A/N: So aside from increasingly shipping Romanogers, I also ship Winter Widow-nothing angstier than former assassins having a deep bond. This is not particularly shippy, however. It's more about history, and the enduring friendship of Steve and Bucky, and lots and lots of pain. Spoilers, really, only for Winter Soldier.
Three weeks before Budapest, before the ugly end and the beginning of everything, Natalia Romanova fails at a mission.
It's a long, long time before she knows why.
This isn't like other missions.
A detour, says her direct superior. Natalia does not know her name; names are currency in the KGB, and the KGB are misers. Natalia stares her in the eyes and the woman is angry, but she does not strike her because Natalia's face is an asset to the unit.
"We have the location of one of their deadliest assassins. We are sending you in."
"A kill." If she were not who she is, she might be flattered by the fact that they have chosen her for a double-mission. She feels nothing.
"Yes, a kill." Her superior's eyes are sharp, but they do not glitter. They are static, unyielding. "But first, a detour. We know almost nothing about this weapon, except that he is undefeated. That's where you come in. Understand him first." The woman's lip twists slightly before she continues. "When you kill him, we need to be sure that there are not others. Do what you must."
A seduction. Ten years ago, at fourteen, when these sort of missions began, her throat would have been dry. Now, she feels nothing.
"Understood."
"You cannot fail, Romanova." Again, the twist of lips. Natalia recognizes it this time for what it is; expectation of failure.
She meets the woman's gaze, lets disdain build its way up in her eyes. She expects the blow this time, but it does not come.
She almost wishes it had.
She fails at the mission, and she does not know how, but it saves her life.
This isn't like other missions. He knows it without saying it, for he says nothing unless he must. He barely knows who he is, unless they order it.
Today, they have ordered it.
In doing so, they risked—he realizes that afterwards, when they punish him, that it was their fault as much as his. They left too much memory in him, a gamble to instill a better ruse of humanity, and even a little memory was a dangerous thing.
(He realizes it afterwards, but he will not remember the realization.)
(It is the only mission he failed, and they leave him with nothing.)
The trail leads her to Italy. She was sure that she felt nothing, but now there is a rising wave of anger. She has done something wrong, become more dangerous to the KGB than to their enemies. They want her gone, but they are frugal. They are misers. If she destroys this weapon, this asset of an unknown enemy (her files give her only scraps of identification), the KGB triumphs. If she falls, they need not fear what will happen if Natalia Romanova turns against them.
She ponders every possible detail of insubordination.
Is the anger she feels now evidence enough?
She goes under the name Selena Clarke, memorizes it and gives no thought to its meaning. She stares for a long time at the pages of the thin file, and wonders how the Winter Soldier came to be.
She wonders if he will kill her.
It is meant to be a quiet kill, a soft kill if kills could be soft. The upstart of the KGB. He gazes, expressionless, at the flame-red hair in the photograph. Beautiful, maybe, if they let things like that mean something to him.
A kill, a mission. That he understands.
But, says his keeper. But.
Watch her first.
He has never been used for this sort of mission; he is a bullet aimed at a target, a bullet plucked out of the wreckage of flesh and bone and fired again and again and again. But she is dangerous, his briefing leaders tell him. Dangerous. Understand her, and then kill her.
If she were useless, the KGB would have killed her already. There must be something different about this one.
There's something different about him, too. He is the grit in the machine that became carbon-hard, the anomaly that became the standard.
They want to understand her, so they let him remember enough, be enough, that he can watch and learn without his blood running cold and steady, pressing him to kill before (and after) anything else.
HYDRA needs to know how to put the Black Widow program to use, or end it.
They meet in Verona. There is a café, and Natalia feels fear walking like ants up and down her spine. She has not forgotten what fear feels like, but it has been a long time since she let herself see it. Fourteen, she thinks. Fourteen, sent to the room of a Russian business czar. She suppresses the shudder, suppresses the memory, and orders a coffee.
Italian coffee is rich and dark and deadly. Natalia feels herself being watched and wonders if it is eyes alone or the sight of a gun that has her pinned down. She tosses her curtain of hair over her shoulders with easy grace.
She sees him before he sees her. Slumped in a corner, elbow on the table ready to push his weight upwards and into attack mode in an instant. He is a threat; she knows one because she is one. He is going to kill her, and she readies herself for a fight.
Then she puts on a smile.
She doesn't do anything amateur like spill coffee on the asset's shirt, doesn't sit down across from him and start flirting.
She leans over him, close enough to smash her forehead against his and then crush the shards of his nasal bones into his frontal lobe with one well-placed upward thrust of her hand.
She says, "We should talk."
Though they speak in English, he has a Russian accent, which matches the file. She thinks that they would have trained that out of him. They must be trying to throw her off. They. His keepers. She is the KGB's red-striped lamb brought to slaughter, and the shadowy enemy is laughing.
Natalia laughs too, at the look on his tired, wary face. She laughs at their keepers, she laughs at all that red.
As though she will be added to the red in her own ledger, today.
