"We need immediate backup in Volgograd," Clint snarled into his radio, diving behind the tattered sofa for the illusion of safety while Natasha covered the door. "I repeat, immediate backup is needed in Volgograd, the Widow and I are under attack!"
An arm bearing a gun snaked through the doorway and Natasha shot at the wrist. A metallic 'ping!' sounded and the bullet had ricocheted. Cold dread pooled in Natasha's stomach as she dove for cover. There was something too familiar about-
Clint had just had enough time to string back an arrow when the biotic arm gripped Natasha and dragged her from their lackluster hiding place. She shot blind for the first time in years, took the kick in the wrist with a grunt and crunch, and her gun went skittering away.
The Winter Soldier kept his boot on top of Natasha's broken wrist and grinned down at her. "Natalia, it has been far too long," he purred, staring her down with the barrel of his gun.
"Winter," she breathed, terror creeping into her voice. "How did you find me?"
"I never lost you, dollface."
Natasha curled her legs and vaulted them up into the Winter Soldier's gut, dislodging him just enough to roll away before he could shoot her. "Hawkeye, get out of here!" she shouted, scrabbling for the fallen gun with her uninjured left hand. Clint ignored her, skirting around the edges of the room and shooting at Winter, who caught the arrow in his metal shoulder without so much as a dent. The room was too small for any of his trick arrows without killing them as well. They would have to lure the greatest assassin who ever lived out into the open.
There was only one way that Natasha knew to do that. She stood, cradling her broken wrist, and stepped into clear view. "The Red Room is gone, Winter. How did you survive?" she asked. "I woke up in the cryo bay alone, the base was destroyed, everyone dead..."
Smiling grimly, the Winter Soldier dropped his gun to his hip but didn't holster it, ready to shoot Natasha if Clint shot him. "I woke up first," he laughed, and swung out with his bionic arm. Natasha ducked and rolled between his legs, barely dodging a kick to her ribs, and when she kicked up Winter caught her foot and twisted. Pain rocketed like a bolt of lightning all the way up to her hip but she didn't gasp, just pulled through the agony until Winter was thrown off balance.
Clint's bow caught the Soldier around the head, too close to fire an arrow but just close enough to get a good hit in. Even so, Winter only stumbled and dropped Natasha's leg to the apartment floor with a thud that she felt all the way to her core. With one smooth pivot at the waist, Winter swung at Clint. He ducked the first, but the second with Winter's human arm caught him right in the nose. Natasha flinched as he hit the wall and went down, momentarily dazed.
"Where'd you find this doofus, Natalia?" Winter laughed as blood poured down Clint's chin. "Such a cute, loyal dog. Is this what took you from those who built you? Did you really think you could escape us? Defect and join their merry band, birth this dum-dum's tow-headed babies like a good barefoot wife? Did you really think our fathers would allow it after the mess you made in Slovakia?"
His bionic arm seized her by the throat, raised her into the air, and long fingers dug into the wall so she couldn't escape. There was his chance, Natasha trapped, injured and virtually helpless beneath his hand, but he didn't strike, not yet. He loomed in close and grinned. "You will never bear a child that breathes," he hissed. Flecks of saliva dotted her cheeks and she stared into his eyes with something like honest fear. "They will drop from you, one by one, bloody blue lumps of silent flesh, until your own guts fall out with them. That is the reward for your disloyalty. And this-" he raised his gun and pressed the barrel between her eyes, "this is the prize for your defection. Do Svidaniya, my little spider..."
"Winter," Natasha gasped before his finger could reach the trigger. "Winter, my darling, please, one last kiss."
The Winter Soldier paused, and a sickening grin spread over his hard features. "Is this love, Natalia?" he sneered, pressing in harder with the barrel.
She snapped her hips outward, despite the pain it brought, until he moved in closer. Felt his breath on her cheek and fought back a shiver. Something shifted in his dark eyes, something deeply buried and very human, and she could see the murderous resolve beginning to wane. When their lips brushed she whispered, "Lyubovʹ dlya detey," and the Winter Soldier fell like a marionette on broken strings. His gun discharged as he went down and burrowed a hole into the wall only inches from her head. The claws of the robotic arm were too heavy to remain buried in the drywall, and the shards dragged across Natasha's throat. Her breathless voice filled with girlish fear was replaced with her usual aplomb. "Get a tranq in him, fast."
