"Natalia, it's 2012," was the first thing Barnes said to Natasha when she stepped into the room. It was half cell and half infirmary.

She sank into the chair by his bedside. "I know, I've been awake since oh-four," she told him as she crossed her arms. "What was so urgent that you had to call me out of bed?"

Barnes reached his hand out toward her; she ignored it and raised one eyebrow. His eyes shuttered and darkened and he curled the hand - his bionic one had been removed for the time being - on his chest. "I don't remember anything," he softly said, "except you. I remember the cold, I remember falling, and then I remember you. Your hair and your lips, fighting beside you, putting us down in the cryo bay...I remember loving you, Natalia."

"Those were artificial memories. The Red Room carved them into us to make us complacent," she perfunctorily explained. "I was already in cryo when they found you, but I still know what they did. They did it to all of us. First they brainwashed you, then they built your arm and gave you a gun and a mission."

Blinking sluggishly, Barnes shook his head as he stared at the ceiling with red eyes. "I don't understand. Complacent. Was I fighting it? The brainwashing?" he croaked.

Natasha looked down at her tangled hands, feeling a million lies she could tell Barnes to pacify him dance on the tip of her tongue, and shook her head. There was nothing she could do to escape her own web of lies. Especially not with two of them from the Red Room in SHIELD's custody. The truth would come whether she liked it or not. "No. You were their perfect soldier. I was the one who needed to be beaten down into submission."

"Because of the baby?"

"Wh-?" Her breath tried to hitch but she stamped it down and smoothed it over. She didn't look up at his face. "James, there was no baby. We weren't really married."

The light over their heads flickered weakly, casting his features into stark white and gray contrast. Natasha remembered her weeks of mental detox after Clint brought her in, the cold sweats, the constant agony of not knowing her own mind, and didn't feel at all sorry for him. The pain was necessary to the process. "But...Natalia..." he weakly said. "I didn't mean our baby."

Sighing, she rubbed a hand over her brow. "What baby could you have possibly meant, then?" she asked.

"The one you choked with your cunt."

Time stopped. It took everything Natasha had in her not to reach out and throttle the Winter Soldier's grin off his face. As it were she seized him by the throat, pulled until a breeze blew between his back and the bed, and shoved him down, an arm across his collar.

"Natasha!" Sharon yelped from the other side of the allegedly soundproof wall.

When the doorknob rattled Natasha held up her free hand in a signal to wait. "He's faking it!" she snapped over her shoulder before rounding on the Soldier. "Listen to me, you pathetic sack of flesh and bolts, because I've had enough of your games already and I will only say it once. SHIELD is trying to help you. They can use your skills and keep you protected from other interested parties if you just cooperate," she growled.

Winter spat in her eye. "Why would I want to cooperate with the idiots who made you so soft, Natalia? They destroyed everything you were. Everything our fathers did for you, all they made you, gone for the love of some goofball with a bow and arrow."

"What did they ever do for me?" Natasha demanded, pressing down on his windpipe. "What did they do to me, Winter?!"

Hands pried them apart. Natasha almost lashed out against them before she recognized Sharon's thin silver watch and staggered away.

"In the hall, Agent Romanov. Now."

Sitting on the floor across from Winter's door, Natasha clutched her knees in white-knuckled claws and fumed silently as she waited for Sharon to put him back under. Two minutes later Carter emerged, flushed and agitated.

"What the hell was that, Natasha? Contrary to whatever your deluded mind has cooked up, we don't want Barnes dead! And choking him isn't going to turn off the Winter Soldier!" she said calmly, though anger danced and flashed in her eyes with mingled concern. "Did anyone choke you when you were brought in? No matter how they might have wanted you dead?"

"Fury definitely wanted to," retorted Natasha with a roll of her eyes.

Uncertainty and concern warred one another in the eyes of her friend before giving in, dropping to sit on the floor beside her. Their hands tangled together between them. When had Natasha become a woman of casual touches like this? Of close friends and sharing her more intimate secrets like children share candy and deceit?

"Natasha, I swear, I didn't breathe a word to anyone about the miscarriage, I don't know how he found out."

For a moment Natasha was confused, but then Winter's words about the baby she "choked with her cunt" came back to her. The blood drained from her face and her hand shook in Sharon's. "It doesn't matter," she said flatly. Clearly Sharon didn't buy that, chafing a thumb over her knuckles.

"It does matter, or you wouldn't have almost strangled him."

"Are you so sure? I'm a trained killer, after all."

