Freedom Is Like This

They were allowed to play together because they were young.

It was allowed because they were both too young to be too mindful of expectations. Natalia was allowed to play hide-and-seek and read him stories. Borya was allowed to play hide-and-seek and listen to her read and never, ever speak out of turn to her.

Except he did, because it was often better that they kept one another company instead of underfoot of any adults; his or hers. And she liked when he did it. No one talked back to her, if they ever noticed her.

She was the only one who called him Borya. In the kitchens or washrooms or servant's quarters (even when they didn't know she was there) his given name was the only one she ever heard used (Boring Boris, he called himself).

And no one called her Tasha. Only Borya. Even her parents, dvoryanstvo that they were, called her by her proper name.

It was on her tenth birthday when everything changed.

"Where are you off to, pet?" Natalia's mother hadn't even waited for her tutor to leave before asking the question. In fairness, Natalia hadn't bothered waiting until her tutor left to make for the door.

"My lesson's finished for today. I thought—"

"—That you would play with that servant boy? No, certainly not. You're ten today, darling girl. This indulgence has gone on for too long. You may not play with him any longer; it is not seemly."

"But Mama—"

"—I said no, Natalia. I will not hear of this again, and you know better than to speak out of turn."

Natalia's teeth clicked with the force with which she shut her mouth. She did know better. She would not mention it again.

An hour after her parents had sent her to bed, she slipped out of her room through the passageways in the walls. (She knew the passages as well as any of the servants; he'd taught her). When she found his quarters, Borya locked his arms around her and rambled in a whisper about how she shouldn't worry and they'd find another way to play together.

It was the first of many nights for many years that they played together in flickering candlelight in his quarters until the sun tinted the black sky purple and she hurried back to her rooms.

Six years later, they still had not been found out and when she slipped into his room for his evening lesson, (she'd begun to teach him to read and write several years before and he'd caught up to her in her lessons quickly), he presented her with a golden chain and a sly smile.

"From whom did you filch this?"

He tsked. "That aunt of yours that always tells you you're too skinny. She won't miss it. And she won't recognize it." He tapped the small, ball-shaped locket that hung from the chain. "This isn't hers."

Natalia swept her hair aside to let him fasten it around her neck. "I love it."

His lips brushed the nape of her neck. His hand and a tiny key flashed gold in the candlelight. "May I?"

Natalia lifted her chin and let him open it; inside she found a small painting where a picture should go. She squinted in the dim light to see. "Is it—"

"—A flower. I'm not very good. Sorry."

"Borya and Tasha."

"Yeah." He pushed strands of his shaggy hair back out of his face. Shuffled his feet.

A smile tugged the corners of her mouth and she squeezed his hand. "Let's get to your lesson, then."

He kept the little key. She told her mother it was a gift from an admirer, among the many gifts received on her sixteenth birthday.

She never took it off and her mother never stopped asking which admirer had gifted it to her.

The public was growing restless. Borya told her as much and some of the staff murmured mutinously to one another when they didn't realize she was there to hear it.

"He is dangerous, and the Romanovs do not listen. They trust him too much. He will destroy everything."

"Who?" She didn't think Borya would tell her. He had been bringing in warnings and vague information for months but didn't have a name to go with the danger.

"Johann, he calls himself. He's powerful and dangerous and has made it so that the Romanovs trust him implicitly."

It was not a name she'd heard. "What does he look like?"

"He's tall, slender. Clean-shaven. He's…I've heard that his Russian is accented. He's not from this country. I've seen him, only once, on an errand for your father."

She nodded. "There's nothing I can do, Borya."

"You stay away from him."

"I don't even know what he looks like!"

"If you saw him, you would know it was him."

Natalia discovered a fortnight later that Borya was right.

She was returning from her daily lesson and a man was approaching her with purpose. She'd never seen him before, but her blood chilled at the sight of him.

"I had heard that Alianovna had a daughter more beautiful than even the Romanov's, but I did not believe it."

"Thank you." She struggled not to itch at her skin.

"I am Johann."

"I—" Natalia suppressed a shiver and a shout. Someone had spilled an entire pitcher of water down her back.

