Steve hit the button to raise the rear ramp of the quinjet after dropping the prisoner in a seat for Barton and Natasha to secure. Stark had made the right call begging off this one, saying it was the wrong time of year to appreciate Krakow. Really, the way the mission had gone down, only one of them should have had to do any Polish appreciation. After confirming he was alone in his miserable garret, Steve and Barton had watched from a grimy window while Natasha had slipped up behind the target and injected him with a syringe of tranquilizers. They'd cleared the small loft of papers – the man didn't seem to own any electronics – and completed the operation well ahead of their extraction time, giving Natasha time to wrap up the prisoner's eyes and ears to prevent him from seeing or hearing anything if the tranquilizers wore off in transit. She had been acting a little strangely since their briefing before the mission, but brushed Steve off when he'd asked about it.

He approached her now, reaching out to steady himself as the jet lifted off with the slightest jerk. In addition to the shackles and leg irons, she had used tape from the first aid kit to secure his hands palm to palm, leaving only enough room for a clip on his index finger to monitor his vital signs.

"I think we've got some extra rolls of gauze if you wanna mummify the guy completely, Tash," Barton commented from his seat closer to the cockpit. She shot him a dirty look, but Steve had to agree with the archer's sarcasm at the moment.

"Nat, I don't think he's going anywhere. You patted him down yourself. He's…"

There was an almost wild glint in her eyes when she looked up. "If either of you had to restrain me, how far would you go before you were sure, absolutely sure that I wasn't going to get away?"

As Barton tried to protest that he would never tie Natasha up without her permission in writing, the pieces suddenly clicked into place for Steve. "You know this guy."

"I did. A long time ago." She finished her task by taping down the improvised blindfold and clamping a pair of noise-cancelling headphones over the prisoner's already-blocked ears. "That will have to do for now."

She sat beside Steve, who immediately stopped exchanging significant looks with Barton. "You, uh, okay?"

"Yeah."

"My forehead itches."

He ignored Barton's complaint, leaning down to kiss Natasha briefly as he looked her over to confirm that she wasn't hurt. She returned his kiss in a preoccupied way. "I'm fine, Steve. We shouldn't in front of him."

"He's not gonna wake up and I think you've got him covered if he does." Barton was scratching furiously at his shaved browline. "You shot him up with enough juice to knock out a bear. We could give him a couple of piercings and he wouldn't wake up."

Natasha's head shot up from where she had been getting comfortable on Steve's shoulder. "Clint, don't you dare."

"Come on, Tasha, this story is hilarious!"

"You're going to tell my incredibly strong, extremely protective boyfriend about the time I was unconscious and you…"

"I was only going to tell him the part about the tranquilizer darts!" Barton winked and Steve thought it may have been intended for him. Natasha was certainly distracted from her concern about their prisoner for the moment. He gave Barton a quick nod while holding Natasha gently in her seat. "Right, so we were in San Diego, chasing this hitman for one of the Mexican cartels who'd also been freelancing on his off days. Real bad dude. Anyway, we tracked him down, car chase, firefight, movie-quality shit going down. Eventually, I get one of his tires and he wrecks, so we're chasing him on foot now. Suddenly, there's all these fences and wires and, like, moats. Then, bam! Zebras!"

"Zebras?"

"Yeah, the dumbass was running through the damn San Diego Zoo. Also, do not fuck with zebras. Anyway, we're still chasing him and we corner him in this outdoor amphitheater and I tackle him, yell for Tasha to help me and she suddenly collapses. I practically brain the guy to knock him out so I can help her, because I think he's called in backup she's seriously wounded, but then there's lights and people shouting for me to get my hands up and…long story short, San Diego PD and zoo security had found us and one of the zookeepers had hit her in the ass with a couple of tranquilizer darts. She was pissed when she woke up."

"I was more pissed about the six new piercings I work up with."

"They all healed over."

Steve kept a discreet eye on the prisoner, whose vitals never wavered during the entire flight back to the Triskelion. He was fairly certain that, despite Barton's efforts, most of Natasha's attention was also fixed on the prisoner. The transfer to the subbasement interrogation and detention level was uneventful, although Director Fury did meet them in the main hangar to ensure successful completion of the mission, further confirming Steve's suspicions that there was something he was missing. He stood beside Natasha as she watched two security guards on a monitor undo her careful bindings, shackling the still-unconscious man to the steel table. He took a deep breath and asked, "So, how do you know him?"

