He remembered it well, the image of the young girl barely twenty years old laying flat beneath an itchy green - grey wool blanket. Her hair was splayed out on the white pillow, radiating like a red halo around her head. He remembered her laughing, her eyes bright with a light he had long lost. She was young, she could come past all the horrors of the world around them and maybe, he had hoped, take him along for the ride.
He could remember the feeling of the blanket on his lower back, and the chills that crawled up his bare skin to his shoulders before plunging down his arms where he anchored himself above her. His legs, still brushing against hers beneath the blanket, were warm but they were beginning to cool as his system came down from the high it felt.
She had been laughing at his expression, at his surprise. The girl was younger than him and yet her version of life under the thumb of Department X had given her more experience than she should have in this field. She was not what his Mom would have called a decent girl, she had never had the option to wait until marriage.
Her sense of self, her confidence and skill, unlike anything he could have imagined a woman doing in his past life as an American citizen. He had seen her with the other girls from a distance before Somodorov requested they have a sparring session. In his thickly accented English, the older man had told Bucky there was no reward in knowing his girls could take each other down if they could not also take down a man. Somodorov had called her Natashkaya, and it was a while before Bucky learned that was not her real name but a Russian pet name of sorts. She was Natalia, Natalia Romanova, and she was Ivan Somodorov's favourite. She had a huge amount of promise both at short range and as a sniper. She used her small frame and appearance of fragility to catch a male opponent off guard, being far stronger than she looked. Bucky soon learned she had other ways of using her physical assets, something a female spy should always be able to handle, but she had a figure that certainly helped her case.
He remembered the first time his hand had brushed against her breast while sparring. She hadn't flinched whereas he felt his cheeks flush instantly and struggled to sleep that night without imagining what they would really feel like beneath his hands.
They had grown familiar with each other very quickly, friends within only days of knowing each other. At first, Bucky wasn't sure if he was just enamoured by her skill or her shapely figure, but when Natalia had taken the first move to kiss him, pinned on the floor of the gym he had known it was more.
He had kissed her then, in the memory, gently letting his body down to press on hers once more, feeling the soft skin of her breasts against his cold chest. He had kissed her with everything he had, with love that seemed to overflow, with amazement at how it really felt to be with a woman, how it had felt to be inside one. It wasn't just any woman, she was special, she understood him and he understood her, both only trying to find a blink of light at the end of the tunnel of soviet slavery they lived in.
He felt sickened, laying in the dark alone. Sickened that he remembered fantasizing about Tasha in those moments. Remembering the times he would be lying in his bed to be joined by the slender ice-cold body of the young girl who shouldn't have been there. He remembered the love, the warmth and the comfort he hadn't felt since leaving the US. He had been so naive, they both had, and it had led to this.
He had lost her for good this time, she couldn't come back to them, and there had never been a chance to tell her. He remembered now, he remembered why the red hair that shone like silk had caused a crack to form in his cold heart every time he saw her. He wished he had remembered her, known her before their chance was stolen forever although wished was a word which didn't feel strong enough for the intensity which he felt.
Now, having read the file handed off to him as the remaining team sifted through the records of Natasha Romanoff, Bucky knew his world was coming apart at the seams.
They had given him the file because he knew the language, that was all. They needed to find anything that had to be destroyed for National security, even if the scattering of friends around him couldn't understand any part of the waves of Cyrillic handwriting that did not mean someone with the will to wouldn't be able to decode it all. There was no one alive that knew he and Tasha had once been lovers, no one who understood the pain he felt before he was handed these files, and he thought few could imagine the pain afterwards.
Lying awake, daring himself not to look once again at the time which would have read only a minute since he last checked it at 3:17 am, Bucky could see the words in his mind. The cursive Cyrillic lettering which gave details of the sterilization Natasha had received. This he did know about, it was something she had told him many years ago, brooding over whether this decision was good for her, commenting she wasn't even aware if she might have wanted children or not. The surgery notes were brief, mentioning a hysterectomy had taken place only days after he had been moved from the Krasnaya Komnata to another station. The sentence that followed rolled around his mind, till Bucky was sure he had been moved for the surgery to happen. They knew more than he had known - perhaps giving she spent her entire life inside the system, they knew more than Tasha herself.
