A/N: So I'm back, and it's not with Temptation. Sorry about that. Don't throw things. I will get to it. Promise. MCU, particularly Bucky Barnes, has been rattling around in my head for a bit now, so I managed to get this out of it.

Nat's almost as old as Bucky and the Cap. I know that's not currently MCU compliant (but I feel it's coming). She's going to call him Yasha. I know that apparently is non-comic compliant as it seems she never calls him that based upon the quick research I did, but I don't really care. Preparate, darling. They're mine to play with now. Spoilers for everything up through Winter Soldier.

(This started as a one-shot, but Thor help me, it's going to be a lot more than that now...)

I was five and he was six
We rode on horses made of sticks
He wore black and I wore white
He would always win the fight

Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, my baby shot me down

Now he's gone, I don't know why
And 'till this day, sometimes I cry
He didn't even say goodbye
He didn't take the time to lie

Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang,…

from "Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" – Nancy Sinatra and/or Nico Vega – both versions are amazing, and you should really listen to one or both while you read this as I had both versions on a Spotify loop while writing.

The SUV was fighting for adequate traction, sliding around as she took the incline of the last rutted rocky pass road that led toward the flat plain where Odessa waited for them far too aggressively for safety, a cloud of dust trailing them as they headed for the pickup point. In frustration, she slowed slightly, shifted down, sacrificed speed for control. The scientist was babbling something, gesturing wildly with the hand not clutching the military-issue duffel bag that contained all of his old life he had been allowed to bring with him, but Natasha had no patience with or interest in his adrenaline-fueled chatter. Every piece of her training, every ounce of her experience was screaming at her.

The entire mission so far had simply been too easy.

She did not exclude from her reckoning the pile of perimeter guards' and special forces' corpses she'd left behind. They had been neither unexpected nor particularly difficult for her to deal with. Stealing appropriate transport could only have been easier if the keys had been left in the ignition. It was almost insulting, really, that so few enemy defenders had been involved, that the pursuit had been so utterly inept. Any SHIELD-trained agent should have been able to handle this assignment, the one she had been promised would be full of dangers only her skill set was capable of suppressing.

She'd been hammered and forged by the Red Room, was now an ally of Nick Fury, and looking for multiple layers of danger in any situation was so deeply ingrained into her that she never questioned the fact that some trap still lay ahead even though they were ostensibly almost "home free." Fury's intel was rarely wrong, and so the lack of resistance she'd encountered so far increased her tension ten-fold.

It's better, much better, to see an army ahead of you than to keep waiting for the whisper of the blade in the dark.

Her lips quirked slightly at the thought. Having been the blade in the dark more times than she even bothered to keep track of anymore, she was intimately acquainted with both sides of the equation. Therefore, she scanned the rocky hills around them continuously waiting for whenever the thing that was coming (because there was always something more) arrived.

The steep climb ended, and the road began a short flat run across the top of a narrow ridge. If she could make it down the other side, then they would be within the coverage range of the extraction team. Such safety as could be had waited on them there. Using her comlink, she radioed ahead to update their location. She shifted gears and accelerated, the engineer yipping in complaint as the vehicle bounced across the washboard road surface with teeth-rattling momentum.

In the corner of her field of vision, she saw something in the side mirror shift, and her hand flew toward one of her guns in a motion born of instinct. Before she could grasp the pistol, she felt the impact of the first tire blowing and had just enough time to return both her hands to the wheel before the heavy SUV began to swerve wildly. The scientist's endless noise had become a mixture of profanity and prayer as she fought for enough control to get them to safety. With only one tire gone, she was confident in her ability to keep them headed toward the waiting SHIELD team. With almost no pause, though, she felt the bone-jarring thump of two of the remaining three tires disintegrating into shreds of rubber and steel, and then the world was spinning as the battered rim of the driver's side wheel hooked a particularly nasty ridge in the road and the SUV flipped.

The screams of the physicist filled her ears, and except for the fact that it rendered him deadweight and thereby a liability, she counted it a great relief when he bumped his head as they bounced around inside the cab. The moment the motion of the crash stopped, she was grabbing his inert form by the arm of his jacket, slashing through the seatbelt restraint, striking out with both feet to clear the remains of the passenger window, and maneuvering them both out as quickly as she was able.