"KGB."

"I figured." He moved to stand behind her, rubbing her shoulders and neck. He hadn't felt her so tense in some time. "I understand if you don't want to talk about it with me, but maybe you should schedule…"

To his surprise, she interrupted, "Do you remember that group photo? The one from when I was ten?"

"Of course."

"I told you that everyone in it was dead? Except for one I wasn't sure about?"

He wracked his brain for a moment, forcing a name from his memory as proof that he had listened, that he had retained the pain she had honored him by sharing. "Va…Vasily?"

"You remembered." He felt her lean into his chest. He kept his hands on her shoulders in spite of his urge to embrace her. "He was sent to a Siberian gulag after…he was in love with another girl in our unit, Oksana. She was in the photo, too. She died in the tunnels at Semipalatinsk. It was…well, it wasn't my fault she died, but I was there. And I was the one who brought back her personal effects, which ended up including a love note from Vasily. If I had just looked at what I was taking off her body, he may have been spared…" She waved her hand in the general direction of the cell, somewhere beyond the monitors. "I don't know. It's…I grew up with Vasily, for lack of a better phrase. I suppose this is how people feel at their high school reunions."

"Not quite, Ma'am," one of the guards monitoring the security station muttered. Steve admired Natasha's restraint as she halted a move toward one of her knives.

He stepped toward the guard and tapped him on the shoulder, causing the man to jump. "When will he wake up?"

"Oh, Captain." The guard's relief that he hadn't been stung by the Black Widow was visible. "Um, probably not for a few hours, according to medical."

"We'll be back before then." He steered Natasha toward the elevators before she could argue. When they were safely contained, he said, "You said Barton gave you six piercings?"

"I'd really rather not get into it."

Steve turned her into him and pressed against her, whispering in her ear, "What did he pierce?"

"My eyebrow," she pointed to the spot and he kissed it gently, "my nose," his lips brushed the rim of her nostril, "my bottom lip," he added some suction to this kiss, "my tongue," this one lasted until the elevator announced their arrival on the level of the locker rooms.

He grabbed her upper arm as she tried to exit the elevator. "That was only four."

"I can't let you kiss the other two here. It was a matching set." She pecked his lips and headed toward the women's locker room.

Steve discovered that Barton had wisely not chosen to hang around to shower. Wily bastard.

After a long shower and sauna, Natasha felt more capable of facing her past. She slipped into a fresh catsuit, leaving off all but two bladed weapons the guards on the interrogation level would never think to check for. There were some men who would be either intimidated or intoxicated by the outfit, but she knew Vasily wouldn't be one. It was still more comfortable to face him as the Black Widow than as herself.

To her surprise, it was Fury rather than Steve waiting for her outside the locker room. As if anticipating her question, he said, "Rogers is already downstairs, though he did ask me about the San Diego mission. I assume Barton is in for some pain at some point?"

"I'll try to talk him down."

"Whatever. I just wanted to see if you're up for this interrogation."

"Do I look like I'm wearing civvies?" She stepped into the elevator and hit the appropriate button. "There won't be a problem, Director."

"I know."

"Then why ask?"

Fury didn't get off when they arrived at the detention level. "I'd say I was just doing my job, but I know you're good at sniffing out lies." He nodded as the doors closed.

Steve was standing at the security station at relaxed attention in a t shirt and fatigues. She would have considered suggesting they take a break in one of the unused cells if she hadn't known how well monitored the entire level was. She gave him a nod of acknowledgment instead and leaned toward the image on the monitors. "Has he woken up yet?"

"Hasn't moved since you brought him in, Ma'am," a nervous guard answered.

"Translator ready?"

A severe woman with a tight bun stood from a chair in the corner and nodded brusquely. "I've been waiting some time. Shall we?"

"You're here for transcription. The guards will set you up."

"Excuse me, but I was under the impression that the prisoner spoke Russian."

"And English, and French, and any other number of languages needed." Natasha didn't specify what the languages would be needed for. "Are you good for anything but Russian?"