The sentence was short Izgnaniye ploda zaversheno, Issledovaniye soderzhimogo pokazyvayet dlinu ploda tri dyuyma. Pokazaniye ot 14 do 15 nedel' beremennosti. Some of the words were ones which Bucky hadn't been sure of, some of the handwritten letters hadn't looked as he expected but with the help of Google, he had unravelled the message.
The Expulsion of the Fetus is completed, the study of the contents shows the length of the fetus is three inches. Indication of 14 to 15 weeks gestation.
The Word fetus had been foreign to him, there was no reason for him to know it, but the word gestation took him back to High School science classes. He knew gestation was linked to babies, to the mother carrying a baby, that was enough to make him dread looking up what a fetus was, but he had to know.
His decision to know had come around midnight, and the luxury of modern-day phones meant he could confirm his fears without leaving the bed. It was a baby; a foetus was a baby. The internet would criticise him for that word, arguing that a fetus only had the potential to become a baby and was not one as such but regardless of the moral side and the science side and the viewpoint of anyone else to Bucky that word equalled a baby.
Natalia had been pregnant; dear God. She had been expecting a baby in those final weeks - final months according to the records. His mind was full of racing thoughts, darting about and interrupting one and other like a highway junction with no lights, every thought demanded his attention but he wasn't even able to finish thinking it before another rude idea overtook. Was it his child? Did she know? Did they? Was it the child of a mission she had been sent on? Was that the reason he was sent away? Had something been wrong? Was there a reason for the baby to be removed? Did they simply want to be rid of the evidence?
The thoughts had begun to evolve into emotions, he was amazed, then anger took over which melted into despair and then the cycle restarted. Thoughts, amazement, anger, despair, thoughts again.
He had tried to keep away from the internet, tried to focus his mind on what he knew, on calming himself so that he might be able to sleep, but the monster of ultimate knowledge that the internet held was too much. He had spent the last couple of hours searching for anything he could find but the answers he cared for most were the ones that didn't exist in facts.
Nevertheless, he found himself thinking in terms of the facts he had read, stating them in his mind as a stray glance told him it was 3:37 am.
Fourteen or fifteen weeks gestation meant that the baby had come into being fourteen or fifteen weeks before the surgery had happened. A fetus at this time actually looks like a tiny person, it has hands and feet; it has a face. Women can go through the whole of their pregnancy without knowing they are expecting, it isn't common but it can happen. A mother to be may experience nausea, tiredness and emotional changes.
The more he thought about the changes in a mother's body, the more Bucky became sure he had seen them happening, making his heart sink in his chest even though there was no way he could have known.
She had snuck into his room once again, a fact Bucky had only become aware of when she felt a small, cold hand slide across his shoulder as he sat at the small desk in his room. He had been focussing more on learning the Russian language, wanting to learn rather than just feeling he ought to. Natalia had such good English.
She snuck in earlier than normal, the corridor outside was dark, the caged lights had ceased to give off their dim and depressing glow only a half-hour before, but there were still people around - members of the department, KGB, and others who didn't have a specific job title. Part of him had wanted to say she shouldn't have risked coming when others might see, even if he knew she enjoyed the thrill, but the other part, the significantly larger part, was very glad to see her.
After three weeks on a job, she was back here, where he could see her and know she was alive - something he could only hope when she was out of the compound. He had twisted in his chair and looked into her face. Her complexion seemed pale, she looked like she had been ill but her cheeks were flushed from the cold and her bright eyes showed nothing but health.
She smiled with her eyes more than her mouth back then, she had suffered enough as a child to lose hope for happiness, smiling with her eyes was a way for that happiness to begin shining out once more.
He didn't remember coming to stand in front of her but he remembered when she had drawn herself flush to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. They had stood still for a moment, his arms around her waist and hers around his neck. He quickly felt shivers cover his skin, the cold jumping off her coat onto him but he did not want to move.
She had been the first to move, reaching up on to her toes to brush her lips to his ear. Her breath had been warm as she at whispered to him. 'Take me to Bed, James.'