Sharon snorted, "Oh, don't give me that; I know you better." She shook their hands before standing and offering Natasha help up. They stood together and headed off down the corridor. "You had multiple panic attacks immediately after, and woke up screaming every night for weeks after Jamie and I visited you the first time. Barton asked for advice about 'a friend of his' and I put it together myself. He's a sweetheart but about as transparent as wet tissue paper when he worries about you," she explained before Natasha could ask how she knew.

Looking down through stringy red strands of hair - she needed a shower - Natasha watched her feet walk for a while. Now was the perfect time for a normal person to confide in their longest friend, but Natasha just couldn't be certain if she would ever be normal. Still, she forced out, "It wasn't...just that," before her throat closed up with the accumulated guilt of so many long empty years living in stasis.

The side of her head burned and itched with Sharon's curious and concerned stare, but she shook her head. Not yet. Not ever. She would never be anything but raw when it came to the truth of it all.

"I thought the point of being on the team was being open with them about your weaknesses to prevent being compromised."

"Well, you aren't on the team," she said, and instantly regretted it.

Sharon looked untouched, but there was a tightness in the corners of her eyes that betrayed the hurt. "Does the team know, then?" she asked. It was a credit to how well they knew each other that she didn't even need to hear Natasha's non-answer to understand. "Natasha, even if you won't open up to me, you need to talk to someone. This is affecting you on so many different levels that you don't and won't understand until the penny drops. Unless you want to have a nervous breakdown. Those are always fun."

"Shut up, Agent Carter," snapped Natasha, rounding on the taller woman. "You may know my blood type and the fact that I'm-" she mouthed the word married despite the hall being empty; there were always hidden eyes and ears in SHIELD, "-but that doesn't mean that you know anything about my mind. You can't even hold your own life together but you're trying to control mine!"

Footsteps stuttering to a halt, Sharon's sneakers squeaked on the tile and she stared down at Natasha with her mouth a thin hard line. "Well. Forgive me for inserting myself where I clearly don't belong," she quietly said and vanished down another hall.

Natasha found herself taking a half-step after her. "No, come on, Sharon-!" But she was alone. She dropped her head into one hand and sighed, frustration tangling in her throat, and set off for a ride ashore.

It was past noon when Natasha made it back to the tower, but she was still exhausted enough to go right back to sleep for the night. Inside the apartment door she pulled her dress off over her head, then perched on a stool at the kitchen table to watch Clint. "Welcome home, Missus Barton," he said with his back to her. "I'm makin' grilled cheese, want one?"

"Sure, Mister Romanov," she replied.

He turned to grin at her over his shoulder, then started singing as he cooked lunch.

For the next week, they spent their less-than-conventional honeymoon doing whatever they wanted. As long as they weren't seen in public together, anyway. They stayed in bed half the day, only getting up to eat and use the bathroom, showered together, and smiled too much. They called each other by their "married names" that only existed within the walls of their home. They moved Natasha's possessions from her apartment to his (theirs), and they snuck out one night to see the Russian ballet like teenagers going to a party.

Natasha practiced saying, "I love you," without her voice trembling in the bathroom mirror. Only when she knew that Clint was asleep.

There would be times when Natasha missed her solitary life, missed the quiet darkness of her apartment and separate bedroom, missed the knowledge that no one depended on her and she depended on no one, but none of those times dared encroach on that first week with her husband.

Bucky did, in fact, start to wake up for short periods of time, responding at last to the therapy Natalia had struggled and sworn through until she surfaced as Natasha. She didn't really feel one way or the other about the man behind the Winter Soldier, but Steve refused to leave the Helicarrier and his friend's side for longer than a few hours at a time. After another six weeks most of SHIELD's medical personnel were able to tell at that point when Bucky or Winter was out. Steve, on the other hand, remained stubbornly adamant that there was not a single bad bone in his boyhood companion's body.

"Dude, okay, that's a really nice thought, but have you considered that the not-bad bones in his arm were replaced by the great big, ridiculously shiny evil metal monstrosity he's been lugging around for the last sixty years?" Tony asked him with a quirk eyebrow and bad attitude.

From her place on the couch, with Clint slumped and sleeping like a log against her back, Natasha tipped her head. "Not to mention the brainwashing and consciousness-altering drugs. The Red Room could have taken the purest of boy scouts and made them into a mindless puppet," she told him, coloring in the blanks in her voice with hints of empathy. Those treatments had been exactly what took her from the Room in the first place, after all. And no matter what punishments they doled, no matter what nightmarish femme fatale personae they filled her with, she never seemed able to stop wanting.