There was only a moment before Clint struggled dazedly to his feet, pulled a trick arrow from where they'd scattered on the floor, and stuck it into the Winter Soldier's thigh. "Thought he was just an urban legend," he muttered, turning to Natasha. "You okay?"
For probably the first time in a very long time, Natasha told the truth and shook her head. Her right wrist was only dully throbbing, but her right leg was completely useless. She didn't even dare try putting weight on it and was still breaking into a cold sweat. "I think my knee's dislocated," she said faintly.
Clint didn't need any further incentive. He roughly wiped the blood from his mouth before picking his way over the Winter Soldier's body and wrapping an arm around her waist. "Come on. Sofa. Help's on its way." The move from wall to tattered sofa was slow and agonizing, gripping Clint's shoulder for dear life as she half-hopped across the dusty floor. By the time they had made it the four feet she was drenched with sweat and black spots swam in her eyes. Her breathing was shallow. After a few moments prodding the swollen flesh of her knee, Clint nodded to himself. "Hold on tight, Tasha."
She gasped and only just managed not to writhe in pain when he extended her leg and pushed her patella back into place. "Fuck, Clint!" she whispered, too breathless to call out.
"Sorry, sorry..."
His radio crackled to life and Natasha forced herself to sit up. They tried to pretend they didn't feel a sinking sensation when Coulson's voice didn't reach them. "Hawkeye, Black Widow, you've been located. ETA five minutes. Are either of you injured?" their new, faceless handler asked.
One hand smoothing hair back from her clammy forehead, Clint picked up his radio. "Widow's got a dis- and relocated knee and a broken wrist; my nose is broken," he reported back. "We've also got the Winter Soldier in custody."
There were several long seconds of white noise. "Are you certain?" asked their handler, softly.
Clint and Natasha met eyes. She didn't have to look at Winter's body before she nodded.
"One hundred percent, ma'am." He turned down the volume on his radio so they couldn't hear or be heard by base. "Natasha, how did you shut him off?" he asked.
"Trigger phrase. A specially designed chain of words...used to shut the soldiers on and off as needed. We all had one individualized for us in the Red Room."
"And you just happened to know the Winter Soldier's? The key phrase to shut down the Red Room's ultimate secret weapon?"
She shook her head. "He knew mine, too, but they're defunct now," she explained, her former trepidation beaten down by pain and exhaustion. Keeping it all a secret no longer seemed to matter. Now that the Winter Soldier was in custody, everything would come to light sooner or later, and she wanted Clint to hear it from her first. "We were partners, he and I. The Red Room paired us together in every way possible. Put the memories of a happy and loving marriage in our minds to make us complacent. We were indestructible." Something glassy and tinged with sentiment crept into her voice, but she tore it away like a bandage.
There was pain in Clint's face, and she could see him pushing it away too. They both knew that life was behind her, even if Clint didn't really know the half of it.
Outside in the street, a car rolled to a stop.
When Natasha was brought to the Helicarrier infirmary to have her wrapped wrist put into a cast, Carter was waiting. There was no fury on her pale face this time, only shock and worry. Everyone in SHIELD knew of the Winter Soldier, knew how dangerous he was, knew that the only agents to have ever seen him had gone home in a box fifty years back. "Thank God, Natasha," Carter said, forgetting all doctor-patient pretenses and wrapping her arms around Natasha's shoulders, being ginger with her injuries. "Oh, crap, when I heard what happened, I thought..."
She took a deep breath and backed away, smiling tremulously. "Sorry. I know you're not big on touching, but...anyway, okay, come on, let's get a cast on that wrist. How's the knee? You should at be on crutches if not in a wheelchair, you first-class idiot! What the hell am I going to do with you...?"