"My apologies!" Borya's voice trembled with apologetic dismay. "I didn't mean – I didn't see you." His eyes were panicked, white all around.

Natalia adopted her mother's upturned-nose sensibilities, clipping her words and glaring fit to burn a hole through him. "You will escort me to my rooms and draw me a hot bath. This is unacceptable."

Borya rushed her away to her rooms. Once there, hugged her with such relief he shook.

"You mustn't tell him anything about you."

"Wha—"

"-That's him. That's the man the Romanovs trust too much." His eyes widened as he whispered. "And now your father." Borya shook himself and set his jaw as if preparing for a blow. "You must stay away from him. We have to keep you safe."

And he did, even going as far as accepting punishment for shirking his duties the days that Johann was visiting the estate so that he could shadow Natalia wherever she went.

When she was eighteen, everything changed again.

This time, it wasn't her mother telling her she couldn't play with Borya. It was a revolution.

She knew something would happen soon. For all that she'd taught Borya, he brought her more knowledge than she could have dreamed, learned and cloistered and female as she was.

It had been a year since she'd first met Johann and the information Borya fed her was reaching a fever pitch and there was no stopping it. She would lie awake at night sometimes, after Borya had fallen asleep, snoring lightly against her hair and his arm slung low around her waist, and try to unravel the tight coil of dread that filled her stomach.

She did not know it would come so swiftly and so violently. Her father had refused to leave their estate on the grounds that to be seen leaving was to be seen surrendering to Those dogs in the streets. We are the masters, Natalia. We will not bow.

And now their house was burning from the main entryway, heat curling under her bedchamber door and around her heart. The cacophony rose from beyond the many other barricaded entrances, glass and wood shuddering, splintering, shattering; the people were trying to break in and they would succeed before too long.

The servants were either fleeing through their passages or joining the fray (on whose side? She didn't know. Neither she nor Borya had trusted anyone with the knowledge of their acquaintance after the age of ten and so she didn't know who was loyal and who would throw her into the heart of the melee).

Natalia's mother was wailing from somewhere nearby. Whether her mother was mourning the loss of their house, or if her parents rooms had been breached, Natalia didn't know and she couldn't find out without risking her own life.

The house shuddered and groaned and something shifted and she knew then it didn't matter what she did; whether it was the fire, or the people, or trying to find her parents, Natalia knew she would be dead before the sun rose.

"Tasha."

She jumped. She hadn't heard him open the entryway cut into her wall.

"Borya." Natalia wasn't proud of how her voice shook. "Why are you still here? You should have—"

"—We're leaving. Now. Come on." He threw her a change of clothes –servants' clothes- and a heavy jacket. She hurried into them.

She didn't realize he'd held out his hand, or that she'd taken it, until he was pulling her along through the passages almost too fast for her to keep up. Far sooner than she would have thought possible, she was breathing in the sharp, cold air of the Russian winter.

Borya had spent half of his time in the kitchens and, once he was old enough (suspiciously, shortly after her tenth birthday and his twelfth), half in the stables. The horses were used to him and gave him no trouble, despite the chaos from every direction, when he hoisted her onto the back of a broad-chested, deep chestnut gelding and swung up behind her.

"Where do we go?" The tree line was fast approaching and she wasn't sure if he had a plan beyond escape.

"Once we live through tonight, we go anywhere we want."

Natalia forced herself to swallow down her panic and sat back against Borya. He resettled his arms so that she could lean into him further.

The last thing Natalia remembered before being thrown from the horse and into a tree was the sound of a gunshot and the high-pitched and short-lived sound of the horse's fright and pain.

"What is your name?" The voice was calm and marble-cold and completely unfamiliar.

When Natalia tried to sit up, she found herself restrained.

"What is your name?"

"Natalia."

"Natalia what?" There was no face to put to the voice; it came from somewhere behind her where she could not turn to look.

"I don't remember." If they knew, they'd kill her. It was only Borya's clothes that had saved her, she knew.

She knew her parents were dead and her home had burned and she did not know where she was and that only by the courage of Borya was she alive.

Borya.

"Natalia what?"

"I don't remember. Where is he?"

"Your friend?" Still there was no face to put to the voice, but there was a cruel smile in the words.