The SUV lay on its roof at an angle to the rock wall of the pass. At least its position provided some cover. She cursed softly as pain lanced through one arm while she dragged and shoved him into the shelter formed between vehicle and terrain.

Fewer sweets for you while you were working would have been healthier for us both just now, she muttered in Russian.

Panting and swiping at the blood coming from a cut somewhere above her left eye, she scanned for the shooter as she propped the scientist up and crouched in front of him. Her fingers slipped to his neck to find a strong, steady pulse. Satisfied that he was at least still alive, she pulled her one of her pistols and began to survey the area for the threat that had overturned them. There was nothing but the sighing of mountain wind, ticking of the hot engine metal cooling, and the slow creaking of the one wheel what hadn't been destroyed as it sluggishly turned.

She'd been taught patience, had it beaten into her, and so she waited now between the dubious cover of twisted metal shell of the SUV and the rocky wall of the roadway for her enemy to show. Her body took the moment to begin making its complaints known. She acknowledged the arm that was broken in at least one place, a half-dozen cuts of varying degrees of seriousness, two ribs that were at best badly bruised, and then more than eighty years of surviving seized the knowledge and shoved it away from her. She could continue to function with far worse than this. She'd had far worse done to her than this as a part of routine training…..

A slight spattering of gravel from the ledge above her had her standing, spinning, pistol ready. As she was making the move, she knew it was the wrong one, but before even her reflexes could react, she felt something punch her through her side, just above the curve of her pelvis, slicing through her as neatly as if she had been skewered. Pain exploded through her body, and she dimly registered something soft and wet striking her as she struggled to keep herself upright, hands skittering on the stone in front of her, gun falling to the ground. She glanced down at the nuclear engineer she'd been tasked with extracting only to find that half his head was gone, whatever coveted knowledge he had once possessed now spread across the rock behind him and across her lower body like some horrific cave painting. He'd been shot right through her.

She denied herself the luxury of succumbing to the pain. That could come later. This mission was ended, but the primary mission of her life, staying alive, was perhaps achievable if she could keep her head clear. She dropped hard behind the cover of the overturned SUV, grabbed for the familiar shape of her gun, and concentrated on holding on to her weapon, steadying her hand, silencing her rough breathing, waiting for the next wave of whatever attack would surely follow. Distantly, she heard the sound of heavy vehicles rushing up the pass road toward them. Blood streamed over her hip, down her leg, soaked through the weave of her suit, pooled sluggishly in the grit beneath her, and her trained mind processed that her vision was starting to darken in around the edges just a little as she saw the battered metal grill of the first of the extraction team convoy round the curve ahead. Minutes later, under the watchful cover of a SHIELD strike team, emergency medical treatment was being administered to her as they tried to stabilize her for transport.

Years later, even after analyzing the situation from every possible angle, she would never know what it was that caught her attention. There was no sound, no flash of movement. It was as if someone had reached down and plucked a secret string inside her, made her resonate to a note no one else heard, and she gasped, head rolling on the gurney. The med tech glanced up, murmured some apology, but she made no response. Her eyes were locked on figure in black which slowly unfolded itself from behind the cover of a largish bolder. She could only see the end of the barrel of the sniper rifle that was slung across his back, and his face was mostly obscured by his mask and goggles, but there was no mistaking the wild fall of dark, windblown hair or the tiniest glint of silver metal where the position of his left hand made his glove gap away from the wrist of his tactical jacket minutely. She could feel the pressure of his gaze from behind the darkened lenses.

Him. She would have known that figure, that stance anywhere. She swallowed hard, fighting to keep her eyes on him, wondering if his mission were over or if it were just beginning. Her hand clawed weakly against the metal surface of the gurney, instinctively grappling for weapons that were no longer nearby, for some form of defense against that which could not be withstood.

