She's barely seventeen when she meets the Winter Soldier. He's a distant figure at first, because young men aren't common in the Red Room. She can barely recall a male figure under the age of forty being welcomed in the cloistered halls before. The other girls either swoon or ignore him. Natasha turns cold and wary, surveying this newcomer from afar. He's a Soviet agent, Darya informs her. Used to be the masked sidekick to some spandex-wearing Captain America. A superhero, Darya tells her. They don't have superheroes in Russia. Just ordinary people made great by circumstance.
When they're assigned a mission together, Natasha acts accordingly. Distant, chilly, vague. He tells her that he's never met a girl like her before.
"You're a mystery, Romanoff."
She allows him a brief smile, unsure of whether this is a compliment or not.
"Thank you, Agent Barns."
He pauses in loading his automatic weapon, fingers fiddling with a bullet casing.
"James. Uh, call me James."
She nods, pushing her long red hair away from her eyes.
"Thank you, James."
They become lovers by an unkind fate and by convenience. She has never been with a man before, and is wary and nervous, though she never shows it. He's gentle and kind and the whole time he whispers in her ear how beautiful she is. Afterwards, as they lie tangled together on a mattress in the attic of some safehouse in Leningrad, he tells her that he loves her. He strokes her long hair, and brushes his hand against her face. It's the first time that she's felt fragile in a long time.
One day, Ivan calls her into one of the labs. Behind a glass wall, a man is strapped to an electric chair. Ivan, accompanied by a group of men in war medals, instructs Natasha to pull a lever that will introduced electrical currents to the prisoner.
"You must do it," he tells her. She's a good soldier, well-trained, so she does it. He jerks and twists, fingers scrabbling at the arms of the chair. She watches impassively the first few times as he struggles. Then the currents become more powerful.
"Please!" The man screams. "I have a family! Children!"
Her fingers stall on the lever. Ivan prods her forward, tells her that this man is a prisoner and must be punished. There is something inside her that twists and burns like the man in the chair.
"I have a daughter! A girl like you! Please don't do this!"
His neck snaps back in pain. Natasha can feel her appendages become numb with a kind of cold guilt.
"He's a traitor, Romanoff. What do we do with traitors?" Ivan asks, his voice deadly and quiet.
"We kill them," she replies softly.
He stops pleading with her, his words become screams. Inhuman, animalistic, purely pain. She yanks the lever down until he stops twitching and screaming and slumps forward, still. She doesn't stick around to see if he's dead or just unconscious. She knows that it was never about the traitor or punishments at all. It was about her loyalty to the Red Room, how far she was willing to go. How far she was willing to follow orders.
And she refuses to break, to snap, even when Ivan orders one of his men to cut off her long red hair. She sees the strands fall to the floor, her long braid curling like rope. She can't explain why, but the sight of the red hair coiled on the cool stones makes something inside of her snap. She pushes past Ivan and runs out of the laboratory and she runs until she finds James behind a dingy Stalingrad bar.
"You cut your hair!" He exclaims, reaching out to touch it. She slumps against the icy brick wall, resisting the urge to crumple into his arms.
"No. They cut it." She holds back her tears-and it's strange, because she hasn't cried in years and she can't understand why something so trivial should make her feel so heartbroken. "I hate it. I look horrible."
James reaches out and tilts her chin upward, forcing her blue eyes to meet his.
"I think you look beautiful."
She stares into his eyes, and sees an honesty there, a tenderness, that she has not seen in a long time.
She allows him to pull her close and kiss her in the gently falling snow. When the bartender glances out the dingy back window, he sees two young people embracing in a narrow alleyway. He sees two people in love, and nothing else. Natasha has two knives strapped to her right leg and a holster on her left ankle. James has a .45 on his hip and a long blade concealed in his jacket. You can't see their weapons, though. Not through the window, not through the falling snow and the way that they fit together, like two pieces of the same puzzle.
Hope you all enjoy! And sorry for the long wait, my friends!