waited for his approval, not wanting to break the spell of Bucky's return to his mind, not wanting to bring Hydra back into his mentality. He did not say a word to stop her, and she trailed her fingers to the hem of his shirt, lifting it gently and helping him to take it off over the relocated shoulder. Her eyes lingered on the scars where the metal connected to him, remembering how once, when they lay together in her dormitory, she had traced them as he slept in her bed, matching the width of parallel scars to the distance between fingers. Natasha had known then that he had not been a willing participant of Hydra's experiments, but had been so fully invested in her own training program that she had never thought about his past or his pain further than that. She could never have imagined that he was an American POW, or that he had fought side-by-side with Captain America. Now that she knew the truth, or some extent of it, she felt guilty.

Perhaps helping him now, tonight, would help assuage some of that guilt. She hoped it would, but it was not the only reason that she was brushing his hair out of his eyes as she cleaned off his face with a wetted towel from her bathroom. She cared for this man, her Soldat, Bucky, and she would never be free of her feelings for him as long as one of them existed in this world, no matter what form they took. She had taken a quick shower and had come out to find him seated at the edge of her bed, watching the skyline as the sun set and lights flickered on across the city. He let her clean his face and then remove his boots. She gently pushed him back until he was laying with his head on a pillow, his body outstretched and his feet near the edge. She slipped on a nightgown and crawled onto the mattress next to him. Natasha watched his profile as he stared at the ceiling for a few moments, before he took a shaky breath and turned toward her, resting his weight on his metal arm. Her fingertips rested on top of her blankets, and he reached forward slowly and wrapped them in his warm hand, hiding a small wince at the movement in his shoulder. Natasha leaned her head forward and pressed her lips to his knuckles in a gentle kiss, then rested her cheek against the back of his hand as she scooted her body closer to him. She felt him lean in toward her, his nose against the top of her head as he inhaled deeply, breathing in the smell of her freshly-washed hair.

"Thank you," he whispered into her hair. She felt his chin quiver and she gripped his hand tighter, letting him know that she was here for him. He didn't make a sound, but she felt the uneven breaths as his chest rose and fell. Minutes passed, and soon his breathing grew deeper and his grip loosened. She laced her fingers through his and gently kissed his fingertips before she finally fell asleep too, peacefully tucked against her Soldat for the first time in decades.

~xXx~

A/N: So...This is the THIRD installment in my One-Shot series for WinterWidow. I am considering bunching them all together, not as a full-fledged fanfic (still one-shots) but it would keep them all together for those who might just want to jump in. What do you guys think?

Reviews are appreciated! :)