"I remember another person. A man. Where is he?"

"Do not worry about your friend."

"What happened to him?"

"The same thing that will happen to you, perhaps. If you are strong enough."

It had been six months. She did not have her necklace. She could not find Borya and she remembered the way her house shuddered and groaned her mother cried and wailed from another place in the house she would never reach because Borya had saved her. It was 1917.

Natalia did not have her necklace and she hadn't seen Borya and she could still smell burning wood horse hair as they fled the only home either of them had ever known. She was learning to fight and keep her mouth shut. It was 1918.

Natalia did not have her necklace and spent each day sneaking glances at every opportunity but never saw him. She did not remember who she was looking for. Every time she received medicine she remembered less but when she resisted she was beaten and starved and left outside overnight, even in the winter.

None of their punishment ever killed her and she healed clean.

She could best every operative they pitted her against with or without a weapon. She had three kills to her name.

It was 1920.

She did not have her necklace and did not know why she scanned every room she was in long after she had finished casing it. Their medicine was not medicine, she knew, but poison. It made her stronger and somehow emptier. She knew she should resist it but did not know why.

She had a dozen kills to her name. She no longer retched until she dry heaved after each kill.

It was 1925.

She had a nervous habit, from since before she could remember, (The past is a painful thing to dwell on, my star. Do not think of it and you will not hurt.), of touching the hollow of her throat. The medicine was good and made her better. Made her into the best. Into what they wanted.

She had twenty kills to her name and had never once spilled a drop of her own blood because she saw everything; more than everything.

It was 1930.

It was 1945 when she noticed her skin was as flawless as it had been when she was twenty-five. Not a single wrinkle creased the corner of her eye or her forehead. She knew it was the medicine and knew better than to ask if she would ever get old enough to die.

Thanks to the war, she had lost count of the number of kills she had to her name. She still had not spilled a drop of her own blood.

Thanks to the war, she was away from her handlers and her medicine longer than she'd ever been.

It was 1945 when she remembered that she used to wear a necklace. When she remembered the sound of a burning house and a dying horse. When she remembered Borya.

It was three months later, memories rushing in whenever she laid her head down, that she remembered everything. Her name (her surname, and remembered pretending she didn't know it), and growing up and Borya and the revolution and escaping and Borya and knowing as she fled that she was leaving her parents to die. And Borya. And the necklace he'd given her on her sixteenth birthday.

Her extraction was in two days on the Polish side of the Russian border. Rather than sleeping, (she always finished her missions early. Always.), she stowed her gear and began to march towards France and the Allies.

When she came across a battlefield full of dead soldiers, she stole a white shirt off the body of a soldier too young to be anything more than a boy and kept walking.

Natalia had to reach the Allies before she was supposed to be at her extraction point. If she was not behind Allied lines by then, she would be dead.

Three hours before her scheduled extraction she made as much noise as possible, holding the white shirt ahead and above herself, and walked straight into an Allied camp. An American one.

She was, predictably, taken into custody and (much to her relief) locked away and constantly under the supervision of no less than three guards. It might have been possible for one to be undercover for her handlers. Not all three. She was safe enough.

Three days later, she met a man named Phillips.

"What's your name?" Lightly accented American. Southern. They had not restrained her.

"Natalia Alianovna."

Philips' eyebrows reached for his hairline. "Alianovna. Like the—"

"—Yes. Like them. My parents."

"You're too young."

The door opened and Captain America himself walked in. "Sir."

"Rogers. Alianovna a name that means anything to you?"

"Russian Revolution. All dead at the hands of the same man who killed the Romanovs."

"Not me." Natalia studied the Captain and watched his eyebrows reach higher toward his hairline the longer he watched her.

"Who are you?"

"Natalia Alianovna."

The man named Philips gave the Captain a look of long-suffering indulgence before waving a hand at Natalia. "Don't let me start calling the shots now."

The Captain continued. "Prove it."

"I can't. What I can do is give you all the information I have. In exchange for asylum."

"Information about what?" Rogers exchanged a look with Philips.

"Asylum." She would not talk until she had their word, in ink. She preferred blood, but she'd settle for ink.

Philips waved his hand again and Rogers nodded. "Done. Information about what?"