"You are bold, to come here," he says. He does not ask her to sit. She does not; she prefers to stand. He is wearing gloves, though the weather is warm.
"I am the best. We devour our rivals," she quips easily. Black Widows do—they eat their mates. And she will not let them forget her, not even if she dies. She is more the Black Widow than they ever knew, when they broke her down and down again, making her perfect through pain.
"You will not kill me," he says matter-of-factly. She thinks he does not look old enough to have the track record that he does. Perhaps the legend is passed down; like all legends, not what it seems.
She touches him, still standing. This is a seduction. This is a fascination. She runs her fingers over the bones of his wrist, feels the pulse jump under muscle. He is human, after all.
The world seems to slow around them. He does nothing, makes no move, there is no threat in his eyes. It is interesting, but there is something missing.
She feels the cold sting of metal against her hip.
Her training to never make a scene unless it is part of the mission keeps her from crying out. She spins around in an instant, catlike, defensive, realizing too late that the man at the table is only a threat, not the threat. That the threat is two inches away from her, with a face that would be handsome and strangely young if it were really a face at all.
The metal—she glimpses only the tips of his fingers, flexible, multi-faceted steel. Strong enough to snap bone between them, not to mention the short work made of flesh and tendons. They were wrapped around her waist a moment ago, lifting the thin fabric of Selena Clarke's flimsy blouse, steel against her skin. He could have plunged through her with that hand, could have crushed her pelvis in his fist. It would have been ugly way to go, torn apart from the middle.
This one does not look like waiting, and she does not know why he did.
His eyes are blue. His eyes are too bright, and in an instant that feels like jumping off a cliff, she realizes that it is because they have nothing behind them.
The man at the table slinks away. She no longer spares him a thought. She stands like a martyr of ancient Rome, strong and steadier than she feels. About to die.
She wants to say his name aloud, say, the Winter Soldier to hear the words spoken, but she knows that if she does he will kill her in an instant.
Instead, she says nothing. She opens her mouth and shuts it again, and the misers of the KGB are laughing in her mind.
"You are not the best," he says, in flawless Russian. Then, in unaccented English, with a smile that is not a smile in that face that is not quite a face, he adds, "You are bold to come here."
He could kill her in this moment now, he could spill her blood into the coffee cup of the old woman sitting two meters from them. But Natalia feels anger filling her again, and it is like wine. It has aged in her veins for years, and it is stronger than her fear.
"I am the best," she says, "And I am here because I understand you."
That last, because it is true. Because now that sees him, she knows why they call him the Winter Soldier. Winter is the season of ghosts, of the shell and shadow of the living. In winter, everything is already dead. And so she knows that there is nothing living here, no man left. This is a machine, this is a weapon. Natalia understands that because she is the Black Widow, and they took everything from her before she began to take it back. Others, they would fight him as though he were a man.
She will not fight to kill him; someone else has already done that. She is here to destroy the weapon. She knows, too, that there can only be one. Winter stands alone; the storm is but a single force.
She readies herself, but makes it look like she is only smiling.
Then someone spills coffee on her shirt.
The kid is thirteen at most. American. Asthmatic, caved-in ribcage that comes with being the skinny one picked last for every team. A klutz with feet too big for his body. Cheeks red with embarrassment, a shock of blonde hair. An empty coffee cup in his hand, an apology halfway out of his mouth.
Natalia sees all of this, registers it out of habit, and discards it immediately.
She is looking at the Winter Soldier's face.
(They. They left him too much.)
Between wipes, it comes back. Before they beat it out of him, it lingers. And somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, there is a stick-thin boy whose arms and legs are more than he can master.
This is not like other missions. The Winter Soldier feels—anything, really, as though for the first time. Pounding in his chest, ringing in his ears.
The boy is sorry. The boy is familiar.
He knows, he knows this boy, and the Winter Soldier is—he is someone, for just a moment, though he does not know who—
The boy runs off. The Winter Soldier is a weapon again, but Natalia Romanova, the target, is gone.
She fails the mission. She understood the Winter Soldier, though she knows now that she would not have been able to kill him.
She understood him, and then he became human for a moment, and she did not know what to do.
She ran.
She ran, and maybe she never stops running. The KGB tries to kill her at Budapest, another impossible mission, but Clint Barton saves her life.
He fails the mission. They beat him bloody and then wipe him down to the depths. They have not made a mistake like this one for a long time, and they will not make it again.
Natalia Romanova becomes Natasha Romanoff. Natasha Romanoff goes over a cliff in Odessa.
The ghost shoots her through the hip, metal on skin again. This time it goes through. This time she can't see his eyes.
This time, she is certain, the weapon is all that is left.
The truth is a matter of circumstances. She did not know that it was Bucky, but when she did, she might have known sooner than Steve.
And when she knew, she understood. She runs her fingers over her scars and thinks of a scrawny boy in Verona, an American tourist.
She was with Steve that day, the day the bullet went through her shoulder.
Between the pain, between the moments of chaos and rescue, she watches him.
She recognizes that look. It's not so very long before she knows why.