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“I did this,” the man who is still learning to be called by name says. His fingers barely touch the scar above her hip, they trace its outline as light as a breath.
Natasha looks at him, an eyebrow raised. She's lying on her back, in bra and sweatpants. He's sitting next to her on the bed, cross-legged.
“Do you remember it?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I asked the Captain if I ever hurt any of you. Before the bridge, I mean. I told him I needed to know. He said I shot you once, and to ask you about the details. But I don't remember.”
He's getting that expression again. The one that makes him look younger than he ought to, after all these years, all those kills. Confused eyes that can be more unsettling than the cold mask that terrorized the few who got to see his face in their last moments.
Natasha sits up. She leans in and presses her lips to his. She stays still, waiting to feel his mouth move against hers, kissing tentatively, then she tilts her head to the side, her tongue slips between his lips and draws him in. She senses him moving his arms. His right hand cups her cheek, the left stops above her shoulder, and she reaches with her own to take the metal hand, draws it to her chest, leaves it there. His cold fingers press the mark right under her collarbone. That wound he remembers.
She bears the scars of only two gunshot wounds on her body, and this soldier put both of them there. One of them wasn't even aimed at her. Natasha doesn't hold it against him, if not as a blow to her pride. She would have shot him without batting an eyelash as well, had the necessity arisen. Even back in the time when they happened to work on the same side.
Natasha places her hands on his shoulders and pushes him down on his back as she throws a leg over his, so she can sit on his lap, straddling him. She looks down with a smirk.
Bucky smirks right back. Years ago, when she was living a different life (no, not a different life, just a different lie she now won't stomach anymore), he had gone without the cryogenic therapy for too long, and small things had begun to bleed through the cracks in his conditioning. Confusion, mostly, and a shadow of that smile. It's the smile she has come to recognize from old black and white pictures of him standing next to Steve, and that now is colored with a different frailty.
It's a smile Natasha could get used to, and she hangs her head down to kiss it again.