He had not needed to be asked twice. She had some form of spell on him from the beginning, and he knew it was more than just the seduction she used on other men. It was the same when they were in bed together, he knew that having been with a dozen men before with him she was real, she was in a world of euphoric love just as he was. When he remembered now, he saw the things he hadn't known were important then. He remembered how she had this odd look that he thought had to be from the cold, how her skin had seemed pale and sickly but her cheeks were red and her eyes bright. He had thought memory deceived him, that it had been too long since he had seen her as well as the relief that she was still alive when she had flinched at his hands on her breasts, breasts that had felt bigger and softer in his hands than he remembered them to be. When he had laid with her, both of them shivering under blankets as their skin cooled, her head tucked under his chin, hand on his chest, he had felt her stomach brushing his, something he had not noticed before. Had her stomach been bigger? Was the flinch because she was sensitive? Was the pale look of her skin due to feeling ill? He had no way of knowing.
Then came the next question, what would he have done if I had known back then? Would Bucky Barnes have been ready to be a Dad? He wondered whether he would have been able to get them both out. He imagined traipsing through the deep snow of the forests with Natalia beside him, tired but so alive. They would walk as far as they could, then maybe grab a lift from a farmer to the nearest town. Perhaps Bucky would have found Allie forces, would have been able to prove that he was an American, that Captain Steven Rogers could prove as a witness and that he had saved the young Russian girl, that she carried his child and he planned to marry her.
He had never even thought about all of that, children, marriage, and he knew that not many of the army boys had. The war had been going on for so long, you lived on the assumption each day was your last and you weren't going home. Bucky had watched the war happening before he was even old enough to join up, for all he knew then it could still have been going on. He imagined what his family would have thought, his Mother's eyes widening when he introduced Natalia Romanova and swiftly followed the introduction by telling her they needed to plan a wedding. That Bucky, the young man from the nineteen forties, he hadn't thought about running around the yard playing ball, he hadn't thought about teaching his son to shave or checking up on whether the boy across the road was good enough for his daughter. Had Natasha ever had those thoughts?
He would never know her thoughts, had she been scared - trying to hide the baby inside her out of fear, or denying it was even there. Did she know that the baby had been sired by a mission and that had stopped her from telling him anything? Although it seemed most likely that she didn't know at all.
Somehow that made the anger in Bucky rise much more than it had since he read the file. They had taken so much from Natalia, she had been moulded like clay into a spy, into an assassin who had shot a man by ten - not only seen a dead body but had fired the weapon and seen him drop to the floor with her ears still ringing. She had been taught how to dress to attract the attention of men, she had been bedded by them many times and her refusal to say when it first happened had always made it clear to him that it was too young. They had stolen everything from her, haunted her, tortured her and in the end, they hadn't been satisfied to just take her womb but they had denied her any chance to grieve for the baby she may have had. They had forced this young woman into a box, not caring whether it deformed her, whether it hurt her.
They could have had a life together, they should have and Bucky felt his teeth biting into his bottom lip as the anger took over. The thought morphed, he started to see himself as the problem. He should have reached out to her, he should have taken the chance to reconnect with her. He remembered the pain in her eyes when they made contact with his, the longing for a person that she believed was no longer there.
She had stayed strong, she had fought with every bit of the spark still inside her, she had made it out and found Steve, found the team; found her place. She had been happy, she had a purpose and a home.
He tasted blood only moments before the tears fell from his eyes, his anger giving way to the pain once more. There was only one person who could have felt this pain with him, who could have curled into his chest and cried with him. Natasha was the only one who could understand this mix of anger and pain. He should have been there to tell her, to have comforted her when she discovered that in another life her baby had died. He should have been with her when they found a way through it when they found their way back to hope.
Bucky allowed himself to close his eyes, feeling the tears wetting his cheeks and drops falling into his hair. He tried to remember, needed to remember one more thing. He remembered the sight of her, not the Natasha he had last seen with her hair bleached blonde and cropped short, he remembered the younger Natalia, he remembered her bright flame-like hair and her green eyes that were so sharp in colour they seemed to pierce his soul. He remembered the feeling of her hand on his neck, the other thumb hooked up under the lobe of his ear so her fingers disappeared in his hair. He thought of her lips on his, not a gentle touch but a deeper kiss with relief and love and a hint of Natalia's dominant personality. He tried to remember her smell, her touch, the texture of lipstick against his mouth.
The memory hurt, the memory made every squeeze of his heart feel laboured and lethargic, but the memory was all he had so he chose to picture Natalia, a smile playing on her lips and laughter in her eyes with a halo in red spread around her on his pillow.