The woman pressed her lips into a tight line, but nodded. "I'll just set up here, then, shall I?"

Natasha didn't look at Steve as she entered the cell block, walking past men and women who had no idea where they were and hadn't for months; SHIELD prisoners were notoriously hard to place in normal prisons, including Supermax facilities and Guantanamo. There were rarely trials for these people. She didn't feel all that bad about putting any of them down here. Hell, if not for Clint, she could be rotting here under the Potomac herself. She passed by the cells without looking at any of the inmates, though security protocols prevented them from seeing her no matter how hard they looked.

The interrogation cells were placed beyond the highest security prisoners to prevent escapes of unclassified inmates. Anyone who got past the shackles and armed guards would have to pass a gauntlet of automated weapons designed to cause maximum casualties with minimum intervention. She paused for a guard stationed at the door to scan her retina before entering the small room. The interrogation rooms were designed to be uncomfortable, piping in the water and the odor of the river to appear as if it were leaking through the concrete. Natasha sat in the chair across from the unconscious prisoner, breathed through her mouth, put her feet up on the table and waited.

The change in his breathing was barely audible when he woke, but she wasn't fooled. She waited ten minutes to allow him to think he had the upper hand before saying, in Russian, "Still going by Vasily Zaytsev? Trying to claim a little heroic ancestry in spite of your laughable sniper skills?"

He lifted his head slowly, blinking at her in the bright fluorescent light. He pulled at the chains restraining his arms and legs before saying, "Vasily Vasilievich has been the only name anyone has called me for some time now. I never knew my father, so I took myself as my patronymic. Fitting, if you ask me." He finally stopped searching the room for an escape, as she would have done, to ask, "Tell me, Natalia Alianovna, have you ever learned if you had a father?"

"Considering they didn't manage to clone a sheep until the mid-nineties, I can't imagine it happened another way."

"But what else would you say? You are with the Americans now, yes?"

"Yes."

"You are honest because you know our KGB comrades would have tortured me for sport rather than taken me peaceably for humane interrogation."

"I wouldn't call it 'peaceable,' Vasily. I would simply call you an easy mark. And whether it remains humane depends on you."

"I suppose I did miss a sizable portion of training when I was shipped to Irkutsk Oblast. You know, our gulag was not far from where we played The Game near Lake Baikal. I remember the time when we were young and you slaughtered a nerpa to save us from starving."

"You think that will help you now?" She tried not to think of the seal's wide, innocent eyes as she had clubbed it to death, instead tapping her fingernails on the table. "Reminding me that I saved your life at twelve?"

"I suppose not. How old were we when you watched Oksana die? Fifteen? Sixteen?"

"Sixteen, as I'm sure you remember."

"How could I forget? The Black Widow emerged from the tunnels of Semipalatinsk, top scorer, as usual. My Ksyusha was left for dead in the radiation laboratory."

Natasha flinched inwardly at the diminutive, but showed no external emotion. "Oksana was distracted, telling me about a young man she was planning to meet when we returned to base. I assumed she had seduced a wealthy Muscovite, as we had been assigned to do. It was not my responsibility to cover for your relationship, had I known about it."

"Nor was it your responsibility to keep her alive during The Game, I suppose."

"Not at all."

"Yet you follow the Americans' orders, bringing me here alive. Why?"

"You know something useful, Vasily. It is the only reason I used a syringe instead of a .22 when I came up behind you."

"When was that? Today? Yesterday?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows?"

"I know. A weak ploy. Still, I know one even weaker that has been known to work."

"Oh? And what is that?"

He kept his mouth closed for a second longer than he should have, making her lunge across the table a second later than she should have. The poison hidden in the false crown on which he had bitten down was fast acting, sending him into foaming convulsions before a nurse stationed with the security team could intervene. Natasha swiped an unopened bottle of water from the guard station as she stalked toward the elevators, Steve on her heels.

"He said something before he died. You were asking him something and he answered. What was it?"

"I asked him who he was working for. You heard him, just like I did." She muttered in Russian, "Гидра."

"Nat…"

"Hydra. He said, Hydra."

"We're going straight to Fury."

"Which elevator button do you think I pressed, Steve?"

She tried to relax in his arms for the rest of their ride to the top floor of the Triskelion, but couldn't manage it.