"The Red Room."

"The…what?" Philips cut in now.

Natalia took a breath and started at the beginning. Waking up after escaping the riot and being in a cold room with a cold voice. The training and the beatings and the medicine.

It took several hours to detail everything. Both men had a slew of questions and she answered every one. They had the most questions about the medicine. She suspected they likely possessed a similar substance. Perhaps had perfected. There was only so much her country could do, even with the resources that had been funneled into the Red Room. Not like America.

Rogers let out a heavy breath once it seemed neither he nor Philips had more questions and Natalia had no more information to part with.

She had not told them about Borya.

Philips waved to someone she could not see that was on the other side of what was likely one-way glass. "Is that bag you brought with you all you have?"

Natalia nodded and took a grateful sip of the water that had been brought in for her at some point. She wasn't sure her voice would work again now that she'd been quiet for a few minutes.

"Then pack it. You've earned yourself a one-way ticket to America. And all the trappings of a new identity."

For the first time since her eighteenth birthday, Natalia felt a sense of relief slide over her shoulders in the same way Borya's arms would long after his lesson had ended and he'd thanked her in the dark and quiet of his rooms in the way that would get him killed if they had ever been discovered.

The next day, she stepped foot in New York City. She was Natasha Romanov and had an appointment with a contact of Philips' to help her erase her accent entirely. Until such time, she was allowed to speak only French. Until she spoke perfect, unaccented English, she would only sound French.

It took several years to iron out all of the edges and lilts in her English.

Rogers, who had stayed behind in Europe to complete a mission she was not at liberty to know about, had died only two weeks after she first arrived in New York; HYDRA had failed and Captain America was frozen and dead somewhere in the Atlantic.

Also killed, she discovered with a chill racing down her spine, was a man calling himself the Red Skull. He looked exactly like Johann. As more details poured out, she discovered he called himself Johann. Was Johann.

Natasha didn't know what had happened after her capture during the Revolution, but she assumed that Johann had died of old age. But in the pictures splashed across papers at every newsstand, he looked no older than he had when she last saw him and she wondered if she had truly escaped her old life after all.

None at S.H.I.E.L.D. knew their Red Skull was the same Johann that had orchestrated the Revolution that separated Borya from her. She did not utter a word. Rogers was dead and it left only Philips who knew who she really was. She was unwilling to lose such an advantage. Such a safety.

Philips returned a few months after Rogers went missing and she served under him from the day he returned until the day he retired.

She watched S.H.I.E.L.D. spring up from the SSR and watched Philips age and die.

She did not have a single wrinkle, still.

Only operatives with appropriate clearance knew much of anything about her. She was considered by all, she had gathered after a time, to be a secret, second experiment much like Captain America had been and Natasha found that this knowledge had agents if not trusting her, then at least not questioning her.

She always looked over her shoulder, expecting to see Johann or the Red Room behind her ready to drag her back to what she'd escaped. Even if it looked like they'd been eradicated, she didn't trust it and felt a dread she hadn't felt in years begin to coil up in her stomach.

This time, Borya would not be there to save her. This time she was ready, if it came.

It was 1980 before Natasha dug in, did her research and discovered the names and faces of all the targets she'd been assigned to kill. Looking for all those deaths that had been sudden, unexplained. Brutal.

Many she'd remembered. There were plenty she didn't.

There was plenty new to learn through the lens of the opinion at the other end of the weapons she'd held to the pleading heads of her targets.

She remembered each mission differently now, and woke often with the the screams and begging and bargaining of the walking dead echoing inside her head.

Natasha had never remembered so much from her missions, aside from completing them successfully, and with each memory there was pain in the remembering. It felt, often, as though she were stitching herself back together after having been torn into as many pieces as it was possible to tear a person and still leave them alive.

She thought of Borya and for the first time hoped that he was dead; that he had died during the torture and training of the Red Room so that he would not have had to endure what she had.

The coiling dread in her stomach had turned to lead several years before and she carried it around like a worry stone. Like a bludgeon.

It was 1981 when she requested that she be removed from active duty. She continued to train and spent what time she wasn't training trying to sleep. When she wasn't doing either of those things, she was dry heaving at the pain of remembering and the memories themselves.