Natasha took the benevolent insults in stride, smiling to herself. While Carter unwrapped her wrist to set it and prepare the cast she allowed her mind to wander. The Winter Soldier claimed never to have lost her, to have kept tabs on her even through the years after the Red Room was dissolved, and though a large part of her was convinced that she would have been dead long before then if that were true, another piece of her head knew it to be true. She and Winter, they had had ways of knowing one another even more intimately than they knew themselves. When she broke off from that life, from the Red Room and started making a name for herself in other ways, she broke off with her connection to him, but he had never lost it. Never lost her.
You will never bear a child that breathes.
"Hey!" she hissed when Carter set her broken wrist.
Carter shot her a look. "Oh, man up, I gave birth with less-"
They met eyes. Nothing else was said until Natasha was set to go with a bottle of strong painkillers. Then Carter chewed her ear off about taking it easy, laying off her knee, finding a friend to make sure she didn't accidentally overdose on oxycodone. "You have someone to stay with?"
Her initial thought was of Clint, but then another name and place entered her mind. "Yeah, I do," she nodded.
She woke up after the first night in Stark Tower flailing, icy water running down her neck, a scream and the suffocating stench of roses in her throat. Pepper Potts stood over her with an empty glass. "It's just me," she said. "I'm sorry for the water, but I was advised against touching you. Bad dream?"
Natasha sat up, still catching her breath and grimacing when her knee started to throb from the excessive movement. "That was probably a good idea. Not touching me. Who told you? Clint?" she asked, voice hoarse from crying out. Pepper nodded and filled the glass in the bathroom. When she returned there were two small white pills sitting in her palm. It was a sign of how deluded by trust and her injuries Natasha had become, taking the pills and water without batting an eyelash.
"I hope I didn't get your cast wet; I aimed carefully but you were pretty animated," Pepper continued, sitting on the edge of the bed and reading from her tablet. After a few minutes, once the oxycodone made the pain fuzzy around the edges, she asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Not even a little bit."
Pepper nodded again and returned to the BBC World News app. When she finished reading she tucked away her phone, then offered Natasha a hand. "You should eat something with that, or you'll get nauseous." Natasha clumsily secured a brace around her injured knee, still getting the hang of the thing, before taking Pepper's hand and using her as a makeshift crutch to get to her feet. Then Pepper handed over her actual crutch and they hobbled slowly to the elevator.
"Hey, she lives!" cheered Tony when they stepped out on a different floor. It wasn't the penthouse, too big and with too much open space to be, but Natasha didn't remember it. "Welcome to the communal lounge, complete with full kitchen, two bathrooms, and a media room. This way we won't have to fight over whose apartment to dick around in every night. Nice, huh?" He looked closely at her. "You look like shit, Romanov."
"We can't all follow your strict moisturizing routine every night," Natasha shot back, but found herself smiling as she sank gratefully into a chair across from Tony. Pepper pushed over a chair for her to elevate her leg. "Oh. Thanks."
"Steve will be joining us again tomorrow afternoon," Pepper told Tony, lining up a few cereal boxes along the edge of the table. Natasha looked at the clock; it was two in the afternoon. "Bruce is coming back on Thursday, and Natasha? An Agent Carter called, says she's your doctor? She would like to come by tomorrow to check your knee with an associate of hers, Jameson. Think you'll be feeling up for it?"
Without even a moment's hesitation Natasha replied, "That's fine." She poured a small bowl of frosted shredded wheat, eating it dry the way she liked.
"She wanted me to make sure you were alright with her associate coming along."
"Yeah, it's...fine." If she claimed not to be at all anxious she would be a liar, but knowing that Agent Carter trusted Natasha enough to allow her four year old son to meet her was almost nice. Even if children tended to make her intensely uncomfortable. Usually it was Clint who handled any kids if they came up on jobs. "It'll be fine."
And it was, oddly enough. Natasha kept to the floor that had been set aside for her when Stark Tower was remodeled - the biggest place she'd ever lived in all her life - and so heard Sharon coming all the way from the elevator. Or rather, she heard Jamie. Natasha never thought that the sound of a child's laughter could be meant only for her, could be a gift, and when a golden-haired boy with large brown eyes and a grin missing teeth came barreling in ahead of his mother, she smiled.