The tech murmured something, but she was too distracted to hear it. A stabbing pain made her gasp and look down for the barest second as he applied something to the still-bleeding hole in her abdomen. She quickly turned her head back only to find….nothing…..

She stared at that emptiness, felt it fill her, until whatever painkiller they'd added to her IV finally kicked in, and the past swallowed her.

Yasha.

The drugs held her down, and she dreamed of the incredible deadly power of a metal arm that could punch through steel and rip through bone, the accuracy of a sniper who never missed, the brutality of a skilled hand-to-hand fighter who had never pulled a single punch even when she lay broken and bleeding on the training room floor. The surprising capacity for tenderness in his touch when they huddled together in whatever place they managed to seize a moment for themselves. The heat and taste of that beautiful mouth, its hungry demand as it slanted over hers, as it devoured her body, delivered her pleasure. The understanding and complete acceptance in those blue, blue eyes when he was above her, beneath her, inside her. The never-dying ghost who made those powerful enough to know of him quake with fear, the Winter Soldier, the master assassin who had been her teacher, her lover, her mission partner.

Her match. The only one she'd ever found.

Yasha…who they told me was dead…..

She was still in the hospital bed they'd forced her into when Fury brought her slug ballistics had processed. He asked no questions when she asked to keep it, only dropped it into her open palm. The end of the spent round had flattened after impacting the scientist's skull and the rock behind it. Her fingers had folded around it tightly, and she ran her fingertips over and over it the edges of the ruined metal, learning every detail of it through touch. The day they finally released her to her own Spartan quarters, she had it pressed into her palm until she finally was alone. Then she took it and tucked it away in a small wooden box kept in a drawer in her room.

Not even the serum they'd flooded her body with in the Red Room could stave off every scar. Initially red and angry before fading to an ugly ridge, the scar was a constant reminder of the mission, as real in every way as the bullet which had given it to her. Certainly, there was medical treatment available that could have removed the external blemish, and indeed such a treatment was offered to her when she went in for a routine follow-up to the injury, but she always simply shook her head, declined with a small smile.

"I'll just keep the reminder, thank you," she murmured, and the look in her eyes, something hard and bright and dangerous glittering in the green depths, prevented the tech from asking further questions and made him grateful that he was not the one who had given the Black Widow anything that made her look like that.

Had anyone been brave enough to ask her, and had she been in a forthcoming mood, two stars that never aligned, she might have told that person why she chose to keep the bullet and the scar. It was because she recognized them for what they were.

The assassin who did not miss, the soldier who always took his prize had refused to take her life. She knew all too well that if he had wanted her dead that day, she would be no more than a notation in SHIELD's colorful history by now, perhaps a name on a graven memorial wall. Her mind turned over the intricacies of what she would have done if she'd wanted someone in her situation that day dead, tactics and patterns he had had no small part in creating.

He could have simply mined the road. He could have used a grenade launcher instead of shooting out the tires. He could have shot me in the head first and taken care of the engineer at his leisure after. He could have slit my throat. He could have set his trap far enough from the extraction point that the rescue team never would have made it before I bled out….

In the darkness of night, she ran her fingertip over the raised tissue of the scar, wondered if he'd been punished for allowing her her life, if he had once again been ordered to sit docilely in the seat of that nightmare machine that existed only to rip them from each other and from themselves, to refine them by torture and twisted science until they were compliant, perfect weapons again. She hoped that the death of the scientist had been more valuable than the life he'd left her in the obscene math his handlers practiced.

But I am a realist, and I do not think so. She traced the scar again, thought of the bullet in its hiding place in her drawer. Pain and love and love and pain, all we ever were able to have of each other in these two tiny packages. Like a kiss from him, like a gift, the only way he has been left to show me that he cared….

The bullet and the scar were also proof, physical proof, that he was still alive, that everything about the way she remembered about the night they ended was just another Red Room lie. No matter how vividly the illusion their handlers had crafted stood out in her mind, the reality was there for her in that twisted metal, her twisted flesh, ugly and undeniable.

Like a promise.

Their time would come again, and maybe they could find freedom to love without the pain.

Yasha.

If you liked it, I wish you'd let me know.