Steve's hands fluttered helplessly as he tried and failed to make his point. "But - but - okay, but..." He looked at Natasha and tightly sighed. "Listen, I was going to find another way to do this, but when I was talking to Bucky yesterday we wound up talking about you, Natasha."

Her heart stuttered and jumped in her chest, but she betrayed no outward reaction. "Did he remember me away from the Soldier?" she asked lightly, tangling her hand in Clint's hair.

"He did, yeah," nodded Steve. "And-and he just felt awful about, well, everything. He wouldn't specify. I think he was ashamed of himself, and can you really blame the guy? But see, he was feeling pretty down on himself, so I told him that I'd help make it up to you if he wanted to give it a shot, and so he and I set something up for you that I think, if you go down to your old apartment, you'll be really surprised by."

The movement of her hand through Clint's hair stuttered and slowed and finally stopped as she watched Steve's face. He was smiling and so earnestly pink-cheeked that Natasha knew that there was something off about whatever Bucky had planned. Still, she carefully slid herself out from behind Clint, settling him against the back of the couch instead of her, and stood up.

"Show me," she said, voice steady as a rock.

Four floors down the elevator stopped to let Bruce in from his lab, wiping a foreign chemical from his hands and smiling a little sheepishly. "It's fine, nothing toxic," he assured them and prodded the floor for his apartment with one elbow rather than asking Steve to do it. "What are you two up to? Going to the gym?"

She shook her head. "I apparently have a surprise waiting for me in my apartment," she said in a voice so light that the meaning hung thick and heavy over them like a fire blanket.

"Oh, that-that's...nice?"

Bruce hurried off when the cab stopped on his floor, wringing stinking hands at his front.

Arms crossed and feeling jittery, Natasha leaned against the back wall of the cab as it slid down to her floor. "Are you going to tell me what the surprise is?" she asked, staring determinedly at the smooth silver doors.

"I promised Bucky I wouldn't."

"Not even a hint?"

Silence fell over them and she gritted her teeth.

The cab bumped gently to a stop on her floor, and Steve stepped out first. Natasha followed at a snail's pace. Every footfall felt like sprinting a mile, the hall to her apartment door too long and narrow to breathe, and the smell of roses drifted through the years to haunt her yet again. Her hands wanted so badly to tremble but she wouldn't allow it, not with Steve watching, but she knew, she should have known, that there was something horribly wrong in the moments before she unlocked and opened her apartment door.

"Do you like it?"

Natasha's breath froze in her throat. The stench of a hundred roses rushed at her in a thick, tangible wall and her head swam with how quickly she forced the air from her lungs. One hand clamped over her mouth and nose, eyes watering, as she looked into her apartment. Steve grinned, thinking her emotional display was one of overwhelming joy.

"Bucky told me you had an attachment to...Natasha?"

The carpet was soft and familiar under her bare feet as she drifted inside, tentatively anchoring her to reality. She took in the scene, the gory stink of a hundred roses already in some state of decay or another all stuffed into her apartment, velvety and smooth, red and white, red and white, red and white like blood in snow, the stench of loss, the screaming emptiness between her legs, sweat and wood smoke, the ghost of her own voice sounding like an animal's keening howl in her ears.

A thorn pricked her finger, and a droplet of blood swelled over her skin. She clamped her hand over the nearest bunch and yanked it free, flinging the vile blossoms away. Steve cried out and everything slid into chaos.

When she returned to her senses she was drenched in dirty water. The carpet squelching beneath her knees. Her hands torn and bloody from a thousand thorns. Steve had called for help when she lost herself to the frenzy; Clint was flat on his back with a bloody mouth and bruises sprouting around both eyes. Every breath felt barbed and dragged down her raw throat. "Clint?" she whispered, voice painful.

He turned his head and opened one eye to scrutinize her. "I figured you'd cool down if I stopped moving," he deadpanned, "like a bear."

Her body shook. Adrenaline crash. "Clint, I'm...I'm sorry..." Her plea broke and fractured into a thousand meaningless platitudes. None of it mattered if she couldn't even offer the truth as a balm to soothe the hurt. Damp rose petals were plastered to her skin. She looked over her shoulder and found Steve, Bruce, and Tony standing in the door, poised to step in and intervene if she went insane and tried to kill her husband.

"Natasha," Bruce said, his voice steady and calm. "Natasha, will you let me look at your hands?"