Borya and her parents and the revolution. Johann and his machinations. The Red Room and the beatings and the medicine. And Borya. Even the good memories, she found, caused her pain to remember and caused her to retch: their loss harder to take at times than the memories of blood-and-brain spatter.

Had there been any point, she might have done more than swallow the guilt and pain and her tongue; panic and bile a slow, steady rise in her throat.

There was no point. It was all old information – decades old and useless as anything other than an exercise in finding out which agent had the strongest stomach.

Six months later, Natasha requested a return to active status.

People were dying.

People were dying everywhere, she supposed. The people that were dying that mattered were the ones that died accidentally. That shouldn't have been dead at all and had Red Room painted all over the circumstances even if she was the only one who saw it. Who knew.

Her request was granted.

She spent several years chasing cold trails and useless leads. She burned through a number of favors she was owed and still found nothing. Everyone else leaves a trail, a trace of their existence behind. Even S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. The Red Room did not exist and neither did their operatives.

The dread-stone in her stomach held her down when she woke in the morning and threatened to pull her down, through her mattress and into the earth. It left in her mouth the heavy aftertaste of tobacco and the faintest hint of incense and metal that reminded her so much of the intoxicating scent Johann imbued the air with that she could not shake, even seventy years later.

Johann died in the forties thanks to Steve Rogers, Natasha reminded herself daily. She reminded herself daily that Borya was no longer there to insert himself so that she would not be alone with Johann.

No matter what she did, how close she got and whom she questioned, she came no closer to an answer. No closer to shaking the stone and smoke that haunted her whether waking or sleeping.

People were dying.

In 1991, just before the New Year, the Cold War ended.

(It was not over. Symbols came and went and on paper T's were crossed and I's were dotted but it was not over, would never be over. It was not about the governments and the countries and the people. It was always about intelligence. As long as there was something to hide, something to find, it would go on.)

The deaths that were not accidents also ended.

Natasha accepted her assignments and flushed out target after target like a hound would course a hare.

The only missions on which she was required to assassinate a target -wet work they called it now, as if it made a difference- were the missions on which it was too dangerous for her not to, and the missions she went on for herself. For Borya's memory.

It wasn't until after the year 2000 that the deaths that weren't accidents began again.

In 2009, in Odessa, Natasha's transport was killed. Not for a lack of trying and she'd earned a bullet wound –entry and exit- for her trouble.

It was the first time she scarred since entering the Red Room and the first time she had bled so much (at all? She couldn't remember, but doubted it) since the Red Room.

Her debrief was protracted and there was a level of suspicion around the information she reported that was only ever present in the way of people trying to hide their fear.

A man, she said. Just under six feet and made of muscle and sinew. Hair to his shoulders and his face completely obstructed. One arm made entirely of metal.

Made of metal?

Yes. Made of metal. It was not armor. The other arm was tanned skin. One was made of metal. She was sure.

Natasha did not see the man again, (The Winter Soldier, those that knew of him called him. The name was whispered heavy with reverence, each utterance an added weight to the stone in her stomach), for another five years.

By the time she did, they'd found Steve in the ice and were able to revive him and she suspected he was comforted to have a familiar face: always positioning himself near her, trusting her judgment where others hesitated.

Natasha was terrified by the fact of Steve's survival and could not bring herself to confide in him. If she were fool enough to think that Johann did not also, somehow, survive his own ostensible demise, she would not live much longer.

The next time she saw the man- The Winter Soldier- he had been sent to kill her.

He would have, had Steve not been there to get in the way. As it was, he shot her through her shoulder. Given the heat and chill radiating from the point of entry, she would likely bleed out.

Natasha thought of Borya for the first time in a long time as she breathed deep, leaning against the tire of a forgotten car.

She focused on the scrape of rubber on asphalt, metal clattering on metal, the grunting and effort of Steve and the Soldier as they fought while she gathered up what remained of her strength.

Natasha had lost enough blood that by the time she managed to stand and shoot, she was replacing the Soldier's face –Steve had pulled his mask off of him during the fight somehow- with Borya's.

She would, at least, see him again soon if there was anything after death besides regret and guilt and empty longing.

