Natasha was seething. The man formerly known as James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes had shot her, shot Fury, tried to eliminate his best friend, and was now inside Stark tower since all the high level prison cells had been destroyed in the collapse of SHIELD. There were countless other crimes involving the Winter Soldier, but they weren't important to her. She had her own missions.
This was her space, filled with people she understood and was beginning to like and now there was a damned black fly in the middle of it. Well, she was a spider for a reason and hopefully all it would take would be some well-timed tugs of strings to get the soldier moved somewhere else.
It was a terrible idea to have them all living in the same building. Eventually tempers would rise and spill over and they needed a team without any loose ends around. While they were all under the same roof, they were all easy targets for anyone who wanted to pick off the people who had brought SHIELD down, and what better way to complete that mission than by using the wild card in their midst?
She knew Fury felt the same: after all, the discovery of HYDRA's existence had turned very personal for him and he had had to fake his own death, concealing the truth from everyone but the people closest to him. Having the Soldier in close quarters continued the personal feelings for the one-eyed director.
Natasha wanted to be angry with Steve, but the look on his face as he'd all but dragged the Soldiers' body over the doorstep had stopped her cold. Steve thought the Soldier would always have his back, but now that the mutual protection was gone, he felt lost.
Natasha didn't see Steve for three days after that, but when he showed up in the doorway of his rooms, pale and with deep circles under his eyes, she knew that Fury would eventually knuckle down under the boy scout's pleas for his friend.
She saw the Soldier around, of course; it was impossible to live in such close quarters and be completely separated, although Clint did a pretty damn good job when he wanted some time alone.
He had a constant expression of slight confusion on his face whenever she saw him, like he couldn't quite figure out why he was there or why Steve was being kind to him. The first time she heard him speak was when a man in a suit and a SHIELD pin entered the common area in Stark tower.
Bucky became the Winter Soldier again, the confusion replaced on his face with the hard stare of a mercenary. His voice had been soft, at complete odds with his appearance. "The Asset is due for a mission report, sir."
Steve had frozen beside his friend, looking between the two men with a growing expression of anger on his face. "Bucky?"
Bucky hadn't moved, hadn't even turned an inch away from the grim agent. "The Asset is due for a mission report."
Steve figured it out a second after she did, dragging the Soldier out of the room just as the agent pulled a gun out of his jacket and fired, missing them both by an inch. He turned and tried to fire on her as well, but by then it was too late and her hands and legs had already closed around his head and neck and twisted.
His clothes - well made, standard business attire - revealed more information, adding to the data she had already compiled from the exchange between the Soldier and the man, who hadn't bothered to conceal his employment at HYDRA very well. Turn the SHIELD pin over and there it was, the skull and tentacles. Natasha tucked that and the man's wallet away for safekeeping. The pin she would show to both Steve and Fury, but the wallet and its' contents would buy her a new jacket to replace the one she'd lost when fighting for her life, and that didn't happen often.
Natasha didn't entirely know what to make of the fact that the Soldier had come a lot closer to making her another notch in his "target acquired" list. It was unnerving, of course: no one had come that close to erasing her life, except for Clint, and he had decided to spare it against SHIELD'S orders. Natasha knew that HYDRA was not so lenient, no matter the target's skill set.
A target was a target, and the Soldier had been very good at his job.
She was also, somehow, excited. He was a challenge, a worthy opponent and part of her wanted to just fight it out, no weapons or outside variables. She wanted to be a challenge for him as well: not because she wanted to prove her worth to him in any way, but because she knew that he must be bored as well. Being the best in your field was monotonous after a while.
But not yet. Natasha had been heavily conditioned in the past, same as him, and it had taken her a lot longer than was personally acceptable to clear her head of the KGB's influence. It had taken over every part of her behaviour and she had only been trained for less than half of the time that the Soldier had been active. If she tried now, her physical outcome might be less than positive.
Steve would want her to wait for Bucky's state of mind to improve first before she had at him in any way. Natasha could be patient if she needed to be, especially when it came to Steve. He considered her a friend, and actually trusted her to have his back if it came to that point. Some small part of her told her that she should be flattered at his trust: after all, he knew her case file just as well as Clint did.
That night was not a quiet one; Natasha fought for sleep but hoarse screams in Russian and English and other languages from the floor below kept her awake. When Steve appeared at her door early the next morning, with black circles under his eyes and a bleeding hand, Natasha knew her closure was not going to come any time soon.