The world was sluggish and unfocused but Natasha bullied herself to her feet. Her hands hovered out before her, dripping red onto the white carpet, and she nearly lost herself in the waking nightmares again. "I didn't mean to," she whispered. "I didn't mean to, I swear, it was an accident..." Bruce's broad, dry hands closed softly closed over her shoulders and guided her to the elevator. Her vision narrowed and darkened around the edges; she wouldn't have made it without Bruce guiding her every step of the way.

In the amount of time it usually took to blink, Bruce was coaxing her down into a chair. "Sit down, Natasha. This is going to sting a little," he told her, and started disinfecting the weeping cuts on her hands. The pain sent her drifting back down into reality.

"I beat my husband," she numbly said. "I had a nervous breakdown and attacked Clint. Sharon was right. The other shoe dropped."

When her hands started to shake Bruce had to close both of his over them. The salt on his skin stung. "Natasha, look at me. Natasha," he told her, repeating himself until she finally dragged her eyes from their hands to his face. "Clearly there is something you haven't told us, but I don't care about that right now. Natasha, whether you like it or not, we're friends. And I hope you know that you can talk to me. What happened today, it's a serious sign of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, maybe even Dissociative Personality Disorder, and you can't fix it by ignoring it or pretending the problem doesn't exist. You've been through a trauma and it's split you in two. I think I know enough about being divided that I could help, if you let me. If you let all of us."

"I know that," she said, replying on autopilot in a small hummingbird voice. "I know I do, but..." Her hands trembled right out of Bruce's and the smell of roses encroached. The back of her throat tasted like bile; she'd thrown up and she focused on that taste as an anchor. "It was lifetimes ago but I just can't think about it. I was fine, I was completely fine for so long, but then I lost the baby last February, and-"

Bruce's face fell into planes and lines of sympathy. "You lost a baby?" he asked, his voice soft as rose petals.

It was the first time outside of Clint and Coulson that she'd called her miscarriage the loss of a baby. Even if she'd bitterly called the child a metaphor. For so many years she'd shoved down everything that made her weak, pushed it off in the the hopes that it would all go away, but of course Bruce was right. And telling him almost made the crushing weight sitting over her chest feel a little lighter. Like he was carrying a portion of it for her.

Natasha nodded. "I miscarried at nine weeks. I didn't know I was pregnant until I woke up and it had happened," she said, and the weight lessened further.

"I'm so sorry, Natasha. That must have been a big shock."

"I was terrified!" she blurted out. "I-I mean, I wasn't alone. Clint was there but we were both so afraid. Of-of what it would do to us, what it meant for our future. We weren't exactly in a solid relationship like we are now, and..."

And she talked. She recounted that dark Bosnian night, the crime scene in her hotel sheets, and Bruce listened. He didn't tune out and nod when she paused for breath; he listened to her. His eyes were vast and dark with sadness for her, one corner of his mouth more creased and puckered than the other. Natasha had never noticed that about him before.

When her words ran dry he moved as if to hug her, but seemed to think better of it. Finally she could take a breath without feeling like she was going to shake out of her skin. The smell of roses was gone and her mind was clear. Her fingers itched with bandages. Before Bruce could speak she leaned forward and wrapped an arm around his ribs, head on his shoulder, and he held her for a short eternity until she felt sturdy enough to let go.

"There's something I need to do," she told Bruce. "Tell Clint I...I'll be back."

"Natasha?"

She escaped to the elevator without another word.

Sharon was checking in on Barnes when Natasha got there. It had been weeks since she'd been back to the Helicarrier and a part of her hoped that perhaps Sharon had forgotten the cold things she'd said to her. "The Winter Soldier isn't out right now," Sharon said, arms crossed and steel flashing in her eyes.

"I don't need the Winter Soldier. I need his memories."

They stared one another down. Sharon must have seen the war in her eyes, because after a few moments she sighed. "Be quick. Someone will be along with his dinner soon and Steve's technically the only person allowed to see him."

Shouldering past her, Natasha replied, "It should only take a minute."

"I'll be watching for signs of violence."

She shot Sharon a look before shutting the door. Barnes was watching her from the chair beside his bed, well enough now to sit up. He offered up a weak smile when she sat on the edge of the bed. "Hey there, dollface," he murmured. "What can I do ya for?"

There was no easy way to say it, and so she just did. "I want you to tell me everything you know about me. Every treatment, every drug, every plan they had for me," she told him. "Specifically, I want to know what they did to me after Slovakia."

And he told her.