The next year, Natasha could not remember how old she was anymore, and everything changed.

The dread-stone in her stomach made it hard to lift her feet and Steve's presence was something she was truly grateful for – he was the only one she had left who remembered. She could feel Johann wrapping around her mind and Natasha wasn't sure how long it would be before the mere memory of his presence would bring her back to what the Red Room had made her.

She knew Johann was alive, though she had no evidence to point to aside from the weight she carried everyplace she went and the thick taste of memory in her mouth threatening to seal her mouth and Johann's secrets shut.

Natasha returned from a mission intending to take a shower long enough and hot enough to wash away more than the blood and grime covering her all over like a second skin.

And she would have. But Borya was there. Sitting with Steve in her apartment and speaking so low and quiet she couldn't hear him.

It was not Borya. It was the Soldier. The Soldier looked just like—

"Borya."

She spoke without thinking and two heads jerked in her direction. Confusion was written in every line and angle of Steve's face. On the Soldier's –on Borya's, because that's who it was, Natalia knew- were eyes wide as dinner plates and an expression so startled, so pained and confused and knowing that he put himself in front of her before anyone realized he'd moved.

"Who is Borya." It was not a question. His eyes were clear and he already knew the answer, she was sure. He wanted to hear her say it; she couldn't believe he was in front of her and from his expression, she knew he was equally elated and doubtful and worried. (How was it possible; was it the Red Room medicine, was it Johann, was it both? –And did it matter, if they were here, before one another again?)

"Borya. Borya and Tasha. You. Me. We—" Steve stood tense just outside of Borya's line of sight.

"He came here looking for you but wouldn't say why." Steve's voice was flat and his face, for the first time, was unreadable.

Borya. Borya was standing in front of her alive and he was acting like he didn't remember her even though the recognition shifted around behind the steely wall of his gaze.

"Who are you." Another not-question.

"Natalia Alianovna."

Borya flinched and blinked like he'd been slapped and took several shaky steps back before regaining himself and setting his face in stone.

If Natalia was right –and she was rarely wrong- he'd been without his handlers and medicine since she'd last seen him and memories had already started to shake themselves loose.

"You look just like her. How?" He was not willing to believe.

For all that she had more opportunities and education, he had always been far more cautious, shrewder when it came to matters belonging to the two of them. He would not run away with her the year before her eighteenth birthday. He would not allow her to intervene if he was going to be punished.

He would not allow many things that she wanted because they weren't good for her. And now, he was not allowing himself to believe because he had to be sure it was her; he would not even leave his memories of her unprotected until he was sure.

"I am her. Who else knew you by that name?" She was demanding answers of her own.

"She is dead. Why do you have her face?"

"You saved me when the revolution came for my family. When Johann brought the world down around us. The passages in the walls. The horse. Borya—" she cast around for anything, anything that would prove to him it was really her. She thought of the last thing he'd said to her before they were separated. She hadn't spoken Russian to someone she loved since 1917 and she whispered for fear of choking on the words. "Once we live through tonight, we go anywhere we want." He would remember that moment. He had to.

He was completely still and silent for several minutes. His face was unreadable but his eyes moved between confusion and pain and something watery that wasn't the onset of tears, exactly, but reminded Natalia of relief.

"Natalia." He whispered it; any louder and he looked like he expected the word to break the fragile thing he was finally grasping.

And then she was suddenly a part of him, with how tightly he clutched her to him and she found herself clutching back.

There was time now to discover what happened to him after they were thrown from their horse in 1917. To help him find his way back to all of his memories. To, eventually, take their time and not worry that he would be killed if it were discovered that he'd taken her to bed.

"He's not safe here, Natasha." Steve's voice broke through and she lifted her head from where she'd buried it against Borya's throat.

"What?"

"They're looking for him."

"HYDRA?" She was asking Borya.

He shook his head. "Not 'them'. Him."

Natalia smiled, as cold and cruel as that voice she heard almost a century ago when she woke up trapped and alone, spread over her features. The stone in her stomach remained but she would crush it to dust, with Borya at her side. They would not be separated again.

"Then we will find him and make him pay for what's happened to us." She touched the hollow of her throat. The motion was not lost on Borya. "He has something of mine."